1001 Disco Days

Elliptical smooth hand jive rolling beats glide to om hip hop at the Y

Beautiful dance to Kishi Bashi on vinyl in basement with the girls, making up moves, practicing their YMCA dance steps, then pretending they are baby eagles and the coffee table is their nest and I'm papa eagle and I'm teaching them how to fly, flying them off the mountain, wings spread wide. The best.

Listened to the new Missy Elliott WTF w/ Pharell, like 5 times in a row, with the spastic pop and loc, lose it in the club vibe. So good. Who does that? Who wouldn't?

my mom sent me a children's album (on vinyl) put out by Jack White's Third Man Records for my birthday. Featuring Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone, Jerry Garcia and the like. I turned off all the lights last night and danced to the whole record with the girls. Except they didn't care about the music so much, they just wanted to play. So I danced to one song while I held one girl, twirling her around to the music, like a living whirlygig ferris wheel, and then switched. Whichever girl was not being held was trying to hold onto the arm of her sister, so that was part of the dance game too, for them, and for me to keep that from happening. A good time was had by all, with only minor repercussions.

First trying my best to be "the baby whisperer" and get 3 month old Forrest to sleep, son of friends from Australia visiting us, Brigid and Evan. As soon as the crying starts it is soooo fierce that you would wear yourself out just to keep it from happening, doing squats up and down, until the rhythm starts to take over. Rhythm of David Burbage or somesuch, a record gotten for a buck from Stray, local thrift store on Skillman, but perfect in the moment, a few glasses of rum coconut monster energy drink later. We danced and it was suddenly the perfect thing needed for me, even more than him. And then he's down and I go to do dishes to Talib Kweli and it is the dance of the dishes, pop and lock stylo, tone loc wild thing on the spunge slide.

"New York is the kind of place where you have to get in your first serve." -Overheard overhead Walking out of the door of the YMCA just now and I see the headline. "George H. W. Bush has mellowed on same sex marriage." Ha, still have a way to go, but nice to know people can change at at 91 years old. I was listening to The Seeds this morning on the elliptical machine. Anyone familiar with The Seeds? They have a 15 minute long song called "Up in her room." It is based on a two note guitar riff and the  conceit of being -up in her room. About halfway through the keyboard player comes in. He is awesome. AWESOME. By that time I  was dancing hard on the machine, flying at 10 mph. Felt like 100. Up in her room.  I was thinking about love. So aptly portrayed in the building intensity of the song. About how when I was young i focused all of that incredibly magnetic and powerful feeling of being in love on one person. Hoping it would be reflected back forever. But ...

Floating through the cemetery

    Magic is afoot in Queens Went to see a spectacular Hamlet (starring Benedict Cumberbatch, beamed to movie theaters live from London stage) and then afterward I'm looking for a drink to decompress from all that tragedy. I stop at a cobblestone pub. A man is running around in front of the pub in figure eights, hands in the air, screaming in celebration. I ask him what's happening and he says Mets are poised to win a big game against the Dodgers to clinch a spot in the playoffs. It's 3 to 2 top of the ninth. I grab a beer and quickly get caught up on the home-town frenzy.  After the win I danced home, (to the music of Slo Children playing the Twango at the D Note several years ago,) whooping it up with the city. Whoop whoop!

Since the girls are home from school for Indigenous Peoples Day, we took advantage and watched old live Van Morrison during lunch. We pretended it was happening in our living room.  And then afterward we danced. A sun dance. "Can I just have one more sun dance with you, my love." Then we went to a new secret garden (behind the hedges of Sunnyside Park)     found heart (in Sunnside Park)

I did have an elliptical work-out at the Y to Peaches yesterday that was, could have well been, considered the 299th dance, but decided maybe it wasn't quite all the way there to full dance-hood. But it was. At any rate, who's counting? This morning I put on Peaches again. I tried Suicide first, but that didn't come close. I chose her album "I Feel Cream" because it's her most personal. And it was a revelation. A revolution. She says, "I'll take you on!" and she does. She's my new muse. And my muse says, apparently, that I'm not trying hard enough. But she also says not to worry, she'll help me with my Mama complex. When it starts to hurt and I complain, she calls it out, "I think you got a little bit more than you asked for." But no, it was perfect. The freedom to say "You can't mess with me!" "I'll take it all on!" That's it. Once there is nothing left to mess with any more you c...

