:^D

Welcome to the Smartocracy

The big epidemic of this age is not Covid, or some other transmissible medical sickness, but rather, an epidemic of certainty. Everyone is so effing sure that they’re correct about everything.

I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.
— Marshall McLuhan

The nanosecond we learned the world was borne of quantum uncertainty, and that life is just a random Card Sharks play, we embarked on a paradoxical defensive adventure to narrow the scope of accepted truth.…

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noise cancellation

yesterday
against better judgment
for the first time
i can remember,
i rode the underground
with noise cancellation
switched on.

i had a far off destination,
under 2 rivers across 3 boroughs,
the luxury of time –
motion as an excuse for standing still.

lol i missed an announcement,
looked up,
and the F was now an E.…

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Spins 2023: Vol 7

Vol 7: Comfort Foods

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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Scratch ’n Sniff Dot Net

Trash Pickup Aftermath // Brooklyn NY // 2015
Trash Pickup Aftermath // Brooklyn NY // 2015

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.

The Alternate Side

20230814.1040

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

For Your Own Safety

GenCare Walk-In Clinic, Sector 23-BK-125, NYC 21221109.1422

“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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Free Thoughts: Performance Magic Distractions

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

2001.11.18 / ferry from nyc to atlantic highlands, nj

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

Is It Lily?

“…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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Luna & the Big Poloma

“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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Spins 2023: Vol 6

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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Found Folder: Tweet Drafts 2014

../users/westy/documents/writing/2014/drafts/tweet-dev-2014.docx

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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