For this post, I picked four bridges that I have visited with unique histories to profile. Some of the stories are creepy, some are interesting, and some are just downright weird. Hope you enjoy!

 

The Antique

 

London Bridge – Lake Havasu, AZ
Length: 930 feet (280m)

How did a century old bridge from London end up in the middle of the desert on a lake that straddles the boarder between California and Arizona? The answer to this strange story involves a property developer, a soft river bottom, and 2.5 million dollars spend in what may have been the world’s strangest antique sale.

In 1897 the bridge was the busiest traffic point in London, servicing 8000 people and 900 vehicles per hour. At this point it was decided that the bridge would have to be widened in order to prevent congestion, the survey for which revealed that it was sinking at a rate of a little more than an inch each decade. At the core of this problem were the heavy granite blocks used in the bridge’s construction. The weight without traffic was somewhere in the vicinity of 130,000 tons.

Enter Robert McCulloch, an oil mogul turned property developer.

“In 1967, the Common Council of the City of London placed the bridge on the market and began to look for potential buyers. Council member Ivan Luckin had put forward the idea of selling the bridge, and recalled: “They all thought I was completely crazy when I suggested we should sell London Bridge when it needed replacing.” On 18 April 1968, Rennie’s bridge was sold to an American. It was purchased by the Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for US$2,460,000.”

In order to prevent the sinking from happening in Arizona, the bridge was reframed out of steel and then covered with the original granite blocks, which had to be numbered and shipped in such a way that they could be reassembled piece for piece once it arrived at its new home.

There is some speculation as to whether or not McCulloch knew which bridge he was purchasing. Legend has it that he was under the impression he was getting the much more recognizable Tower Bridge and only realized the mistake once the construction was already underway, a claim that McCulloch denied.

Interestingly, the “sinking” effect was not the origin of the popular children’s nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down”, which can be traced as far back at 14th century Italy. Popular theories to the origin of the song include the frequent burnings of the wooden bridge’s by invading armies prior to the construction of a less flammable structure and rumors of child sacrifices being buried in the later structure’s foundation.

Although the bridge and it’s adjoining somewhat underwhelming, “English Village” never became the tourist magnet that McCulloch has hoped it might, Lake Havasu’s popularity as a retirement destination and the logistics of disassembling a two hundred year old bridge in the middle of the Arizona desert mean that London Bridge’s future is likely secure.

German Tourist’s video:

Bread’s Song “London Bridge”:

“is nothing sacred anymore?”

English Village video:

 

 

The Battle of the Sundial

 

Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay—Redding, CA
Length: 700 feet (210m)
Width: 23 feet (7m)
Height: 217 feet

A world-renowned architect and a group of small town visionaries faced some heavy resistance when they announced a unique plan: to build a state of the art walking bridge across a small bay North East of Redding, California.

The story reads like something out of a Marquez novel. It all began when the city allocated $2 million in funds towards the creation of a footbridge that would connect a local park to a wildlife center and arboretum. The initial plan called for a simple stone design with towers at the end, but when the city began pursing an architect to draw up plans, the committee in charge found themselves enamored with the work of the Spanish neofuturist Santiago Calatrava.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Calatrava agreed to submit three designs, and the cantilever-spar cable stayed bridge won out.

Despite the fact that the increased cost of the much more complex plan (an extra $20 million) would be provided mostly by a private foundation, with some extra money coming in from state and federal grants, local officials and papers took every opportunity to skewer the project. One local city councilman even took a vow to never step foot on the structure, a promise he has kept today, over a decade since its completion.

Still, the value of the project is hard to deny today. The small Northern California city now receives 300,000 tourists each year and benefits from the millions of dollars of commerce and tax revenue that those visitors bring with them.
Side note: As the name would suggest, the cantilever tower from which the weight of the bridge is suspended acts as a huge sundial. The tip of the shadow, which the tower creates, moves at a speed of one foot per minute, which allows the observer the unique opportunity to see earth’s rotation with the naked eye.

Ground perspective video:

“This. Is. The. Sun. Dial. Bridge.”

