Today.

Today is the fifty-second episode of Polyester City. One full year, every Tuesday morning, 10:05 am.

Today is also the last one of these things that I will be publishing for a while. 

I am a big, big believer in consistency. Setting a course and riding it out. Figure out what you do and do it. Keep on keeping on and all that. 

My original plan was to do this weekly for a year, and it’s been an honor sharing Polyester City with you every Tuesday. Now I have some other projects I would like to work on for a bit, but I do intend to return—perhaps with seasonal releases, say 13 episodes in the Fall or Winter or something like that. I will keep you posted!

I couldn’t think of a better way to wrap up this year or a better example of ‘hey, this is what I do, I’m just going to keep doing it’ than On Kawara’s Today series. 

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Kawara created over 3000 date paintings over nearly five decades [1966-2013]. Just the very model of sticking it out, as it were. And while I am composing today’s beat for the entire Today series, I used the colors and layout from the very first one, Jan. 4. 1966. Art is honest and vulnerable, and with a series, it all starts with the first installment.

What speaks to me the most about Kawara’s whole run are the little differences from painting to painting:

• Whatever country he was in, Kawara would use that country’s language and alphabet to represent the date.

• He would often create more than one per day, with nuanced color and typeface differences 

• Many of the paintings were housed in cardboard containers he created in which he glued the day’s local newspaper. 

Incredible. The little distinctions are statements about our lives. Every day is pretty much the same when you get down to it, with slight [but experientally significant] disparities. 

Where you go. 

What you do. 

Who you see.

But you breathe, you eat, you talk, you sleep. Same stuff. The trick is being happy with that. Not trying to invent some exciting world with amazing new experiences every day. 

I think I’m getting a little philosophical here.

Anyway: A big blue box and three small white boxes. Pretty simple, right?

Wanted this beat to sound circular. Trying to get at how the years go by, round and round. I think the initial pulsing horn loop sets that vibe.

To capture Kawara’s slight differences from painting to painting, my main theme has minute changes, depending on which instrument it is played. A note different here or there. Slightly different key. During the first half, the synth that echos the Wurlitzer is in a little sadder-sounding mode. The outro is pretty straight blues with a bit more of a swing vibe. You get the idea.

Also, I think this might be the first one of these beats that is in three. It has a kind of waltz feel to it. Again, this is the circular concept: did you ever watch couples waltz? I mean, people who are really good at it? They are essentially going in circles non-stop around the dance floor without bumping into the other couples. Little circles within a bigger circle. It is mesmerizing.

Kind of like these date paintings.

So, thank you all so so so much for tuning in every week, reading these things, listening to my music, checking out the art. I will be back soon with something, so don’t unsubscribe!

In the meantime, if you are so inclined, please check out the past year’s work at these places:

• YouTube

• Bandcamp

• Spotify

• SoundCloud

• Polyester City Homepage

Thanks again, be kind to everyone all the time, and I will see you soon.

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As always, thanks for reading Polyester City. If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment by clicking the link above. If you know anyone who likes Music and Art and Stories [and sticktoitiveness], which is pretty much everyone, please consider sharing by clicking the link below.

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We were in the city (aka NYC) recently, and man was it packed. At one point I frankly got a little freaked out. Just too many people. Too many cars, too many pushers and shovers, too many everythings.

But through it all, I saw people on bicycles. Darting in and out of traffic, jumping up on the sidewalks, then back down onto the street. I always feel that there's a little magic about bicycles in the city.

Our cousins who live in Graz, Austria have bicycles. They hardly ever take their car out. A lot less traffic there, though.

It may be a bit late for me to start thinking about becoming a bicycle rider, especially in the city. Broken bones are a virtual certainty. But wouldn't it be great, just zipping around, not worrying about being stuck in traffic jams?

Believe it or not, I have a favorite bicycle art: Ai Weiwei’s Forever series. 

Lots. Of. Bicycles.

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The image I'm using here is from Weiwei’s first bicycle sculpture in 2003. Though not part of the official series, which dates officially to 2008, it’s my favorite. It’s the beginning of the whole thing. The first time I could find a sculpture of his with repurposed bicycles.

But some of the later sculptures have really gotten out of hand. Here’s one with 760 bicycles. I mean, Forever Bicycles, 2014 has 1,254 bicycles. 

Did I mention it was a lot of bicycles?

Some people don’t see the art. (“He just glued some old bicycles together, right?”) But looking deeper, he’s really commenting on Chinese society. Bikes might symbolize freedom and movement in China, but welding them together is a hell of a statement, no?

And also, they are gorgeous. To me, anyway. So, art.

Ooooh, music that sounds like riding a bicycle. This has been done before.

But hey, there’s been more than one song written about love, right? I mean, some estimates put that 100 Million love songs have been recorded. Definitely more love songs than bicycle songs.

So anyway, music about bicycles. 

This has to be one of the happiest-sounding beats I’ve done for PC. Maybe the happiest. Usually dissonance = sad or scary, but not here I guess. Despite being in two different keys at the same time, it still comes across as happy to me. 

While recording, I was imagining riding a bike in the city [as opposed to winding along a country road or speeding through the Tour de France], so it needed some grit. The whole track is overdriven, really hitting the board hard, lots of red lights. Not so bad that it becomes hard to listen to, but it gets the point across.

I don’t usually do a straight-up solo in these beats. But this one came fast, maybe a take or two. Old school West Coast hip-hop synth sound!

I work with a cat who rides his bicycle to work every day. Doesn't matter the weather. Unless it is actively snowing, he gets here on his bicycle. 

Pouring rain? Fine. 

10° outside? Great. 

105°-in-the-shade in the middle of August? Even better.

He'll get to work and say things like ‘ooh it's a cold one out there’ or ‘hey, tough one today.’

I like to think of myself as someone who is dedicated to the things I do, but this is a little too next-level for me. 

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We have a little faculty meditation group here at the school. Meetings are every Thursday morning, and a nice rotating half-dozen of us or so show up most weeks. We chat about mindfulness-type things, like how to be better human beings, and we practice for about a half hour or so. It's lovely.

The other day, we ended up discussing how, despite our best intentions, we sometimes live our lives from a not-so-mindful place. One co-worker mentioned how he was a few minutes late driving to school that day and was a little concerned he wouldn't get to mindfulness in time. While in that agitated mindset, someone cut him off and he flipped the full-on double bird at the perpetrator. Both hands. Off the steering wheel.

Despite our best intentions…

And that could be any of us.

For the next couple of days I just couldn't get his ironic story out of my mind, thinking about how silly road rage is. So I found this 2014 painting by Eric Joyner entitled Road Rage. And good Heavens am I glad I did.

I don’t think I can articulate Eric Joyner’s awesomeness better than the very first words out of his mouth in his website’s introductory video:

“I paint robots and donuts.”

That hooked me. Robots, sure. But donuts? I just love his explanation “Hey, I'd been painting robots for a long time, and I decided they needed a foil”. 

And, as everyone knows, donuts: the archenemy of robots.

The whole concept of robots having road rage is one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Any science fiction nerd worth his salt knows Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics":

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So a robot yelling and screaming in his car after being cut off and jumping out to confront a human? Preposterous.

But…maybe robots are allowed to be mad at each other?

Finally, I tried to get the donut into the reduction. I did. I just love how the pink robot is eating the donut with one hand and smashing into cars with the other hand. Fantastic. 

And my reduction does kinda look like flipping two birds I guess.

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I don't usually write snap-it-to-the grid electronic-sounding music. While the majority of the drums I record are loops or electronic drums or beats I create with individual sounds, I work really hard to make them sound loose and natural – often purposely out of time. Really funky sometimes.

