../melody in chaos
This “advice to self” list has grown, plateaued, and shrunk through the years and ears, and continues to evolve. I return to it every once in a while to add and pare, and laugh at some of the sillier constraints I’ve set on my happiness and contentment as time rolls.…
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Sometimes only lyrics can bring salve against the world’s absurdity, so no wordless vinyl made it to the turntable in this edition. I kinda needed to escape to the familiar of late, and there is no warmer embrace than some fav records, no?
I can’t eat vinyl, but if I could, there’s a ton of comfort food in my collection.…
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If the web was scratch ‘n sniff, how many posts would you bring to your nose?
If sites and blogs emitted odors, how far would you keep your phone from your face when you check the subway status?
The internet, as with a war epic or a make-out scene in a barn or a Victorian-era period film, is easy to romanticize (and project ourselves into) because it doesn’t smell.
90 minutes
1x / week
give or take
holiday suspensions
78 hours =
3¼ days
every year
give and take
time suspended
sitting
idling
avoiding citation
on the alternate side
standing still
in the driver’s seat
nothing but space
on the alternate side
to
go figure
the moon out
yourself out
the odds
the risks
in my ny city
fruit hangs low,
so low,
aamof,
that
parking enforcement officers,
none the wiser,
sweep the vehicles
even when
the street sweeper
never shows to
sweep the streets
and no one
with a fresh ticket
on their unattended car,
nestled between
wiper blade and windshield,
is any the wiser
to the unswept grit
left underfoot
or the inside grift
right out in the open
on the alternate side
“Doc, it’s so weird – been a month and this mosquito bite hasn’t gone away.”
“That’s not a mosquito bite.”
“What do you mean? I saw the f-er bite me.”
“It wasn’t a mosquito, Quinn. It was a Genica Cognidea mosquito drone.”
“A Coggy?”…
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I always say “wordless” instead of ambient when I describe my instrumental interstellar flights (even stuff w/ abstracted dialogue). But now, after all these years, I wonder, is ambient music actually wordless?
That is to say, is a melody a form of lyric?
In an unrelated performance story:
My biggest performance fear is to be cringe.…
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city of strangers
city of dreamers
rushing on
pouring in
chasing dreams
same as when
first we played the game
played tricks on our eyes
that we were the sole alive
a thousand wandered streets
a thousand crowds
my dream the same
as on arrival
absolution now
i don’t live in shadow
anymore, but
first city light always finds the truth
no matter how fast you live
or how many times
you outlast the night
20230810.1304
“…We dated, like, freshman year, and it went really bad and to this day he still calls me a bitch.”
“What? Really?”
“For, like, a year and a half! His friends, too. And they don’t even know me!”
“Shutup! One, you are not a bitch. And two, you have never been a bitch.”…
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“So Tom Cruise enjoys the intimate company of a grapefruit cocktail?” Luna piped up, inquisitive, as we lingered over some new sidewalk scrawl on 4th Avenue.
We had just walked through an adjacent park that contains our neighborhood’s biggest playground, a full soccer pitch, 8 handball walls, a skate park, a dog run, six basketball courts, and two small community gardens.…
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This week’s theme: Dinners and a Movie
Wendy Carlos’s follow-up record to her inspired and celebrated Switched On Bach, The Well Tempered Synthesizer comes with Glenn Gould’s proclamation on its rear cover: “Carlos’s realization of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto is, to put it bluntly, the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs – live, canned, or intuited – I’ve ever heard.”…
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Twice in the early 2010s, I lost all my drafts in the Twitter app after running my phone through TSA airport X-ray conveyors. So I began to write potential tweets in an MS Word file, away from the app. I appended new drafts to the same file for a few years.…
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Trendy is the last stage before tacky.
— Karl Lagerfeld
True style is timeless. In theory, there’s no such thing as “poor” style.
You either have style or you don’t.…
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YouTube travellers Mother of GROM include a couple of my tracks over the final leg of their family’s 7-country 1-summer European swing. “GROM” is the nickname of their van, a converted Ford Transit XLWB mk7 minibus.
Lee Rosevere’s remix of Truth Is A Lonely Place opens the video; then Particle Theory appears midway through.…
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Every year since 2018 (save 2020), Cat & I have returned to her hometown of Chicago to visit her father, Steve, her step-mother, Marcia, her sister, Ellen, and a rotating cast of cousins and old friends. They’ve been in their house in the Beverly neighborhood since 2002. Prior to that, they had a house in Hyde Park, off the U of C Midway, where Cat grew up.…
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jell-olives – castelvetrano, negroni, orange
a brilliant bite from Cat’s birthday dinner last night at Café Mars
Was on the road for over a week, into last week.
NYC ⏩️ Cuyahoga Falls ⏯️ Chicago ⏩️ Indianapolis ⏩️ Pittsburgh ⏩️ NYC
Still processing the adventure. A bit of family heaviness preceded, too. Hung over the quiet parts.
Today I saw a female leafcutter bee in my Brooklyn backyard carrying a leaf back to the underground lair she’s building in the soil between two of our garden’s bluestones.…
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TV Series Premise: “Karma”
Massive text messaging glitch, across every SMS platform, sends “Hey! 👋” to every person everyone has ever texted with – from spouses to kids to Amazon drivers to old lovers. As a result, everyone also realizes the last time they interacted.
All these last times will be recalled anew, and all will find out who never erased their number.…
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There are no sorrows
Nor joys either
In our life.
So let us learn,
Thoughtlessly wise,
Not to live it,
But to flow down it,
Tranquil, serene,
Letting children
Be our teachers
And our eyes be
Filled with Nature.
—
Fernando Pessoa
Master, serene are
Dec 1914
One of my favorite spins of 2022 was Pigments, a collaboration between neo-classical composer Spencer Zahn and electro-funk-soul artist Dawn Richard. Zahn and Spencer’s interplay unfolds with each listen, and escalates tracks like Cerulean and Saffron into time-stretching cosmic slurries, with not a shred of bombast, ennui, or self-consciousness. Different parts will recede or dominate depending on your context.…
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