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Church or maybe Mosque 

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The Endd of Humanity

[SPOILERS: Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End]

If you haven’t read Childhood’s End, you should. Also you’re ignoring the spoiler alert for some reason. Anyway, it’s a wonderful, wonderful book. I might re-read it myself. I’m going to spoil the “big reveal” that drives the first third of the book. A quick summary: a benevolent alien race appears in the sky one day and promises to bring peace and utopia to Earth (which in fact they do). They choose to communicate with humanity through a chosen representative human, who I remember as being, well, some guy. The one thing the alien Overlords (that’s what they call themselves) refuse to do is reveal their physical bodies to humans. They say they want to wait for a generation that has grown up in a world where the Overlords are present from birth, so as to be used to their existence. Mr. Some Guy, realizing he will be long dead before he will know what the aliens look like, devises a plan to shine a flashlight through the one way mirror he uses to communicate with them, and on his last visit, succeeds in catching a glimpse. Now for the SPOILER: the aliens look exactly like the classic folklore Devil.

Oh hell yeah, badass. Anyway, this is why they didn’t want to reveal themselves, knowing humans wouldn’t be able to accept this.

Skipping to the end of the novel, it turns out the purpose of the Overlords visit was to prepare humanity to join the Overmind, a collective consciousness of civilizations brought in from throughout the universe. A “final generation” of humans are born, who are psychically linked and who share a consciousness. Eventually, humanity’s single consciousness joins the Overmind and becomes one with it, meaning the end of the human race. The point I’m getting to is, and this is also a point of the novel: humans throughout history feared the Devil because they knew that the triumph of devils would mean the end of humanity. I’m sort of obsessed with this idea, that we as humans are already aware, we know, right now, how humanity is going to end.

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I miss the old New York

EVERY generation of dreamers who has ever moved to New York will eventually utter the following sentiment: I miss the old New York. What they mean, of course, is they miss the memories that took place in New York when they first moved there, when everything could be exciting, from eating a chopped cheese in the Bronx to witnessing a dance battle on the train in Queens; closing down a bar in Brooklyn that let you stay til 5am, and the daily rush of feeling small in the shadow of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. After 10 years, these are known (in order) as buying a sandwich, commuting to work, having a hangover, and ignoring your surroundings. If anything changed, it was probably you, not New York.

               But that said, let me entirely contradict myself: I miss the New York that I moved to mere days after New Year’s, 2007. Sometimes I say December 2006 to make it sound longer ago. And no matter what anyone says, including my prior paragraphed self, it was a much more interesting city back then. Those pre-iPhone days, which only exist to me now as memories. We never took pictures of what we were doing. We just did it.

                As soon as I arrived, I moved into a loft off the Morgan Avenue L train stop in Brooklyn, a neighborhood people now refer to as Bushwick and real estate marketers back then referred to as “East Williamsburg,” which is hilarious. Pray for the soul who moved off Morgan looking for the Williamsburg experience. Dreamers moving to New York these days know exactly what they are going to find. Information is free, complete, and ubiquitous. Mention Bushwick to anyone in the world and they will know what you’re talking about. “I went to this great restaurant when I visited…”

               Oh, the fun we had back then! It doesn’t seem that long ago, but already, it’s ancient history. Most people don’t even remember the events I’m about to tell. On January 6, 2007, the temperature in New York hit 72 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. I had lived here for 3 days. People exploded out of their homes like so many firecrackers, filling the sidewalks, parks, rooftops, patios. It was a gift from God in the middle of a brutal winter. The sun set that evening as a rainstorm rolled in. The sun would not rise again for 174 days.

               The permanent night was not “dark”, in any traditional sense. When the night is cloudy in New York, as it almost always was those 6 months, the clouds reflect the city’s nauseous light. The sickly orange, bilious green clouds press on you like a lead blanket. During those dark days, the buildings were black shadows, holes in that oppressive sky. Fetid rainwater collected on the corners of the intersections, never to dry. Trees, with the color of their leaves washed out by that light, looked dead. We loved it.

               Without mornings, there was no work, at least for those of us with day jobs. There was only the city, Manhattan!, and the night. We crawled the streets and avenues on countless adventures, never forced to stop. Hours stretched to days stretched to weeks stretched to months. Every corner, every doorway, every staircase, masked by the dark, each had a secret to be found. A hidden room behind a hair salon on 14th Street where the air exploded in rainbows, blindingly. A basement in the East Village, a hundred feet underground, carved out of the rock and lit by tiny candles. A dark-haired girl lived there, never once leaving. “I know what’s outside,” she would say. “endless night.” Once we ducked through a door on Grand Street only to find a long hallway reaching back as far as you could see. At its eventual end, a most ornate ballroom of chandeliers and oil paint portraits. A waiter, obviously unshowered, wearing a stained wifebeater tank top, asked us if we cared for tea.