Not this one. These are robots, my friends. As much as AI has progressed, robot music still sounds like robots. Oh, there are my usual swooshes and bangs and indecipherable voices and static, but, in the end: robots.

I know I tend to beat themes to death a bit [we’re trying to get a point across here I suppose], but this one is intentionally over the top. It’s just the exact same phrase over and over again. Something a robot would do!

After the drop, I add a very important sounding string section to join in on the theme, but: same notes!

The only time it sounds different is the breakdown where I send the synth through a 1980s video game-sounding bitcrusher, and as it distorts more and more it starts to sound like the melody is changing.

It is not.

One last thing about robots…err, I mean meditation…

Wait: I mean robots AND meditation!!

Researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Hong Kong Science Park this past year explored using robots as guides for two different types of practices: loving-kindness and walking meditations. 

"Our goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how social robots can promote participation in at-home interventions and provide evidence-based support for young adults' mental health. We will thus continue exploring the efficacy and potential benefits of using social robots in mental health interventions for young adults."

Right! Everyone is afraid these days about how robots are going to take over the world. Let's hear it for researchers trying to figure out how to use these new technologies for good!

PS – Ever notice Buddhist monasteries aren’t often located near major highways? I’m guessing it’s so the monks aren’t tempted by road rage. (After all, they’re human – not robots.)

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I’ve mentioned I live on a lake? Every once in a while during the cold months, when it is unseasonably warm with snow still on the ground, the whole town fogs up like a ghost story.

Fog. Fog REALLY upset me when I was a kid. Makes me a little uneasy to this day, despite finding it so fascinating.

In a good fog, you can’t see for more than a few feet. A wall of white,  like being lost in a cloud. The air is damp…sticks to your skin. Sounds seem muffled. 

Eerie.

Maybe it will lift soon? Or maybe it will stay all day? No way to know. All you can do is wait…

wait…

Ok, now that I have sufficiently freaked myself out, remembering how I felt when I was a kid, I suppose I should take a stab at writing some foggy-sounding music. 

Only one fog-related work of art to consider here, one of my favorite paintings in the history of forever: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.

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I’m in love with this piece of classic, full-on romanticism. 

For years I believed this was Chopin with his back turned. Of course, it was painted when Chopin was 8 years old. So...

Also, it kind of looks like the over-the-shoulder view in every single dungeon-crawler RPG I’ve ever played, which makes me happy.

Art, boy, sometimes you don’t know why it hits you the way it does. From this fantastic piece on Friedrich and Wanderer:

“Even if you haven’t studied the art, you feel it,” Koerner says about the particular magic of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. “You feel that those summits that you see in the fog are not just figments of an artist’s imagination. They’re not made in the studio. Each of these peaks and valleys, each rock, each tree, has been observed and then refigured and restaged in the painting.”

As to my reduction: the limited color palette is also something I admire about this. You know those movies that have that overall blue palette [Blade Runner comes to mind]? Just a few colors with some shading can tell this big of a story. Wow.

You would think this painting might call for sweeping strings and crashing and booming, yes? Something very capital-R Romantic? But I kept coming back to the disjointed, fuzzy-sounding idea I started with. I think I scrapped it three times during the process, starting something entirely different and then returning. No idea why, but this is what the painting sounds like.

Really, all that is going on here is a pretty standard chord progression with the main theme and piano solo raised up a full step. There are technical ways to describe it (which would bore everyone, including me), but really it's just me playing the melody in A major while the harmony is in G major.

Hanging on those minor 9s sounds weird and creepy. Like fog.

I think if you played everything in this beat ‘right’ and sped it up, it would sound like a pretty passable run at a show tune. But after the different keys and the strange guitar sound used to play the theme, and the wobbly effects, and the spooky wordless voices…well, Stephen Sondheim I’m not.

So, back to being frightened of fog.

What really terrorized me when I was a kid was John Carpenter’s The Fog. Nothing like a good ol’ ghost story. It’s got everything: I mean, come on, fisherman corpses bent on revenge? Old priests? Golden crosses?

Also: Adrienne Barbeau.

It was one of those movies that was on HBO when HBO had only around 10 movies to play, over and over and over. 

Scary every time it was on.

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We’re not ones for lots of rules around the house. Keep your room clean. Do well in school. Be polite. The real basics. Nothing over the top or militaristic.

We do, however, have what we call The Three Things: 

Do your best. Feed your brain. Be kind. 

These three things are not rules. They are sacrosanct, immutable truths. They are repeated as a family mantra every day when we leave to drive to school and work, and they are discussed each night at the dinner table when all three of us take turns recounting how we tried hard, how we learned something, and how we were kind to someone. 

That said…I do have one kinda hard-ass rule. When our son and I drive to and from school each day: no phone. We are driving together. I am not a chauffeur and neither is he.

• We can talk, that's great. We talk all of the time. Politics, philosophy, books, religion. 

• We can listen to music, that's cool too. 

• Or, even better, we can just stare out the window. 

There's something to be said for just staring out a window with an open, clear mind. A car window is great for that. A window at work is good too, maybe, if you are a little bored. 

Even your front window at home. When it’s snowing. In Vienna. Like in Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky’s beautiful little 1925 masterpiece View from the Window, Vienna.

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I was planning on writing a beat for this painting weeks ago, but then life took over and we went on our little jaunt to London. While at the Tate Modern to see the El Anatsui installation I wrote about a couple weeks back, I stumbled upon this very painting. I had no idea it was at the Tate Modern and that I would see it in person! Serendipity. 

It’s just a perfect little work. From the Tate’s write-up:

“This painting depicts a view of roofs and facades seen from the artist’s fourth-floor flat in Vienna, where she lived during the first half of the 1920s. The cupola in the upper centre of the painting is part of the Johann Strauss Theatre, famous for its performances of light opera.”

Bonus! A little Strauss namecheck. The waltz king!

I love how this reduction came together. On around my third or fourth version, when I felt I couldn’t take anything else out, it somehow started to look more and more like the original painting. Maybe it was one of those rare works I didn’t have to strip down to get to its essence. It’s already right there in front of us.

There needed to be something hypnotic about this beat. A short little phrase that repeats over and over. Imitating the snowflakes, perhaps. Or maybe how all the rooftops look the same when you look out a city window from some height? 

The trance you go into when you aimlessly stare out a window. Man, is that good for you!

The very first thing I wrote in this beat was the repeating guitar line. Just two notes, over and over. There were no drums yet. No bass line. No little piano trinkle, tinkles. Just the guitar. I was in a trance, just listening to the guitar lick repeating repeating repeating. 

And then, before you know it, some groovy drums and bass appear. A couple of backward pads and some reverbed-up piano, and suddenly we are staring out the window on a snowy Saturday afternoon.

“If you could only paint a single good picture in your lifetime, your life would be worthwhile.”

That is what Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky had to say about the importance of art. Agreed. 

Of course, she painted over 300 works spanning more than seven decades. This one is most definitely NOT the only “good picture”.

One last thing I found out on our visit to the Tate: In 2019, The Archive Gallery at Tate Britain was renamed in perpetuity as the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Archive Gallery, in recognition of a gift from the charitable trust in her name. 

It is the largest gift from a private trust ever made to Tate Archives. To help us all look out the virtual window at art through the centuries. Thank you.

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Driving along Harlem River Drive recently I saw Keith Haring’s legendary Crack is Wack mural, and it made me think suddenly:

Hey, pot is legal! 

That is a sentence when I was a kid I never thought I’d say out loud.

