:: Why The Kimono Is Beautiful ::

:: Monday, May 27, 2002 ::

I remember living in New York City, indifferent student broke, working at a Barnes & Noble for a couple of bucks an hour, the one in the deco building near Carnegie Hall, now a deli; in love with everything, Glenn Branca, Mars, the Raincoats, The Clash, the buildings, the subway, the clubs, my place near the Dakota, my walk to work, my repairman's jacket. But also biting my nails about everything. I was hanging around with lots of freaks, including Caren from my favorite band from that era, The Minx, who also was employed at this legendary B&N. It was a great job. I especially loved working the music section in the mezzanine. I'd play Einstein on the Beach really loud for the baffled Carnegie crowd until Therese, my extremely cool boss, would look up from below and give me the 'gag' sign. Yuppie ethos hadn't yet devoured everything, but you could feel its maw, the heat of its breath. For example, I noticed the kids were dressing in golf clothes whenever I'd get out of the hothouse village and go to cape cod. Which I at first took to be this superb joke pulled off by people much higher on the irony spiral than I was. Only it wasn't a joke at all. I talked to them. And you could feel it leaching into some of the parties that we'd crash in the city. I was reading Celine at the time and he was describing being penniless in nyc and having a relationship with this rich american, Lola, and saying things like "Poverty doesn't draw unless it's presented properly, swathed in imagination." I think he was trying to convince her he'd sired children all over and keep her on the hook for a while with the prospect of adopting one of his illegitimate, abandoned (non-existent) children. Hearing this song today (originally a poem, though I can't find the second stanza) reminded me of that period. I think it was about the kind of guy whose existence went completely unnoticed to me then. I also remember I wrote a one-act play about my time at Barnes & Noble, with all my friends from there in it. I'll look for it and put it up here. If I can find it. I've lost a lot of that stuff.

Old spooting creek was beautiful this weekend. Our first poppy, maroon, giant, voluptuous, came up. We didn't want to leave.

Ok. I found the 2nd stanza. Horny Guy is whole once again.
:: 5:02 PM [+] ::
...

Did a lot of playing the past few days, music and otherwise. Wednesday night we had our first Frank Drake practice in a while. Anne was out with her buds so it was total bachelor land. Chris and Zack and Art came over early and we played a wicked game of basketball. We've decided that we're going to take on all bluegrass comers in ball. Then we devoured a couple of hundred slices of pizza, drank some wine, did some picking, watched Chris dunk Quentin in the sink, watched Quentin soak Chris w/ the faucet, etc. Next day I began recording Van Turn Around, a lovely sonic mess. But before I finished i got a call from Chris suggesting we do some busking in Kendall Square. Since I'm auto-suggestible I did. Art and Zack came. We were too late for the lunch crowd, but we played for a couple of hours and made $27. ! Who needs to work? Then I went home to pick up Quentin. Art was heading up to Maine for a weekend getaway. Zack and Chris headed into Boston for a close-out sale at some western clothing store. Zack came by around 5:30 wearing the most gigantic cowboy hat I've ever seen. I guess they each got one of those monsters. Plus bought one for Jeremy. The Cantab's gonna look like a scene from 'Bonanza' next Tuesday. Anne, Andrew and Quentin took off for Falmouth. Gabriel stayed uptown with me, but was going to a crew team dinner. So Zack and I headed out to my favorite sushi bar. We traded weird stories, ate a boatload of food and then wandered over to Matt Murphy's pub for a couple glasses of chateau abracadabra. Amy joined us there and eventually we headed back to my place and played songs. Amy's got a great voice. I think we were playing Elton John and Magnetic Fields songs, me on piano, Zack on Andrew's cello, everyone singing. We were going to crash a Matt Glaser party, but it was way too late. I went to bed and dreamed a bunch of Sid Barret dreams.

Today is a gorgeous day. I finished a rough version of VTA. I was going to write an account of one of the few one-night stands I ever had, from many many bachelor moons ago. I think I could make it interesting and not some bizarro overshare. But it seems like too weird a thing to stick in a blog. Or this blog.

How about this instead, two poems, a dyptich, topic self-evident.

--------------------------------------------------
Has Anyone Seen My Mother?

On my way to a business breakfast
I saw Mother painted
On a blank brick wall
Beside a diner.
Waving to cars.

