I was in an electronics store yesterday looking for new pair of headphones and stumbled across an interesting device: a cassette-to-MP3 converter. 
I was dubious, but it was only $30. And there was only one left. I took it home and dug out my stack of long-forgotten cassette tapes – 25 in all – and began the transfers. These took real time; a 90-minute cassette takes 90 minutes to download, almost like the old days of making tapes, timing the starting buttons and checking levels. Some of the cassettes have that bad warbling sound but many of the songs are pure nostalgia: Mr. Love (Vehicle), 
Zoolook (Jean Michel Jarre), 
Alibis (Moev), 
Uncertain Smile (The The) 
and Now Nothing (Penguin Café Orchestra). 
Ah, yes, cassettes…I wonder how long this will hold my attention. (The 45s would be next if I’d hung on to any of them.)
Category Archives: music
Christmas Card…with a stinger
I wish you a Merry Christmas. I wish you merry Christmas. I wish you a Merry Christmas. And a Happy New Year.
Moon and World Trade Centre lit as a Christmas Tree
Good tidings I bring to you and your kin. Good tidings for Christmas. And a Happy New Year.
Construction Boots as Mistletoe
Bring me some figgy pudding. Oh bring me some figgy pudding. Oh bring me some figgy pudding. And a cup of good cheer.
Man Sleeping in Brooklyn Bridge Subway on Christmas Eve
I won’t go until I get some. So bring some out here. Good tidings I bring to you and your kin. Good tidings for Christmas. And a Happy New Year.
Empire State Building as Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer
Sufjan Stevens – Bowery Ballroom, 12/21/12
Sufjan Stevens played out the apocalypse at the Bowery Ballroom in New York last night. And I feel pretty good. 
It was a remarkably lovely show with Santa balloons, noisemakers and crazy costumes – a real X-Mess as Sufjan wrote on his shirt – but it was the music….my goodness, the music, that transfixed. He played many different things, many of them Christmas songs, some of them not, like one of the encores: To Be Alone With You. (Click for live clip of the song here.)
Sufjan Stevens is a remarkable presence with a profound sense of who he is, his mind working too fast, his talent radiating out, almost embarrassed about it…but not that at all.
Sufjan Stevens as the Christmas Unicorn.
Sufjan Stevens as the Christmas Unicorn
I’m the Christmas Unicorn! You’re the Christmas Unicorn too!
It’s a simple thing. It’s a wonderful thing. It doesn’t have to be a world full of guns, floods and death. It really can be something else. We just have to put on our damn balloon suits. That’s it.
Christmas unicorns and confetti for everyone.
And nominate Sufjan Stevens for President of the Inter-StellarCollective.
December 21, 2012…and all is well.
Okay, it’s been a pretty windy day, rainy too…but I don’t think that qualifies as the world coming to end. And so…now what? We went through the seven stages of accepting this world’s end, and the planet’s still here. 
What are we going to do now? There are so many battles remaining to fight: getting rid of guns, taxing fairly, bringing peace to Syria, Congo, Palestine, Afghanistan, dealing with our collapsing planet, being honest and decent to one another. I mean, really, are we up for this? Or is to be same old same old? I would like to suggest some things to get us on the right track. Not only is Sufjan Stevens’ voice delicate; so are his words. Listen to Seven Swans.
And will I be a part of what you’ve made?/ And I am throwing all my thoughts away./ And I’m destroying every bet I’ve made/ And I am joining all my thoughts to you/ And I’m preparing every part for you
The Partridge Family: Season One is worth watching too. Yes,The Partridge Family. No one gives better moral advice than Shirley Jones. 
People aren’t as different as we think. We may have different beliefs, but we’re all pretty much alike.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a fascinating examination of free will and morals, and it’s only 796 pages.You’ve got the time. 
Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.
And finally, if you’re in New York this week, think about attending Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace event in Times Square. It is on every night 11:47-12:00 midnight until December 30.
What better way to spend the apocalypse?
Survival Guide: Two Days to go
Today is a day for personal reconstruction and working through to make sense of this Mayan Doomsday. Your mind should get back to work, and you will find yourself seeking realistic solutions to problems posed by the upcoming apocalypse, such as collecting firewood.
To Hear: Transient Random-Noise Bursts (Stereolab) Looping moments to think and plan. 
To Watch: Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica) It’s sad and beautiful story, and although things don’t work out like you hope, there is promise at the end. 
To Read: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) Compromise and sacrifice from innocent eyes.
To Do: Reach out to somebody you haven’t been so kind to in the past and try to make good. It’s worth a shot.
Survival Guide: An Upward Turn
As you start to adjust to the imminent end – now just three days away – your life should become calmer and more organized. You are in the upward turn. (That was quick!) Your physical symptoms lessen, and your depression begins to lift slightly. The closing of Mozart’s La Nozze di Figaro just might be, as artist Ragnar Kjartansson suggests, the most beautiful minutes of music ever recorded. Put it on a loop and listen again and again. 
Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is an absolute treasure, combining sophisticated story-telling with joyous detail and wit. I guess my point is, we’ll eat tonight, and we’ll eat together. And even in this not particularly flattering light, you are without a doubt the five and a half most wonderful wild animals I’ve ever met in my life. So let’s raise our boxes – to our survival. 
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, is also something to behold. It’s short and lovely and there’s pictures too. All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.
It’s time to get out there and do something active. Ride a bike, go for a walk or a swim, do anything but a run. That’s bad for your knees and hips.
Apocalypse Survival: We Must Change
“We must change.” So pronounced President Obama at a memorial service on Sunday for the families of victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. 
