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March 2nd, 2011

It’s been a long time.

Winter was a sort of interminable prison sentence this year, but spring is finally doing its slidy dance into the corners of the grass plots of Brooklyn. This month I don’t have any great back stories or epic inspirations, just an old cliché: the-best-of-something-or-other. So, this mix is the Best of White Gilt.

As a very few of you may know, my good friend Shay and I hold a sporadic dance party in Greenpoint called White Gilt, which was the name of our band, but then I turned 30 and we both got very career oriented. So, why not turn it into a DJ night, which is much more mature and serious-minded? This was, we both agreed, a Good Idea. Read the rest of this entry »

All is Falling

September 27th, 2010

In 1975 the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Cape Cod on a single-handed crossing of the Atlantic as part of what would be his final work, entitled In Search of the Miraculous. His vessel, the thirteen foot long Ocean Wave, was the smallest craft in which such a feat had been attempted. Three weeks into the voyage radio contact was lost, and ten weeks later the Ocean Wave was found partially submerged West-Southwest of the coast of Ireland, Ader’s intended destination. He, however, was never seen again. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dalek’s Dream

July 30th, 2010

Being addicted to British television has its perks. In addition to off-color sitcoms and Welsh cartoons, the BBC has a very nice way with music documentaries. Synth Britannia is a well-researched, extremely interesting piece about how a once marginalized and underground genre of music came to be the defining style of a decade. It’s difficult to imagine PBS devoting the same kind of attention and care to these acts’ American counterparts, mainly (I suppose) because production costs would far outweigh interest in the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

The safety of objects

June 15th, 2010

Don DeLillo’s White Noise was published in 1985, went on to win the National Book Award, and thrust him into the forefront of a vague movement called ‘postmodern literature’. I have never truly understood what this label means. Postmodernism in literature and art, in architecture and criticism has certain elements in common, but nothing binding, nothing constant, and maybe that is the point. At its core, postmodernism highlights the recursive, fractured thoughts that plague us as members of advanced capitalist societies: truth is relative to the observer, we are alone in a crowd, and the devices we use to create a sense of community or identity only serve to drive us further apart. We buy things that in turn try to sell us a semblance of self parceled out in neat monthly payments of 19.95. Read the rest of this entry »

The lord of depths

May 7th, 2010

Change is never easy. Whether it is the yearly confusion surrounding seasonal shift or a major alteration in fortune, change takes us all by the scruff of the neck and wags its finger in our faces. Through its clumsy reminders we are forced to accept that we are finite, that we own nothing absolutely, and that we must make the best use of the time that we have. I believe that an approximation of personal peace can be attained by acceptance that flux is the only constant, and that in the end, the details are everything. That said, sometimes you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going. Read the rest of this entry »

Rain on the sea

March 30th, 2010

On such a series of rainy days it’s hard to be patient for the inevitable promised spring flowers or the long, drowsy days of summer. This is the difficult transitional phase, the growing pains of a season that just isn’t quite ready to step up to the plate.

For some reason, days like this make me think of northern France. Directly south of the English cliffs at Plymouth there is a town called Brest. It was almost entirely destroyed during World War II, left with only three buildings standing. In 1945, the poet Jacques Prévert published his poem Barbara, which I think is a fitting complement to such a day as this. If you are feeling a little wistful, a little longing for a rainy sea and a French day that smells of brine and wet wood, on a beach where the horizon melts into the earth– this is the mix for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Closing time

February 23rd, 2010

There is an end to everything. When I moved to New York City in 2003 I was 22 and mostly stupid. Having just graduated from art school, I was still laboring under the misapprehension that the world owed me a living, that my friends would always be my friends, and that I would be young for a long time. Those first six months were probably the hardest time I’ve ever had. I was seriously poor, working jobs that were detrimental to my health and my self-esteem, sometimes barely scraping up enough change to eat, and just wrapping my head around the fact that my previous four years’ experience in no way prepared me for life in the ‘real world’. Read the rest of this entry »

In a cold funk

January 29th, 2010

Deep winter is a tough time to live in New York. No one much feels like going out to brave the squalling wind and snow, especially for a drink in a hot, crowded bar with people so bundled up they resemble haystacks. February tends to be the month that we all burrow down into our skins and make a ream of plans that we have no real intention of carrying out, or research dream vacations that we will never be able to afford. Read the rest of this entry »

Voice of the Xtabay

January 9th, 2010

It’s funny how some American cultural institutions, though supposedly predicated on reality, are in fact products of our collective imagination. Take ‘tiki’ culture, for example. When I was in LA, I had the good fortune to go to one of the country’s longest operating tiki bars: Tiki Ti. Ray Buhan opened Tiki Ti in the early 1960s after working for some of the city’s original tiki establishments, and it stands in the same spot to this day. Unbelievably, it is also still run by his family– his son, and now his grandsons tend the bar and make the 85+ concoctions on the menu. Read the rest of this entry »

The Elephant Vanishes

December 13th, 2009

I stumbled upon the work of Haruki Murakami around 1997, picking up a copy of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at my local bookstore. I had never heard of him, but the blurb sounded interesting enough, and I had been trying to find out more about Japanese literature– the internet left something to be desired at that point as far as research went. Read the rest of this entry »