“It’s a TinyKit,” Luna exclaimed, “for teenies like me!”
“Some things really shouldn’t be recycled, Luna,” I intoned.
“But it’s more of an upcycle, not a recycle,” she cocked her head.
“Upcycle, eh?”
“Yeah! Upcycled in your-”
“Enough. Let’s go.”
August 03, 2019 at 07:17PM
instagram
Posted in img, Luna Talks, nstgrm
Tagged img, luna, luna stories, luna talks, nstgrm, park slope, reusable douches, tinykit, words
If you don’t like Huey Lewis, we’ll still be friends. But never will we spend Friday night watching The Kentucky Fried Movie on a twice-copied glitchy VHS, and never then sneak into the country club down the road to make out on the edge of the sand trap on the dogleg par 4 11th.
August 02, 2019 at 02:57PM
instagram
Tagged Huey Lewis, Kentucky Fried Movie, luna, nstgrm, sand traps, VHS, vinylz, words
“I love LA!” Luna declared.
“You’ve never been-”
“Shut up! Like you’d know!”
“Uh, hello…?” I pulled a poop bag from my pocket.
“Rrrr. New York’s cold & damp & everyone dresses like monkeys. I love LA!”
“You know Randy Newman’s satire, yes?”
“Yeah, & his attire isn’t monkey!”
July 30, 2019 at 10:27AM
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Posted in dogs, img, Luna, Luna Talks, nstgrm
Tagged los angeles, luna, luna stories, luna talks, new york city, nstgrm, Randy Newman, vinylz, words
it hot
July 21, 2019 at 04:40PM
instagram
Posted in dogs, img, Luna, nstgrm, prospect park
Tagged dogs, heat waves, luna, nstgrm, prospect park, summer
“Do you think they tossed it because the kid’s a musical disappointment?” Luna queried.
“C’mon,” I shook my head. “Not everyone’s Conservatory bound.”
She turned and taunted at a parlor window. “What’s the matter, can only play in C? Can’t handle 3/4 time?!”
“OK, let’s go.”
July 19, 2019 at 04:09PM
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Posted in dogs, img, Luna, Luna Talks, nstgrm, nyc
Tagged img, luna, luna stories, luna talks, nstgrm, park slope, Sibelius
“Hey, asshat,” Luna piqued, “why am I wet?”
“My app said no rain for a couple hours, but this cell-”
“So get a new app, asshat.”
“Where did you learn that word?”
“From you,” she gazed off, “the asshat.”
Voice Over: “Remember, people who say asshat have dogs who say asshat.”
July 18, 2019 at 05:15PM
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Posted in img, Luna, Luna Talks, nstgrm, nyc
Tagged apps, asshats, img, luna, luna stories, luna talks, nstgrm, rain, weather apps
10-inch LPs are the puppies of records. // The Clash – “Black Market Clash” (1980)
July 17, 2019 at 05:08PM
instagram
Andy Summers didn’t know a puppy could sleep to his + Robert Fripp’s “I Advance Masked” (1982), but described “a synthesis of 2 guys who grew up playing guitar, heard the Beatles, listened to jazz, got influenced by Oriental music and Steve Reich, but still play rock.”
July 16, 2019 at 07:13PM
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Tagged andy summers, luna, nstgrm, robert fripp, vinylz
love at 40.8931648, -72.3236284 degrees
July 07, 2019 at 10:07AM
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Tagged bridgehampton, cat thomas, img, luna, nstgrm
If you don’t like Bruce, we can still be friends. But we will never do two straws in one ice cream soda.
July 04, 2019 at 02:05PM
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St Clair Beach | Dunedin, New Zealand from Dip Creek Productions. [Vimeo | Twitter | YouTube]
A classic blue sky day here in Dunedin, New Zealand. Filmed on Tuesday the 25th of June 2019 in the middle of what has been a surprisingly lovely winter. We thought we would see if there was any surfers brave enough to catch a wave or two? We found one hearty soul! Conditions looked blustery out there.
Most of the shots in the video are filmed at St Clair Beach and the esplanade. As the sun started to set the views toward the end of the video are from St Kilda beach.
Music from Free Music Archive : Westy Reflector, “the other side of the end”
Callum McDonald, New Zealand videographer based in Dunedin, soundtracks a “classic blue sky day” in his home city with my track the other side of the end off my 2017 record cipher /e dreams [Bandcamp | Spotify].
