They didn't make you read The Plague in high school? I thought that went right along side The Great Gatsby or Of Mice and Men...

Wow…this just triggered about a dozen alt-name ideas…🤫😎

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Actually, sidewalks of NYC, including those around Central Park, have (licensed) food cart vendors still, some featuring open vats of boiling somethings — for hot dogs or roasted nuts (yum!) or, yes, pretzels. But none perhaps as charming and idiosyncratic (with misspelling) as our freelance PL fellow here from another era in the city’s life. Hmmmm… maybe recreating “him” in particular would be an excellent conceptual art project or alt-art CD photo shoot… as long as they acted fast, before a cop asked to see their vendor license…

Just try to keep toes far from ledges, and razor blades locked away 🫂

Feb 23, 2025 I would like to note a kind of cosmic irony about this entry. You can see that Walter wrote this c. 2010, and we posted it here in 2020 — so it commonly lives buried low among all post threads in this Forum category (analogous, in terms of eyeballs, to being on the 6th page of a Google search) A few days ago (Feb 20, 2025) it was bumped up to the top of the Forum category, due to its having “recent activity” And what was that recent activity? Reply posts by spam bots— posts we immediately deleted — that tend to show up whenever we send out a Newsletter, spraying themselves quasi-randomly onto threads like the drunk at a party who spews all over the canapé trays. So here now is this little cork — bobbing up to the surface of the position-attention water; an impressionistic dystopian dispatch from a man long dead, who knew and could imagine nothing about our current moment… just as the tsunami racing across the ocean will soon crash over us all…. …. because of a random spambot touting herbal dick meds. Calling Dr. Jung…

right? can't say if I'm happy or sad he didn't live to see this .....

Sorry! Fixed now (-who knew a trailing white space could be so mighty?)

well then -- odds are I miss you too :-)

DaKine Dave Russell in da house! MAHALO for the great history and knowledge! And your meticulous dedicated record keeping/notation is the ONLY reason we (or anybody) could possibly aspire to a legacy site. 🙏 Soon after Walter’s death (too soon, probably), when I began to contemplate W’s mess/pile of scattered DATS, many separated from their original case — this was in NYC — it was ONLY your master book of DAT#s and contents that allowed me to make a start! Just a for-instance. 🙏🌈 Oh, and on those studio jams — hearing those during my months of listening through 100s of DATs was both wonderful and almost too painful. But yeah I think we’ve put bits of jams on this site: Here's "Black Dog", for example (and that post contains links to a couple others) :-)

Hey, PhD dissertations have been built on flimsier analyses 🤓. Any smart future musicology candidate would be wise to borrow yours (and a far sight better than yet another OZ/Floyd joint)

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MATTHEW OMFG your GF thumbnails on the Downloads page 😝 I'm dyin' ICYMI (reduced size) ©️Matthew Kerns ©️Matthew Kerns©️Matthew Kerns ©️Matthew Kerns

sad…buoyancy…bobbing Love that!

Perfectomondo!

Gratified by your comment: it explicitly reflects two animating goals of establishing Walter Becker Media: :: to illuminate both the Pipeline and the Process involved in creating and crafting W’s (and most) music :: and in particular, to illuminate how relentlessly and creatively Walter was devoted (driven?) to enrich and nurture both The Final Products we think define a musician’s “work” are in fact just the end points — or the good-enough-given-this-deadline points — of a process of experimentation with a song that’s emerged from the writer’s large storehouse of musical and semantic inspirations and ideas. And some writers, like Walter, were stunningly protean practitioners of this creative life. Anyway — always happy when readers indicate they’ve absorbed our rhetorical intentions for presenting a deeper WB; makes our labor feel lighter :-)

Many of us can name the preexisting commonalities we discovered in those who eventually became our partner: e.g. “We both  loved SD”. One item on my list is: we both insisted on graph paper notebooks.

Actually that’s just the first (blank) page pulling away from the binding; it’s an old notebook…🩼— In my experience he was mos def a non-ripper. Indeed, every pad of any kind with any content was laced with his phrases, lines, thoughts. I’m still finding little pieces of him amongst pages of flight numbers, phone numbers, grocery lists….

Translating additional page notes, for those who struggle with W’s handwriting: * International day of the dog * Ringing the ratbell down to tha bone * Grey hat hacks * Grand Canyon rim to rim