davidbowie – Kelvin Wetherell

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream

– Vincent Van Gogh

Let all the children boogie

– David Bowie, Starman

Saturday, October 4/2025. How did that happen? Here we are, rising to meet darker mornings and lighting the candles sooner in the evening. Or, in my case, the candles and the blue Christmas lights that I hung for the season around our mantle at home when we moved in to ours five years ago. They never got packed with the rest of the holiday swag. They were too cozy and amazing to not have all year round.

Today’s pic was created by my dear kid. She had a pal over a few weeks ago. I was pickin’ and singing’ while they were drawing and making slime. I guess she caught the music vibe and this was the result. I love how I look like a young goth boy and that I have no feet, floating along like a ghost. The goatee is on point and the Bowie tee is the coup de grace. Funny thing is this was how I looked in my twenties. The kid nailed it. I guess, apart from the black hair and eyeliner, not much has changed.

The new recordings are well underway. Vocals and acoustic guitar. The bare bones of five new tracks prepped and ready for an as yet unbooked drum session in the wilds of Belfountain, Ontario. I have some string and organ parts fleshed out for these ones. There are five more songs in the queue for acoustic guitar and vox bits. Ten songs feels like a bit much, but I can’t decide who won’t make the final cut. Well, there are about twenty-five hanging about. These ten feel like the strongest, culled from songs old and new. Some of the older numbers don’t feel lyrically congruent with the immediate current. The first four tunes came easily in the studio. Number five flipped me the bird. It’s one of the simplest guitar bits, but the one with the most grace and black space between the notes. These almost always require a different touch. For the audio nerds, I also went down a preamp rabbit hole, working on the vox and acoustic guitar chain, all the while working on getting the part recorded. It’s all moving forward nicely, with no shortage of madness and that feeling of absolute connection that keeps me returning to the music well.

Stereophile continues its journey. I’m working on getting the book into a local bookstore on consignment. An old friend of my brother’s contacted me through my YouTube channel, after listening to the record. He described it as dystopian. That concerned me and made me feel like I got it right. The lyrics are full of our potential for great love in a landscape that’s not thriving. I’m learning to live with these and all the pairs of opposites. The conflicting internal elements that are part of my everyday experience. Of feeling okay with not feeling okay, in a world where it so often makes sense to not feel okay.

I recently saw an FB post about Laurens van der Post, a South African educator, writer, philosopher and conservationist. He’d spent time in the desert with the Kalahari people. One night they asked him if he could hear the stars. When he said he couldn’t, they thought he was joking or having them on. Upon realizing he was serious, they were sad. They knew that someone who couldn’t hear nature must have the greatest sickness. This really hit me. We gaze at the stars, but have any of us caught up in this western living ever heard them? I remember sitting on the steps of our old place on summer nights. It was on a hill in a quiet neighbourhood. I could hear the garden growing. It made sounds. It was one of the most beautiful and stilling things I’ve ever experienced. We now live on a main street in Leslieville. There’s no more of that. In fact, last night while trying to track the acoustic guitar parts mentioned above, the traffic bustling by only a few from the front door made recording a terrible pain in the ass. I’m aware it was late rush hour on a Friday, but there it is. When she calls we have to answer.

Anyhoo, back to the stars. Imagine that. Imagine hearing them. I don’t often enough extol to good stuff modern life offers. There’s a lot to wonder at. I do riff quite a bit on how much we’re losing to modernity. Not hearing the stars is another reminder. It also reminds me that we’re connected to these brilliant lights in the sky. We’re made of the same love. While we reach and listen for the starsong on high, may we hear the same murmurations inside.

Let all the children boogie…

K. xo

“I want to wake up in the city that never sleeps…”

– Sinatra

“Now you’re in New York/These streets will make you feel brand new/Big lights will inspire you”

– Alicia Keys/Jay Z, Empire State Of Mind

“When you first took my hand on that cold Christmas Eve/You promised me Broadway was waiting for me”

– Shane MacGowan/Kirsty MacColl, Fairytale Of New York

“When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.”

– Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life (1978)

“I’m walkin’ here!!”

– Al Pacino, Midnight Cowboy

It’s been a minute. I’ve been missing the regularity of writing for you (and for me!) while the irregularities of the summer schedule play out. One of those irregularities was a very much welcome one; Ava and I recently took a four day whirlwind trip to New York City. It was Ava’s first time on a plane and, for both of us, our first time in New York. We got back a week ago and I’m still processing. I think I will be for a long time.

Anyone who’s been to New York might well attest to its immediate effect. We took an Uber from Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey, across the bridge into New York. Total gridlock at 1pm. The traffic and our hunger after travelling couldn’t quell the excitement. We landed at our AirBnb in Harlem and dropped off our bags. Our host had left us snacks, which we made short work of, so we could get outside and start exploring. We were three blocks east of Central Park. Our first afternoon and evening was spent exploring the immediate area and finding a bodega to buy breakfast supplies at. So to sleep…

I’m writing this morning, not to give you a total play by play of the trip. I think that would be a ponderous exercise. I’m writing because I need to get the experience out of my head and onto the page. Since getting home, I’ve been met with intense flashbacks of our experiences, to say nothing of the level of havoc the amount of walking we did wreaked on my chronic pain issues. I could’ve posted a bunch more quotes to lead off today’s writing. The ones above all directly apply. I always assumed that Frank Sinatra and writer Paul Anka were talking about living the high, showbiz life when they talked about the city that never sleeps. I’ve always pictured Broadway and the eyesore that is Times Square when hearing this line. It was also true in our little neighbourhood; there was noise all night long: trucks, people, voices…constant vibration.

I’ve not travelled much. When I have, it’s never been in the tourist spirit. I prefer to take enough time to feel what life there is like. Well, what life is like from the perspective of someone curious beyond tourism, but nonetheless on vacation. I won’t pretend to know what living anywhere is like without experiencing all the usual suspects of adulting. I’m a helpless romantic, but even my romance has limitations. Life is hard. The cost of living is real. I will say that my attraction and connection to New York City were immediate.

On the morning of our second day, Ava and I took the tube south to the Brooklyn Bridge stop. Leaving the station, we were met with the bridge itself, on a misty, rainy summer morning, disappearing in a vanishing point across the Hudson River. My breath caught. Shivers. It only got deeper and sweeter from there. We wandered everywhere. One World Trade still has a gravity to it. There we stood, in a place where, all those years ago, the stupidity of mankind resulted in a staggering loss of life. I recently read a quote that said something about not finding anything typical of America in New York. This was true for me. I’ve longed held the way by which America is run, and attitudes typical of that ignorance and self-proclaimed superiority, in deep contempt. The line between the people and it’s financial/political/military rule must be drawn. Everyone we met in New York was amazing (except the security guards at the Chrysler Building, who had too much time on their hands and not enough to vent their testosterone on).

All the tube station names are done in this beautiful mosaic tile.

Since our return, some folks have asked what the highlight was. It’s almost impossible to pick one, but if I had to, it would be the revelation we received in the graveyard of The Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. The Basilica is an old church with catacombs beneath. Ava and I went in to ask what the tour was all about. Their 11:45 tour group didn’t show. We ended up having a private, guided tour of the church by a chap called Lee, who’d grown up in the area. He has a vast knowledge of local history. Martin Scorsese grew up in the neighbourhood, went to school across the road and was an altar boy at the church. The real life events from his film, The Gangs Of New York, took place where we were standing. The wall surrounding the church was put up explicitly to keep the church form being damaged by the warring religious factions. Ava and I are fond of graveyards and cemeteries, so this stop and our walk through St. Paul’s graveyard earlier in the day were high points, with their sacred sense of history and the Divine. We saw gravestones dating back to the 1700s. I still haven’t mentioned the highlight. While in the graveyard, Lee gestured to a building adjacent to it. It was an old brick buidling with a modern, grey addition added to the roof. Lee pointed out the terrace visible from where we stood. It was David Bowie’s condo from the time he bought it in 1999, up until the time of his death in 2016. Ava and I got all wide-eyed when he told us this. I have more shivers in the retelling. I pictured Davey coming out on to the terrace of a morning, coffee in hand and looking out across the big city. I saw him leaving the building to head to the studio to cut Blackstar, his last record and brilliant epitaph. I saw him in his final days, after the well-recorded courage with which he navigated his disease. This last image is the hardest, for obvious reasons. Oof.