Drone Footage featuring Clair de Lune:

Documentary:

 

 

The Bridge from Hell

 

Hell Gate Bridge—Queens, NY
Length: 17,000 feet (3.2mi/5.2km)
Width: 100 feet (30.5m)

The long and curious history of the Hell Gate is often overlooked in favor of its more popular cousin just down the East River in Brooklyn. Even with its diabolical name (actually derived from the Dutch word for waterway “hellgat”) this bridge in Astoria, Queens still struggles in terms of recognition when compared with so many other New York Bridges. Although its construction was a feat of engineering unprecedented at its completion in 1916, the stories of the Hell Gate and the water below are what make it interesting to me. As far as strange history goes, it doesn’t get much better than this one.

A list of actual facts about the century long life of the Hell Gate:

-The name “Hell Gate” actually comes from the Dutch word for waterway, but was also given in reference to the notoriously treacherous waters that the structure spans.

-It is almost identical in its design to the Sydney Harbor Bridge. The main difference is in size, with its Australian sister being 60% larger.

-In the event of a total apocalypse in which human life ceased to exist, the Hell Gate would be the last structure standing in New York City.

-Before its construction, the waterway below was known for being the most hostile and difficult to navigate point of entry into the city. This was mainly due to the presence of a large reef that created both physical obstacles and caused the sudden appearance of huge and unpredictable whirlpools. During the height of oceanic trade, the waters were causing the grounding of almost a thousand ships each year.

-This reef was destroyed in the largest man made explosion prior to the testing of the atomic bomb. The army corps of engineers was called on to plant 300,000 pounds of explosives inside the reef using 7,000 holes drilled into its exterior over the course of seven years. The resulting blast sent a water spout hundreds of feet into the air and was heard and felt as far away as west New Jersey.

-Prior to that successful explosion, a French engineer named Benjamin Maillefert raised money from local merchants in an attempt to clear the straight. His method involved using a long pole to lower large amounts of explosives down onto the areas of the reef that were exposed above the water. This method was meant to take care of the problem a little bit at a time, and worked for several months, until Maillefert and his team made a mistake. An account of this day reads:

“The relentless blasting of Hell Gate went on till March 1852, when the law of averages caught up with Maillefert. After placing a 125-pound charge of powder atop a rock, he took what he thought were the lead wires to the submerged mine and paid out the line till he and the supply boat were a safe distance from the explosion site. Upon touching the wires to the battery terminals in his boat, he blew the other boat clear out of the water and was thrown 50 feet in the air himself. Of the five men in the operation, three were killed and Maillefert and his assistant were disabled.”

-There are two shipwrecks of note that took place in the waters that the bridge now spans. The first was the loss of the HMS Hussar, which happened prior to the bridge’s construction. Actual details of what the ship was carrying vary by account, but some suspect it was bringing back pay to British soldiers and might have gone down with a fortune in gold coins worth over $500 million today. Salvage experts and treasure seekers are still pursuing the wreckage.

-The second shipwreck took place in 1904. The steamer General Slocum caught fire and sank rapidly while carrying 1,342 members of an evangelical church to a picnic across the river. Estimates put the death toll at a little over a thousand, which make it the worst New York area disaster prior to September 11th. Most of those on board were women and children who could not swim and discovered when they attempted to escape the blaze that lifeboats had been painted directly into the deck preventing their removal. Life preservers also were found to have been filled with iron bars to meet manufacturer weight requirements, and several accounts of the disaster make mention of mothers throwing their children overboard inside of the rings, only to watch them sink immediately to their deaths.

-In 1991, $55 million was raised to refurbish the look of the Hell Gate. This restoration included to repainting of the long neglected structure in a color invented specifically for the project, appropriately named “Hell Gate Red.” A flaw in the paint resulted in its almost immediate fading. It would appear the new look just wasn’t meant to be.

-Many believe the Hell Gate it haunted, with stories of disappearances and ghost sightings going as far back as the 1920’s. It is easy to see why the bridge would have captured the imagination of story tellers: two small, red lights are all the illuminate the structure at night, making it by far the most poorly lit bridge in New York City.

-Nazi agents targeted the bridge for sabotage during the ill fated “Operation Pastorius” in 1942. Eight spies were dropped on American shores with orders to destroy several key pieces of infrastructure, of which the Hell Gate was one. The mission had several close calls but was ultimately brought down when two of the men decided to betray their team to the FBI. The betrayal was not as easy as it sounds. One of the men attempted to do it over the phone but was hung up on several times as being a prank caller, and ultimately had to travel to the FBI offices in DC. Even then it took several hours and meetings with various agents before someone decided the story was true. The two informers were given life in prison and eventually deported back to Germany, while the other six members of the team enjoyed one-way trips to the electric chair and burial in unmarked graves in a potter’s field.

