../melody in chaos
First new track in a while spilled out today, on the heels of my first couple weeks flying solo here in NYC (Cat’s away in Melbourne on Apple’s “Metropolis” for at least a year). A couple days ago, Luna underwent some demanding diagnostics that uncovered she has epilepsy. I’m still processing news and new routines.…
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Meta Meat Team Mate
Ford Kharkey sat behind the wheel of his immaculate repair van, eyes scanning the road ahead. His assistant, Cleave, a lumpy nug of rich red and pink ground beef, sat shotgun, upright in a plastic tub secured by a metal O-ring lashed to the passenger seatbelt. Just south of Belle Glade on Florida 27, they drove in silence for a while, punctuated by the intermittent sounds of love bug splats and wipers against the windshield.…
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This Terminal command to disable MacOS’s default “low-priority throttle” has been indispensible while backing up with Time Machine of late:
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0
Leaving it on (“=1”) shunts the backup to the last in line for the CPU no matter what. My backup process, however, is a VIP club goer.
Would that I could control, with one simple line of code, the throttle on my darkest thoughts.…
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tr: Because nothing is yellow, everything is green.
haha, at least everything’s not blue…
Sound is physical art.
it’s better to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer
Nothing is random.
You don’t need things you use all the time to “look like new”, just well tended.
We see in most people what we look for, more than what they project.…
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The idea that alien life forms would conform to our dimensional perspectives and physics, and yet still leave themselves vulnerable to human weapons and hate, is naive.
…“An Earthland vacation this light-year? Really?”
“I heard it’s pretty, and I always wanted to go.”
“Okay, but just remember to bring ‘sion-block-“
“Yes, I packed ‘sion-block!”
It’s not the fake, it’s the flake.
Cat Thomas
My IRL family, Maplewood, NJ, 1981 [me: 2nd from bottom left; paternal grandparents Ida & Morris: top row left; self-timer composition, Kodak stock, format unknown]
Down in Florida last month, I began to organize my parents’ 6 bins of photographs, the earliest of which reached back into the 1880s. Aside from being an invaluable record of my family history, the trove also provides, upstream, a fractal of the entire era of mass manual photography.…
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AI still “artificial,” for now :^D
“Hey Westy, when you grew up with no internet, what on Earth did you do for fun?”
Action Park, Vernon, NJ 1982
Caracas, Venezuela 1980
Myrtle Beach, SC 1981
lol. Wouldn’t trade my 80s childhood for all the TikTok in China.
Via “Fight Club” author Chuck Palahniuk, a 4-question Jungian archetype quiz drawn from his graduate-level college Psychology course.
1. What’s your favorite color? Now, no thinking, give the first three words that describe that color.
2. Name an animal. First one that comes to mind. Now, give three adjectives that describe that animal.…
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Youtube user Saboruchan takes us on a journey through a “virtually untouched” abandoned bowling alley in Haikyo, Japan, that opened in 1973 and closed in 2018. Through the modern miracle of a cc-by-sa-nc Creative Commons license, the scene is soundtracked with “Chasing Flight” off my 2016 record Almost X.
Saboruchan’s affection for the abandoned-in-state space and its lost localised grandeur resonates through the video.…
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Park Slope is the mac ’n cheese of nyc neighborhoods. And not an artisanal macaroni and cheese, either. More like a boxed pasta with the powdered cheese packet, where the most adventurous thing that happens is the addition of a few drops of Cholula
Don’t take this wrong. Boxed mac & cheese is far from a damaged or morally bankrupt dinner.…
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One of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in sights, sounds, places, and people.
Alan Watts
You are the clear blue sky.
Pema Chödrön
Everything else is just the weather.
Let’s say you’re eschewing car travel to walk up Campden Hill Road, from Kensington to Notting Hill, London. Wearing a pair of Nike Air Force Ones, you are drawn uphill by memories of the mythical Geales for fish & chips and sticky toffee pudding, when out of nowhere you step in a pile of human feces on the street that entered the street-shitter’s GI system as a Double Big Mac Happy Meal.…
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written: 20191113.0927
key: A
time: 3/4
one for the lonely
I set out to write a “holiday song” a few years back, even daring to dream of expanding the thought into an EP I would definitely call A Very Westy Holiday.
The EP’s still a dream, but I was home in NYC a couple weeks back, and dusted off the track, while also dusting off Jolie, my Gibson ES335 modded by Paul Schwartz of Peekamoose Guitars.…
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“Matter is mostly empty space,” Luna piped up on a walk through The Club’s bocce courts. “Ergo, everyone has a big sucking vacuum between their ears.”
“Ergo?” I quired. “Fancy word for a fido.”
“Fancy?” she sniped. “You wouldn’t know fancy if it bit you in the Birken.”…
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Were there inner voices before there was oral language? Just curious what a Neanderthal thought to theirself.
Tbf, I still have no idea how an idea in my head ends up in a written word. I don’t think in words as I write. With no codified written language, maybe Ned Neanderthal, in his codified codpiece, had no facility to express it all, either.…
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In 2018, my wife Cat costume designed the Amazon series Homecoming in Los Angeles, so we decamped Brooklyn for a 1930s cottage aerie perched halfway up Laurel Canyon. I couldn’t bring any guitars to LA, because when you pack for an 8-month trip, with no back-and-forths, hard decisions have to be made between fashion studio and music studio.…
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DALL-E 2 AI INPUT: “A former musician, surrounded by destroyed instruments, under a pink sky, photographed by William Eggleston” (2022)
Someone randomly came into one of my social feeds today with “former musician” in their bio, and the notion sent me, well, riffing…
What, exactly, constitutes a “former” musician?
Did they never “make it?”…
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