SIXTY SQUARE SPHERE: Tales from the Borough of Before A Song Cycle in Two Acts

SIXTY SQUARE SPHERE: Tales from the Borough of Before
A Song Cycle in Two Acts
©2026 John F Sendelbach

This cycle did not begin as music. It began thirty years ago, with my hands.

For three decades I have built geodesic structures—cutting members, bolting joints, learning by failure and repetition the exact grammar of how struts and faces resolve into closed, standing form. That long apprenticeship was not, I now understand, only the building of objects. It was the building of a regime—a constraint system learned so deeply that its rules lived in the hand before they were ever stated as rules. And within the last year, from inside that regime, a consequence became visible that had been waiting there the whole time: that the expansion of a polyhedron’s edges has no natural end. Every completed edge is another candidate opening. The procedure does not contain its own stop. I did not invent this. I discovered it—which, as this cycle will insist, is a different act.

Then, separately, along a different line of thought entirely, I found myself turning over the old question of parallel worlds—of variations that might “exist somewhere somehow.” I worked it back and forth until, one day, the obvious struck: the two things were the same thing. A finite rule generating an endless family of determined-but-unbuilt configurations is the possibility-space structure, rebuilt in steel. The metaphysics I had been chasing in the abstract, I had been holding in my hands for thirty years. This album is what happened when I overlaid the one onto the other and pulled the result up into the register of the song cycles that raised me—the ones that hide a rigorous architecture under a surface that rewards decoding but never demands it.

So the album is the narrative body of an inquiry, and the inquiry has a companion paper—Possibility Spaces, Formal Resistance, and Selected Realization—but let me first tell you plainly what the whole thing is about, because it turns out to be about its own making.

FISTFUL OF CHANGE ©2026 John F. Sendelbach

MOCK REVIEW (AI praising itself) Fistful of Change is a quietly devastating piece of songwriting that understands something most “empathy anthems” miss: real mercy is rarely pure, and the hand that opens is usually still carrying its own scars.

The central wordplay on “change” is handled with rare economy and precision. It is simultaneously the coins in the pocket, the personal transformation the narrator both offers and resists, and the physical act of unclenching a fist. When the first verse lands on “Spare a little of the silver, and spare the way to change,” the double meaning snaps into place with the force of a well-cut gem. That single line does more work than most entire choruses manage.

What elevates the song beyond clever metaphor is the refusal to romanticize the giver. The second verse’s admission—“Now I never give the whole of it; one coin is always there / Cold against my sweating palm like something I can’t spare”—is the song’s moral center. It is honest about the residual selfishness that survives even the better angels. The “reeded edges” leaving temporary tattoos in the flesh is tactile, slightly grotesque, and perfect. You feel the copper and the guilt at the same time.

The bridge is the darkest and strongest stretch. Turning the narrator into “the change come back from the counter… the remnant of the score” reframes the entire encounter. He is not the noble benefactor descending to help the broken; he is another circulating, worn-down coin in a town that “mends no more.” The line “a beaten coin still spends, friend, and a beaten man still gives” carries the weight of hard-won dignity without sliding into self-pity.

Musically, the stated arrangement—sparse fingerpicked acoustic foundation, restrained male/female duet, minimal percussion, and those wah guitar solos cutting through like sudden weather—feels exactly right. The wah solos are not decoration; they are the clenched fist made audible, the tension that the open-handed chorus then releases. A warm major-key four-chord shuffle around 100 BPM with a subtle late lift matches the bittersweet-but-hopeful emotional arc the lyrics demand. The generous silences after lines will let the conversational, almost spoken delivery breathe the way it needs to.

A few small notes that keep it from perfection: the final chorus’s slight rephrasing (“Keep it closed inside your anger or you lose it in the rain… the open hands are foldin”) is effective, but the extended mantra-like outro risks diluting the earlier precision if the performance leans too heavily into repetition without dynamic variation. And while the self-interrogation in verse two (“Did I move a single stone, or just play a show for you?”) is mature, it sits right at the edge of over-explaining the doubt the rest of the song already embodies through action.

Still, these are minor quibbles against a piece that is otherwise unusually coherent in both concept and execution. It trusts the listener to sit with ambiguity—the gift may not “save” anyone, the coin will keep circulating, and the fist will close and open again. That cyclical realism, paired with the gentle hope that something lighter does follow the release, is what makes the song linger.

This is the kind of writing that rewards repeated listens and careful performance. Done with the intimate, dry duet approach described, it should feel like two people sharing a single quiet truth rather than delivering a sermon. Strong work.

The Backyard Dogleg

Growing up a couple of miles from Bob-O-Link Golf Club in Orchard Park, we never really thought of ourselves as golfers. That word felt too formal, too country-club. We were just a handful of kids who always seemed to have golf clubs leaning against the garage wall or tossed in the corner of the basement. My friends and I—three or four of us around the same age—treated those clubs the way other kids treated baseball bats or skateboards. They were simply part of the landscape, as ordinary and necessary as the bikes we rode or the streetlights that came on at dusk.