Climbing Hell Gate bridge:

Drone footage:

Hell Gate Gold:

 

 

 

Bat Bridge

 

Congress Avenue Bridge—Austin, TX
Length: 945.9 feet (288.3m)
Width: 60 feet (18m)

Residents of Austin, Texas got a surprise when a rehabilitation project on the busy Congress Avenue Bridge was finished in 1980. A colony of Mexican free-tailed bats decided that the beneath the road deck in the concrete structure made a most excellent and cozy home for their summer migration north.

Initial reactions to the bats were not positive. The fear of the flying rodents led to a petition demanding their eradication.

Today, bats and humans live in relative harmony. The 1.5 million creatures eat up to 20,000 pounds of bugs each night including agricultural pests, and contrary to their pop-culture persona, are harmless as long as there is no attempt to handle them. The city even built an observation center adjacent to the bridge, “giving visitors a dedicated area to view the nightly emergence.” The Austin Ice Bats, a minor-league hockey team, was named in their honor, which is probably the least they could do considering Count Dracula’s tiny cousins bring the city an estimated $10 million in tourism revenue each year.

The Texas department of Transportation even recently launched a project to study ways in which to make other bridges more habitable to bat colonies. The name of this project is “Bats and Bridges.” Presumably “Operation Wingspan” was already taken.

The sound of the bats pt. 1 (turn your volume up):

The sound of the bats pt. 2:

The colony exiting, seen from the water:

 

*

p.s. Hey. I’m so happy to be able to facilitate and introduce this beautiful post by your 24 hour guest-host B, artist of theatrical and other stripes as well as a d.l. of this joint sometimes known as Bear. Please let your bygones be bygones today and pleasure up. Thank you, and mega-hearty thanks to you, B. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Well, actually, he doesn’t in fact seem to love it, and we’re currently negotiating over some requested changes that we think will make the vid far less interesting, and ultimately it’s his call, so we’ll see. The interview for Japanese Wired Mag was really nice. Very interesting questions and discussion, and I was very happy. So, cool. I’m kind of in love with or obsessed by or both re: Japan. Especially by being there. Zac and I are hoping/planning for a visit there after we finish shooting our new film to celebrate and recuperate. We’re figuring out the US road trip today. The whole point of it was originally supposed to revolve around going to America’s most legendary amusement park Cedar Point, but we only realized yesterday that it’s closed for the winter! So, we have to make new plans rapidly. Oh shit, your cold came back? I hope it was just a brief flirtation that your body has thwarted. How are you feeling? What are you up to today in case of perfect health or even not? ** Ferdinand, Hi, man. Yeah, she is, right? Thanks for the link. Everyone, if the Carla dal Forno track/vid intrigued you yesterday, Ferdinand has provided a quick route for you to listen to her broadcasts on Berlin Community Radio, and the entrance is here. ** Jamie McMorrow, Hey, J-man! Oh, you were around there even back then? Sucks, ships in the night. Time’s hard-assed linearity has its downsides. Thank you much for the link to the doc. I’ll hope to have time for it today, Cool, unzappiness is next to godliness, or it can be. I went to take a photo of my chocolate loot and realized I had eaten enough of it that it was no longer an impressive sight, and I didn’t want to spoil the majesty of the original, untouched booty by besmirching its legend with a ruins shot, but trust me. Oh, you can guess about the composer if you want, but I can’t tell you if you’re right or even if you’re warm until the signal comes from on high. I’m happy to hear you made some music yesterday. How did that go? Yeah, the Moor Mother is quite something, isn’t it? She’s very interesting. Wednesday had its ups (fun interview with Wired Magazine Japan) and downs (a less than stellar reception of our music video), but it did its job, I guess I would say. Did your Thursday bear fruit? Big love, me. ** MANCY, Hi, S. I saw that very mysterious and charismatically unsolvable image you put up on FB re: your project with Mark, and it did the trick of building up my anticipation through the wonderful filter that only feeling confounded can instill. Here’s hoping the weather and co-ownership — that sounds like a spooky couple — stop requiring your attention asap. ** Sypha, Hi. I think Gaga used to infest her trash pop with enough elasticity and effective hooks that one could think there was someone more interesting than her pushing its buttons. She played dumb more skillfully than she plays meaningful. Well, naturally, I would be way more than happy to have a second Mauve Zone Recordings Day on the blog, if you’re so inclined. Thank you for proposing that, and, yes, bright green light, if you need one. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I’m a big fan of Thomas Brinkmann, and that new album is just terrific. Yes, CDF’s involvement in F ingers is what drew me to her own work. Let me know how that live Coil is. I haven’t received the CFT Day in my mailbox yet. Do you have my right email? denniscooper72@outlook.com. I’m excited for it! ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. There was some good stuff in the gig. I might particularly recommend the Moor Mother and Yves Tumor to you, if I know your tastes at all? Gosh, I’m not sure if you’ll need to get advance tickets for the New Museum thing. It’s a reasonably biggish theater space, but I don’t know. I think I’ve seen at least one of those videos by Errol Morris’s son, but I don’t think I realized there was a series of them. I did not know that about quaaludes, no. Huh. Very interesting. I’m going to go find that doc and his others. Thanks a lot, Steve. ** Jeff Jackson, Hey. I like what I’ve heard of Jack Rose, which isn’t a massive amount yet. The recent reissues of a bunch of his albums has put scoring some of them on my to-do list. You recommend anything in particular? I just got Ambarchi’s new album yesterday, but I haven’t heard it yet. Yes, I’ve had him in posts here before. He’s great, and he’s a really nice guy as well. He has collab-ed with Stephen O and the guys in Golden Fur, so I know him a little through them. I put my finger on the trigger of a site selling that Robbe-Grillet and then pushed downwards yesterday. Anticipation. All best, bud. ** Misanthrope, Clearly whatever is haunting your recliner does not have your best interests in mind, but then again, something that can haunt something else clearly has more awareness of things than you or I do, so its madness may well be methodological and beyond such lowlife human judgements as right and wrong. I remember your erotically tinged fondness for normal dudes. That seems sane, but it may not be. 30 trick-or-treaters: not bad in these dark, dark, dangerous days. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Very happy you like the gigs and that one too. Oh, yes, I’ll send you my mailing address. Do I have your email address in my new email account, I forget? My old one is a huge jumble to find anything in. If you haven’t written to me since the switch, can you send me just a quick email? Otherwise, I’ll send you the address shortly. ** Cool. With that, continue or begin your exploration of B’s bridges. Thank you. See you tomorrow.

