Crush by Floating Points
Jon and Megan
Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn, NY
It’s heatwave summer in the city. There’s at least one song mashup to pursue in that statement but unless it offers reprieve from the current state of things, I can’t see how it’s worth the effort. As we near the 250 years milestone of our Declaration of Independence, it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the festivities, such as they are. Here in New York there will be Tall Ships and fireworks and surely more celebration. Broadly speaking, we’ve had a good year: new mayor, an overall increase in sociability and regard for others ,1 and, of course, The Knicks, whose prowess and victory have been shared by veteran basketball enthusiasts and non-fans alike. We deserve it. New York can be a very difficult place to live and if it seems like our good stuff is especially local in light of our shameful national and international scenes, I’ll take it. So from Brooklyn, New York City, here’s to wishing everyone a safe and healthy Fourth of July, looking forward to more agreeable, less conflicted, and peaceful celebrations in the years to come.
My simplest favored measure of goodwill is the extent to which people pick up after their dogs on the sidewalk. Under Mayor Adams, for example, dog waste left to fester on the sidewalk was at an all-time high, at least as I’ve observed in the last 3 decades. Since Mamdani took office, except for last winter’s deep-freeze, the sidewalks are cleaner.↩︎
It’s heatwave summer in the city. There’s at least one song mashup to pursue in that statement but unless it offers reprieve from the current state of things, I can’t see how it’s worth the effort. As we near the 250 years milestone of our Declaration of Independence, it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the festivities, such as they are. Here in New York there will be Tall Ships and fireworks and surely more celebration. Broadly speaking, we’ve had a good year: new mayor, an overall increase in sociability and regard for others ,1 and, of course, The Knicks, whose prowess and victory have been shared by veteran basketball enthusiasts and non-fans alike. We deserve it. New York can be a very difficult place to live and if it seems like our good stuff is especially local in light of our shameful national and international scenes, I’ll take it. So from Brooklyn, New York City, here’s to wishing everyone a safe and healthy Fourth of July, looking forward to more agreeable, less conflicted, and peaceful celebrations in the years to come.
My simplest favored measure of goodwill is the extent to which people pick up after their dogs on the sidewalk. Under Mayor Adams, for example, dog waste left to fester on the sidewalk was at an all-time high, at least as I’ve observed in the last 3 decades. Since Mamdani took office, except for last winter’s deep-freeze, the sidewalks are cleaner.↩︎
I’ve commenced my roughly quintennial reacquaintance with “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” a song I believe to be irrefutably and uniquely powerful, but I can never get my head around the mix in the last section. I’m not sure where such a song is supposed to “go” but near-incoherence doesn’t seem quite right. But then, there I am, at the end of this breathtaking song, awash in cosmic reverb and a kind of asynchrony, and I think, “well, yes.”
I can’t remember how I found “American Diner Gothic” but anything with a tagline like “In the 2020s, the weird soul of placeless America is being born on Discord servers” will at least tickle my attention, and this piece, which folds alternately into anxious sociology and a kind of copped-out insider pov, turned out to be a wonderful read.
I didn’t know there were active offshoots or versions of the Guerrilla Girls but the original efforts remain inspiring. This kind of protest seems mostly impossible to me in our current moment. Too much info flows through specialized scrolling for their type of production and interference to touch anyone who isn’t already looking for it.
The photo site continues to be a work-in-progress. Which is to say, I continue to work on it and am making progress.
I made a memorial page for our cat, Lieu, to whom we said goodbye yesterday. Dearly missed.
I’ve added a new photos section to the site. it functions independently from the main site in some ways, e.g. the site’s search function does not extend to the photos subsite. Neither does the “photography” tag search the subsite. The photos site also has its own RSS feed. I might learn to remedy these distinctions in the future but for now it’s like an attached garage for photos. I’ll be organizing them by theme or location and adding photos when I can.
Brooklyn, NY