Now, I’m not a drug partaker myself, but I have a relatively laissez-faire attitude towards the whole thing. The never-ending, completely ineffective anti-drug campaigns that haunted everyone in the 80s and 90s certainly didn’t stop any kids from taking drugs, but they did drill into our heads that drugs were illegal, that’s for sure.

Haring’s orange handball court might be the only anti-drug message that ever worked. 

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There have been two versions of the original Crack is Wack mural in the abandoned handball court at 2nd Ave and East 128th Street, right off Harlem River Drive. The one shown here is the second one, the one still standing. 

The first was almost immediately defaced and turned into a pro-crack message and subsequently painted over by the city.

Haring himself was arrested as soon as he was finished with the original installation, but such was the outcry from the media and the neighborhood itself that Haring was let off with a slap on the wrist. 

Soon after, the Parks Department invited Haring to recreate the mural. He was given paint and a city truck to drive around and find a new site for the work. Anywhere he wanted. But the artist insisted on using the original site and repainted the wall with today’s artwork, very similar to the first.

In 2019 the mural was completely restored. The process was very complicated, you can read about it here.

This was a tough one for me to reduce. I took a good eight or ten different approaches before I settled on this one. It sits somewhere in-between one of my grid patterns and some straight-ahead geometric shapes. I think the slight 1- and 2-percent angles of certain lines get it there in the end

There were a few things I wanted to get across in this beat:

• Raw sounding, to echo the artwork’s IRL environs

• Taking place outdoors

• And of course, a straightforward overall vibe to mirror Haring’s simple lines 

I don’t think I can compose something simpler than this. I listen to a lot of great minimalist and atmospheric music, but every time I try and do something that simple I just have to fill it up with bells and whistles. 

Not this one though. I imagined myself at 14 years old in the garage with my buddies trying to figure out how to play some AC/DC song. I just tried to channel those young kids with guitars and drums and no idea what they were doing. This beat is really just smashing away at things.

I hear different instruments as their own little worlds that happen to be playing simultaneously. It felt like the perfect thing to do was to have the choir and organ parts be in parallel keys. I think the vox are in F major and the organ is in F minor? I’d have to go back and check exactly what I was doing there, but you get the idea. They kind of sound like they go together but there is definitely something off.

Finally, the whole thing sits on top of the loveliest bed of a field recording I made of a park near the house. Birds, crickets, the whole thing. You can really hear it during the bass breakdown just before the drop.

I love origin stories. The Godfather II immediately comes to mind. Batman of course. Also very good was the recent Wonka, which the three of us went to see for our annual New Year’s Day movie outing. Yes, Timothée Chalamet is delightful. Olivia Colman can’t help but be good. But Hugh Grant as the Oompa Loompa? Come on, that’s outlandishly great casting. I’m guessing the Oompa Loompa spinoff series is mere nanoseconds away from being greenlit.  

Wait, back to Haring. His origin story is just fantastic. The artist spent a full half dozen years developing his signature style by creating white chalk drawings throughout the NYC subway system. Sometimes up to 40 in a single day !!!

Cats like Haring just aren’t going to be denied. They are going to be great or work themselves to death trying to get there.

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I have spent entirely too much time in my life playing chess. 

I don’t say that because chess is a waste of time. Or because I've had better or more important things to do. Not even because anyone requested I stop spending so much time playing.

It's because I stink at chess.

Now don't get me wrong, I’m not that bad. But I've always wanted to be really good at chess. My dad taught me to play when I was little and I was hooked. 

Hooked I tell you!

I'm fascinated by the history of it all. The tournaments, the lore, the players…I can reel off the name of every World Chess Champion in order since Wilhelm Steinitz. 

It’s like a drug. Countless hours studying. Books of tactics and strategy. Lifetime memberships to Chess.com. Lines of the French Defense memorized a dozen moves deep. 

But, alas. I stink.

I can write some music about chess, though! 

The outstanding piece of chess art that inspired today’s beat comes from every artist’s favorite chess lunatic, Marcel Duchamp, who in 1911 painted the beautiful Portrait of Chess Players.

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Now, my fixation with chess is real, but it pales in comparison with Duchamp. The man was as obsessed with chess as anyone could be about anything. At the height of his powers, as one of the most famous artists in the world, he moved to Buenos Aries, played chess for a year, and came back and essentially retired from art and dedicated the rest of his life to chess. Chess playing, chess journalism, chess problems. Everything chess. 

Guess what? He wasn’t that good at it either!

Oh, he was solid, certainly better than me, probably what today would amount to around a 2000-rated player. A strong club player. 

But to dedicate your every waking moment to it when you aren’t all that great?

Yikes. 

Yet, this painting of the artist’s two brothers playing is exquisite. So all is forgiven. 

I positively adore the colors, and its cubist feel just screamed for one of my grids. As much as any of my reductions, this one truly helped me understand what this painting was all about.

When I started writing this beat, everything was undefined and ethereal and misty sounding. To me, everything about the game of chess is mysterious—as is this painting—so I wanted to get right at that.

However, the age-old argument about the game of chess is whether it is an art or a science. I've always kind of felt it was both, so I felt I needed to add some more well-defined, stringent, scientific-ness to this piece to accompany its artistic fuzziness.

Drumline. Not sure I could come up with a type of music that is more rigid and militaristic sounding than marching percussion. Unfortunately, I'm about as good of a drummer as I am a chess player – i.e., not as good as I’d like to be. And while I have played live drums on some of these beats in the past, I don't have the technical chops to pull off this type of snare drum work. 

Chopped-up sample loops to the rescue!

Once I found some great sounds and cut them up a little, I still wasn't sure how they would sound when I dropped them into the beat. But somehow, magically, it sounded like they were there the whole time. I think it gives the whole piece a perfect balance of artsy dreaminess and rigid thought.

I talk about traveling a lot here…we do like to travel. One of our favorite vacations we've been on was a July week the three of us spent in Iceland. The perfect weather, the spa baths, the volcanic rock, the friendly people, it was all delightful.

But as you might imagine, my favorite thing was visiting the Bobby Fischer Center about an hour's drive outside of the capital. The most famous chess match in history was played in Reykjavik in 1972 between the impossibly brilliant but deeply troubled Bobby Fischer and the then-champion Boris Spassky. East versus West, USA versus Russia. The height of the Cold War. It was front-page news and every game was broadcast live on national television.

Among other things, the museum had a beautiful replica of the chessboard and pieces used during the match. I stood over the board, picked up the c4 pawn, and pushed through the first half dozen moves of Fischer’s legendary game 6 win. Electrifying.

And then I found myself thinking, just for a second, “Maybe if I spend more time studying my openings…”

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Back in the day when I was playing ~250 shows a year as a gigging musician, I was what you might call a swingman. The term comes from basketball: someone who can play both the 2 (shooting guard) and the 3 (small forward). Useful, that.

It means I usually played both keys and guitar in whatever band I was in. Sure, twice as much gear to carry, but it meant I was rarely out of a job.

In the years since, I’ve spent much more time at the piano. Writing, practicing, etc. Every now and then, though, I get the itch to strap on the ol’ Strat and pretend I’m Ritchie Blackmore or Eddie Van Halen or Yngwie Malmsteen.

Very fun!

So inspired, I needed to find a guitar painting as the basis for this week's beat. I decided on one of the hippest, low-key music paintings: Françoise Gilot’s Paloma à la Guitare.