When she saw me
She tried to laugh a little.
But once she started crying
She was a non-stop silent mural.

Of course I was thinking she
Was upset about the
Damned one-page letter
I always promise to write.

But no.
She had her arms wrapped
Around her old beaverboard box,
Filled with thousand page
Confessions she wanted me to read.

As she took the top off
The papers began to fly
Like the colorful confetti
We tossed and tossed way back
When the dinosaur age ended.

---------

Gulf War

Wasn't dad good?
He built a tall house;
Paid for the milkshakes;
Used words like 'lumber',
'Carpe diem', 'length'.
His breathing was loudest
Among the family
And he lived his life
So you felt you used him.

Dad became a beaver
In my mind;
My mind became
A strut for the dam
Of my mind's beaver.

He built a clothesline,
Circular and revolutionary,
And we fixed it
With an engine
And a pulley
And hung a cat
By its tail
And watched its
Private revolution.

We saw death become
The absence of an idea.

Dad crawled out
The timeforsaken bunker
Mouthed nugatory spittle
Into the absence
Which became
A permanent feature
Of his drive-by head:
His living hat, you might say.
:: 4:58 PM [+] ::
...

Spent a few days in Falmouth. Set up my makeshift atelier and started resurrecting old songs. 'Big Bistro Brother' and 'Van Turn Around', specifically. The first is a rather savage bit of beefheartian lo-fi splooge, based on a deranged 'musician' character from the unfinished Inner Beauty group-written dystopic novel 'Skunk Angst': The pastoral story of how, in the aftermath of a burst economic bubble, Americans schism into 'Seen Enoughs' and 'Situationists'; the former the invested movers and shakers who eventually commit mass suicide, the latter the slackers and culturists who take over the country and run it as a vast amusement park for the rest of the world. 'Van Turn Around' was/is a strange conflation of my departure w/ family for San Francisco in '93 and my teenage utopian visions of being a communard in that same city.

Friday afternoon Zack showed, in serious need of seaside downtime after a week of horrifying gigs. I showed him around the place and then we sat under the friendly May sky trading songs. On his new big-low-end Martin he even played me a fantastic slowed-down arrangement of 'Johanna Jubilee' that I'm gonna make him record. Later we went to Woods Hole for seafood and then to the haunted bar at Captain Kidd's, where Zack told a Joycean 'nighttown'-ish story about coming out of some club in Dublin in the middle of the night, trying to get breakfast at the only joint that was open, finding it jam packed and then getting a tap on the shoulder from some dickensian wraith, pointing him to a doorway in an alley. Turned out to be some kind of bizarre afterhours breakfast speakeasy. After a few rounds at Kidd's we stumbled a couple of blocks inland to my cousin Vicky's, where a small multi-generational party was underway. We hung out and played some more music (turns out Beatles are pretty mutli-generational) and then back to N. Falmouth.

Saturday the skies poured buckets. After breakfast at the N. Falmouth Diner and a drive around seasqualling Megansett, I came back to Brookline in time for Andrew's confirmation dinner. Went back to Falmouth on Sunday for some more recording and cleanup.

Steve visited from SF this week and we had a bunch of mile-a-minute design sessions and margarrita lunches and ethnic dinners and then do it all over again. Just like during dot-bong.

Most interesting occurence of the week: The appearance in the mail of a chicken-scratch envelope that turned out to be a letter from Andrew-the-4th-grader to Andrew-the-8th-grader. Here it is, verbatim:

June 17, '98

Dear Andrew:

Long time no see, eh? It's me, your 4th grade self. I've been learning, as you may remember, the danger of drugs. You better not be smoking, you lug! I don't want to get angry, but just don't smoke or you will be very, very bad. Smoking makes your tongue and teeth yellow. You'd better have a lot of money because I want it. I hope you listen.

Your teeth if you smoke:

[drawing of a row of crooked, chipped looking teeth]

I know it's D.A.R.E. gimmickery, but it was still moving. Andrew's extraordinary 4th-grade self, momentarily with us again, in a very child-is-father-to-man kind of way. Time always waving goodbye. Exquisitely hard to endure sometimes.

:: 10:50 AM [+] ::
...

Maybe only Quentin knows how much I really like a park bench.
:: 9:10 PM [+] ::
...

