Inside Track: King Jack’s 99th Dream
Scaffold Bridges, Jack Kirby, Donatello the Turtle, Disquiet Marc, Matthew the Doorman, Matt the Labyrinth Builder, and Princess Luna open a door that freezes time
20241202.2010
One night in December 2024, last time I was in New York City, around 10pm, holding my dog Luna in one arm, I walked through the lobby of my parents’ NYC crash pad, The Gotham Condominiums. We were on our way to the street for what I hoped to be her last walk of the night.
“Buona sera!” exclaimed Matthew, The Gotham’s 3p to 11p doorman. He opened the door and stepped out into the sidewalk, underneath scaffolding erected a year ago to comply with New York City’s Local Law 11 facade inspection mandate.
“Is it raining?” I asked Matthew.
“No, Westy,” he said, “it stopped. But you know what else stopped?”
“No, Matthew. Tell me.”
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Revised in 2021, Local Law 11 mandates every building in New York City over 6 stories must have its facade (“exterior walls and appurtenances”) inspected every 5 years — up close, on a scaffold.
LL11 is a regulation with its heart in the right place. No live-streaming personal shopper leaving Bergdorf’s wants to get hit with a brick from 240 feet above. The City’s building stock, though, is for the most part so old and decrepit that you’re getting gored by a gargoyle horn loosed by an errand breeze poses a very real threat going forward.
Now, construction repair crews don’t erect scaffolding all the way up a 24-story building to repair a few bricks. They cover the sidewalk with a 1 or 2-story scaffold bridge, and then workmen work from the roof, descending and ascending on platforms and pulleys. In a way, that sidewalk bridge protects passersby not only from falling drill bits, but also falling workmen.
In a related story, that bridge might also protect you from getting plonked by an improperly secured window air conditioner, being swapped out with a temporary panel for the winter, by an upper floor cheapskate who refuses to permanently mount their A/C. Yes, Virginia, it is not urban legend. The unit might even bounce off your window on its way down…
☝️not The Gotham, btw, but rather, the a/c described above that fell from above
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The Gotham Condominium, on 87th Street between Lexington and Third, in the Upper East Side neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan, comprises 200+ units. If you’ve ever owned a house, you know unplanned work is a feature of ownership, not a bug. Home ownership is never set-it-and-forget-it. Especially where communal ownership puts wear and tear on common systems. The Gotham has a decent financial reserve, though, and a large pool of relatively well-off owners who can absorb assessments for unplanned work.
Engineers found LL11 issues with The Gotham’s facade on first inspection in 2022, and the problems turned out to be extensive enough that the restoration project stretched on and on. It appeared almost done in December 2024, but there was still no firm end-date.
Buildings with the same problems, but without The Gotham’s financial resources, however, get around repairing their issues in full by erecting essentially permanent scaffolding. For many less well-endowed buildings, the cost of forever renting scaffolding will always be less than the cost of facade restoration.
The City’s fine schedule for non-compliant buildings is, at maximum, $1000 a month plus $40 a month per linear foot of sidewalk shed. A sidewalk shed, on average, runs about $15K a year. So if you own a 40-foot wide building with $1M of facade problems, you can either come up with $1M now, or go almost 22 years with scaffolding for the same money.
True to form now, if you walk around the City long enough, you will see scaffolding that, clear as day, went up years ago. Some of these are stalled projects, or active construction sites stuck in permit approvals-limbo. But tons of these covered-over buildings have no funds to restore their facades, and so choose to amortize fines and long-term scaffold rentals instead of initiating a massive repair. Brick by brick their facades will eventually crumble onto their sidewalk scaffold bridges.
20241202.2010
In any event, that December night, the street was damp, but I couldn’t see the sky beyond The Gotham’s scaffold bridge, so also couldn’t tell if rain was falling.
“Is it raining?” I asked Matthew.
“No, Westy,” he said, “It stopped. But you know what else stopped?”
“No, Matthew. Tell me.”
“Time,” he paused and looked at me square. “Time has stopped.”
“You don’t say,” I glanced at him with a smile in passing, and hit the street.
Luna and I looped up the south side of 87th to Lex, crossed 87th, and came back down the north side of the street. Along the way, she conducted all her business. Before we could get to the trash can on the northeast corner of 3rd Avenue, however, she sat down, refused to move, and started to flaneur.
For about 5 minutes, Luna observed traffic and attempted to gain the affections and attentions of passers-by, while I mulled over Matthew’s declaration of frozen time.
“Okay,” I told Luna, “nothing’s really happening tonight.” I picked her up, tucked her under my right shoulder, and we made our way across 87th Street, then west, along the south side of 87th, back to The Gotham.
