“Night Creatures, unlike stars, do not come OUT at night—they come ON, each thinking that before the night is out he or she will be the star!” — Duke Ellington

When the sun starts to get low either head out to gather nighttime ingredients you don’t have or run home – because a real night creature isn’t ready until the last minute and there’s much to do.

If you’re out, hit the grocery store or bodega — wherever there’s a plethora of supplies, edible and hardware. You’re going to want a snack, or bobby pins – things sinful, inane, or necessary – to welcome and prepare for indulgences. This is especially true if you don’t have time to cook a proper dinner.

Give the cashier and everyone in the store big smiles — who knows, maybe (maybe, maybe) you’ll run into some of them later. You want to start charging yourself and the outside world with mischievous energy that coaxes out surprise...

A review of Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra performance at nublu 151 on April 23, 2019. The orchestra consists of Steven Bernstein (Trumpet), Curtis Fowlkes (Trombone), Charlie Burnham (Violin), Matt Darriau (Clarinet), Peter Apfelbaum (Tenor Sax), Erik Lawrence (Bari Sax), Matt Munisteri (Guitar), Ben Allison (Bass), and Kenny Wollesen (Drums).

The start of the new weekly residency headlined by Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra marked New York’s transition to springtime with music that sounded like new growth in dirt. The musicians who joined Bernstein onstage had definitely experienced the pieces before, but they exorcised them for the season; the songs let out their death rattle and their first breath all at once, and the last wintry sighs lingering in me after a drawn-out March were cast out.

The opening notes of their first set remind me of a...

Haughty warlord steps to the mountain’s peak.
She surveys the great expanse below
(it’s just mist and muddy watercolours).
She looks up at the sun above
(a sickly speck).
She turns to her left and sees another mountain.
They look each other in the face, and yell in a thousand colors
like Godzilla.

More short-form “reviews” of music I’m listening to here.

A review of issue 29 of MONU (Magazine on Urbanism).
Follow link to read on the MONU website. Scroll or search for text in-page.

Image from Carolyn Drake’s contribution “Wild Pigeon” (p. 78)

In MONU 29 the word “storytelling” takes on the grand connotations typically associated with architecture — futuristic visions, imposing scale, immense risk — while continuing in the tradition of gossip, morals and myths, performances and gestures. In this issue of MONU these folkloric traits are traced in urban development and design processes, physical explorations and creations; urban structures are built and sustained by layered, conflicting stories and the bodies that live them, eternally (re)shaping cities and histories. This “narrative urbanism” is a patient, organic process revealing every construction site and street corner as a haunted site with stories past and passing by.

This issue’s...

You’re in a red Thunderbird cruising through America in slow motion.
Brilliant light ricochets off the hood of the car.
It shreds prairie land and blue sky into pieces.
America is your house. You smooth through it like it’s butter.
You can’t smell anything. You can’t hear anything.
You can’t see anything broken, but there’s yellow tape all over.

More short-form “reviews” of music I’m listening to here.

(Extrapolation on Getting Situated) … I’m having a hard time convincing myself that throwing myself into graduate school for a year is anything more than succumbing to another form of mental entrapment framed by a well-oiled institution-machine. A set stage. Keep pushing on and you’ll find Happiness/Money, wittle yourself down to an Individual, and be sure to perform and eventually recycle the same 10 activities, rituals, cleanses, hobbies, tics, masks, trains of thought — and even less roles and physical functions. Your mood shall be defined by anxious migraines and anorexia that somehow makes you smug. You will be unfulfilled and you will sit on your hands, or make another cup of coffee. You and another Individual swear to latch onto each other so you can fit into society real snug and spend $$$ to eat out and peacock while making each other sick; you’ll learn to tolerate compromise...

A film review for Music & Literature magazine.