Last night before dinner I was in my usual spot on the back deck, staring a nice meditative hole into the dancing maya. Andrew came outside to join me. It was about 65 degrees and still light out. A beautiful dusk. He'd gotten home from a lacrosse practice and was exhausted. He lay down on the other bench and started telling stories. School stuff. Something about the ways he and his friends had mildly subverted some kind of 'annoying' ethnographic survey some BU grad student came in to give them. Like writing 'ok' in the area that says 'Do not write in this area.' Suddenly he looked up and said, "Dad. Look. Cloud parade." And started a litany of sky images that went on, rapid fire, for twenty minutes. I wish I could remember it all. It was stuff like this:

- there's a mouse w/ a moustache
- there he is again only with sharper teeth and smiling
- there's a bald eagle
- hey, it's a fuzzy animal with a capital 'Y' on its chest
- look. a baby fighting an angry bird. the baby has a blue stool, the kind Stanley [our dog] is afraid of. the bird has a lamp, a book, and a clock. the baby's about to smash the stool over the bird's head.
- there's a shrimp. see that gap in the bottom right corner of that cloud just passing the roof line? look at the bottom, dad, the jagged area. that's the shrimp.

On and on. As I was going inside he was still lying on the bench. I heard him say:

"That was fun. I forgot the other world existed."
:: 8:25 AM [+] ::
...

Tonight I'm heading down to Falmouth for a few days. I haven't been in a while so I'm pretty excited. Anne says everything is absolutely febrile with bloom.

I'm bringing equipment and am hoping to link up with Watts and do some mixing/sequencing and otherwise noodling around. Zack is scheduled to come down Friday night so I can introduce him to the house, Anne's ancient red beach wagon, Nobska Light, the local beach and the bars in Woods Hole.

-----------------------------------------

Sartre was a bookish boy. Once a friend of his mom's said: 'No book can be dangerous if it is well written.' Sartre turned to his mom and on that basis asked her permission to read a notorious novel. 'But if my little darling reads books like that at his age, what will be do when he grows up?' 'I shall live them out!' was his brilliant reply.

-----------------------------------------

The other day I had lunch with my friend Steve Y. Steve and I worked at my last startup together. Steve's an eclectic, cerebral, open-headed, big-hearted guy who seems to do at least a little bit of everything. He's also a very progressive disclosure kind of guy. Everytime you think you know Steve, he springs new, surprising facets of himself on you. Our overlapping interests include philosophy, technology, the wondrous surreality of family life and music (particularly our tribal drumming sessions in Kendall Square, Cat Power, Bach and Stereolab). Recently he wrote in his blog about how golf, a passion of his dad's and long a barrier to their relationship in certain respects, had suddenly become a vehicle for intimacy. Steve, not a fan of the sport, had relented and begun accompanying his dad for games of golf. These have proved very fruitful as a means of bringing Steve and his dad closer. At lunch the other day Steve was talking about this again, reaffirming what a good thing it has been. I talked a little about what it was like for me when my dad died two years ago and the strange fog it put me in for months; and expressed some regrets about too few visits during his last couple of years.

In fact, there seems to be a father zeitgeist about. Tim's father just died after a stoic battle with cancer, Steve P. is worried about his father's recent health issues, Zack has talked a good bit about his relationship w/ his father (whom I met up here for an exuberent dinner last month), Paul is in an intense state of caretaking for his father in the aftermath of his mother's dying last year; Ted's writing a book on long distance care for an elderly parent, based on his experiences w/ trying to care for his father during a terminal illness; Watts is dealing with longstanding unresolved issues around his highly ambivalent relationship with his overachieving, demanding father, Art's father issues are epic beyond my ability to limn them here, and (it's not all gloom) I've been exchanging some emails with Bridget's musician father about what a cool singer and person she is; and when I bring some of this stuff up to my own kids, the mortality stuff in particular, there's a kind of wide-eyed inchoate fear coupled w/ a willed denial wrt any connection between mortality and their dad.

Anyway, last night Anne and I were supposed to meet Steve. There's a singer named Rachel McCartney that Steve's been telling me about and she was playing last night at the Kendall Cafe. Anne and I ate dinner there and listened to Rachel's first set. We then waited around for Steve, thinking that maybe he was intending to come to the second show. By 10 p.m. we figured something must've come up and so we went home. This morning I checked our vmail and, sure enough, there was a message from Mariel, Steve's wife, that Steve's dad had had a heart attack and that Steve had flown to Michigan to be with his family.