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The subject of this painting is Paloma Picasso, the daughter of Gilot and Pablo Picasso. Born in 1949, Paloma [whose name means peace] brought her own art to the world in many forms, including a popular jewelry collection for Tiffany & Co. She was the subject of a number of her father’s paintings, including Paloma with an Orange and Paloma in Blue. Unsurprisingly, this is my fav painting of her.

[It’s the guitar. Or maybe the sweet feathery hat.]

So back to the artist—and Paloma’s mom—Gilot: what a life! Likely best known for her long stormy relationship with Pablo, she was a superb artist in her own right.

Gilot’s career took off after she left Pablo, aided in large part by her very honest and reasonably sympathetic best-selling memoir “Life with Picasso”.

Oh, and she later married Jonas Salk. Boy, Pablo and Jonas are two very different cats. Wow.

GIlot just passed away in June at the age of 101.

Again: What a life!!

Reduction notes: this was a tough one to decide on. The background for the painting is turquoise, but I couldn't have a turquoise background with a turquoise shirt – it just doesn’t work here. I need the composition of these reductions to be very separate and delineated when I am envisioning the music. Does that make sense to anyone besides me?

The painting is so laid back, and Paloma’s look is so off-in-the-distance-not-really-there, that the whole thing needed to be seriously subdued. 

No place for EVH or Yngwie licks here, just some pretty straight-ahead, vaguely Spanish-sounding acoustic guitar.

Other than drums and percussion and sound effects, everything in here is played on stringed instruments: acoustic and electric guitars and bass. Hmmm, maybe the background drones are some sort of synth patches jumbled together and slowed down. But mostly guitar, anyway.

The bass has a lot of air in it. I wanted something really soft on the low end. Couldn’t be percussive at all, very mellow. It's kind of difficult for me, I’m usually all about the bangin beatz®, but the cool feel works here.

And that bluesy lick halfway through the bridge…I love the idea of Paloma digging into that while she's sitting for the portrait because she's so bored.

Anyway: Guitars! 

Speaking of children of famous artists, I’ve always imagined that it must be interesting to act as the literary or artistic or musical executor to one's parents. 

Christopher Tolkien had a long and extraordinary career as his father's literary executor, for example. His histories of Middle-earth are remarkable works of editing.

But those Picasso kids... Man, how many unknown Picasso paintings might they have lying around the house, each one of them worth countless millions of dollars?

Things are a little tight this month? Grab the thing sitting behind the bureau on the third floor, send it to Christie’s.

I mean, I know it's probably not like that, but it sure could be.

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Denise has been flying a LOT for work lately. Boston, Philly, LA, Canada.

Flying, flying, flying. 

We’ve flown together a couple of times recently on holidays as well. I don’t much care for flying myself. It's nothing pathological, of course. I get on planes and go where I need to go with a minimum of fuss. Most takeoffs and landings are uneventful other than maybe me gripping the armrest a little too tightly.

I never flew when I was a child—it wasn’t until I was an adult that I ever boarded a plane. However, even when I was young I knew flying wouldn’t be my thing. 

Why?

Because none of my favorite superheroes could fly! I always preferred the earthbound good guys: Batman of course. Daredevil. Green Arrow. 

[Special carve-out for cats who could fly with aid, like Iron Man or Silver Surfer. I must admit they were cool. And let’s not forget Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.]

Anyway, the path of our return flights sometimes goes right over our little town, which you can see from the air pretty plainly since we live on a distinctively whale-shaped lake. Pretty riveting looking at your home from above.

There's an amazing painting of Marc Chagall’s in which he and his wife fly over his childhood hometown. Let’s write some music for the 1918 masterwork Over the Town.

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Music first this week. I really like this one.

You would think flying music would be all sorts fast-moving, exciting goodies filled with whooshes and swooshes. But Chagall and his beloved Bella Rosenfeld appear to be the epitome of super chill up there in the sky. 

So, a happy, dreamy-sounding beat. I thought the best way to do this was to have a lot of different individual lines kind of weaving their way together. The bass line, the guitar chops, the main theme—they are all moving. Not a lot of staying in one place.

There are some simple chords holding it all together starting about a third of the way through, played on a Wurlitzer. A sound I freely admit to using too much.

Speaking of sounds I use far too much: after the drop, the theme—which has only been played on the piano up until now—returns with a Mellotron flute added. If I had to pick one sound that I love above all others, it would be that one. 

Can’t for the life of me imagine why I love it so much.

Chagall loved to paint himself and Bella flying around. There is even a play about the two of them flying around called, naturally, The Flying Lovers.

Birthday has them flying in the living room.

Bouquet with Flying Lovers has them soaring around with some flowers. [Started in the 30s, Chagall finished this one many years later after his Bella died.]

But Over the Town is the one where they truly take flight. It must have been inspired by Bella’s note to him after they got engaged:

“I suddenly felt as if we were taking off. You too were poised on one leg, as if the little room could no longer contain you. You soar up to the ceiling. Your head turned down to me, and turned mine up to you... We flew over fields of flowers, shuttered houses, roofs, yards, churches."

This reduction was fun to do, it helped me get into flying-mode. I can feel them up there over trees and houses and fences.

And that one little guy, squatting...ummm, what is he doing? 

He didn’t make it into the reduction.

Fear of flying shouldn’t be a thing. It’s a very silly thing to be scared of. 

Some quick Google “research” [which is always accurate] shows there are approximately 0.01 deaths per 100 million miles flown. Which is literally a one-in-a-million chance something bad will happen to you. 

Those are pretty good odds. I'm not a mathematician or anything, but I must admit that those stats prove the safety of it all.

It’s possible lying in my bed not moving may be more dangerous than flying. 

Have a safe week everyone.

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Some mornings I find myself recording musical sketches without a specific direction. Just sandbox-playing, trying out new ideas, new sounds, new grooves. 

Re-use is a big thing for me, especially during playtime. I pull pieces of things I've used previously and rework them, turn them inside out, etc. All in the name of generating new ideas and sounds.

This is a pretty common thing in music, we've talked about sampling before.

Many visual artists do this as well. Maybe the most internationally well-known of these types of artists is the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui. His recent work Elephant in the Room is one of my absolute favorites.

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Our recent trip to London not only inspired me to write Poets’ Corner from a few weeks ago, but also today’s piece. Not long ago, the NYT did a fantastic interview with the artist about his new show at the Tate Modern. We had to check it out – and the stunning exhibition, with massive floor-to-ceiling hangings and sculptures, really defies belief. 

Here is a little bonus snap of me in front of Behind the Red Moon, which does not do justice to its majesty:

I left the show blown away by his work, and got a little obsessed, reading about all of the shows he's done throughout the world and checking out every piece on his website. That’s where I found today’s inspiration.

Anatsui confronts ideas of consumption, waste, and environment using resources typically seen as garbage. Wood, liquor bottle caps, cassava graters, printing plates, copper wire, crumpled aluminum—all part of his art.

Elephant in the Room is made entirely of reclaimed tropical hardwood, reassembled and painted. It’s just slabs of old wood. Looks like an elephant.

Art.

Finally, I positively loved doing this reduction. Because of the way I hard outline the geometric shapes, I can't put them too close to each other or they will bleed together. So here I spread the shapes out a bit. I can feel each piece of wood as a separate thing now, and also see that bright white background come through a little more. A little hope shining through for our planet.

A little slower-moving than usual…like elephants!

Last time I wrote an elephant-related beat, I went a little overboard with the ponderous, galumphing bassline. This time, a little more subtle.

So, I’m still featuring the bass here, but a bit more artfully, I think. Something about this sculpture I take as, I don’t know, thoughtful?

