I have a fresh newsletter up today. Lead photo is from last March, taken in Oakland during a fit of sunshowers we were having there for a few weeks. Shot on Kodak Tri-X film with a Pentax 6x7 medium format camera.

Pasting a few excerpts in the replies.

https://wilsonshook.com/newsletter/2025/4/8/spring-offerings

#ManualTherapy #BodyWork #Pasadena #BelieveInFilm

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Winter Garden Healing Arts — Spring Offerings :: Winter Garden Healing Arts

Happy Spring / Celebrating one month in Pasadena Spring Discount Visceral Manipulation Study Group and private coaching Sarah Davachi on Alastair Galbraith Poetry by Elizabeth Bishop

Winter Garden Healing Arts

In thinking about what to share for this month's newsletter, I came across this touching description of one musician's work by another. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, but I knew I needed to snatch it off of the page and let it be more than mere record promotion. Here, Sarah Davachi addresses the music of Alastair Galbraith. Davachi's music features heavily in my office playlist. Galbraith manages to squeak in with one of his quieter pieces.

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Sarah Davachi on Alastair Galbraith:

"It’s hard to describe how Alastair’s music makes me feel, and it’s something that I’ve been trying to do for myself ever since I first fell in love with his records many years ago. In a concrete way, there’s a kind of intimacy and quietude, a sort of functional aloneness, that I admire so deeply in his music and that I aspire to in my own music. I’m consistently obsessed with the production and arrangement in his records. His songwriting is so beautifully sparse in its base structure, and that’s something that I appreciate on a technical level because I know how hard it is to be simple and reduced for the sake of a specific meaning. But Alastair somehow manages to touch that negative space further and make its emptiness tangible. And I suppose that this intimacy speaks to the emotional aspects that I latch onto in his music as well – from my perspective, what Alastair is so incredible at achieving in his music is the idea that one could take a moment or a feeling, and suspend it in time as a miniature or a sculpture of sorts that you can walk around and observe and maybe just sit with for a while. It’s an experience unlike much else."

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(the quoted text above refers to Galbraith's LP Lagash, published by Nice Music)

https://nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com/album/060-lagash

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060 'Lagash', by Alastair Galbraith

4 track album

Nice Music Label

In keeping with the theme, here is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop that has been rattling around my brain ever since I first heard it set to music by the Dutch post-punk band The Ex. Their 1998 Starters Alternators record, produced by the recently deceased Steve Albini, is an old favorite of mine. They adapted Bishop's "One Art" into "Art of Losing," a song whose jaunty rhythm plods along in perfectly unstable tension with a creeping, churning dread that eventually overtakes the song. Similarly, Bishop's lines present themselves with a tidy, almost diminutive order, approaching the notion of loss in steadily escalating stanzas. Her formalism betrays a nimble, vertiginous dance over a vast emptiness; her rhymes neatly laced against dissolution. It is, in Davachi's words, a feeling suspended in time, "a miniature or a sculpture of sorts." Let us sit with it for a while.

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"One Art" (Elizabeth Bishop)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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#poetry