I don't know anything about Steve's dad's condition, at this point. But I'm at least taking some proxy comfort from what Steve has written and told me recently about the connection he and his father have established in the last year.
:: 9:59 AM [+] ::
...

Sometimes I drive Gabe to school in the morning. I did today. I know he was up very late last night because he was still up when I got home from the cantab at 1:30 a.m. So he was a little sleepy, but still pleasant. This morning he was just asking desultory questions.

Sitting at a traffic light besides a large truck: "What's W.B. Mason do, anyway?" "They sell office supplies. Paper mostly, I think.""Ah. From the lettering it looks like they would sell pigs. Or, no. Home made cupcakes."

"Why do they make SUVs?""I don't know. I can't answer that.""I think you should only be able to drive an SUV if you build it yourself. You know, they tell you what parts you need and where to get them. But you have to build it."

etc.

:: 10:04 AM [+] ::
...

Since I'm on the subject of family: My older brother is sort of the nerdy genius in the family. When he was young he was preternaturally, almost bizarrely mechanical. He read Popular Mechanics from the time he could read. Which was young. And in addition to understanding innately how the world worked, he could put the doxa into praxa, as it were. So, for example, I remember him at age six taking the keys to my grandfather's Ford Falcon, 3 on the column, and taking it for a drive around the block. Not sure how he reached everything, but since I was in the passenger seat at the time, my memory of his little spin is quite vivid. Naturally, given how much fun it appeared to be for him, I snuck the keys out later myself. Unfortunately, while I grokked what the 'gas' and the 'brake' pedals were all about, the 'clutch' was entirely beyond my ken, like training a rat in a maze to take a left at every prime-numbered door. The result was I stuck the key in, turned the engine over, and since the thing was parked in Reverse sat there in horror as the car bolted backwards and into my neighbor's fence. Fortunately there wasn't any real damage and, as happened so many times over the years, my brother was available and, w/ amply, skillfully expressed disgruntlement and disdain, pulled the car back into its original position and told me to 'smarten the fuck up'. Hey, kids swore back then. Telescopic fallacists notwithstanding.

There's no doubt in my mind that my brother would have made a superb engineer of one sort or another. But for a variety of reasons I won't bother with here, he ended up going to vocational school, studied plumbing and eventually converted a nepotism job he got from our Selectman grandfather into running the water department in the town we grew up in. In his spare time he's done things like: built his entire house: framing (w/ some help from my youngest brother), masonry, electricity, plumbing, finish work; learned bass guitar at age 18 and got good enough to have been gigging regularly ever since; learned to program; learned enough Netware and, eventually, windows networking to set up and adminster the network for his job; became a serious gourmet cook.

While he can be lots of fun, he still maintains a seriously cranky side. He's also capable of outrageous political and, more importantly, social incorrectness. Consequently my kids and their various cousins and friends all think that he's one hilarious uncle. One example: My sister is an attorney and also lives down on cape cod. She socializes a lot more than my brother. Once a bunch of us were at the bar at some fancy restaurant waiting to eat. While we were waiting, this pretty famous author (whose name I'll refrain from disclosing), a friend of my sister's, walked up to her and started chitchatting. My sister thought that we'd all like to meet the guy. When she went to introduce him to my older brother the conversation went something like this:

My sister: Dan, I'd like to meet X. He's the writer who wrote Y. You've probably read it.
My brother, spinning around to look at the writer: Is it pornography?
The writer, falling backwards and looking pretty seriously aghast: Of course not.
My brother, turning back to the conversation he was having: Then I haven't read it.

My poor sister.
:: 3:30 PM [+] ::
...

A few quick Andrew stories:

1. When Andrew was three I took him to see 'Aladdin' at the Coolidge Corner Theater. The place, unlike now, was in a state of serious deshabille. But we could walk to it. At one point I looked over to see how Andrew was enjoying the movie. Instead of looking ahead at the screen like everyone else, he was staring at the strange old paisley ceiling. I asked him what was up. He said: 'Dad, look! The roof looks just like my imagination!'

