love is a wonderful thing and comes with many benefits

good afternoon ~

(click the link / brat sled to listen)

My Big Breaklove is a wonderful thing and comes with many benefits

today’s track is simply just one undulating loop of piano snippets running through my sampler

thanks to all who picked up the Friends Meeting track yesterday - we’re at a couple hundred bucks and climbing in money generated, will be sending off the first round of donation today :)

ged and I will be playing that set at Visit in Newburgh on Saturday - - come thru

also next week we’ll be putting up another track from “flavortown” so stay tuned for that ;)

Walking down through down past the auto garage a very elderly person struggling with the bits of ice clinging to the sidewalk flags me down. Excuse me, she says, where is the social security office? I notice that we were standing directly outside of it, so I offer to go check the entrance for her, just to make sure the place is open. I walked right past it! she says as I hold open the door for her, watching every intentional footfall land with utter determination. They say walking is good for you, she mutters, but I would have tried to go all the way to the corner! Her tone indicates that this is a completely outrageous and shameful possibility that I have helped her avoid. She pats my shoulder affectionately and I barely feel the whomp of her tiny hand through my layers of winter insulation. She leans in closer, conspiring, I am being let in on something as a reward for offering her forty seconds of kindness. Let me tell you something. A pause. This is delivered in a manner exactly halfway between a joke and a premonition: never get old.

At the library down by the river the other day the lady at the desk realizes that I am married to my wife when I return a big stack of our overdue and intermingled books. She calls out to me while I'm browsing the aisles - very un-library like come to think of it - and lets me know that I'm allowed to take home the book on hold under Gracelee's name. I walk back to the desk and say, oh, I didn't realize that was one of the perks of being married! She says that love is a wonderful thing and comes with many benefits, then she winks.

John and I have been diligently and regularly making very beautiful work in his studio - somewhat icy, quite spare, and unfailingly tender music centered around plunked out chords and melodies on his Fender Rhodes piano. A lot of it sounds like what the Hudson looks like now - the movement and collision of geometric ice, flowing in both directions. We make loops or deconstruct things, we sample and resample, we add tasteful glitches or snippets of lap steel, we reverse wave forms and leave in all the digital artifacts and noise floor crackles. We listen to the constructions on a loop while sipping on little cups of chaga. We get an idea to add some kind of almost overblown cymbal hits, something to activate the upper frequencies a bit. He keeps turning up the gain on the pre-amp, trying to get the metallic overtones to resonate longer and louder. He tries a variety of implements and finds that, to our surprise, one pair of sticks makes a very delicate whooshing sound as the bundle of small wooden rods collide against themselves and the air. That becomes the take, him shadowboxing, this music is quite literally about the notes you don't play.

While diligently posted up on the couch, working with our hands and these buckets of glass beads to finish fabricating a piece for Gracelee's upcoming show, we decide to watch Twin Peaks again. It's my third time through, seems to happen about once every eight years or so. But it feels so different now, and not just because Lynch has departed this plane. The music throughout the show - also centered around a Fender Rhodes - strikes me as more beautiful and the town is far less quirky and charming than I recall it being. I'm totally engrossed - that quality remains - but it upsets me more, lingers with me in a different way. And I realize that this is the first time I've ever seen this show after having the real and horrifying experience of losing a young, beautiful, beloved person. The first few episodes at least are a disturbingly accurate representation of what that's like. I've been hollowed out in that particular way in the intervening years and Badalamenti's sad chords resonate through me with a long tail echo. Another thing I've noticed - there are way more frogs in the sound design than I would have guessed.

It was six years ago that I went sledding for the first time - I had only seen snow maybe five times in my life before moving to the East Coast and I never had a good opportunity to slide down a hill for most of the time I spent in New York City. But five years ago my friend rented a super cozy AirBnB for the weekend and we got some pretty substantial snow and either someone brought sleds along or they had some at the house because we spent a whole afternoon cackling and hauling ass down a steep slope. Afterwards I took a bath in the enormous bathtub and drank a white wine spritzer while the rest of them listened to vinyl records in the living room, what a dream. Full of endorphins, slightly day drunk and extremely relaxed, I connected to the WiFi on my phone. I checked the stories of someone I had been trying to figure out a way to talk to and - well, would you look at that, Gracelee is hanging out with some kind of sassy miniature donkey, here's my chance. Who would have ever thought that this sequence of events would lead to today's current situation, which is that now anytime it snows five inches or so my wife and I take turns hooting and getting face full of snow when the sled hits the edge of our driveway? Well, one person saw it very clearly and though I am very sure she is busy and popular wherever her spirit now resides I hope she is glad to know she was totally right (still batting one thousand). I couldn't promise the lady outside the social security office that I wouldn't get old, but I'll try my best to get old alongside someone. We're nearly there already - the other show we're watching while we work is "Murder, She Wrote."

But what about you? What nice things have the older ladies of your life said to you recently? Have you done any fun stuff in the snow lately? What notes are you not hitting?