               Back then, Manhattan, the Lower East Side, East Village, Soho, all of this was still the center of the universe. Manhattan was king. The weirdos and characters you would meet back then, whew. They seemed to appear from thin air and disappear right back into it. Who were these people? Where did they come from? Did they even have normal lives, families, homes?

               A topless woman with a moustache showed us a circus behind a velvet curtain in the Lower East Side. A Greek man wearing a cape took us to a room made of solid gold. That was on Mulberry Street. A girl, blonde, face carved from marble, in a private school uniform, walked me to the Upper West Side. The journey took 99 hours. We ate hamburgers at an all-night diner, you can imagine those cooks were awful tired working nonstop for months. On 22nd Street and 8th Avenue we found a dilapidated warehouse conducting a grand ball. I remember that Bjork was there. The guests were dressed in Halloween costumes. The host, a famous drag queen, his hair shot back like a rocket, like Frankenstein’s Monster’s Wife, declared he would never throw such a ball again. He announced: “Manhattan is dying; these are its last days. There is a tide coming in, called Brooklyn, and we cannot escape. All that beard and lumberjack stuff, I just don’t get it. And anyway, I live with my mother and she’s sick of me coming home so late.”

      Endless

      Nights

      Dark

      Days

One day I walked out of the Beauty Bar on 14th Street, there was more than one of them back then, and I decided to go home. I hadn’t been to my loft in 6 months. Just as I was beginning to walk down the steps to the subway, the 3rd Avenue L station, I saw a faint glimmer of pink light in the sky. It was the sun. My eyes, accustomed to the dark, burned. The pink glow was blinding. It was morning—the morning of June 29th.

By the time I exited the train at Morgan Avenue, in Brooklyn, the sun was full in the sky, beaming strongly, unencumbered by a single cloud. I checked my watch, 6:30am, realized I had to be at work at 8, a clothing store in Rockefeller Center where I would man the stock room and take out the garbage. I was nervous. Your first day at a new job is always scary.

Later that day, the first-generation iPhone was released in the United States at the price of $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for the 8 GB model.

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The Devil made me a Woman!... I ain't no liar. Her eyes burn black like the lake of fire. She struck the match and then I sold my soul... For the black haired girl from the lake of fire.

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Fall 1997

There was a brief moment when drum&bass tried to go legitimate, I dunno, this wasn’t that but this album had ads on MTV and the video played during hours that people were watching, that is, not in the middle of the night. I bought this record (CD?) at the famous Tower Records on 4th and Broadway Fall of 1997 that is now an empty storefront for pop up shops--I think--and listened at least 20 times on that trip with my bright yellow Discman Sport. I also bought some compilation CDs called like, “Drum & Bass Selections 3,″ “Herbal Beats Vol 8″ and things like that but you can’t find them on youtube.

These things are where I derived my understanding of urbanity, and maybe that’s how it really was? By the time I showed up to experience it for myself there were about 24 months before avocado toast.

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You will never have six pack abs part II

My sister is 5 years older than me, meaning she graduated from high school in 1997. Somewhere around the years 93-94 she dated this skater type boy with long blonde skater type hair, who I remember most distinctly because of his very controversial ear piercing, its dangly-ness a hot topic of gossip in my neighborhood cul-de-sac. I also remember his name being Travis which it most assuredly was not, I believe Travis is the name of a character from a teen movie I once saw, or I think it is, and I’m not going to look it up. I’m going to call him Travis. I think they dated for maybe 2 weeks.

