Hongdae, Seoul… some shoegaze, dreampop, experimental electronics and hiphop beats mashed up. It’s easy enough. It’s mellow. It’s nothing like the K-pop that’s come over to the US on the BTS wave. YELLOW KITCHEN would be considered on the edgy side anywhere on the planet. Seoul, San Fran, Brooklyn… anywhere you go. It’s easing me into a headachey Sunday morning. Kind of badass though.

So many people out and about in the warm, spring weather, some maskless but most still covered. People are reluctant to get back to 2019 and with good reason for many of us. The masks work on a lot more than Covid-19. It’s an added layer for semi-anonymity for us city-dwellers. Privacy and solitude are all we really lack in the cities. Somehow the masks help with that. Constant exposure is wearisome… but of course many of us have also learned that it’s good for dust particles, smog, common colds and pollen, so there you go. And masks aren’t the only thing that I’m reluctant to let go of.

These mornings…. oh yes, these mornings. London, Manchester, Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Sarajevo, Riga, Budapest, Prague, Seoul, Beijing, Tokyo mornings. And Brooklyn mornings too. I’m nowhere near ready to go back in time. To any point actually.

Google Photo does that annoying thing where they offer up pictorial highlights, This Day in … etc. There are people, places and things to remind me of not only how things were but how on that day I imagined the trajectory of my future. It amazes me how some of them seemed so right and perfect at the time but revealed themselves to me toxic long before Google decided to exhume them for my viewing pleasure. The notifications are always cheerful. You never get a notification like, “Hey motherfucker, remember dodging this bullet?” Or, “Hey remember sitting in this park feeling like your world had collapsed?” That sort of thing might be more helpful than having their algorithm decide what was cheerful and memorable and then serving it up to you like a birthday cake.

Anyway, the past is the past no matter how you felt/feel about it. Yellow Kitchen recorded this in 1998 and it still sounds like the future. Some things do last. Art and music can last. Good ideas last whether or not you decide to act on them. Bad ideas that turn to action go away eventually. The Universe is really comical that way.

Ha ha fucking ha.

Selah.