Zumba YMCA

I heard some difficult news from my brother. Earlier this month he recommended a certain version of Peggy oh, by the Grateful Dead. I was just thinking today I should listen to it. Then our old basis Jax texted jeremy a question, we have a play that song together? Jeremy told him he had just recommended that song to me. Jackson said I must be on the slow children van with. So to deal with the emotion I went downstairs and danced to the music. It was cathartic and great in the best way.

Tomatoes off vine Leaf drawing Coloring A friend told me that I was nobody was better than me at finding the synchronicity in life, the fantasy in the quotidian. But it's more than just fantasy. Today I took Sofia to a secret Garden, I was just using my "imagination" and merely meant the cemetery, but once we got there we found a hidden real secret garden full of ripe tomatoes. Ate them off the vine.  At one point on the ride there, we were looking at a clown poster. While she was distracted I picked up a pair of clown glasses that just happened to be on the ground. I told her there was more than one kind of magic. She said there were hundreds. I said yes, but two different kinds that I knew of. The kind that relied on distraction and the kind that was real. When she was looking at the clown poster she was distracted and so I picked up the clown glasses and put them on. That was a trick. But the fact that the universe happened to "randomly" put the funny glasses...

Got caught up in the auto dance seeing Thee Oh Sees with Tyler Burba at The Bowery Ballroom. Felt good, like clearing sinuses. But even better was drinks with Anselm Berrigan before hand, where he recounted the secret history of his incredible parents and then gave us his terrific new book.  Tyler going through Portal

Invited to a Banksy tribute on Delancy Street, danced hard to old Skool hip hop while the painters painted. After listening all day to Frank Delany explicate Ulysses, I'm in a cerebral dance, where my body is writing, just as the language of Joyce is musical and dances across the page.

On that fantastic pop and lock, groove and slide, conveyer belt around the hood. Quinn pops up like magic and then Katy and then long conversation about books and movies and kids and life. Like magic I tell you! Like an apparition rising from the very sidewalks.  Someone doesn't want to stay off the grass!

Not sure where the slack in the soft shoe came from, but today went out in the hood this morning and then tore it up at Shima's 40th, on a deck in Edgewater NJ overlooking Gotham. Old Skool hip hop. Shaking something out, maybe old age itself. shaking down entropy. 

Dancing with girls in backrayd to king sunny ade. Dance contest. Then inside and flying with Lucia. The best.

Pop meets the void

Thoughts on a leash, but the body moves, twice through the cemetery, to Thee Oh Sees, once at home while the girls ate dinner, to the new tripping ASAP Rocky.  Just life at its tiring sweetest. Can't quite tell what this bird carries in beak. (Metaphor alert)

Great thing about dancing is that it puts you as close to the moment as you can get, because you are following the music, and you don't know where the music will go so you you have to stay on your toes. An especially great way to start your day.  So glad to have another ecstatic dance this morning. Also thinking about that phrase "it's all good." A black squirrel crosses my path and I think 7 years of bad luck and then I laugh. Bad luck is impossible. There is no such thing as bad luck if you are living at the bottom of nothingness and top of everything. But then of course there is cruelty in the world, so it isn't all good, is it? Stare down Great dance album! New favorite band of the month.

I was reading an Octavio Paz poem, called Pro-Am. (Ex Dios de Maquina de auto correct, the poet's friend.) It was about the vertigo on the edge of the cliff, falling ringing even as the glass shattered. Falling in the valley of sunset Verbena at the Botanic garden. Some call it Latana. When I overheard the ladies of the bench talking: "How's your sister?" No reply. "You don't talk to her?" No reply. "She doesn't even hold the door open for me anymore." No reply.

I laughed so hard at 99 and Barry this morning, their May 1st, 2015 show. I was so alive in that laughter walking to the graveyard. I had to sit down and say it. I could feel that laughter hollow out my chest, like a bellow of joy.  What I thought I was doing when I started this project was far less than what I am doing. I thought I was just trying to live my life, get in at least 1000 more dances. But I realized this morning that what I am actually doing is learning how to master being in the moment. Like yesterday starting out with that pigeon in the morning, scattering debris and leaves. Somehow this lead to baby goslings in Central Park in the afternoon, which lead to catching Alex Katz' painting of Kenneth Koch's face on the cover of KK's collected at a bookstore this evening.  Only $4! And even though I want to tell these stories to you, because I love you, these words are only faint pointing toward the moment. Except when you read them,  because then we ar...

I did yoga while listening to baby Dee singing the robin's tiny throat. Then ran for six minutes. The moment was sanctified when I watched a pigeon scatter leaves and debris with her wings as she rose off the sidewalk and into the sky.  Prose: she a Conrad Stephen Boyer turned me on to BBC. Started plank challenge, running challenge.