Spring « And Also This

Archive for the ‘Spring’ Category

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 »

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 »

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 »

Stories About Impermanence

April 10th, 2009

So, spring is finally eking its way across America, reaching small fingers to my corner of Brooklyn. As a sort of anticipation of the summer, I’ll head due south for this mix, to New Orleans.

I grew up a few hours from New Orleans, and to be honest, it has doggedly followed me around since the first time I visited. They say that the city either gets in your blood or not– it chooses some people to retain for its own, some people to leave outside the circle of influence. Even before the hurricane, it could be a vicious place, full to the brim with poverty, a dark past replete with the worst offenses of the colonial era, and a bizarre, violent sense of humor. It was very cruel… and very beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »

It's hard to say…

February 20th, 2009

Sometimes it is difficult to say what you mean, more difficult to do what you intend– intentions are slippery creatures, constantly shifting with context and emotion. I intended to be productive this winter, to come up with a sort of road map for the next few years, but I find myself at the tail end of it having done almost none of my own work, though I have so far managed not to become a casualty of the economic downturn (yet). So, instead of a road map for the next few years, I made a mix for the next few months– something that reminds me of the coming changes, something somewhat wistful, somewhat quiet. What I really want is to record it onto an old cassette tape and take off somewhere in a beat-up car, but we can’t have everything, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cannibal Manifesto

November 3rd, 2008

The winds of change, they are a-blowin’. This, combined with the steadily cooling weather puts me in the mood for Tropicalia. Started in Brazil in the sixties, the movement encompassed a diverse mash of influences, taking on guises from many styles of music, poetry, and literature. It ended abruptly in 1968 when Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the leaders and most recognized voices of Tropicalia, were incarcerated on false charges by Brazil’s right wing military dictatorship. Though later released, they were exiled from the country for four years. Many of their contemporaries were not even this fortunate, undergoing torture and forced “psychiatric care” for their artistic creations, lifestyles, and attempts at cultural syncretism. Read the rest of this entry »