../melody in chaos
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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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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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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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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Spotify playlist #105 for June 2023 reflects movements in space, internal and external:
listening to jazz with my father on the lanai
stories of my parents’ meeting in 1969
my mother’s covid while recovering from a broken hand
my father’s pneumonia while recovering from covid
the WGA strike and potential SAG-AFTRA walkout suspending Cat’s latest gig, extending our trip by 3+ weeks
finding peace between the days of Luna’s now kinda-regular bi-weekly epileptic seizures
the kinetic calmness in the chaos of a tennis court
weekly quests for the perfect mango
the road from Florida back to NYC
Not bummed to be back in NYC, but I don’t return home after being away with unbridled excitement anymore, either.…
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Digital currencies are formed of energy. Every eCoin is, in essence, nothing more (or less) than captured electricity. Inasmuch as the energy required to “mint” an electric dollar is trapped, never to be re-released into the world as actual power, the value of it is measured against what its captive energy otherwise could have powered.…
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…Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
In December 2020, Cat & I decamped to Lowell, Massachusetts for almost 9 months as she costume designed the return of the Showtime series Dexter.
Our temporary home, give-or-take 4 hours north of New York City, was a charming, modern 1-bedroom 5th Floor apartment in a 75-unit rental complex called the Thorndike Exchange.…
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AI doesn’t know from dumb luck or smart devices. It has no reference point on which to center its intelligence or judge its progress. It doesn’t know from vacations or personal life / work life balance. It doesn’t exist in a linear universe.
In time, it will assume we live in its universe, flipping the script.…
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Down in Florida now for a couple, maybe a few weeks, to visit my parents and retrieve our car to drive back to NYC. We expected to be on the road back already, because Cat’s latest job on Amazon’s The Peripheral has enough scripts locked to shoot a few episodes, despite the WGA strike.…
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All episodes here:
https://westy.substack.com/t/tennis
Intention is always more important than outcome.
– Winston Ramsay –
The internet from the start offered a grand social paradox. Everything’s apart together, but also together apart. And everyone’s alone together, but also together alone.
Fwiw, pandemic lockdowns aligned our interactions in the physical world to how we interact with each other on the internet. Everyone alone together, and together alone.…
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The evolution of reading and attention span leaves me terrified to write paragraphs longer than 2.75 sentences. Some paragraphs, however, require multi-sentence packages to deliver complete thoughts. That said, the copious negative space now around paragraphs opens up
It’s not the notion of what constitutes a short sentence that has changed, but rather, what constitutes a complete thought.…
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I promise this isn’t about to become a tennis blog, though I’d have no objection. This is the first in what will be a 10 or 12-part series on the game’s deep impact on me, and its confluence with playing music. After all, racquets and guitars are both strung and played.…
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The most important thing you can do with your art is to deflect, not reflect, reality.
Is there a switch we can flip, that doesn’t involve a mushroom cloud, that would make everything go back to normal?
And by that I mean, a switch that would just shut everybody the fuck up and create a world of empathic listening?…
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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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