The wall at the Old Basilica, where the Gangs of New York held court.

The other highlight for me happened unexpectedly, on our way to the subway to begin our journey back to Toronto. We started the day at a cafe near the AirBnb, I didn’t get the name of it. Coffee and pain au chocolat were excellent, as was our host. The scary part was paying for our stuff and needing the bathroom, only to find it occupied by some dude who was taking his time, if you know what I mean. After a few days of restaurant food my bowels were, aherm, compromised. I began to sweat, literally, but willpower trumped biological need, as I felt strongly that shitting my pants on our last day in New York City would be poor form. To be clear, not shitting my pants was not the highlight. Read on…

I was about to fork over about $175 CAD for the Uber back to Newark. There was a chap on the back patio of the cafe, with his babe sleeping in the stroller beside him. He was clearly a regular, as the owner came out to chat with him. I told them we were on our way back to T.O. and asked if they knew about flat rates with the NYC Yellow Cab Co. They didn’t, but it turned out that the young Dad, called Ajay, grew up in Scarborough. He told us how to get to the New Jersey trains down at Penn Station, which went directly to Newark Liberty. This info saved us a ton of money. It meant more legwork, but, even though the crush to get on the Jersey trains at Penn Station is intense and overwhelming, it was worth it. Reason being is that we had to walk across the top of Central Park to get the right line going south. On the walk, which happened to coincide with a car free Saturday morning in the area, not dissimilar to Pedestrian Sundays in Toronto’s Kensington Market, we came across Malcolm X Boulevard. This was unexpected. Ava was curious as to why I wanted a pic, as she and I have never discussed Malcolm’s legacy. Malcolm is a hero of mine. I read his autobiography in my twenties and it was hugely inspirational. That someone could emerge from where he started, as a criminal in the streets of Chicago, to where he ended up, is something. After his trip to Mecca, in the face of being blacklisted by the Nation Of Islam and subsequently assassinated by members of the same, he returned to America with the realization that there was hope for black and white to coexist. Mecca was the only place where he’d experienced being treated with love and equality by human beings with blue eyes and blond hair. His was a life of evolution and great courage. I feel glad in my heart that this was my final experience of New York.

The view from Central Park, looking east.

When we landed at Billy Bishop in Toronto and got in the Uber to head home, the first thing I noticed is how clean our city is. I was chuffed to come across Fran Lebowitz’s quote. It’s really true. I’m happy that my city is not filthy, but clean is not enough. There’s something about every aspect of New York City that gives it its depth. It’s magnetic. The city is magnetic. My most excellent travelling companion and I plan to return as soon as we can. We saw so little while we were there. What little we did see left indelible marks on our hearts and spirits. I see us being there together again. I see me playing shows there. I see more of New York in our lives.

Thanks so much for reading. I realize this is a longer entry and it’s not linear. It’s representative of the way the images and feelings of the trip continue to hit me, at random, inducing a fluttering of the heart and a wistful feeling for a city so new to me, yet so familiar. New York City had always been something that was almost a fictional point of reference. Some place I saw on a map and in movies, music and culture. Now it’s in me. So many cultural dots were connected on this trip. My world is a little bit smaller for the experience. There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave it here for now. Maybe the rest will appear in song at some point…

K. xo