 

Moor Mother
Laura Cannell
The Hecks
Boobs of Doom
Carla dal Forno
Norin
Helen Money
Yves Tumor
Grumbling Fur
0comeups
Thomas Brinkmann
shittyflute
Amoral Avatar
Macula Dog

 

 

_________________
Moor Mother By The Light
‘Ayewa is a Philadelphia-based artist and community activist who has been a fixture in the city for over a decade. Moor Mother began in 2012 as a solo project, and under the moniker she’s released dozens of EPs on Bandcamp, recasting the protest song as a moving electronic collage. According to her own description of the music, it falls within “blk girl blues” and “project housing bop” to “slaveship punk.” These self-made categories allow Ayewa’s music to be fluid in terms of expression, yet consistently grounded in a sense of history. It is very much influenced by the idiosyncrasies and formal experimentation of Sun Ra, but also aligned with the chaotic joy of Shabazz Palaces.’ — Kevin Lozano

 

_____________
Laura Cannell Winter Saltings
‘Laura Cannell’s new album Simultaneous Flight Movement is a record of space, lightness, and place. Its 14 tracks were all recorded in one take inside Southwold Lighthouse in Suffolk, and throughout the air and stones of the structure around Cannell’s twin recorders and violin becomes extra instruments. Despite the inherent claustrophobia of the lighthouse structure, Cannell’s music rolls forward both with high emotion and a terrific sense of space, an evocative portrait of souls within a landscape that exists beyond specific place and time.’ — Luke Turner

 

____________
The Hecks live at Township
‘The Hecks are adept at not just giving you good vibes, but a lot of flowering character. The songs grow inside you like weeds, sturdy and imperceptible. You’re not grooving on the rhythms so much as on the group’s expert command of drift, repetition, and brevity. The vocals are somewhat nondescript, but imminently seviceable to the music. The intensity is compact, as is the mood, as is the song structure: It’s a car ride to nowhere kind of album. A make weird dances in the abandoned industrial park kind of album. An album burnt out but keenly focused. A good place to be before you’ve obliterated it with infinite context.’ — Willcoma, Tiny Mix Tapes