2. Around the same time, we were in the town library. It was winter and Andrew had on his spacesuit-like blue winter coat. He used to insist on keeping the hood zipped up, inside and out, because he thought it made him look like a robot. Which it did. We were waiting for Anne to check out some books and Andrew started hanging onto the metal theft-detector swinging gate. Suddenly a classical library battleaxe appeared out of nowhere and reprimanded him. He swung around, snorkel-mask facing her head on, got into robot-fighter pose, and said: "Stand back, feeble mortal!" I thought the battleaxe was going to punch me. I tried to apologize. But she just spun on her heels and went into a back room.

3. A couple years later we were living in San Francisco and Andrew was in some kind of yuppie daycare in Pacific Heights. I remember how all of the moms looked identical. Slim, jeans, loafers, Range Rovers. One day Anne went to get Andrew at the end of the session. The place was packed with all of these moms and precious kids. As Anne went to get Andrew he turned to her and bellowed: "Greetings to the tax collector!"

4. Last night at dinner Gabe was describing Brookline high's comback in a rowing race in Worcester that afternoon. As is often the case, Andrew wasn't paying attention, but was leaning on the table, giggling to himself. I asked him what was so funny. After a hesitation registering the question he explained that he had just remembered the first time he ever visited the neighborhood school. "I was with mom and we were picking Gabe up. There were these three girls and they seemed huge to me, even though they were probably only third graders. I had my Elmo doll. I remember they walked up and said how cute I was with my little Elmo doll. I was laughing cuz as they walked away I think I remember crapping my pants."
:: 9:05 AM [+] ::
...

Yesterday was a gorgeous spring day and I spent it like millions of parents, running around to watch kids' sporting events. I've always felt some guilt about my record on that front. When I was a kid you just found games. They were ubiquitous. I assumed that would be true for my sons. But in San Francisco, in particular, nothing could be farther from the case. Everything involving kids had to be pre-arranged. And organized. And legitimated. I'm not so good at that, so I've been feeling like I've let my sons down on that front. Things got a little better once we moved back to Brookline. The school is in the neighborhood and there are millions of kids and while some things are still hyperactively rigged, there's also a lot of spontaneous kid stuff going on. My other bit of guilt is that I'm innately pretty uncompetitive. Or I should say, it's deeply buried. In fact, I stopped playing basketball in my 20s and switched to running because I was so weirded out by the occasional bursts of ugly atavistic competitive hot flashes I'd sometimes get just playing a game. As a result I've never been a canonically 'good' sports parent. Meaning, while other parents were shrieking like they were participating in the Allied landing at Normandy while watching 6 year olds swarming a soccer ball like iron filings following a magnet dragged undernearth the playing field, I'd watch my son watching the cloud formations, paying no attention to the game, and be thinking 'what a beautiful boy and such a gorgeous sky and hey that cloud looks like Walter Mathau' etc. until the coach would scream at my beautiful boy because the ball would fly by him without at all registering in his consciousness. And I'd think, oh gosh, I need to have a talk with him about what all those other crazed people are here for. Well. Kids are resilient and adaptable and always surprising and, amazingly, in the past few years, with no kicking whatsoever on my part, both of my older sons have found athletic passions. Gabe does track, x-country running and rows crew (his favorite). Yesterday his varsity boat was rowing on the Charles twice; and today we got him up in time to be on a bus at 6:30 a.m. to head to Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester for more rowing. And he won't be back until dinner time. And Andrew has gotten a pretty serious lacrosse jones and carries his stick around with him like a third arm (makes me want to tell the Flaubert sheep story, but I can't). Most interesting, to me, both are doing well, having a blast, and don't seem to be emotionally keyed into whether or not they win or lose. It seems actually to be mostly about existential exhilaration and camaraderie, which I know myself to be a profound thing. So yesterday I went back and forth between the Charles River and the lacrosse field in Brookline and thought 'What beautiful boys,' and experienced no especial pangs of what-a-defective-parent-i-am guilt.

In the evening I went first to the Plough, where Ellen had convinced a few of us that some spring roistering was called for, and then to Curt's birthday party. At the Plough Susan told me a great rejection story and vividly described the damage she would still like to see inflicted on her vile rejector. I told her my one rejection syndrome story, and how it eradicated any need for revenge. Curt's was a serious music nerd party, where you do things like stand with Steve in the backyard, devouring great food and singing the themes from the Brahms op. 117 Intermezzi. I also had a blast swapping ghoulish family history tales, one-upsman style, with Janet. It was one of those parties that should have gone on for three days. But didn't.