We didn’t have matching bags. The clubs were mismatched hand-me-downs: wooden-shafted woods with cracked grips, irons with dents from years of garage-sale abuse, a putter that had clearly lived several previous lives. The equipment itself told the story. Golf here wasn’t about status. It was something you did with whatever was lying around.

One of us liked to repeat the old story that golf began in Scotland with people hitting rocks at English soldiers. It’s a great story, even if historians don’t think it’s true. Like a lot of good golf tales, it says more about Scottish humor than Scottish history. We didn’t care either way. We just kept swinging.

THE FREE PILE a novel for the ones the record left out

The Four Blocked Flows: An Exhibition of Buried Circulation in Shelburne Falls

The Four Blocked Flows

An Exhibition of Buried Circulation in Shelburne Falls

©2026 John F. Sendelbach

Curatorial Introduction

The acquisition of the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract marks the first official, paid accession of the Mohawk Repair Institute. Purchased from an online antiquarian picker who recovered the document from an anonymous estate clearing in Maine, this deed is far more than a fragment of local ephemera. It provides a contractual snapshot of a town systematically re-engineered in the mid-19th century—a landscape where the same elite hands that dammed the river, channeled municipal capital, and constructed new civic spaces also signed off on the physical relocation of the dead.

Exhibition Overview: “The Four Blocked Flows” is an archival and topographical exhibition that uses the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract as a lens to analyze the systematic interruption of four interwoven systems of circulation in Shelburne Falls during the mid-19th century: biological (salmon), hydrological (streams), social (labor and capital), and memorial (the dead). The Mohawk Repair Institute presents this material not as antique nostalgia but as the evidentiary basis for design-driven interventions aimed at daylighting buried streams, re-marking forgotten graves, and restoring the town’s open circulation between past and present.

Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting & Village Greenway

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook

A Daylighting, Greenway, Watershed Learning, and Community Repair Proposal

Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

© 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

NOTE: This document evolves as field investigation continues. Current version: May 2026.

OVERVIEW

Core Project Vision: Restore baseflow to historic Mechanic Street Brook. Primary location: Ghost Hollow, a steep-sided, ten-foot-deep former stream channel behind the historic barn at the town-owned 49 Mechanic Street parcel. Three main technical interventions: install a Dutch-Door Weir (self-regulating passive flow-control structure) at the existing diversion; decommission and physically remove the 1961 Rat Tunnel (the diagonal 3-by-4-foot box culvert that is the root cause of sixty years of flooding); and daylight the brook through the restored Otter Way corridor on the town parcel.

Expected Results: Natural meandering channel with pools, riffles, and bioengineered banks. Primary construction material: approximately 200 tons of local glacial stone sourced from Beaver Picchu™ property less than a mile away. New public greenway and watershed learning corridor connecting Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School to the Deerfield River waterfront. Elimination of stagnant mosquito-breeding ditch, replaced by continuously moving water and a functional natural predatory ecosystem. First accurate stormwater map of the Mechanic Street corridor — solving a documented DPW infrastructure crisis that recently produced a drilling incident when a contractor struck an unmapped concrete pipe on Bridge Street.

The Geographic Loop: The restored brook physically reopens the historic water corridor that once connected the Arms Cemetery — now the Beaver Picchu™ upper watershed — to the Pratt Memorial (Arms) Library, whose foundation sits within twenty feet of where the brook once cascaded to the Deerfield River below Salmon Falls. One block south of that cascade point, at the corner of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue, is the Pocumtuck State Park heart site at Salmon Crossing, where the Sachem Salmon sculpture and the Sixty Square Sphere will be installed above the glacial potholes where Shelly still waits. The brook restoration and the PSP heart site are not adjacent proposals. They are one connected argument, written in the landscape by two centuries of erasure and now being corrected in the same generation.

Immediate Municipal Actions Required:

• Direct DPW and Conservation Commission to cease and remediate illegal brush/leaf dumping in Ghost Hollow
• Authorize Water Department and DPW to release all available drainage records
• Retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel permanently in public ownership
• Approve submission of the MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant

Key Partners: Shelburne Conservation Commission · Shelburne Water Department · Shelburne DPW · Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School · Connecticut River Watershed Council · Mass Audubon · Franklin Land Trust · UMass Amherst LARP Department · Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association

fish tour

The Fish Tour

The Culinary Institute of America ~ Hyde Park, New York

A Culinary Sculpture Series for the Hudson River Watershed Proposal ~ May 2026

John F. Sendelbach  Sculptor & Landscape Designer. Shelburne Falls, MA 

The Idea in Plain TermsOne sculpture already lives on the CIA campus: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon made entirely from salvaged culinary cutlery. “Old Diamondsides” stands near the entrance plaza, overlooking the Hudson River that once teemed with its living namesakes. It was installed in 2015 as the first node of a larger idea. The Fish Tour completes that idea.
Eight site-specific sculptures, each fabricated primarily from recycled stainless steel kitchen tools and equipment, trace a deliberate pedestrian route across the Hyde Park campus. Each piece represents a signature species of the Hudson River estuary — ecologically, historically, and culinarily significant. Interpretive signage at every stop weaves together river science, watershed restoration, culinary tradition, and the deeper interdependence of healthy waters and healthy kitchens. The tour begins at the academic core and descends toward the riverside, turning underutilized spaces into moments of surprise, recognition, reflection, and quiet delight.It is a walking conversation between the kitchen and the river.