In my mind I saw this big guy tromping along, doing what elephants do, and every once in a while looking up and checking out his surroundings. That's what those little doodles of bass and electric piano are: distracted elephant!

All the twinkling and sparkling piano lines and echoing voices…just the sounds floating along in the air that might be catching this guy's attention.

Drums are a little more understated than usual for me too. And no big snare drum! Some clicks and claps did the job here. 

That kick drum knocks though, right?

Artists whose work is centered on the environment and re-use, or Artivists, are very big in today’s art world.

Standing armies of garbage; horses made of recycled toys; pop-art portraits made with old cassettes; fantasy beasts made with recycled tires.

You can truly make anything out of anything. So: Art. Go make some.

You can also, apparently, upcycle when it comes to making new foods from unused food bits that would otherwise go to waste. At first blush, it may sound a bit unappetizing, but it’s pretty fantastic. 

My wife recently told me about a woman-owned company called Super Frau!, which makes “upcycled fizzy drinks” out of the whey discarded by companies that make Greek yogurt. (Did you know that more than half of the whey is discarded?) As a vegan, this drink isn’t for me but…as someone concerned with the planet, I’m hopeful that non-vegans will give it a try. The Peach Mango one, maybe?

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In a fun and futuristic way to start the new year, I was checking out some deep-space photos. You know the ones taken with that especially fancy new James Webb Space Telescope? Can’t help but think of Star Wars, Star Trek, Foundation and the like.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!

I can see how conspiracy theorists who don't believe that we've ever been in outer space might point to these photos as proof of a grand hoax. They're just so outlandish looking, they seem like they must have been made in Photoshop. 

And of all the countless, non-hoax, stunning space photos taken over the years, I have one clear favorite: NASA’s  The Pillars of Creation.

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The Webb telescope has taken some outstanding updated shots of the Pillars, all super high-res and colorful and nifty. But for me, nothing surpasses the original 2018 shot taken with the Hubble Telescope. 

From NASA:

“These towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas sit at the heart of M16, or the Eagle Nebula. The aptly named Pillars of Creation, featured in this stunning Hubble image, are part of an active star-forming region within the nebula and hide newborn stars in their wispy columns.”

Towering tendrils of cosmic dust??? That sounds like it’s straight out of a science fiction novel. (Again: not a hoax.)

Also, it kind of looks like Dio giving the horns. Which will make me smile forever.

My piece on Kusama’s The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away was an earlier take on floating-through-space music. This, though…this is a whole new bargain. This needed to be dramatic and soaring.

We’re hurtling through space here, folks.

Space-opera-worthy music was called for. Spooky, ethereal voices singing along with strings on a theme that has no grounding notes, no major or minor tonality…very zooming along!

And I wanted it to sound like we were moving fast, very very fast. So even though the beat is only around 100 bpm, the rolling, repeating bassline keeps this baby moving.

I couldn’t help myself, the breakdown finds me playing some disjointed, very high-pitched synth lines which I meant to sound like some radio interference. Instead, it came out sounding like a theremin that just found out it won the lottery.

Then finally after the drop, back to the main theme but with a classic ‘70s space-age sounding synth added…we’re hurtling, all right.

Ok, science fiction nerd-out time. [Isn’t that what we’ve already been doing?]

Can't talk about all this without talking some classic sci-fi, and for that we need to go back to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. I read these books when I was a teenager, and while there were earlier space travel science fiction books [H.G. Wells, Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, even C.S. Lewis], the Foundation books were either directly or indirectly the inspiration for virtually every major science fiction world since. 

I mean, Star Wars is incredible of course, but George Lucas did a lot more than be inspired by Foundation.

Also: not a hoax.

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The way these things usually go:

• Something comes up in my day-to-day life, it could be anything

• I say ‘Hey, that's interesting, maybe I should write a PC episode about that thing’

• I do some research on that thing and find a work of art that I think represents it

• The fun begins

But every once in a while, I see the work of art first. And it’s one that I just have to write about. 

I was familiar with the trailblazing but somewhat overlooked artist Sonia Delaunay, though I'm embarrassed to admit I did not know that much of her work. Until… 

…I was reminded of her in a recent piece in the (highly recommended) newsletter Tiny Werewolves. Largely about art deco, there was a small section in the post on Delaunay which led me down an exhausting rabbit hole.

At the bottom of that magnificent rabbit hole was her 1925 Simultaneous Dresses (Three Women, Forms, Colours).

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What’s not to love about Delaunay?

I love that she kicked ass in a world dominated by men. She played in the same sandbox as Picasso, Mondrian, and the like. And she didn’t just hold her own, she thrived.

I love her geometric abstraction…it’s kind of hard to hide that influence on me. [Speaking of Mondrian, sheesh].

And of course, I love the applied art aspect of her work. I’ve written before about artists who were also textile designers. Clothing and accessories, of course, but plenty more, including maybe the coolest-looking set of playing cards I’ve ever seen.

In regards to the reduction…I made some tough calls while boiling this down to what I thought this painting should sound like. So much going on in the busy background, All the angles, all the geometry. But finally, it was the three dresses. They are what mattered most. That’s what this beat needed to sound like. Fashion.

I have no idea why, but I was thinking about David Bowie when I was recording this beat. I guess maybe because he was so associated with clothing. Maybe because his wife Iman was a celebrated supermodel. 

Maybe because I had just heard his song Fashion in the car the previous day and it is an unrelenting earworm?

I very nearly said “beep beep” in this beat.

I don't know…these dresses, the whole fashion aspect of the painting, when I was recording this beat I just needed some hypnotic 80s funk. It came together sounding oddly like a supermodel walking down the runway in 1985.

Big fat drums and bass, finger snaps, funky guitars, synths through a talk-box…all too 80’s funk for me. Once I started I couldn’t stop!

Beep beep, indeed.

Clothing as art. That’s another reason I was reminded of Bowie. Countless amazing stage costumes and characters associated with The Thin White Duke. 

So, Bowie aside, cause he’d take up all five spots, my favorite art-clothes-costumes ever for musicians: 

• Lady Gaga: Even as a vegan, it’s the Meat Dress, of course

• Peter Gabriel: NOT Slipperman, too freaky: I’ll take The Watcher of the Skies

• RHCP: The lightbulbs from the make-believe Woodstock concert in 1994

• The Residents: Every time they ever walked on stage.

• Daft Punk: Never give up the robots!

What am I missing here?

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Happy Holidays one and all. Hope you are having a great time celebrating whatever, however, and with whomever you celebrate! 

If you live in or around NYC, the Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting is an inescapable part of the holiday season, no matter what or how you celebrate. 

I myself have some conflicted thoughts about the whole Rockefeller Center tree stuff. I mean it's fantastic, lots of fun, and super New Yorkie. However, when I was about 10 years old and staying with my aunt in Manhattan for a few days, she decided to take my younger sister and me ice skating. We’d never ice skated before…and our aunt took us on a December Saturday afternoon to the ice rink at Rockefeller Center.

To this day I still have nightmares about sitting on the ice, with security guards yelling at me for not moving. Um…I wasn't moving because I didn't know how to ice skate! At all! And at least 8 million people were skating around. Flying by me. Knocking me down.

Enough about skating—let's get back to trees.

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Each year, the Rockefeller Center tree is truly immense. TV and photos just can’t capture the enormity of it all. I mean, there have been years when the tree was over a hundred feet tall!

But even if you're there and see how big the tree is in person, you may wonder: is it really that big? You know, compared to other big trees? Or is it just big for a city boy like me? 