 

______________
Boobs of Doom Liquid Dinosaurs
‘“Liquid Dinosaurs” lumbers on a fabulous hollowed out thrum of slo-mo trap-funk, piles on the doom riffs and makes no attempt to make the two elements fit together, rather the effect is like hearing a battle between soundscapes that only gets resolved by your brain accepting that the oddity WORKS and being able to accept the battle itself as an entirely new genre (let’s call it DANK).’ — Neil Kulkarni, The Wire

 

_______________
Carla dal Forno What You Gonna Do Now?
‘Carla dal Forno’s breathtaking psych-folk dirge “What You Gonna Do Now?” was one of the highlights and focal points of our recent Halloween mix, its murky melancholy and deeply unsettling spectral beauty perfectly encapsulating in under 4 minutes the vibe we were attempting to convey throughout the mix. But in truth, any song from dal Forno’s stunning debut LP You Know What It’s Like would have done the trick: the record is an intimately enveloping and beautifully dark creeper, eliciting an eerie aching and a sense of general unease that gets under your skin with repeat listens.’ — gorillavsbear.net

 

______________
Norin Plötsligt Och Självklart
‘Hannes Norrvide has had a busy year, it has been only six months since the latest album from Lust For Youth was released and since then he has released the debut album of Norin in the shape of February’s “Bakom Planteringen”, he has released his collaborative work with Frederik Valentin under the name Kyo with June’s “Aktuel Musik” LP and the earlier “Potentiel Musik” cassette album. “Reflektera” sees Hannes Norrvide further explore the textures of hazed out underwater acid that he instigated on his debut. On “Reflektera” it is paired with a more aggressive DNA coding, especially the track “Nästan” that closes the B-side, on which washes of static bleed into alarm like synth pulses and the nearly broken beats. Bridging the industrial patterns of his recent tape “Skisser och Idéer Från Frankrigshusene” with the Nautical pulse of his debut.’ — Posh Isolation

 

_____________
Yves Tumor Broke In
‘Yves Tumor’s debut for the PAN label offers a perfect distillation of everything the label stands for, filling another as-yet-unnamed niche between the eyes of hypermodern styles. It’s an album that takes you from the most beautifully produced earworm one moment, to the depths of sonic experimentation the next – making for easily one of the most impressive and memorable albums of the year. Alongside the likes of Dean Blunt or Klein, Yves Tumor is patently rewiring the conventions of soul music and psychedelia according to his own, twisted schematic and modernist insight, making this album feel vital at a point where conservative sensibilities seem to have permeated the spirit of so many “independently” minded creators.’ — wu uk

 

_________________
Helen Money Become Zero
‘Helen Money’s Become Zero continues cellist Alison Chesley’s exploration of emotive and intense music. Written after the death of both of her parents, Become Zero amplifies Chesley’s musical ferocity with palpable sadness and striking beauty. Using her extensively manipulated cello, Chesley joins forces once more with drummer Jason Roeder (Sleep, Neurosis), Rachel Grimes (Rachel’s) and collaborator and co-producer Will Thomas (who provides sound effects and samples) on an album that is incredibly personal and visceral.’ — Thrill Jockey

 

_______________
Grumbling Fur Strange the Friends
‘Grumbling Fur’s talent for stuffing their music with layer upon layer of invention makes not only for difficult generic categorisation, but also calls into question the listener’s perception of every track upon each repeated listen. The qualities which present themselves upon the first few listens to a GF track are often near-entirely obscured after multiple revisits, as the audience’s attention is diverted by any of the countless other constituents of these sensual, tactile instrumentals and explorative lyrical musings.’ — THE LINE OF BEST FIT

 

_____________
0comeups Go Plug
‘London-based “non music” producer 0comeups’s One Deep, released via New York City’s increasingly abstracting PTP imprint, is an ontology of planes and spheres collapsing into a single point suspended in blind constellation. Atomization means that what one point shares with all other points in a system is also what separates it from them. As One Deep has thoroughly internalized, once we ascend to the next platform, we are merely “On The Roof Texting,” entering our next illusion in transcending the one prior.’ — Nick Henderson, Tiny Mix Tapes