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Time courses an elastic line through my songwriting, in both lyrics and music. Sound is one of the few spaces we can manipulate time; play with time. Fwiw, sports like tennis and golf and bridge, with no clock, also offer players and fans freedom from a certain linear temporality.
In every musical composition, notes have length, rhythm has tempo, and time itself has many “signatures.” Any change to the temporal structure of a musical piece changes its personality, and determines much of the context and meaning of musical passages.
To some extent, time is the songwriter’s frame, and a blank score the canvas.
My track “King Jack’s 99th Dream” (off 2016’s Almost X) is one of a host of meditations on time I’ve recorded through the years. Almost X is my most spun album on Spotify (fwiw, cover is a photo of Drew Barrymore I shot at a Williamsburg bowling alley called Gutter). The lyrics came first, then the music.
Time to make up your mind
Time never falls behind
Time to make up your mind and close the doorShe drew you in, black and white
From her studio in the sky
She drew you eight times ninety-nine…Frames in time
And you will never escape that night
Until you make up your mind
And close the doorShould’ve paid off those bills
Should’ve laid off those pills
Should’ve written one more word
Before you put your machine to sleepWhat the hell were you looking for
when you opened up that door?
What the hell were you looking for,
if not time?It’s just like Jack once said
“Bittersweet life is at best.”
It’s just like King Jack once saidYou’re framed in time
And you will never escape that night
If you never make up your mind
Yeah, you’re framed in time
And you’ll never escape that night
Until you make up your mind
And close the door
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The first draft of “King Jack” came 4 years earlier in 2012, in response to a prompt sent out to the Disquiet Junto sound artist collective by disquiet’s founder, Marc Weidenbaum.
Marc describes the Junto thus :
The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded over a decade ago. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday morning, shortly after midnight, I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to invited to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday ed. in any time zone. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year. It’s continued weekly since then.
Marc’s weekly prompts are enlightening and thought-provoking, whether you actually produce something or not as a result, or whether you even make music or not. They will foster upstream creativity in just about anyone, I wager. Join the Junto email list here.
On 04 April 2012, Marc sent out the Junto’s 14th consecutive prompt (the 687th will arrive in my inbox this week fwiw). We were instructed to re-tell, through sound, a single-page comic strip by author and illustrator Matt Madden, extracted from his beyond-insightful book “99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.” Marc’s direction was as follows:
In the book, Madden tells the same story 99 different ways, each in a different comic-book style. For example, he tells it as a superhero comic, he tells it as a manga, he tells it as experienced from upstairs, and he tells it as if it were overheard at a bar. Madden did this in homage to the French writer Raymond Queneau’s own “Exercises in Style,” which is a key text of the literary movement known as Oulipo.
Oulipo approaches the act of writing with intentional constraints, and the movement’s approach to creativity was a strong influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto. Oubapo is the name of the comics version of Oulipo. What we’re up to is the musical version: Oumupo.
Produce a piece of Oumupo.
The Junto’s fluxus core focuses more on manipulating sound and evoking tone and texture, rather than, for lack of a better phrasing, having the human voice doing The Watusi all over all a track. Junto sound artists’ output tends towards the wordless and structureless (for the better, btw). The rhyme inherent to almost all modern sung music (including rap), by definition ensnares the music underneath and always threatens to send it to the backseat.
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Over the course of the next 4 days, I cast the comic’s pretext into a quiet little pop song. I had done a few Junto projects up to then, but decided to sing for the first time in one, Watusi be damned. Here’s “King Jack’s” initial recording:
To mirror Madden’s “99 Different Ways” constraints, my track had 8 lyric sections and ran at 99 BPM (approximately — my tempos flux up and down a few BPM through most of my studio recordings).
For the version on Almost X up above, I re-recorded “King Jack” from scratch, adding a lead guitar and harmonies at a slightly faster speed (all apologies to the Madden-inspired 99BPM concept).
I still imagine, as I did when I wrote it, that it is track #8 off the soundtrack for a Rashomon-esque film adaptation of Madden’s book.
To honor my love of comics, I focused the chorus on “frames,” and centered the track around a quotation by “King” Jack Kirby, an OG comic god (no understatement):
“Life at best is bittersweet.”
Jack Kirby
The phrase was originally said by Darkseid as he spoils a wedding at the end of “Mister Miracle #18,” written and illustrated by Kirby. In more modern references, it’s more associated with the character Kirby King’s letter to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Donatello (“Don” to his friends).
