I’ve commenced my roughly quintennial reacquaintance with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” 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.
I’ve added a new photos section to the site. it functions independently from the main site in some ways, e.g. the main 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.
Or Kathy Norris,1 was a cellist here in New York for a few years in the mid- to late-1960s. She played on two of my favorite records, At Judson Hall by Noah Howard and Intents And Purposes by The Bill Dixon Orchestra.2 She also appeared on a Dixon-produced record by The Robert F. Pozar Ensemble, whose namesake was also known as Cleve Pozar. I came across Cleve Pozar via this terrific piece by Hank Shteamer and some other info at 50 Feet of Elbow Room, and to be frank, Pozar is a whole rabbit hole of his own, worth pursuing but not so deeply with regard to cellist Catherine or Kathy Norris.
In a way, it’s no surprise that I can’t find anything about her or evidence of further recording sessions. To those of us who listen to Noah Howard or Bill Dixon or Cleve Pozar, these musicians are titans, progenitors of music that pushed the boundaries of both jazz and solo and ensemble improvisation. But they’re either major minor figures or minor major figures in the broader history of creative music. Their current stature is defined by their status as makers of nearly irretrievable music, makers of records lost to the fray of their original moment. That is, this is not music that was ever popular, and however much “everything” is available online, anyone who has spent anytime looking for these outside, fugitive recordings knows this isn’t true. Collector’s prices can be prohibitive for titles that were privately printed in small numbers, and unless a fellow traveler has made a rip available, there’s maybe YouTube and probably nothing. And if one is looking for a session player,
there’s little or no chance at all of finding them elsewhere.
But for the moment, I wonder if Ms. Norris is easy to find but not where I’m looking, or if she left New York and stopped playing music, or perhaps she’s due for renewed interest and someone is working on it right now?
You can find my favorite albums from 2025 at Album Whale. It was a year of considerable discovery for me, a year of both more and less obscure listening, of both familiar and surprising instrumentation and dynamics. Hopefully you’ll find something to enjoy there.
Not altogether unrelated, I’ve started keeping a running list of notable listening and reading at an In Rotation page here at the site. Not a best of, exactly, but stuff that seems worth mentioning. If I come to sense a lack I might add viewing to the list but right now books and listening is enough.
However inclined one might be to consider Patti Smith simply a rock star who writes, a pass at the prelude of Bread of Angels should confirm that she is, rather, a poet who has made some records.
I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. “Sit down and have a drink” he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. “You have SARDINES in it.” “Yes, it needed something there.” “Oh.” I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. “Where’s SARDINES?” All that’s left is just letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven’t mentioned orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn, NY
Fugitive Recording, Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn, NY
Chicago, IL
Chicago, IL
Chicago, IL
Brooklyn, NY