He is right. There is no doubting that. We are an extremely violent species with an unconscionable past. And we must change that. But can we? Is there really any way to do this? My money is against. The fourth stage of accepting the oncoming apocalypse is a day on which depression, reflection and loneliness dominate. This is supposed to be a long period of sad reflection, but you’ve only got the day. You realize the true magnitude of your loss, and you isolate yourself on purpose. William Basinki’s The Disintegration Loops is ideal for this state of mind. Created in Brooklyn on 9/11, these CDs document the disintegration of sound on reel-to-reel tapes. 
There are five CDs in all, but Disintegration Loop 5 is 52 minutes well worth trying. Michaelangelo Frammartino’s Quattro Volte evokes a similar feeling; it is a film with a disintegrating narrative of sorts, using an old shepherd, a baby goat, a tree and smoke, in that order. 
It’s a remarkable film for contemplation. Jose Saramago’s Blindness is far more harrowing, starting with a plague of white blindness that gets worse and worse and worse. It is next to impossible to put down. 
President Obama concluded his speech with the following: “We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” What are you prepared to do? Genuinely. What? It’s something to think about and act upon. We must change.
Survival Guide: Time to Get Angry
You only have five days before the Mayan Day of Doom, and it’s time to get angry. 
The world is fraught with injustice, much of it self-imposed. What is wrong with us?! It is exhausting to consider. It’s so stupid! What have we done!? Arghh. You may also need try to bargain with the powers that be for a way out of your despair (“I will never eat Lucky Charms again if this world won’t end”) even if you know that none of it will work. 
It’s a process, one step at a time. There is a lot of angry music that might help get you in the mood, including Nine Inch Nail’s The Fragile and Rage Against the Machine’s The Battle for Los Angeles, but Sinead O’Connor’s The Lion and the Cobra captures this deep-seeded emotion most profoundly. You’re still spitting fire/ Makes no difference what you say/ You’re still a liar! 
There are far too many angry people-with-guns movies, and I am sick of those. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God is a much better tonic. Aguirre is as angry as it gets, none other than the self-proclaimed wrath of god. 
You should also read Dee Brown’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee, a chronicle of the systematic destruction of the Native Indians in the western United States. It underlines the errors of our ways with depressing clarity. 
After that, physical labor will do you good. Burn your anger off. And if it’s still boiling, get a punching bag and have at it. 
Survival Guide: Pain and Guilt
I have to admit that it is hard to write my blog today. I cannot process in any way what happened yesterday in Connecticut. I don’t know how it is possible for someone to kill children one after the other, putting not one bullet into each tiny person, but several into every one of them, every last one. It makes me think that maybe the Mayans were actually right, that this really is the end of us, that the apocalypse has arrived, not with great storms and collapsing fault lines in the earth, but in us, dumb, staring at each other, wondering how we really got to this. And we did. The fact is that there are people – millions and millions of them – that will actually continue to support the right to bear arms as it is stated in the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 
They will say that guns don’t kill people, that people kill people, that guns have nothing to do with it. They will actually say that. And they will believe it. They will actually fucking believe it. That isn’t politics. That’s suicide, pure and simple. Guns don’t kill people? Really? 
How would that lunatic have killed 20 kids without his damned guns? How fucking stupid can you be? Anyway, yeah, the Pain and Guilt step of suffering grief, instructs that, as the shock wears off, it is replaced with the suffering of unbelievable pain. Although excruciating and almost unbearable, it is important that you experience the pain fully, and not hide it, avoid it or escape from it with alcohol or drugs – as tempting as they might appear at the moment. Life feels chaotic and scary during this phase. Does it ever. But to get through all of this insanity, I recommend that you look within as much as you can bear and maybe listen to The Great Destroyer by the American group Low. When I go deaf/ I won’t even mind/ Yeah, I’ll be fine. 
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino) is required viewing, reminding us that war kills everything in body, mind and spirit. This one’s nothing but pain and guilt, horribly, beautifully so.. 
I also encourage you to delve into the writings of the great philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer: They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice…that suicide is wrong, when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person. 
And don’t stop at Schopenhauer. You must keep going. Read as much miserable philosophy as you can bear.
Most important of all, do something. Please. Sign a petition. Write a letter. Speak your mind, damn it! Fight these monsters right to the fucking end. Do it! Really, do it. Or else you have to just watch the world go to its damned and terrible end.
Coping with the Apocalypse
Whether it’s to come by holocaust, super-storm, bio-plague or sheer boredom, Mr. Mayan has predicted that our world is to end in exactly one week: December 21, 2012. 
While the prediction is dubious at best, the exercise of what you might do if this actually were the case, is interesting. You’ve got a week. Now what? Starting today – and using the seven stages of grief – I offer my Survival Guide to the End of the World.
Today is easy. It’s all about SHOCK & DENIAL.You don’t have to do anything really.You’re numb and can deny the reality of this in order to avoid the pain. Shock provides emotional protection from being overwhelmed all at once. This may last for weeks…but you only have the day. Anyway, you just need to deny what’s coming up. Nothing more.
First of all, I recommend some music. A long and involved listening to the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks Volume 16, Filmore 11/8/69 is ideal. No need to think. Just relax your mind and go with it.
After this, you might consider watching the film, Superbad (Greg Mottola). It’s so excellent because it’s so stupid, one of the most genius dumb-ass films ever made.
And, if you are able focus yourself for any time, try and read Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Everyone’s in denial throughout the story; nothing is as it should be. And that’s good, right? 
And finally, you should do something different. Maybe juggle or kayak. Have your fortune read– Oh, maybe not that. I’m going to see a new band: Grizzly Bear. 
And maybe I’ll take a pedi-cab after that. Arggh! (That’s a Grizzly roar.)