:: 3:24 PM [+] ::
...

Update: Okay here's a really quick, dirty, badly mixed version of 'Silver Moonbeam'. I should go do a quick remix, but I'm too lazy. The modified lyrics are here.

----------------------------------------------

Since I've stopped writing poetry I've been getting some nice messages out of thin air from some of the poets I met through publishing at The Hold and at the online poetry readings Art and I used to frequent. Having some distance on the stuff is good. I'm thinking I may finally do a chap book. I kept threatening to do it. Cait was gonna do the production. But the stuff was coming so fast and furious that I felt I lacked objective means of determining what was usable and what wasn't. But now I read them and they're like the work of someone else. So it seems easier. I'm also finding as I rummage through the piles that I'm getting musical notions for them. For instance, the poem I posted yesterday, 'Silver Moonbean,' I turned into a song yesterday afternoon. It was my standard process of avoiding going into the basement to concoct a 'band' via layered gizmos by doodling at the piano. Voila, another song. I like it, though I had to add some words to flesh it out. Maybe I'll record it today, instead of doing the song I had planned. And here's another one I'm a) fond of and b) thinking of setting to music:

Dave's Ant Farm

I work on Dave's Ant Farm.
The wages are execrable
But Dave leaves us mostly alone.
Unless I push his buttons.
Then we go at it terrifically.
We're like the Monitor and the Merrimack
Rounds pounding into one another
In a victor-less exhumation of old rage.

The only other concern is, in darker moments,
With Dave a little bored or vexed in spirit
With his sundry pressures
He is capable of pouring small amounts
Of sulfuric acid down one of the holes.
And then he's around a lot. Watching.
Eating his seaweedy lunch. Contemplating
It seems, what to do about his mistress
In the Balkans. All that whiteness.
And his dream of metallized hydrogen.

But I shouldn't be doing this. I already have too many songs. I just need to finish off the ones I've started recording, rip a couple of the older ones I'm going to use and I'm probably close to finished w/ this CD.

My 3rd floor window is open and I hear my windchimes. There's a sweet vernal breeze making mischief with the papers on my desk. I also hear the faint conversation of a couple of businessmen. What are they doing on my street? What are they talking about? I can't hear the words, just the hypocritical tone of voice. That wingless fly feckless aggression.
:: 10:23 AM [+] ::
...

When my younger brother was in college and in law school, he spent his summers working a lucrative job on a fishing boat out of cape cod. Since most of the crew were 20-something townies and paid under the table, there was a strong culture of coming in from a week or ten days at sea, flush with cash, and heading straight for the Yankee Clipper restaurant and bar for a few days of R&R. One bright sunshiney summer day, while everyone else was at the beach, my brother and his classmate and fishing buddy Kyle were sitting at the darkened, dingy Yankee Clipper bar, working on maybe their 18th drink and regaling the owner, Bob Gianfrante (who referred to them as 'Burnout' and 'Blackout') w/ their absolutely interminable stream of falstaffian jokes, impersonations and bawdy non sequiturs. Suddenly my brother felt a weird twitch in his right eye. When he next looked over at Kyle, Kyle began grinning and said, in this lispy murmur he and Matt use when communicating w/ each other: 'Matty. It looks like your eye just had a major league blowout. Gianfrante, could you get Matty another cocktail. He's just had his eye blow out on him.' Bob looked over, and sure enough, Matt's right eyeball was as red as a demon's. For some reason my brother was extremely proud of his red eye, which seemed to take forever to heal. I think he was even hoping he might have a blowout in his left eye as well. The older fishermen and especially the drunken boat lumpers who worked the docks all seemed to take a kind of paternal pride in Matt once he showed up with his red eye.

---------------------------------

Silver Moonbeam

I've fallen in love
With a silver moonbeam again
I said I wouldn't

But then I get hopeless
Peering down at the sidewalk
In front of your building

A silver moonbeam
Makes a circle big enough
For two to dance inside

So the madwoman of Broadway
And I can dance. She may be mad
But she knows it's Saturday night.

:: 9:00 AM [+] ::
...

