"Sapokanikan"

I went out for a walk this morning and put Joanna Newsom's "Divers" on. Spring is slowly coming on in Denver; we're supposed to get some rain/snow late tomorrow night but then nothing for weeks. About halfway through the walk "Sapokanikan" came on and I remembered how much I'd loved it a few years ago, listening to it over and over. Newsom has (justifiably, and admirably) never put her catalog on Spotify so I have to pull up my Bandcamp download to listen to the album which I usually forget to do. In Newsom's words in 2015:

"Sapokanikan" is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality.

It's also quite simply a song about New York City, which is a place I've been thinking about a lot in that last couple of days. I'm not sure if folks living in the city are going to be comforted by its weary, cosmic history of the town from the Lenape to the near-present, or the music video shot in 2015 of an isolated Newsom singing the song as she travels through the streets of Sapokanikan. But finishing my walk around the park I ran into my own weird history: a man dressed in an overcoat, cowboy hat and boots, walking across the crosswalk towards me.

He's in the middle-right of the photo, next to the big tree. I tried not to be too creepy or invasive taking a photo of him.