Dusti and Prentice have a new baby : Hattie Mabel, born today in Chicago, IL. I hear all are fine and well...

It's been a while yes, and I've been distracted myself. And so there are things you should know and I'll get right to some of it now....
MUST SEE ART:
Marlene McCarty's show of larger-than-life pen and pencil drawings of young adolsecent/teenage murdereresses entitled:
Polgergeist, Girls at Home at:
American Fine Arts Co. 22 Wooster, (below Grand) NYC :: Are you in NYC? I would definitely go see this show if I were you. or if you were me....and
Bellocq's Storyville photographs, at Julie Saul Gallery, on W. 22nd. btw 10/11 Aves.

FILM:
Stolen Kisses ~Baisers volés~. Truffaut's Antoine Doinelle is a bit more grown up in this 1968 French New Wave follow-up to The Four Hundred Blows ~Les Quatre Cents Coups~. Now in his mid-twenties ... he's falling into and out of careers, falling into and out of loves. He's pathetic and full of promise simultaneously. C'est une Film Fantastique!. Trés. If you missed it at Film Forum, you could rent it. And should.

COMMENTARY: Somone named Harris emailed me and says he, too, hears "There's A Place" on various trains throughout the city. And so does DG at LighteningField. So. See. I'm not....

have you visited ziboy.com yet?
have you taken stuntlab's poll yet?

Have you heard that subway train? The one which, when pulling out of the station, rubs and screeches –musically– the first three notes of a song you know so well?
The first note: low, minorish (hhmmmmm), --- the second note: higher, sweeter (hhmmmmmmmmm), --- then the third note: middltetone, evening out the first two (hhmmm)...

And it's definitely West Side Story, when you hear it:

That's all. Just the first three notes. But you fill in the rest of the song in your head, for the rest of your day (...for us, Somewhere, a place for us....).

And no way is it an accident, when you hear it. It's right on key. It's Like violins, too. Not like the acrid subway screech that you hear every other day, from every other train.

Maybe once a year I'll hear the first three notes of West Side Story's "Somewhere" reverberate from the train. Today I heard it from a One-Train, as it pulled away from Wall Street Station. I was climbing the stairs toward the street. Unmistakable, though. It's a gem. A New York song, too.
But then you'll forget you ever heard it, until you hear it again... a year later, two years later.

Perhaps the song belongs here, in this very station, in these very tracks. Dents and rust at friction with any train car as it pulls southbound towards Brooklyn.
Or do the song's 3 notes belong to the train cars themselves? Sounding their three notes whenever they pull out of any station, allover the city?

Such a musical beginning - laaa laaaa laa - it starts out full of promise, as if Josh Bell were performing a solo from the train platform (surely he'll continue to the song's teary end). But suddenly it reveals itself to be incomplete, (plaaaaaace...), as it recedes from the station, cutting its song short. It teases.

Ultimately, though, you feel fulfilled, in the way you always will whenever you hear music in your city, in unexpected places.

And then there's the other train song, you've heard it too, I'll bet. The one that just sounds like "Born Free....". Just the two notes, bong-bong: Born Free.

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