This vid marks the second time Creative Commons licensing has taken my tracks to Dunedin, NZ. In July 2017, Since I Heard the Sun soundtracked a Thunderbird Trike ride on Dunedin’s Mt. Cargill Road. Xclnt to see a city to which I may never travel IRL from another angle.
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SOURCE TRACK
The bar, as many are, late into random Wednesday nights, was almost empty. We toasted the straight line between the 1969 riots that spilled out of the bar and the 2015 Supreme Court decision that realized many of the demands of those courageous rioters to simply be seen as human. We toasted love. We toasted John.
The original court case, fwiw, was Obergefell v. Kasich, and revolved around the inability for John and Jim to be listed as spouses on John’s Ohio death certificate. They wanted to be buried together. You couldn’t share a family cemetery plot in Ohio if the state didn’t recognize you as family. That the case centered on a death certificate, not a marriage license, from a legal POV, brought the equal protection clause to bear in a way that Ohio could never get around.
Doesn’t mean they didn’t try.
If you recognize the defendant in that original case, it’s because John and Jim sued the state of Ohio, and Former Gov. John Kasich became the de facto defendant in court documents. Kasich, though, with his presidential ambitions, and his tea leaves reading correctly that this case would be decided against him ahead of the 2016 elections by the U.S. Supreme Court, forced a patsy in the Ohio Department of Health named Hodges to take his place in the case.
Weasels gonna weasel.
John’s and Cat’s being lifelong friends, we had a front row seat to the whole glorious, tragic, bittersweet, and loving arc of their two-decade relationship. Their wedding took place on a tarmac in Maryland in July 2013, a few months before John’s death.
My 2014 record Particle Theory [Spotify \ Bandcamp] was was written during the last stages of John’s battle with ALS, dedicated to Jim and him, and released after John passed away, a full year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on their landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case. The case’s outcome was never certain, and the tracks revolve around the nature of love and justice, death and sentience, and finding one’s self in the context of politics. As happens when your writing’s tuned in a bit deeper into current events, songs on the album tell the stories of a few people, real and imagined, consumed in the global common denominator struggle to protect rights of the individual in the face of cold anti-humanity.
The opening track, Drifting Moon / Spinning Earth tells the story of a queer person’s escaping Ohio, who uses their “shadow as a sword” to find love “1000 feet in the air” in New York City.
The title track later on was written on the plane home after John’s memorial service in Cincinnati, OH. Those songs bookend some of the songs I am most happy to have written, but never wanted to have to write, including a track exploring the disappearing of Syrian programmer and open-source advocate, Bassel Khartabil. Alive when I released Particle Theory, Khartabil was executed in late 2015.
The cover photograph is a sunset moonrise over the North Carolina Outer Banks beach in front of John & Jim’s house where we spent many summer weeks with them. The shot is from December 2013, when we took a trip down there to say goodbye to John towards the end of his battle with ALS.
It’s a dark record under its sunny surface – which is my wheelhouse, of course. Dancing through darkness is the only way I know. Could be one reason why queer folk and straight AF me have always found safe harbor in each other. Very psyched Particle Theory remains among my most spun and downloaded collection of songs, and that it’s a grace note, as well as a footnote, for a movement based on love.
[edit: Watch here. Playback disabled on external sites. Maybe that’s one reason the video only has 17 views a/o 23 June 2019… :^D]
Lac du Der ‘station nautique’ France.
Natuur en recreatie, genoeg te beleven voor een weekendje weg.
Ondanks het koude weer toch nog een uurtje gevliegerd met de Freilein.Nature and recreation, enough to experience for a weekend away.
Despite the cold weather, still flying an hour with the Freilein.Music: Westy Reflector – ‘Riding Waves’
The Internet is at its best when shared passions become community. When the net first started to gain cultural traction, smack was talked, of course, but digital space wasn’t a tool of division, so much as a journey of discovery and connections. It was a weird (in the best way) and wonderful window into what other people were thinking and doing, made even better when the most obscure and arcane pursuit saw a light of day in ways no other communication system in human history allowed. Net 1.0 was a network of tangible dreams built by concrete dreamers. The physicality of the network itself was way more evident, too: the iconic modem handshake sound; the wires into your computer; the relentless arrival AOL discs in your mailbox…
“You’ve got mail,” indeed.
It was work to get online, but a few dreamers did the heavy lifting and posted sites, or created and managed email listservs. All of a sudden, within a few years, anyone who did anything could find a critical mass. For example, a kite enthusiast’s passion no longer had to exist in a vacuum or in a mythology, or stay beholden to local flying groups, random beach encounters, or obscure magazines.
