Did You See Jupiter?

2011—A teeming, tangled year in which connections and threads continued to reveal themselves… Memories: Standing in the empty 46th floor of the lone completed World Trade Center-complex building listening to Arvo Pärt for the Guggenheim Museum’s “stillspotting nyc”; walking around Krakow at Unsound Festival with Morton Subotnick and hearing him stop and play, at variable speeds, a collection of music boxes for sale on the street; driving in Iceland, with volcano ash swirling up behind and sounds courtesy of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira; beginning to crack, and be cracked by, Hillel Schwartz’s book Making Noise: From Babel To The Big Bang & Beyond; thinking not enough people talked about the movie Another Earth; looking at paintings by Lyonel Feininger at the Whitney Museum and Willem De Kooning at MoMA; seeing/feeling pretty much everything differently after leering into the videos of Ryan Trecartin at PS1; watching an audience respond as wildly as any I’ve ever seen to young Nicolas Jaar’s disarmingly evolved live band; rejoicing over the presence of a surreal singing oscilloscope in an old ’60s TV special gathered on DVD for The Ernie Kovacs Collection; meeting certain moods and moodiness with the films of Nicholas Ray.