I could not record today.
My studio is not soundproof enough sometimes for a city daytime
Contractors hired by an aspirational Brooklyn property developer
are down the block stamping underpinnings
for a cantilevered condo
That will be 4 times the size of the
60 year old 2 family that the developer
Demolished a month ago

On the opposite side of my apartment from the recording studio
The back of a post office is across the street
The carriers often shout at each other
In the loading dock
While jumping up and down on postal truck roofs
One of them, a man with a bird voice, likes to sing
Arias from Norma
As a mechanical gate opens and closes to let the trucks
In and out, he gives
the gate a mournful movement

Night brings its own challenges
The Bingo Hall on 5th Avenue allows its patrons
Access to its rear alley, which shares
The north side of my Condo complex
The alleyway is the de facto smoking lounge
Where winners coming out to smoke
Make on-a-lucky-streak noise
The ones on a losing tail fall off towards the streetside of the
Alleyway and smoke in silence
As passing headlights echo through
The flickering alleyway’s security gate

Tomorrow I’m going to mail packages
That have been sitting on my dining room table since before last holiday
I look at the gifts meant to be given,
Gifts that people have no idea they are going to receive
I’ve created a purgatory
Between loneliness and not loneliness
But to me these gifts have become
When your partner isn’t talking, the soft rustle of a paper
Or a sweater against a sofa…
Things that mean everything that you don’t notice
If you’re not standing still
Or trying to record

—–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? I’m dying to try this stuff .. I have tried the artificial green licorice variety last time I was in greece and was underwhelmed. Is there anything available with real wormwood .. actually hallucinogenic?

thanks,
starr

—–Original Message—–
From: Westy Reflector [mailto:[redacted]]
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 2:08 PM
To: ‘Starrman’
Subject: RE: absinthe ..

Starrman –

How’s the eyeball business? Sorry I missed you the other week. I trust Tull was excellent.

I spent 1 night in London in the late 90s drinking the The Green Fairy with a few friends and by the end of the night we had all made up new names for ourselves and I woke up in someone else’s shirt. Since then, I’ve been obsessed. (more…)

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. Charlie Hoffman and Mole (mo-LAY) Coons, Harvard and Cornell water polo players using London as a base to play the European summer circuit for money and debauchery, lived on the 2nd floor. Their WC was separated from their kitchen by a sheer curtain and their Bag hung from a curiously low hook on the wall between the toilet & shower, no doubt installed by previous occupants to keep from having to hang the Bag off of the kitchen utensil drawer handle.

My roommate on the 1^st floor was Craig Kiner, an East Meadow, LI, expat working as an associate for the firm of Cravath, Swain, Moore, et al. He was gastronomically regular and quite tidy, so our Shit Bag always seemed fresh, god bless him. I was somewhat fortunate as the manager’s WC at my bartender job in Shepherd’s Market was paper friendly and the manager, Paddie Like A Sausage, quite generous. Paddie took gracious allowance to my Shit Bag predicament and agreed to let me use the manager’s WC so long as I stocked it with the latest News Of The World (“News of the Screws,” as he called it).

“Those bastards at News of the Screws ain’t fair to Georgie Best, but it’s the only real paper,” Paddie would say. “Eye wouldn’t even wipe me arse with the Times.”

 

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. Sometimes, though, even with the welliest wellie, not everything made it through the pipe and the unassuming plastic bag next to the bowl brush became “that of which we could not speak.” The flat was not air conditioned. The spectre of the Shit Bag haunts me…

Riot My Earthman!

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?…

do?…

…

(more…)

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? I tell you I had a devil of a time with all the nearby parking garages, but I finally found one that valued my taste and I have a fantastic space in the front there…”

Courage and conviction seemed worth thinking about this Memorial Day weekend down here in Mexico City, where there are few rules and freedom arises from chaos rather than a uniform culture, as my friend Victor Z explained.

A courageous life to every earthbound individual now conjures up a different set of experiences. As it should. But as such, the fight in the world now is about defining what it means to be brave and express conviction, not what it means to be free.

No one is answering America’s personals listing now. The world has put the fear of loneliness at the heart of our politics. Karaoke, anyone?


A society’s convictions are revealed in what it finds courageous. Which societies among us inspire an higher order conviction among its participants?


A society becomes fundamentalist when there are the fewest avenues to conviction, and where courage and audacity are elevated to the level of conviction. "We behave," said Riviere in Saint-Exupery’s 1931 novel, Night Flight, "as if there were something of higher value than human life…But what thing?"

Manly virtues no longer play a part in war as they did in Homer’s epics, nor do they play the same part in writing as they did during the birth of modern religions.


Would we have had fewer wars if we’d never learned to write? Or built the Internet?


"Coming down…entering the clouds," went the newlywed (6 weeks) pilot Fabien’s final transmission from inside a Patagonian cyclone in Night Flight. "…see nothing."


"See you on the flip side," went the Master Blaster.

- :^D