 

_______________
Thomas Brinkmann PSA
‘Thomas Brinkmann takes his seductive reductionism to the next level. »A 1000 KEYS« is a harsh meditation on the expressive qualities of digital sound production. In translating the timbre of a grande piano into binary codes, thus rebuilding its corpus with 0 and 1s, Brinkmann subverts the sensual qualities of this proto-romantic instrument in a sardonic way. Replacing the musician with a mathematically precise series of frenetic repetition and intriguingly dissonant difference, the result sounds at times like a violent ride through the brains of Schönberg or Webern, drained in amphetamines, at others like Feldman’s ephemeral sketches or Russolo’s futurist outburst.’ — Editions Mego

 

____________
shittyflute Katy Perry’s Firework
‘Hello i am Shittyflute, in my channel you will find the shittiest flute covers and some kazoo aswell, i am happy to make your day happier and your ears hurt.’ — shittyflute

 

_____________
Amoral Avatar AA5
‘Collaborators Leo Abrahams and Chris Vatalaro take guitar tones into new space, music concrete influences worked in as a kind of rhythmic accompaniment to more familiar guitar-focused melodies. Interspersing his drum accents with those made by found objects, Chris Vatalaro has chosen to use these influences for the purposes of combining rhythms and juddering accents with novel textures. Vatalaro has used his time as a session percussionist with other experimental artists like Eno & Hyde and Steve Reich, to work as a useful point of reference on his own work in Amoral Avatar; for Leo Abrahams, this project is a diversion from his last album in 2013, Zero Sum, oriented towards more New Age guitar melodies. The pieces on this new collaborative work sound less finalised, with many of them ending abruptly – lacking the sentimentality of a cadence-based conclusion. Time and effort is instead spent on creating direction and a pointer towards an overall mood through heavily developed introductions.’ — Lottie Brazier

 

______________
Macula Dog Smokestack
‘Macula Dog’s most notable precursor is not Devo or The Residents or Pee-wee Herman, even though sonically and/or conceptually they are all closely aligned. Rather, the true progenitor, Typhon to a great cast of monsters, may in fact be the 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. Renowned as a polymath, he also maintained a museum within the Roman College. On display were all manner of curiosities — marine creatures, ancient manuscripts, experimental devices — but perhaps most notable were his catoptric machines, inventions that could create monsters out of men. Relying on mirrors and projections, these devices could superimpose the head of an ass or deform the shape of the face like modeling clay. Kircher writes of “this machine which has rapt everyone in great admiration when they see instead of their natural face, the face of a wolf or a dog or another animal.” That is the experience of Why Do You Look like Your Dog: displacement, deformation, degeneration, devolution.’ — Cynochephalus

