To the left are his four solo albums released after leaving Roxy Music. They felt a logical progression of rock to cerebral to meditative to a fusion of them all. The right of that above are the two (early) collaborations with Robert Fripp. The music is equal parts each musician. Below that, his first four “ambient” albums. Process music (like much of the 20C modern music I listen to) but as wallpaper as opposed to foreground. The lower left, in the middle of his early ambient works, is the album with David Byrne. Also process; not wallpaper.
Running a long string of failed tests with a coworker and there’re only two tests left. Looking hopeless. As test T-minus-1 is running, he sends me the AP news and I reply “if this test works I’m going to pass out.” Lisa had just poured a drink minutes before the news because she’s leaving for a long weekend in Baton Rouge tomorrow and it’s her First Friday. It’s my coworker’s wedding anniversary. It’s my niece’s birthday. Top story on Reddit before the news was the celebration of the birthday of a Redditor’s grandmother’s 100th birthday.
And Mother Fucking Trump is Mother Fucking Indicted.
Credit where credit is due: the first thing my coworker said was we need to drink Manhattans tonight.
(Side note: I was thinking this morning about what my next compositional work would be and it often goes to write-what-you-know, and thus for me to such life-changing events as Those Four Years or The Year of Pestilence or The Year of the Flood (personal) or Our Burgeoning Civil War. Ultimately, I’ve done thisbefore and so must find another inspiration no matter the intrusive resonance of these events.)
OMG same building where the Central Park Five were arraigned in. Jesus Fucking Christ this is beautiful.
Please, please, please, take out a full page ad and do that GoFundMe thing.
7:30 PM
I can’t, can not, focus on a depressing endgame with this. The indictment is not a guarantee but it’s a move forward and, more important at this point in these hours after the event, a move forward that can be celebrated for how far it’s gone.
Joy Reid is speaking with a (Jewish) Lawyer. Oh my, how do you respond as a Jew, or as anyone but you-know-what-I-mean, to the DeSantis references to “Soros-backed-investigations”?! Often I think about Those Four Years and how it was a master class to me, as a White Male, to appreciate what black people and Jews and LGBTQs and whoever, go through, and just how much I’m not prepared for it and how much I now look to them to give me insight into how to survive. How to survive mentally. How do you survive the garish lawlessness? I’m not sure I can justify it logically, but Those Four Years made me feel as if justice had become not only meaningless but anarchic. And yet I’ve always appreciated empathetically the anguish that minority or marginalized groups must go through. They experience it from birth to death. Trump’s decisions absolutely never affected me, but they were such a surfacing and normalization of the ideas that were so completely repugnant, that I felt that they affected me (again, I say this without the naivety of an oblivious white male).
8:00 PM
I am told of a “perp walk” and as much as we salivate for the “perp walk” I also understand the need for circus-less-ness. Jesus Christ the security that will be needed.
I won’t be able to find it, but I often think of Tom Nichols’ essay on how Trump has made us all lesser socially and lesser morally. I want the worst for Trump. I want the greatest pain for him. And I hope I can facility the worst for his followers. I think of myself as a humanist and humane and my desire for cruelty to another is discomfiting morally. But maybe I think too charitably of myself when I’ve also often said “It’s always OK to punch a Nazi.”
I’ve been on a viewing jag over the last couple of weeks. Marx Brothers films, Russ Meyer films, an old TV show, a rare Japanese thriller, and a Mario Bava giallo.
A few years back I watched the Swedish sci-fi film Aniara [ IMDB | Wikipedia ] and it shook me. The prompting to watch was from some now-lost review that described it as eccentric and bleak (my remembered words, not theirs) and highly recommended it but with warning w/r/t that last characteristic. And it is that last characteristic that continually resurfaces to shake me.
