31. Slipper Beach

You and your trusty vessel wash up ashore onto a small bed of coarse orange sand, enclosed on all sides by rock.

The rock — a deep, rich maroon — includes an elegant arch curving from east to west, further inviting wonder by appearing not only impossibly smooth, but also as if the entire affair is one single piece.

What must have taken millennia for wind and water to carve is now the extraordinary shape of a graceful slipper, beach for heel and cave for toes. It is a somewhat gloomy gracefulness, however, due to the wispy drape of fog blocking your view of anything up beyond the foot strap.

The slippery stone makes climbing up impossible . . . and you lack the equipment to scale it.

[ Fly up into the fog ] —

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The fog parts effortlessly, embracing your ascent.

An overcast, blank canvas, the uniform shade of solitude, surrounds you in every imaginable direction.

You are aware of extreme cold but do not really feel it; does the world, when it can be neither seen nor touched, still exist?

~ do you?

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// Side B //

Table of Contents

⇨ What’s the Score? + You’re a Music Supervisor, Too ⇦
• Postcard from West Morocco
• 10 Things That Crossed My Path in the Last 2 Weeks
• Midnight Fog Meditation

Thanks for tuning in! You witnessed an improvisation snippet from last weekend, and a photo taken in Australia’s Blue Mountains from February.

I considered scoring today’s story with “The Wild Forest Reigns”, off my 2021 solo-piano EP, Lullabies of the Pleiades. Here’s the song,

and a photo from the release • promo • triptych,

California’s central coast, with Casey

. . . but in the end I chose the more oblique soundtrack.

Dear listener, what do you think: do you prefer a direct hit when combining stuff —e.g. fiction + music, blazer + trousers, picture + text — or would you rather a bit of dialogue, friction, rebellion? If I admit I adore Magritte and wear different socks on each foot, you already know my coordinates.

What music and/or sounds would you pick to score Slipper Beach?

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Postcard from West Morocco

This week I’m writing to you from the outskirts of West Morocco, near Essaouira. It’s my first time in the country and everything is exciting, from the braying donkeys to the fresh-ground almond butter to the 18th-century medina’s souk markets overflowing with rugs instruments spices jewelry and particularly popular escargot stalls.

Interactions with locals have all brimmed with heart and genuine curiosity, and I can’t get enough of the traditional music (lots of Gnaoua) popping up everywhere at sunset, like lanterns lit upon the city’s high terraces, flaring into the night, favoring daily life as festivity.

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10 Apparitions, 2 Weeks

Clippings of stuff crossing my path recently . . . some music, some ideas:

1. A brisk walk generates more ideas than a leisurely one, if I’m dictating thoughts into a voice recorder.

2. I love the new album Sou Kora from Ballaké Sissoko (kora) / Vincent Segal (cello) / Emile Parisien (sax) / Vincent Peirani (accordion), especially “Amir” and their thrilling arrangement of Aldo Romano’s “Il Cammino”:

3. “Rule of life: Never make asks of someone bigger than you. Give until they offer.” Alex Hormozi

4. Love Nikita Diakur’s animations. Mesmerized by “Doorway”:

5. You’ll always get my attention with heterodoxy against 99% of common practice among trained professionals in the field of their expertise. This is why I harp¹ about piano improv’s being accessible to everyone including 100-year-olds — and why you should join the mailing list for my Piano Liberation Workshop, whose next cohort launches soon!
   
   Oops, veered off-road. Seymour Bernstein + Ben Laude + Logan Skelton correct the record on what hairpin notation means in 19th-century music scores:

6. “We overvalue people we don’t know and undervalue those we do.” Brian Norgard

7. Killer ambient work by Hiroshi Yoshimura on Surround, originally released in 1982 and now re-issued:

8. Count Basie and His Orchestra appear so exquisitely in this episode of Blazing Saddles that I eagerly await their surprise arrival to my current desert surroundings, too. Who chose “April in Paris” — was it Basie?

9. “haha” and “hehe” go back, at least as far as the 11th century.

   

10. Posted this one in substack notes but I find it so captivating, here it is in book context from 1911 too. Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, carved in the 18th century BC. The scales of physical immensity and time gulf are both impossible for me to grasp.

    

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One last evening fog meditation, before we part ~

What are you excited about lately?

See you in a couple weeks — unless you write first.

🧋

1. Pun intended — because not intending a pun in print is a) impossible and b) what are you doing with your life?