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** New Juche, Hi, man. I look forward to the day when the composer/musician is revealable too. I’m chomping at that bit. Yeah, I skipped Halloween ales, but I stocked up on chocolates the day after. Didn’t even watch a horror film. It was a strangely common day. Hooray about the Rangoon book’s completion! That’s excellent news! All the best to you. ** Jamie McMorrow, Uh, yeah, when was that? Hold on. It was March 24 – 26, 2007 to be precise. You’re right by there. I kind of vaguely remember what that hood looked like. I’d like to get back to Glasgow. I liked it a lot, but I had just barely over zero time to explore it while I was there, and I’ll gladly take you up on the dinner when/if. Maybe I’ll try the the doc about ‘The Innocents’ first since it’s easy, and because I kind of like watching ‘about’ docs before I watch the films themselves, nerdily. The Salon was mega-fun and sensory overloaded and stuffed. I’ll try to take a pic of my loot. I came home with a shitload of chocolates that I’ll never be able to get around to eating. A teeny bit of last minute fine-tuning has lead to the video’s launch towards Xiu Xiu’s hopeful approval having been delayed until today. But today’s the day. So sorry about the sleeplessness. Did last make up for it? Are you sparkling inside? Love right back at ya. ** Tosh Berman, Thank you, and I second Thomas’s awesome, Tosh! ** Tomk, Hi, Tom. Thanks for the good words to your namesake. ** Montse, Hi, Montse! Yeah, I have to celebrate Halloween by proxy and via internet these days, but I’m peculiarly satisfied with that. Warmest of hugs to you! ** DC, I second your apology. ** Sypha, Hi. I agree that Lady Gaga has fallen into the common trap of thinking respectability equals a step up. The danger with her was always that she slammed through the self-image remaking thing so thoroughly so fast that there would be soon nowhere left for her to go vis-a-vis her rampant attention-seeking-as-art thing. It was interesting when she was making occasionally awesome pop trash while referring to herself as a serious artist. That was kooky, but, in retrospect, I guess it portended her recent misdirection. I don’t know what would have been the most interesting next move for her, but sidling up with much attached publicity to a snore like Tony Bennett and a snore/pretentious banality like Abramovich kind of cooked the fun and mystery out of her goose. I would be hugely surprised if she can recover any quantifiable amount of her mojo after that. And thank you for the good words about TM’s book and for reposting your review, which I hadn’t read. ** Dóra Grőber, Howdy, Dóra! Yes, as I mentioned up above, we didn’t end up getting the video off to Xiu Xiu yesterday, but it’s happening today, and, what with the vast 9 hour time difference between us here  and him in Los Angeles, I guess we probably won’t get a reaction until tomorrow at the earliest. Fingers crossed. I’ll see if I can find a video or something from Bohemian Betyars. I’m glad the party was a lot of fun, although being squashed and gasping for air sounds like there was a price to pay. Still, all in all, very cool. Well, finally sending the video will take a bit of today. I’m kind of excited because Wired Magazine Japan is interviewing me this afternoon about my animated gif fiction, which is awesome because of my Japanophilia and because I feel like the animated gif fiction could be really interestingly liked and received in Japan. So, I’m very curious to see what that interview will be like. Uh, and some work, and I need to get on planning out my longish upcoming US trip because Zac and I are thinking we’ll take a road trip between the two NYC events on the 7th and the 16th, and that needs figuring out re: renting a car and where to drive and so on. So, all of that will be my day, I think. And yours? What did Wednesday offer you, and what did you accept from its offerings? ** Thomas Moronic, Hey! The tonnage of thanks is entirely exiting me and hopefully worming into you. Which is a weird way to put it, I guess, sorry. Oh, cool, awesome that the EIF project found usage in your novel. You think you’ll ever do another one, or are you at the exit of that interest? Oh, thank you a lot for offering to send me a copy of the novel. I’m very excited to read it! ** Steevee, Hi. The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is so confusedly and messily self-defined that it’s just kind of a joke house. It’s long past the time when it could claim to be some kind of purist rock shrine. Just the idea that a mildly clever, unimaginative riff-recirculator like Dave Grohl is in its echelon and influential there says a bunch. I mean, it’s patently absurd that Kraftwerk is only now even being nominated and that their nomination is controversial. And yet I haven’t seen anyone saying, Wait, all it takes to be nominated for the Hall of Fame is having recorded one song that’s been the soundtrack to hundreds of TV ads (aka Steppenwolf)? The ‘Keep popular music guitar-based’ movement is like a ‘Keep America white’ movement for wusses. I’m not interested in Kanye West either, although I think he’s a very savvy producer, but that particular attack on his work is nonsense. All of which is saying I agree with you, or I think so. Look forward to reading your reviews. Everyone, please go read Steevee’s always thoughtful thoughts on two new films: ‘Loving’, and The Prison In Twelve Landscapes. ** B, Hi, sir. Ha, trust your instincts, for sure. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. What a forgetful system. I thought that systems were supposed to eliminate the forgetful tendencies of the human mind. Great, thank you ever so much about the CFTD post! Fine day to you, sir. ** MANCY, Hi, Steven. Aw, thank you so much about the gif work, man. How’s stuff? ** H, Hi. I remember the amazingness of New York falls, and I hope I’ll get to luxuriate a bit in this one soon. ** Jeff Jackson, Hi, Jeff. Yes, I finally have a copy of ‘Novi Sad’, and I’m am anxiously awaiting the moment when I can dig in fully. This week, I think. Weird, no, I did not know that ‘A Regicide’ has been translated into English or published. How could I have missed that?! Yes, me too, I will order myself a copy within minutes. Wow. Thanks so much for the alert. ** Okay. Now, let’s see, oh, I made a gig for you today. New and newish music that I obviously got something out of and think you might be impacted by as well should you have the opportunity today and take it. See you tomorrow.