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cold walk to the South Slope
Wednesday, January 9 2002
There's a guy named Art Winer in Park Slope and now and then he sends me emails inviting me to come over, but for some reason there's just never any time. Today he wasn't doing anything special so he invited me over yet again, and I decided to go.
Art lives over on 14th Street, which is something of a hike when the weather is as cold as it's been of late. My problematic tear ducts were working overtime in the blustery wind and I'm sure I must have looked like I was mourning the double suicide of the other thirds of my ménage à trois to people I passed on the 7th Avenue.
Art Winer's place was a spacious one bedroom dominated by an impressive setup of computerized audio equipment. We quickly got to the business of drinking while he told me about what he's been up to of late. Shot of whiskey in hand, he told me about his job as a mastering engineer for Sony prior to being laid off in December. He'd been working on an experimental new technology called the audio DVD, a technology with the potential to provide many more tracks and such audiophile excess as fully-immersive music. But then the economic climate went cold, and suddenly no one wanted to be spending money on experiments. So now he's out on the street, and, like many in New York, living on his severance package. Art says he doesn't know anyone who isn't unemployed.
Still, Art does have considerable audio mastering skills and plenty of fun equipment (some of it handmade prototypes), and he has a number of musician clients who hire him to master their CDs. This gives a decidedly eclectic quality to his CD collection. There was indeed some wacky shit in there. When Art's friend Matt came over, we got to hear this forty year old gentleman who calls himself Moody Bastard singing goth wank-metal tunes about such subjects as his cold, uncaring father. "Fuck your goddamned job application!" was one of several choice lines from a chorus that had Matt and me begging for more throughout the evening.
Later in the evening, Art told me the story of how he'd begun reading my site. It turns out that he'd been a student in Oberlin during my time there, and his old girlfriend Leslie Maslow had shared my fascination with Dan Re!tman. She had even somehow obtained a copy of my old Macintosh AfterDark® screen saver module (one featuring a hacked Flying Toaster animation whose frames had been replaced by those familiar from the Dan and Gwen animation). One day Art did some web searches to find out what Dan was up to and, quite naturally, he stumbled into my site.
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