../melody in chaos
I could not record today.
My studio is not soundproof
enough for a city daytime.
Contractors hired by an aspirational
Brooklyn property developer
stamp rumblefooted underpinnings
for a cantilevered condo to be
four times the size of the
sixty year old
two family the developer
demolished a month ago.
The mufflebooms travel
into my rear office studio,
up through my mic stand,
from the sub strata.…
continued...
I started creating tracks for the Disquiet.com Junto in January 2012 upon the group’s founding by Marc Weidenbaum, a San Francisco music, technology and culture writer. A former editor of Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, he has written for Nature, Boing Boing, and The Atlantic online, and he also lectures on the role of sound in the media landscape.…
continued...
A fuller transcript because radio interview…
:^D
Kurt Anderson: “Are you comfortable playing the blues?”
Playing the blues intimidates me. Almost more than any other musical expression. You can’t fake it, and unless you’ve lived it, you can’t be true – merely authentic. And I’d rather eat, say, “true” Soul food than “authentic” Soul food, any day.…
continued...
Yesterday Disquiet.com‘s Marc Weidenbaum published a wonderful perspective on the Junto’s impact on the Studio360 Yellow Dog Blues cover challenge. In addition to featuring my contribution on this week’s Studio360, tracks by Junto members Ethan Hein and Tom Anderson (both in the set below) had been featured on the May 28th broadcast of Soudcheck, in which Kurt Anderson and Marc Anthony Thompson (Chocolate Genius) were interviewed by John Schaeffer.…
continued...
Requested today: the origins of “Westy” and “The Reflectors” and why I switched to “Westy Reflector.”
My IRL name is Dave Westreich (“West’-rike,” fwiw). Westy was my nickname through high school and college, because there are a lot of Daves everywhere (cue Kids In The Hall). I wrote and performed a lot in the late 80s and early 90s in NYC on the Brownies+Continental Divide+Bitter End circuit.…
continued...
My wife, Cat, is an xclnt, award-winning film & tv costume designer, and my front row seat to her work is electrifying and teeming with inspiration. That said, her job takes her away from me, sometimes quite distant, for very long stretches.
When she filmed Kill Bill in 2002, she shuttled between Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beijing for 8 months, came home to NYC for 1 week and then went to Mexico and LA for 3 more months.…
continued...
In summer 1992, between my Junior and Senior years of college, I was an intern in Rolling Stone’s editorial department assigned to work on the magazine’s 25th Anniversary issue. Memorable for many reasons, though not enough to warrant a memoir, the summer shot me human-cannonball style into the hyper-reality of a myth-making enterprise.…
continued...
background track: “(i believe) this sounds like me” – recorded 02.24.2013
hey, world. this is westy reflector,
(i believe)
coming at you from brooklyn, new york, planet earth.
(this sounds like me)
my real name is dave.
i write songs.
(i believe this sounds like me)
i try to keep my songs simple.…
continued...
Late one late December day in the late ’00s, on a new-mooned new-years evenight in the Mexican-not-Mayan Riviera, a small vacation coven gathered under soft starlight, poolside on a bluff overlooking an inking Pacific Ocean. As the group’s just-like-grandma’s cake started to kick in, Orion turned away from Earth for a few moments and a twinge of lawlessness neuroscaped through them one by one, in a cascade.…
continued...
Listening to the new Van Halen. The record makes me think of the early 80s and learning how to play the guitar and all the great VH soundtracked-times I had. So this afternoon, I prodded my past with a zapping-stick and searched on my first and only guitar teacher, an acidjazzfusion master named John Macey, whom I haven’t seen or heard from since the late 80s.…
continued...
Synthetichef need not follow landmark neighborhood signage rules. Because, you know, he’s all about “progress.”
She doesn’t need you or me.
Well, maybe just you and me. That would be ok.
We’ve always had to fight her to live. Environmentalism is not 100% about saving the planet from our wicked ways. It is also about preserving certain ways of life. Certain perspectives on things. Making sure certain skills stay relevant.…
continued...
markdown, brooklyn, 9:51pm
your tax is what it costs you to make your money.
Shut up. you smarting again.
No no, think about it. You get a “refund.”
Yeah, yeah, refund, yeah.
It’s called a tax “return.”
Uhuh huh return uh huh.
And when you ‘return’ something for a “refund,” generally,
you bought that thing and want your money back.…
continued...
—–Original Message—–
From: Starrman [mailto:[redacted]]
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 10:13 AM
To: Reflector, Westy
Subject: absinthe ..
what up Wes-T.
I hear you are our resident expert on absinthe. I also hear that it was just legalized.
Can you recommend a good real bottle that I could easily pick up here in the city?…
continued...
Living with the Shit Bag was trying at first, but eventually it became a silent force that bonded me to my roommate and the rest of the building’s occupants.
Each Unit had a method for dealing with the Bag. Albain and Christie, chanteuses from Lyons summering in London to score a few gigs at Soho supper clubs, lived on the 3rd floor and decorated their “sac de merde” with grease pencil sketches of fruit and flowers.…
continued...
When I lived in London for a throw in the early 90s on the border of Holloway and Islington, my roommates & I had an “electric” toilet. The toilet’s outflow pipe was so skinny that our landlord, Omar Everyday In The Same Green Sweatsuit, forbid us to throw paper in it and cautioned that certain fibrous meals, when finally passed, were guaranteed to require a real cranking wellie on the flusher.…
continued...
So, let me get this straight, the moment we reach the point we can measure things, we get to witness the destruction of everything?
Yes, you’re simply helpless in the face of forces that large.
So, seriously, what exactly are we supposed to
do?…
do?…
do?…
do?……
continued...
…After years of hotel living – the tiresome room service, the pesky valets – I gave up that complete bohemian life and moved into a townhouse in the East 60s – west of Lex, of course. It was a place I loved in the early 80s, when a dear friend of mine who worked for Eva Linton owned it, and I bought it immediately when he – well, when he, decided to sell, you see?
| Main Entry: flix·ti·pa·tion Pronunciation: 'flik(t)-st&-'pA-sh&n Function: noun 1: abnormally delayed or infrequent passage of online rental DVDs. 2: STULTIFICATION |
 |