Kirby King was Kirby’s nod to his nickname, a self-insert into the TMNT story arc. The character was an artist who lived in the basement of April O’Neil’s building. His drawing pencil had an attached crystal that allowed the worlds in his drawings to come alive.
In a pivotal issue, after he and Donatello save one of those worlds, the door back to their world begins to fade. King pushes Donatello back through it as it closes, and ends up trapped forever in a world of his own creation.
IYKYK.
Here’s the entire collection of tracks produced for the Madden prompt:
20250205.2022
Random Thought 2025.126:
Without scaffolding, the whole world would be a single story.
Just one big ranch.
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Back in my studio in 2012, the same Thursday that Marc’s prompt arrived in my inbox, I also learned of the death of my childhood guitar teacher in New Jersey, acid jazz fusion guitar wizard, John Macey. Wizard is an understatement, actually, and he remains criminally obscure. Acid Jazz isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but in the opening run of his 3rd record, John demonstrates flat-out flawless virtuosity. Even if you’re not always a fan of “the noodle” (as my wife calls it), I mean, genius:
I had gone a while between searches on John, and I was not good about communicating with him over time (as with other friends, perhaps my greatest flaw in general). So his death in 2008 took 4 after-the-fact years to reach me. When I did find out, it hit me as if he had passed that week.
Time can skew that way a bit. I imagined delayed grief may have been standard practice in bygone ages where no instantaneous communication existed, and messenger pigeons were the fastest mode of delivering even the most urgent news. We communicate now, however, at light speed, which allows us to sync lives with each other in real time, and also gave rise to the whole concept of FOMO.
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Back in John Macey’s tiny Mendham NJ studio, in 1982 at 11 years old, I laughed at how far apart his and my styles were, while I also marveled at his playing during our lessons. He was a patient and enthusiastic teacher, to say the least. Like the best sports coaches, he never attempted to shoehorn you into his technique or form. He didn’t judge your level of play in reference to his performances. He judged it in reference to your improvement.
I had half-hour lessons with John every Thursday (that day’s a running theme here, it seems) for about 4 years, and still refer to his notebooks full of his hand-written licks and transcriptions every time I have to construct a guitar solo. I’ve dumbed down a lot of his riffs into my songs, but I know he’s not rolling over in his grave about that so much as rocking and rolling about that.
The one advantage to learning guitar from a jazz savant is that early on you’re exposed to chords, fingerings, and modes you never dreamt existed. What George Martin was to The Beatles, John was to me.
The main guitar line in King Jack is lifted from one of his phrases (that John probably played in 15/9 time lol), and floated around a disambiguation of Dream Academy’s “Life In A Northern Town.”
John was also my personal music transcriber before there was an internet rife with tabs. Every week, I’d bring him a random song on a cassette with a guitar solo I wanted him to work out. He would then spend the latter 15 minutes of the lesson learning it by ear, and breaking down the parts for me. He had a single-speaker cassette player that he would play, pause, rewind, stop, play again, pause, play back what he’d transcribed, cross out errand notes, play again, pause…
There wasn’t a single song I brought him that he failed to nail and write down within 10 minutes. Here’s his take on Elliot Easton’s solo in The Cars’ “Just What I Needed”:
They say, since sound propagates waves that passes through most materials, every note you play on a guitar goes on forever. Some of John’s runs were so fast, though, so good luck ever trying to catch up to them.
20241124.1943
Time isn’t visible. Time has no flavor. Time makes no sound, nor emits a scent. You can’t see it, taste it, hear it, or smell it. Time has no mass. You can’t touch it.
None of your five senses work on time.
But somehow, we do “sense” time. We feel it go by — like wind, or a missed bus.
We also feel time — because it’s a structure.
You could almost say that time is the scaffold of existence.
The same way that the scaffold of construction sites keeps you from getting bonked on the head by falling bricks, the scaffold of time (to paraphrase science fiction author Ray Cummings) keeps everything from happening at once.
:^D
20241202.2022
“Your meditation on time was more philosophy than I expected on a dog walk,” I said to Matthew as he swung the door open after seeing us approach for re-entry.
“I think a lot about time,” he said. “I stand in a doorway.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Luna said, pointing her right front paw up at him. “You’re more than the doorman. You’re the door, man.”
“Ooh, a hidden comma. I like that,” he said to her, waving his arm towards the lobby to guide us inside with a flourish. Then to me, “She talks?”
“All the time,” I said as we crossed the threshold. “All the time.”
“Until the next time,” Luna called back as we hit our 4th step in. “Watch out for falling gargoyles!”
“Buona Notte, Luna!” Matthew chimed.