Sometime later, it must have been about 99, my sister was living with a girlfriend in a shitty rental house, one of those houses that’s been divided in two, in the “right” part of the house, as opposed to the left, about 50 yards east of the train tracks. The backyard, if you could call it that, was just a field behind the house that ran straight to the tracks. I know from my own time living near those tracks that they are loud as hell when the trains blow their whistle. There are some awful condos on that field now, sorry to those who bought before they heard the trains. What’s funny is maybe six years later two of my own girlfriends lived in that very same rental, where they went to great lengths to make it look like a girl’s living from 1966 or whatever, with a record player and mod lamps and other nonsense, which they had to take down when they moved out a year later. Three more years after that my friend who was sort of a ghost also moved into that very same rental although I only visited once and can’t remember a thing about it other than what happened there was very bad. That’s the funny thing about my hometown, the infrastructure of the place never changes, that is, things are added but never taken away, and once you live there long enough your stories cross through every physical place you occupy like strings with no beginning or end, running in every direction. You can stand in the living room of a shitty rental and see all of the realities you occupied in that place in the past and if you try hard enough you can see the realities of when you will stand there again.

Anyway, when my sister lived there it was certainly not tastefully decorated and instead was one of those apartments where you couldn’t see the surface of the coffee table due to debris like fast food wrappers and empty beer cans re-purposed as ashtrays. Like I said my sister lived there with a girlfriend but as it turned out Travis started living there as well, he had dropped out of high school years back and no telling how he reconnected with my sister but he had his own room in this house from which he hardly surfaced. What he did have in that tiny room, other than a mattress on the floor, was a bench, you know like a workout bench, and a full set of weights. Oh, that’s right, so Travis had gone through a bit of a transformation, seeing him one day after that many years was shocking to me, gone was his long blonde hair and adolescent body, no, the man now had massive, giant muscles, I mean just really jacked up as they say. Like his T shirt was about to fly off his body at any minute. His slacker expression and lazy eyes had given way to a clenched jaw and intense glares into the distance. This was one night when I was there at my sister’s house, enjoying the kind of evening freedom you enjoy when you have a curfew, when he came in the door and retreated to his room immediately, and in fact my sister had just been talking about him to the other roommate, and you could hear him setting up his weights and then he turns on the stereo and my God, the absolute loudest, angriest music comes bursting from behind his closed door, just crunching punishing guitars and awful fucking screaming at frantic paces, and I was filled with anxiety. My sister rolled her eyes. She said to the roommate, who already knew, so it was really for my benefit, “I asked why he listens to that shit all the time, he says, this is what I hear in my head anyway, this is how I get it to shut up.”

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In the junk sick night it's too hot to sleep I'll stay awake until / tracklist

Marina and the Diamonds - Obsessions (oOoOO Remix) Kingdom - Fogs (Pictureplane Stargate Dub) Katy B - Katy on a Mission Nas - Queens Get The Money The Weeknd - The Morning (Dolor Remix) How To Dress Well - Ready For The World (xxxy Re-Edit) Submerse - Hold It Down Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx - NY is Killing Me Radiohead - Videotape (xxxy's Straight to Video Mix) José James - Black Magic (Joy Orbison Remix) Burial & Four Tet - Wolf Cub Jay Electronica - Eternal Sunshine Salem - Till The World Ends (Britney Spears Cover)

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Summer’s gonna hurt u / tracklist

Freaky Tonite /Ruddyp & Carling Ruse Bells /El Blanco Nino pressure (ta-ku remix) /utrb Constructive Interference /Evil Needle & Sivey Bank Head (Extended) /Kelela Save Us /MisterMack x Rvdical The Kid (//Fractions) Maybe /Ruddyp Bosco X Nevr - Slippin (Remix) /Neguim X Sants Gravity /The Code DNY GLVR /LPLX Her Way /PARTYNEXTDOOR Rhubarb Uptown Anthem /Arae iThink /Gillepsy Alina Baraz & Galimatias - Make You Feel (Remix) /Savon Threatz [Promnite Edition] /Denzel Curry Girl Like Me /SLAVA ButtaLove /Jo Def btstu /niia Collard Greens (Jeftuz Remix) /SchoolBoy Q Rained The Whole Time x Number One (hemsworth blend) /shlohmo x r kelly Black Roses /Jo Def Its Gettin To My Head /Drum Wont /Jo Def The Place (Tvyks Juke edit) /inc. Shadow Boxer (Kilter Remix) /Shapeshifter Girl /Cleindl Wiggle /Losco The Subject /Brian Folk

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✈ last summer from Seattle to New York I thought a lot about flying, the way it promotes disconnection & introspection, the abruptness of air travel, the trust in the machine, the absurdity of sitting down in the sky, the context of the world from up above, the color blue, and insomnia. SO I made a 55 minute #future mix about it which you can listen/download on Soundcloud (link is in my bio). I worked a long time on it & am pretty proud of this one. #tbt #blue #nofilter (at the heavens)

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