Banner day yesterday of site transformation, rebalancing: added pages for Attendance Cards, for VIOLENTLY ADORABLE, and Frequencies and "latest" (back) to the About page LINKS. Hoping that Squarespace adds a Mastodon social link icon soon but I suspect it will fall under their "such and such takes awhile to implement so please be patient (while we try to add stuff and break everything)" canned response.

Also nifty: the inspirations behind my new Principles page dug my efforts.

In word-land: banner morning this morning of getting back into the fiction groove – one of those rare mornings when I have a lot to write here but also managed to get a lot done in The Work: usually the amount of writing in this space is in inverse proportion to the amount of writing in The Work – of finding what wasn't working (efforts to combine – didn't need to combine stories, only to switch the medium of one) and how to – possibly – make it work for me again; also set a goal of releasing a new Etude by year's end.

I have now listened to Mr Leonard Cohen on vinyl for the first time and it was like listening to him for the first time ever – and this coming from someone who has a piece of his wisdom tattooed on his arm, "(if your life is burning well), poetry is just the ash."

Related: this was also my first time listening to music via physical media in years and I seem to have forgotten how, the patience, the focus it deserves. Efforts underway to return to that sort of patience from streaming befitting the investment in aural physicality. As I replied to K when she asked, "Why vinyl?": streaming is an e book, cd a paperback, vinyl the hardcover.

If you haven't checked it out, that Amazon Prime documentary on the music of Bond, featuring Billie Eilish and a ton of others, is fantastic. Helped to crystalize an unrealized goal I had as a music student: to have written a song as beautiful (and tragic) as "We Have All The Time In The World" and a score as rousing and exciting as ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (still my favorite Bond film).

Today's (and all moving forward) Attendance Card drawn in 4'33": Barry said she had her students draw for the duration of a song, so I decided to draw for the duration of John Cage's 4'33". Initially conceived card as a shrug but turned into what I can only approximate as a "Hallelujah" response to Mr Cohen on vinyl.

the morning's attendance card, a sketchy me which was initially conceived of as a shrug but morphed, over the four minutes and 33 seconds of creation, into an approximation of a "Hallelujah" response to Mr Cohen on vinyl.