Well, think of this: the star that they put on the top of the tree has been made by Swarovski since 2004. There have been a few different incarnations, but the current star measures 9’4” in diameter, has 3 million Swarovski crystals, and weighs 900 pounds.

So, yes. The tree is that big.

For the reduction on this one, I didn’t try to reduce any specific photo [the one above is from 2022]. Since it’s a different tree each December, I just tried to make something that looked Christmas tree-ish and captured the vibe of Rockefeller Center during this time of the year. I hope you can feel the holiday energy.

I think this beat sounds a bit like a holiday song you might hear on TV. Why not…there are lots of bells, right?

There are no words of course…and it's in several different keys at the same time…and there is a trombone.

But bells are bells!

I did start with the idea of recording a holiday beat that you might hear on the city streets. A trombone, a simple stand-up drum kit, an upright bass, some sleigh bells… maybe it sounds like some buskers making some holiday music and [hopefully] some cash at the foot of that giant tree.

And all those revelers clamoring in the background. That's probably the thing that sounds the most like Rockefeller Center on December 22nd.

Did I mention the trombone?

Finally, the harmony in this beat is one of those things I love to do. Here, the bass and piano foundation is in G major but the melody is in E major. They don't truly go together, yet there are lots of notes in common. If you just played an E major scale over a G major chord it probably wouldn't sound that palatable. But if you land on the right notes, it sounds fine—just the in-between notes are a bit off!

To me, the more dissonant the better of course, but there have been angry emails. Hahaha (or should I say hohoho).

Keeping in the vein of scary horrible holiday-related traditions, have you heard of Krampus? 

For centuries, the good folks of Austria (and some Germans) have been telling kids that, if they’re bad, they may get a visit from a devil of sorts named Krampus. You know, to eat them. Or take them away to hell.

In either case, those kids will not be getting presents.

When does this happen you ask? Well, there’s a whole day dedicated to this demonic activity: December 5 is Krampusnacht. And it’s a whole celebration, with adults dressing up as Krampus to scare kids and make other adults laugh.

Hohoho indeed.

Looking for a new holiday flick to watch while baking cookies? Check out the 2015 movie Krampus.

Happy Holidays!

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“Hey cuz, did you see the New York Times piece on Mark Rothko this morning? Inspiration for a future Polyester City piece, maybe?”

This is the text I got a couple of Sunday mornings ago from my dear writer/English teacher/all-things-artistic-loving cousin…as I was sitting on my couch reading the article!

Fate. Had to do it.

Truth be told, I've been wanting to do an episode on Rothko for quite a while—he's certainly one of my favorite artists. But so many paintings to choose from…

Finally broke down and picked the massive, 9.5 feet-tall No. 14, one of the pieces headlining an enormous retrospective of his work running through February 2024 at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

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I am always fascinated when an artist suddenly figures out their thing. And sometimes so abruptly. This happened with Rothko, in the extreme.

In 1947 he stopped giving traditional titles to his paintings. After that, he either numbered them or named them after the colors he used. Rothko seemingly felt that any names or titles would influence one’s view of his work.

"Silence is so accurate," Rothko said.

Then just three years later, he finalized the basic layout that would constitute virtually every one of his works until his death in 1970:

“By 1950 Rothko had reduced the number of floating rectangles to two, three, or four and aligned them vertically against a colored ground, arriving at his signature style. From that time on he would work almost invariably within this format…”

 And that's it. Suddenly he was Mark Rothko. Amazing.

I’ll admit, this painting kind of already looks like one of my reductions [I’m sorry: my reductions look like this painting]. Not a great deal of work for me to do on that front. Though trying to get the colors just right took longer than expected!

The major decision here: how fuzzy to make this beat?

Rothko’s work is famous for being fuzzy and blurry and diffuse. But Rothko himself didn’t think his work was so mellow when in 1959 he said “...behind the color lies the cataclysm…”

Yikes! I think I’ll stick with fuzzy.

So no big drums. Tricky, that. I like the big drums. Alas, softer, fainter edges it must be.

At the end of the old-timey radio intro, the beat kind of just blooms…no big abrupt changes. And the same thing on the drop after the breakdown…things just float back into the beat. 

Soft stuff here.

Finally, love the little bluesy line that appears in the last go-round. It doesn’t really belong there I suppose, but you can’t take the blues licks out of a kid raised on Deep Purple and Hendrix.

And a last thing from that New York Times piece. The current Paris retrospective is truly a once-in-a-generation thing. 

The last major show dedicated to Rothko was more than 25 years ago in Washington DC! Between the outrageous prices of his work [one piece has been on sale during this show for $40 million] and the tremendous size and fragile condition of the pieces, it’s easy to see why no one wants to loan them out for a show. 

I know a number of my readers are in Europe, and I believe a few are in France. If anybody is in Paris and is reading this before February 2024, please go to the show. There are 115 Rothkos on display!

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For quite a while in my 30s, I got into running. [Well, in my case, jogging.] I would sign up for 5Ks all the time and I even ran a couple of half marathons.

Unfortunately, the city streets where I was living were less than ideal for exercising. But then I noticed that people were regularly running in the giant cemetery about a quarter of a mile from my apartment.

Running in a cemetery? I guess that could be okay…?

It was more than okay. It was gorgeous and peaceful. People visiting departed loved ones would wave to me and smile. I would say hello to those buried there as I passed them. I would remember their names. Even used some of those names for characters in fiction that I wrote. 

While jogging the other day, I was remembering my graveyard runs, and I thought “hey I should write a beat about a cemetery”. And what's the coolest cemetery you can think of?

For me, that would be Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.

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Well, I guess Poets’ Corner isn’t technically a cemetery or graveyard. It’s more of a burial ground. Or a tomb? A mausoleum?

Necropolis?

Well, poetic license and all that… dead people are there, that’s close enough.

According to the Abbey:

“The first poet to be buried here, in 1400, was Geoffrey Chaucer, author of 'The Canterbury Tales'. Not because he was a poet but because he was Clerk of the King's Works. Nearly 200 years later, Edmund Spenser (1553-1598) who wrote 'The Faerie Queene' for Elizabeth I, one of the longest poems in the English language, asked to be buried near Chaucer…”

1400! So began the coolest burial ground going—for literature lovers, anyway. I have visited on a couple of occasions, [including just this past week on a delightful Thanksgiving holiday], but the first time I was there I just stood and stared at Charles Dickens’ grave for about 10 minutes.

Homage must be paid to the greats. I mean, come on: Chaucer. C.S. Lewis. Rudyard Kipling.

Oscar Wilde, for heaven’s sake.

The picture from which I created my reduction is held by the Royal Collection Trust of England and was taken by an unknown photographer in the 1860s. It’s the spookiest photo of Poets’ Corner I could find.

This reduction kind of created itself. The photo was taken at some distance with some wonderful lighting. Very fuzzy. Lots of browns and tans. Lovely.

Wanted something a little empty, not a lot going on to clutter things up. What we have here is:

• groovy drum kit

• a little percussion

• very simple 808s on the ones

• a little three-note percussive ostinato figure

• whistling

That’s about it. The middle section has one of my long free lines and there are some miscellaneous booms and crashes and swoops, but it’s reasonably empty.

Funny thing about that repeating three-note pattern: when I first started writing, the beat had a very strong Steve Reich/Philip Glass kind of vibe happening, where I wanted it to be all of these interweaving single-note repeating patterns. 

That lasted about 10 minutes. This is all that’s left.

And finally—how about that whistling? Whistling can be very creepy, and I think the droning, repetitive feel of it here makes me feel like I’m so frightened I can’t move. I mean, we’re talking about graveyards here, right? And yes, I couldn’t help myself…the whistling is on purpose. 