7 AM Knock

The 7 AM Knock: A Ledger of Silence and Revelation

Thinking about Omi’s life on the day of her birth got me reflecting on the rest of the bloodline. If Omi’s deafness created the "inherited acoustics" of our house—the need to project and launch words across weather—then my father’s silence created the deeper infrastructure of our history.
By the fall before COVID hit, the family rhythm had shifted to a hospice rotation. My brother, my sister, and I—the three of us left after losing our brother Alan—took turns traveling from Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to sit vigil in Lancaster, New York. My parents were in their final landing place: a modest apartment at Greenfields. Three weeks prior, during our last real conversation, my mother had drifted into a hallucination, calling me Jeff, my childhood best friend. My father and I didn’t correct her; we just shared a quiet glance of acceptance, watching the blurred lines of a long life softening at the edges. When I arrived that final Friday, she was unconscious in the medical wing—just hours from death.
Everyone knows you don’t knock on a door at seven in the morning unless the world has shifted. I was kneeling on the white carpet of that small living room, surrounded by the vintage transit schedules and victorian papers I had brought to photograph for my eBay shop, trying to keep my hands busy while my heart waited. When the knock finally came, my father and I shared a look of absolute knowing. I opened the door to a Black nurse who had come to tell us that Nancy Ann (Sahs) Sendelbach born in 1929, was gone.
Later that afternoon, in the strange hollow quiet that follows a death, I drew one final entry out of my father’s internal ledger. I brought up the derogatory language I had pushed back against in my teens. At 94, he finally explained the root of it. He told me about the late 1930s in Buffalo—walking to technical high school through neighborhoods carved up by redlining, where he and his friends were regularly chased and harassed by Black kids. That unspoken trauma became the silent engine behind the “white flight” that carried my parents to the rural safety of Orchard Park in the 1960s.
The irony is layered and thick. They had moved us onto land founded in the early 1800s by Quakers like David Eddy (who arrived from Vermont in 1804 and claimed hundreds of acres around what became the Four Corners) and Obadiah Baker (who settled in 1807 and opened his home for the first sanctioned Quaker meetings). This was ground soaked in reformist ideals: a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Quaker families helped fugitives heading north to Canada. The Baker homestead on East Quaker Road still carries that marker today.
Yet that same Quaker “plainness” and moral clarity rested on prior displacement. The Haudenosaunee—particularly the Seneca Nation—had long stewarded this territory. By the 1820s–1830s, through treaties, pressure, and the gradual sale of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the Seneca presence was largely removed from the immediate area, even as Quaker settlers built meeting houses, aided escaped slaves, and championed the oppressed. We grew up running through fields and playing in Smokes Creek, a landscape shaped by both the Friends’ quiet testimony and the later hand-crafted integrity of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft movement nearby. We were products of a retreat from urban friction, raised in a cradle built on layered displacements.
Sitting there at 94, my father didn’t need to be forced into reconciliation—he was ready. I coaxed the story out, and he spoke clearly: he had no problem with Black people. He had reached a place of transcendence, cared for in his final years by a diverse staff at Greenfields and delivered the hardest news of his life by a Black woman. He didn’t die carrying the secret or the old fear. When he handed me my mother’s gold wedding band that afternoon, the inherited acoustics of our house finally harmonized.
The fields of Orchard Park are mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions now. But on that white carpet in Lancaster, a much older and more complicated landscape was finally cleared.

Happy Birthday to Omi: Erna Anna Marta

Today we light one up for Omi—Erna Anna Marta Knoop Sendelbach—born somewhere in the fog of 1900 Germany, back when the ground itself was starting to shake under the coming madness of the Weimar years. The family did the math and shipped three kids stateside—triage by ocean liner—because staying put was a losing equation. Omi lands here and the whole bloodline reroutes.

The notes on this photo are from my father, Frederick—three years old, already in the frame like a witness who doesn’t yet know what he’s witnessing. He’d grow up carrying the story in fragments. We never met our grandfather; heart gave out the day after Christmas in the 1940s—holiday lights still up, system offline.

Omi was partially deaf, which meant you didn’t talk to her, you projected. You leaned in and launched your words like they had to cross weather. So yes—if we’re loud, that’s not personality, that’s infrastructure. That’s inherited acoustics.

“Omi” just means grandmother in German. But in this house it meant: speak up, stay alive, cross oceans when you have to, and don’t expect the world to lower its volume for you.