November 30 is Luna’s birthday as listed in her adoption records. My ketzela is officially eight years old today. She looks all grown up and beautiful in the portrait above, but she also can still seem like a kitten, as in this photo where she receives some birthday scritches.
Please join me in wishing her a Happy Birthday!
After the Issue Project Room show in Brooklyn last Saturday, I headed north to the Bronx. Out on the street in Riverdale in the Bronx, I came across this cat:
The cat was a bit shy, keeping a bit of distance, but not running away either. It eventually went up one driveway.
It seemed to be a pet cat, not a stray, and after several entreaties came up to me, even head-butting my hand. It is always a treat to encounter cats when out and about.
Weekend Cat Blogging Thanksgiving Edition is hosted by Jules and Vincent over at Judi’s Mind Over Matter.
The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this Sunday by Nikita and Elvira at Meowsings of an Opinionated Pussycat.
And the Friday Ark is hosted by the modulator.
Once again, I will be in New York this month. It has become a yearly pilgrimage of sorts, as well as time to visit with family and friends. There will be lots of art, music and urban landscape writ large. And for this in the NYC area, I will be playing a show this Thursday.
November 15, 2012. Ambient-Chaos featuring Groupthink, Amar Chaudhary, LathanFlinAli, Charity Chan.
Spectrum, 121 Ludlow, Second Floor, New York.
LathanFlinAli, Groupthink, Amar Chaudhary, Charity Chan, and Lukas Ligeti live at the Spectrum Loft Space in Manhattan. Spectrum is a new loft space dedicated to experimental and music.
The event starts early. So please be there by 7:30 to settle in and enjoy the frequencies.
I will try and post sporadically, but in the meantime I do expect to continue with live updates of NY adventures via Twitter @catsynth.
Here is a video from our Reconnaissance Fly show at the Starry Plough in Berkeley this past August. (It was the same show the generated this Weekend Cat Blogging post.) It features one of our more challenging but also fun pieces, the medley of “Electric Rock Like a Cat” and “sanse is crede nza”, with music by Polly Moller and Amar Chaudhary, respectively.
It was our best performance of this set to date, and a lot of energy from both the band and the audience. So much so that we nearly had a disaster on our hands when our drummer Larry-the-O knocked over his hi-hat dangerously close to bassist Tim Walters’ foot. Fortunately, no one was hurt and a good time was had by all.
I am now an official host for The World of Wonder on San Francisco Community Radio (KUSF in Exile), alternating weeks with Matt Davignon, and my first show is tonight at midnight PDT. You can listen live online here and find an archive via podcast after the fact.
Each week we will be presenting a variety of music that most people don’t hear everyday, a mixture of esoteric, avant-garde, idiosyncratic and many other kinds of music. I do encourage readers of this site to tune in.
This morning, the decommissioned Space Shuttle Endeavor flew over the northern California today, including San Francisco. It is part of a farewell tribute as en route to its final resting place at California Science Center in Los Angeles. We were able to get a good view of the flyover from the roof of CatSynth HQ.
It was impressive to see so clearly over the city. But it was also a bit melancholy. I was in my early school years when the first shuttle flight took place – I of course had my own model of it (probably more than one), and was enamored with space and space travel in general. With the shuttles now decommissioned, it is unclear what we do next to keep moving forward space-wise. The moon and Mars proposals still seem squishy, and in someways feel like a step backward from the space shuttles when I see the proposed vehicles. Nothing to really bridge the gap between our past in space and the promise of routine travel from science fiction. I hope we can somehow rekindle the shared desire to explore and move into space.
Today we look at a long walk from a long time ago. It was probably 1979, and in the summer, a time when I was often with my grandparents in the Bronx. I had already acquired the lifelong fascination with streets and roads that I retain to this day, and my great aunt (my grandmother’s sister) planned a long walk for us in a neighborhood that alternatively could be called “South Riverdale” or Spuyten Duyvil. It on the western edge of the Bronx along the Hudson River and just north of the northern tip of Manhattan.
[Click image to enlarge]
This walk is quite a vivid memory. It is odd to realize that I can retrace most of it on a map. I know that we started out from what was then the intersection of West 230th Street and Riverdale Avenue, heading south up the hill to Johnson Avenue. The hillside was steep and wooded (as it is today), but then enough that you could see the flat city blocks towards Broadway to the east. We eventually turned right onto Kappock Street, which curved its way further up the hill amidst more buildings.
From there, we turned north onto the service road for the Henry Hudson Parkway (NY 9A), which we followed for a distance. Though this mostly provided a view of the parkway itself, one could also look past it towards the Hudson River. Ultimately, we turned away from the parkway onto West 235th Street, crossing Johnson Avenue again in the “downtown” section of Riverdale. The exact route we took to get there is a bit fuzzy, but I attempt my best guess in the map above.
We stopped for a rest and refreshment (probably juice or milk as I hated soda), before continuing on West 235th towards Riverdale Avenue. It is on the side of steep hill with ledges separating lanes, so we walked along the higher section and descended the hill back to West 231st.
In November of 2002, I wandered back along West 230th Street out of curiosity to see how things had or had not changed. An old library building I remembered was still there, as were most of the larger commercial buildings. But the area around the intersection at the end of 230th was completely reconfigured, with wide green spaces separating different directions. The nearby high school campus had gotten a lot bigger. One small street from the start of the original walk, Ewen Street, appeared to have been completely removed.
It would like to re-create the original walk on a subsequent trip to New York, along with photos. It might even happen this year.
Reconnaissance Fly’s official band website is up and running! Check it out, with links to upcoming shows, musical samples, even a recipe or two.
For those who have not been following along on Twitter or the band’s Facebook page, we have also been hard at work at our first album. We finished tracking this weekend (save for one overdub), and we’re looking forward to the next steps of mixing and mastering.