On a recent visit to Newport, RI, we went on one of those scary haunted midnight walks led by a fantastically schmaltzy, over-the-top tour guide complete with velvet cape, tophat, and cane. 

Outstanding.

The whole thing was fun, but I learned something I never knew: the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery.

Here is a full explanation, but while the terms are interchangeable today, originally a graveyard was always outside or connected to a church. Cemeteries are more recent inventions, needed once the tiny graveyards filled up!

One last note: over 100 poets and writers are commemorated in Poets’ Corner. But they’re not all actually buried there. Shakespeare, for instance, is celebrated there but buried in Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon. [That means double the chance to pay your respects to the Bard.]

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I suppose all artists dream at some point of creating art that will last through the ages. Something that survives them and impacts generation after generation. Even if it’s only one piece.

Shakespeare, Picasso, Beethoven; bodies of work of this lasting magnitude are, of course, heights no artist can sanely aspire to. But just one thing? That enters the realm of possibility, no matter how distant. And that would be wonderful. Just one thing that continues to stir emotion.

That said: how many artists would sign up to have their work live through the years anonymously? People would recognize their work immediately, but their name would be lost in time.

This is the case with Pamela Colman Smith's legendary tarot deck, most often known as the Rider–Waite Tarot. Anyone who has ever handled a deck of tarot cards knows it. And talk about having a permanent spot in art history: somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million copies of the deck exist throughout the world. Millions of people look at Miss Colman Smith’s art every day but have no idea who created it.

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Originally there to see Hopper’s New York Movie, I was mesmerized when I happened across an original Rider–Waite deck in person on exhibit at the Whitney. 

My favorite card in the deck is doubtless “The Fool”, for which this week’s beat was composed. But the entire set is…well…Magical.

Such an interesting story about how this deck came to be – not to mention the story of Ms. Smith herself. Young life in London. An early trip to study in New York. [She studied with Arthur Wesley Dow, the same NYC teacher as Georgia O’Keefe.] Costumer and designer for the Bram Stoker-managed Lyceum Theater Group. Buddying around with William Butler Yeats. Membership in the metaphysical secret society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

This woman had her underground-occult-bona-fides rocking.

Reduction notes: Seems a simple scene, but there is so much movement. Water flowing, wind in the Fool’s hair, the dog jumping, sun rays shining down. The whole thing looks pretty bouncy.

Really wanted to get the puppy (and to a lesser extent the sun] in there, but there is only so much room. Plus, it’s called “The Fool”, not “The Fool and The Dog and The Sun”.

The beat for this bouncy image needed to be bouncy, right? 

A big hollow subbass. Guitar trills. A shaky tambourine. Lots of bouncy things for a bouncy fool bouncing around.

This may be my favorite theme I've written for one of these beats. It's just one long through-composed melody with a bunch of imitation, but no repetition. This melody also changes keys a number of times throughout and is as usual completely oblivious of whatever harmony is going on underneath it.

I very rarely fade things in or out, but something about the lasting nature of Smith’s art and the long history of tarot made me think this beat should have a no-beginning-and-no-end vibe.

Finally: I wanted the fool to talk throughout—which he does if you listen carefully—but especially in the middle of this. So during the middle section breakdown, I created an interesting wordless-vocal sound to play in unison with the bass line. I am imagining this kid blabbering.

Or bouncing.

Really, when I think of a fool, I don't necessarily think of a carefree young lad walking off a cliff with his puppy and his hobo stick. I'm usually thinking of the noble court jester, sitting next to the king and queen waiting to make them laugh.

And the greatest of all the fools, all the harlequins, was unquestionably Henry II's own Roland the Farter.

That’s right.

I'm sure Roland had many talents. I'm sure he could juggle. Balance chairs on his chin. Run around in circles singing songs, making himself dizzy until he fell down. 

I'm confident he had a fantastic tight five. 

But, the one thing he's known for after all of these years, is breaking wind. On cue. Hell, it ultimately got him Hemingstone Manor and 30 acres from the King. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

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A song that rolls around in my head often—not necessarily an earworm, but just a song I think about from time to time—is Elton John's “Philadelphia Freedom”. I had a little red, white, and blue transistor radio when I was a kid and listened to a lot of Top 40 radio on WABC in New York. For some reason, I remember that song playing all the time.

It probably wasn't, but you know how fuzzy memories can be.

And while for all intents and purposes I am a New Yorker, I have a soft spot in my heart for Philadelphia: 

• I played so many nightclubs on Columbus Boulevard in my youth. 

• My undergrad degree is in history, so all the Revolutionary War goodies really light a fire. 

• Philly Soul…The O’Jays “Back Stabbers” is one of my all-time favorite ‘70s songs. 

• And of course, so many great jazz musicians. John Coltrane, seriously…

So I wanted to write a song about Philadelphia. But about what? 

Well, the first thing that pops into my head when I think of Philadelphia is none of the above. It's the giant Love Statue by Robert Indiana in Love Park across from City Hall. That statue, along with others in Indiana’s sprawling series, is based on his wildly famous and influential 1965 print Love.

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The LOVE artwork has had many different incarnations.

It started out as a design for a personal Christmas card to friends from the artist; then came prints like the one at MOMA; the postage stamp may be the most famous stamp ever, it was everywhere.

These days though, Love is probably most seen in the huge sculptures Indiana created over the years, appearing in parks and museums. There are over 50 of these simple, positive-message-bearing (imploring?) sculptures.

This reduction was harder to do than you might think. Only three colors. And the letters take up so much more space than my blocks and planks usually do against the backdrop. Plus, depending on the specific statue or print, the blues and greens can be located in different places. Decisions had to be made…

Speaking of decisions, I decided not to write a beat that sounds like love. Those greater that came before me have been broken on that wall.

Instead, I thought back to walking through Philly when I came across the sculpture for the first time and stopped to wonder at it. That was it!

A funky, groovy beat for walking through Philly, tell a little traveling story of the city. 

First, I’m strolling the streets and avenues. Then, in the middle eight, I stop in the park in front of the sculpture and marvel a bit at it, daydream a little. Then I’m back on my way, off to wherever my feet may take me. 

Finally, I wanted the ending to sound like I was ducking down the stairs into a subway, leaving the city behind. I thought the main theme played on a spare, wobbly-sounding piano after all that full-band-funkiness would do the trick.

Ok, so let's get back to the vast number of astonishing Jazz musicians that hail from Philadelphia.

I would argue that the great triumvirate of jazz cities in the United States includes New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit. But Philly, woof:

• Billie Holiday

• John Coltrane 

• McCoy Tyner

• The Brecker Brothers

• The Heath Brothers

• Stan Getz

• Philly Joe Jones

• Sun Ra

• Christian McBride

• Joey DeFrancesco

Man, that’s a lot of great jazziness, And that’s just ten names. 

Anyway, if any of you folks are from Philly, I hope you dig my little tribute to your city! 

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Henri Rousseau. He didn't find his thing until his 40s. Worked as a tax collector for much of the time he was painting. Most critics thought he stunk.

It seems we live in a time where increasingly you can’t be considered a real artist unless you are financially successful at it. Yet so many of the great artists of the past – and certainly of today as well – have had to support their art by working at all sorts of ‘normal’ jobs. 

T.S. Eliot was a banker. The great Charles Ives was an insurance executive. 

Phillip Glass: plumber.

Toni Morrison: editor. 

Herman Melville: customs inspector. 

Vivian Maier: nanny. 

And many of these aren’t before-they-were-famous situations, these are the-whole-time-they-were–creating-their-art situations.

