#goodbyetoallthat

Mark Vennis & Different Place: Finding the Beauty in "Goodbye to All That" Mark Vennis & Different Place have unleashed "Goodbye to All That", a record that feels less like a standard studio production and more like stumbling across a box of forgotten, mud-stained letters from the front lines, set to a rhythm that refuses to sit still. https://open.spotify.com/album/0uvXq10rlm29SxAdmx8IVQ?si=fai-hk9BQru4curtMTfKIA There is a particular flavor of cynicism that seems to ferment best in the damp air of the British Isles, a friction between the polite notion of a "stiff upper lip" and the bloody, brutal reality of how an empire is actually built. This album captures that friction perfectly. It’s a kaleidoscopic trip through history, but don’t expect a dusty lecture. It hits you in the chest. [caption id="attachment_63791" align="alignnone" width="768"] Mark Vennis & Different Place: Finding the Beauty in "Goodbye to All That"[/caption] Right from the opening track, “The Beating of the Drum,” there is a sense of impending doom that I found surprisingly danceable. The driving low-end pulse anchors a melody that feels fatalistic, like watching a ship leave port knowing it won't return. It sets a marching tempo that propels the listener straight into the machinery of war. Vennis’s vocal delivery is the lynchpin here. In tracks like “This Nation’s Ghosts,” he shifts between a spoken-word confessional and a strained wail. It’s conversational yet urgent, like someone grabbing your elbow in a noisy pub to tell you the real version of history. The band featuring Dave Sweetenham, Sean Quinn, and Brian Gee builds a landscape around him that is both gritty and weirdly cinematic. [caption id="attachment_63792" align="alignnone" width="1366"] Mark Vennis & Different Place: Finding the Beauty in "Goodbye to All That"[/caption] “Empire Road” stood out to me for its mechanical, almost oppressive hypnosis. It uses these droning frequencies and electronic tones to critique the hollow glory of conquest, sounding exactly how industrial decay feels. But just when the weight of imperialism starts to crush you, they pivot. “Golden Country” washes in with chiming resonances and a sun-drenched, hazy atmosphere. It’s a moment of pastoral escapism, a desperate lungful of fresh air before the reality of the modern world rushes back in. The album wraps its critique of greed “The Trader” and execution “The Crawling Through the Woods” in musical textures that borrow from punk, folk, and blues, yet belong to none of them entirely. It’s rough around the edges in the best way. [caption id="attachment_63790" align="alignnone" width="768"] Mark Vennis & Different Place: Finding the Beauty in "Goodbye to All That"[/caption] By the time the final notes of “Requiem” fade out, you aren't just left with a collection of songs about British history; you're left with a mood. It’s a melancholic resignation, a nod to the ghosts we can’t seem to shake. Does looking back at the wreckage help us steer the ship, or are we just documenting the decline? Website, Facebook, Twitter(X), Instagram, TikTok, YouTube

Knowing when to let something be. ✌🏻 . . . . #positivequotes #letitbe #goodbyetoallthat #wakeupyoursoul #mood #mentalhealth #therapy #recovery #mentalhealthawareness #inspiration #feedyoursoul #bossbabe #motivation #gypsysoul #chasingthesun #breakstigmas #happiness #lifestyle #instagood #positivevibes #selflove #bossbabe #wildchild #wanderlust #radiatelove #unicornvibetribe

It would be ten years, a move to Williamsburg, a poodle, another poodle, a baby, then another baby before we would finally break up with New York.  Like Joan Didion astutely observed, the end was not as clean-cut as the beginning.  I, and later we, had many mini break-ups before actually putting a deposit down for our move. As if to make up for overstaying our welcome by not just a few years, but probably a whole decade and then some, we didn't just move to Westchester or Connecticut, or even the West Coast.  We had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and an even more vast ocean of culture and language, at least for me.  We arrived in Florence, Italy with a toddler, a newborn, a poodle on canine tranquilizer and half a dozen suitcases.  I don't know how we did it.  We looked like refugees and in our own way we were.

Just finished this profound read as the sun went down in Washington Square Park. If you have spent any time living in #NYC and have not already, you should read this book. #goodbyetoallthat #goodread (at Washington Square Park)

    It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my  finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in  the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.