This week, a Creative Commons use of my song Riding Waves [disquiet0066], off my 2013 album Transient Lines, took me into the world of kite flying. Holland-based YouTube channel Powerkiting took to a nature preserve in France, and soared a Freilein Vertigo Framed Quadline Yellow kite soundtracked with Riding Waves.
Freilein kites are among the more high-end, complicated, sophisticated flyers, sewn by master sailmakers, and retail for around $180. The dedicated kite flyer is no mere hobbyist, but a true outdoor sportsperson, in tune with wind, sun, climate, and terrain. The pursuit has its own language. A quick dive into the world brought surface knowledge of “handles,” and “lines,” and “knot settings;” What it means if a kite becomes “brake heavy.” Some flyers feel sensations with their eyes closed through their handles and know exactly what the kite is doing in the air.
That the narration and intro of the video are in Dutch, and that I don’t understand a single word, is all the better. Sometimes listening to and/or watching someone demonstrate their passion in a foreign language brings you to the pure essence of their pursuit. The tone; the smiles, the laughter, the furrowing of brows at something serious, the dreaming faraway gazes, the connection to the greater. It’s all there, in a borderless communication.
One of the more famous kite flyers in history, Benjamin Franklin, had this to say about his Kite Experiment, wherein he proved the connection between lightning and electricity (in 18th Century English, which sometimes presents an air of impenetrability):
As soon as any of the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wire will draw the Electric Fire from them, and the Kite, with all the Twine, will be electrified, and the loose Filaments of the Twine will stand out every Way, and be attracted by an approaching Finger. And when the Rain has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach of your Knuckle.
This sounds like what happens when I play the guitar. Perhaps a kite is a single string instrument…
In any event, I treasure this video for all it reminds me. On one level, it serves as a reminder of why I release all my music as Creative Commons. It also layers on a reminder of all the good stuff the internet can still bring. The net doesn’t have to be ping-pong political noise. It can still be a place where you just share your love of the wind. Wind lovers united.
As a sidenote, Riding Waves was a “posthumous collaboration” with talented Indiana-based musician Jeffrey Melton, who recorded as nofi and passed away in 2013 at the age of 42. He was an early and prolific contributor to the Disquiet Junto, and one of my first friends on Soundcloud. For this track, Junto members all took a piece from a long live Nofi set, and played along live with it. Every time this track’s CC license use pops up in my alerts, it brings back memories of too-cursory electronic interactions I had with nofi, and the bittersweet elegiac joy I had recording the song.
Kites. Who knew?
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SOURCE TRACK
Posted in aired|reviewed|remixed, transient lines, vid
Tagged aired, creative commons, disquiet junto, freilein vertigo, holland, jeffrey melton, kites, nofi, powerkiting, riding waves, soundtrack, transient lines
Most car horn use is an expression of a driver’s loneliness, masked as urgency.
Car horns should not only be all in the same key, but also the same mode. Doesn’t have to be major. I’ll take Mixolydian, even Aeolian.
Frivolous horn use should be per honk – $0.25 for the first second of duration, $1.00 each additional second. Call the oversight/enforcement system HornHeeder – like ShotSpotter meets EZPass.
Using a car horn for anything beyond a true warning is the same as when a dog barks out of lonesomeness, or chews its paw out of idiocy.
“The three tree tried to eat me!”
“Well, next time don’t give it your number two.”
May 30, 2019 at 11:08AM
instagram
Posted in img, Luna, Luna Talks, nstgrm, prospect park
Tagged dogs, luna, luna talks, mylar balloons, nstgrm, prospect park
DaCaLuF – Saison 3 – Ep49 – Puerto Perme from David Bellais on Vimeo.
Première visite dans un village Kuna. (Panama)
Musique : Lonesome Faraway Sounds par Westy Reflector
Xclnt to find in my alerts another new DaCaLuf adventure soundtracked with a song of mine. Since 2014, videographer David Bellais‘s videos have been some of my fav CC uses. Pure joy of exploration and discovery…
source track:
“Lonesome Faraway Sounds” from my 2017 release, “cipher /e dreams.”
liner notes:
Dedicated to the memory of Berta Cáceres and to the ongoing effort to free Bassel Khartabil.
Update 2017.08: RIP, Bassel.
tangerine dream b/w wolverine dream
May 09, 2019 at 11:55AM
via instagram