Maier was a nanny for 40 years!

I’m just imagining Rousseau coming home from a long day of enforcing tax laws in 1897 Paris, sitting down and saying, ‘Hey, I guess I’ll paint something!’ and out comes The Sleeping Gypsy. Ho-hum.

So anyway, art. Go make some.

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I don’t always go for the most iconic paintings, but file this one under iconic: it’s on permanent display right next to Starry Night at MOMA. Not bad. 

But that’s not where I discovered it. That discovery first came from a Simpsons episode. Actually, I've learned a lot from the Simps over the years.

Not the most straight-ahead reduction for me. So much to include: the subject, the lion, the mandolin, the jug, the moon. (The mountains didn’t make the cut.)

The robe. I try to stay away from a lot of small objects, but the multiple long stripes worked here.

I may have made the moon too small. But if you look at the original…it's pretty small!

This beat needed to be dreamlike. A discordant lullaby for the sleeping woman.

I’m playing the main theme with four or five different string and synth patches, all garbled and effected up to make it sound really dreamy. Very slow attack – each note fades in a bit late.

The strumming guitar drone runs throughout the piece. It’s upfront at the intro and coda and during the quiet sections, but it retreats to the background while the main theme is playing.

Had to be some sort of strumming happening with her mandolin lying next to her, right?

Let's talk about that drone. This was a typical way that I create drones that run underneath many of my beats:

• Create a loop by strumming a guitar or playing a string patch or yelling into a microphone or whatever, generally in a completely different key than the rest of the song (tension!)

• Duplicate the loop by playing it a half step higher or lower.

• Turn the samples around so they play in reverse (sometimes).

• Pan them nearly hard left and hard right.

• Add fuzzy effects

Et voilà, an eerie-sounding background drone to set any mood!

It is not lost on me of course that today the term ‘Gypsy’ is considered offensive to the Romany people. [HERE is some basic info]. 

I just love the painting, and unfortunately, the word is in the title. 

Nothing I have read makes me think that it was anything other than Rousseau using a term commonly used at the time. The painting feels respectful to me.

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How can I write a beat about a book? That’s not really what I do here. But I spend so much time reading, I’ve been thinking about how to make it happen.

Maybe I can write about a book cover! That’s art. Sometimes great art. But, which one? There have certainly been a few…

I finally thought, well, since I’m probably only going to have one shot at this, let’s go for what I would argue is the most iconic cover art in this history of American literature: 

Francis Cugat’s 1924 painting Celestial Eyes, the image that graces the cover of the first edition of The Great Gatsby.

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There are countless editions of Gatsby with countless different covers. But this is the one, without question. Celestial Eyes has endured as the all-timer, the image most associated with what many argue is the great American novel.

Here’s something nifty I learned while researching the art for this beat: 

“For Christ’s sake, don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book,” Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to his editor Max Perkins in 1924.

So you are telling me that the whole concept of the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg optometrist billboard—one of the great metaphors in the history of fiction—first came from the book’s future dust jacket design?

Wow. That’s art indeed.

Loved doing the reduction for this one. The colors are so beautiful. The eyes and lips were pretty ready to go, but the shining carnival [and/or city, depending on how you see it] took a bit more time.

Who wants to write 1920s-style jazz-age-prohibition-flapper music? I do, certainly. But I could never pull that off in one of these beats. It would sound ridiculously forced.

So I compromised. I stayed away from my usual atonal-polytonal-blahblahtonal thing and wrote something with a chord progression that might at a distance sound like it belongs in the A section of some jazz standard.

Ahh, but that B section. Couldn’t help myself. No way I could write something for this painting without trying to evoke those spooky eyes. I broke the whole thing down, changed keys, and arpeggiated a couple of altered chords…simple enough. 

Still not spooky enough!

So when the rhythm section comes back in halfway through, I had the bass return to the bass line it played in the verses. Ah, the tension.

Finally, I thought a fun, straight-ahead Hammond solo at the end would be nice. Or…maybe a guitar solo? No wait—how about both a the same time?

That was fun.

I know, many people will read this and argue that some other cover art is greater or more famous or whatever. Art is like that.

HERE is a list of 25 of the most iconic book covers in history. Looking through them, I’m listing a few below that could give Gatsby a run for its money:

• Catcher in the Rye

• Catch-22

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• Jurassic Park

• To Kill a Mockingbird 

Would you have picked one of these—or another that’s not even on the list? Let me know!

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October. That means many things: Oktoberfest; The World Series; Halloween.

National Pizza Month.

October 24th is National Bologna Day. That’s something.

But really: come October, come spiders. I’ve been seeing soooo many spiders. At the lake. Outside the house. Inside the house. Enough already.

I don’t love spiders, but I try and respect all life…if they are in the house, I do my best to trap them and put them back outside. 

My wife [and our intrepid editor] Denise on the other hand? She not only wants to crush them but also impale their heads on little toothpick spikes outside the house to warn off all the other spiders.

No choice then but to write a spider beat. Clearly, the hippest spider art comes from Louise Bourgeois. Her titanic late-period spider sculptures are almost unimaginable, and the most famous [and well-traveled] of them is 1999’s Maman.

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I don’t think I could write something that sounds more like a spider. 

Overall creepy vibe, of course. The crawling, breathy flute lines. The delicate, atonal choppy chord pad throughout. The little thirds melody in the middle that rises up, higher and higher each time, like a spider disappearing into thin air when it’s been startled.

C’mon…SPIDERS!

Also, the way the beat starts so abruptly makes me think of the way spiders just seem to appear out of nowhere. Spidery magic.

Finally, the bass in this one…I use plenty of 808’s in these beats, a fairly common practice. But I tend to use them only as accents or downbeats while a more traditional bass sound (whether I’m playing live or via a virtual instrument) fills it up. Not this one. The bass is ONLY on the accents here. 

Though Bourgeois is best known for her steel spider sculptures, she didn’t start creating them until she was already 80 years old – and her career stretched nearly as long as Maman’s legs, spanning 8 of her nearly 10 decades.

Bourgeois said that she chose spiders because their traits reminded her of her mother. “She was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider.”

Maman was created for the grand opening of Tate Modern in London in 2000 and remains in its collection. At more than 30 feet high and 33 feet wide, one would think it would have to be a permanent installation. However, the work has been on a constant worldwide tour since 2001!

In just the first 10 years after its debut, Maman visited New York, The Hague, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Havana, Belgium, Sweden, Paris, Boston, and Naples.

Whew. Who is taking that thing apart and reassembling it every time?

And boy did I love working on this reduction. There were so many photos of it on display all over the world, but I chose one outside Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany. Two reasons: 

• Just love the way it looks against the brick building and ominous sky, and

• Creepy scary German kids' stories. Ever read an original Grimm? Yikes.

You might expect to find me writing about how useful spiders are for the ecosystem. But we all know that already.

Instead, I decided to dig into how pervasive these small-but-feared critters are. Turns out there are about 40,000 species of spiders. Only a few pose any sort of threat to humans, though.  

Wondering if there are any in your house right now? The answer is yes: yes you are living with spiders. They’re in 100% of homes. Apparently, each home has an average of 61.84 spiders in it at any given time. 

I’m not sure how they came up with that spiders-per-home average, but I am sure this counting means I’ll be upping my spider-removal game as soon as this post goes live. 

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Until next week, thanks for reading Polyester City. If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment by clicking the link above. If you know anyone who likes Music and Art and Stories [and giant steel spiders], which is pretty much everyone, please consider sharing by clicking the link below.

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