Hm. Being back at work, if part-time, was both happy and surprisingly strange yesterday. Even though the cool new space (thanks Ted) is just on the other side of Harvard Square, it was pretty brutal getting over there. I found a better route this morning. But there's some conditioning required for this sort of thing and I'm not quite there yet. Coming home needs some practice as well. I came in the door and got the standard-issue enormous bear hug from Quentin's wiry little arms, the kind that cracks my heart in twain; but then as I was kissing his sweet and beautiful shaved head he inadvertantly headbutted me in the mouth and gave me a fat lip. Maybe it made me look like Steve Tyler as I played assaultive spazgrass at the Cantab last night. Another fine time. At one point Chris, Jeremy, Flynn, Art and I, plus this sf ex-pat violin wunderkind Nick were playing some cornstomp out on the street w/ this large gathering of street people, cantab outflow and smiling passersby. It was a splendid 60 degress. Problem was, the Cantab was still open and the main band was on so Judy the bartender came out and insisted that we needed a permit and (this is the tortured part) if we didn't stop they, the Cantab, could be held responsible for our illegal assembly. Since Judy is a variety of She Who Must Be Obeyed, that kinda ended Cootstock I. Later, outdoors again, when the place had closed Nick the violinist played the gavotte from the Bach E major partita and a bunch of the first movement of the Kreutzer sonata. All under the cloudy warm skies of cambridge earth.

I love getting updates from my friend Dave (San Francisco Dave, not Cambridge Dave). I worked with Dave at Intuit. When I first met him I thought he was just another well-adjusted example of the grand sunny coastal California eugenics experiment. But through a process of progressive disclosure I soon learned that in fact Dave was crazy. Hints included stuff like the front page of a Spanish newspaper Dave had hanging on his office door, with a picture of the Pamplona "encierrillo" and realizing that the guy standing three feet away from the unfortunate son-of-a-bitch with a bull's horn protruding through his torso was DAVE! Turns out Dave was wearing a video camera beanie and had some choice street level shots of all the action. Eventually I also learned things like that Dave had hung out with Mother Theresa bathing lepers, had once walked from Johannesberg to Cairo, through some Graham Greene-grisliness, and one year even converted to Islam so that he could make hajj and see Mecca. We routinely get cards from Dave w/ pictures of his huge self, wry grin, hanging out with Mongolians, Colombians, Thais, Turkistanis, smiling, grimacing, respectable, disreputable, monkish, menacing... Most recently Dave made it back safely from a 4 month trip to South America, where he was supposed to be hanging out in Venezuela but seems to have spent the majority of his time in Colombia. Though it's possible to get Dave to meet you at Lake Victoria on a 30 second cue, it's impossible to get him to connect via a proper arrangement when he comes to Boston. He always ends up in the wrong bar.

Here are a couple of the tunes that Bridget recorded in my living room last week. This one is by some composer whose name I forget. And this one is, I believe, a nice withering original; w/ stoidal raincoats-stylings for the guitar solo. The sound of the impeccably timed back door closing is courtesy of Gabe.
:: 8:40 PM [+] ::
...

I was just reviewing another bizarrely adventure-packed week. Okay, it's not Imax material. But it is a glorious kind of everyman's unremitting flux.

Last Monday I had lunch with one of my best friends from grad school, Diana. I tracked her down through google. She's teaching at MIT. We hung out a lot back when, went to the Village, the West End Cafe, readings at Alfred Kazin's; we weren't big drinkers but we did have a tequilla party at Mark's once, after which I got violently sick (of course), and we all got drunk sitting outdoors in front of Butler Library one fine May day, in the midst of which I spotted Michael Seidel and bolted across the quad to berate him for being unconvinced by my arguments for why Leopold Bloom in fact ejaculates several pages after the conventionally accepted moment; and, moreover, that that moment is the bathetic center of the book since it also coincides w/ Bloom's first acceptance of Molly's infidelity w/ Blazes Boylan; noting such things as the fact that afterwards Bloom's interior monologue goes away for good and the book becomes increasingly a technical tour de force and an intimation of 'Finnegan's Wake', blah, blah, blah. Seidel was a good guy and appeared to be having a hearty laugh at my stiff-fingered pontifications. Or maybe it was the styrofoam boater I was wearing. I had this reunion a few years ago and friends from the four corners of creation came. We tried to locate Diana, but failed (this was pre-google so I was forced to use some piece of shit like Inktomi). We all thought she was at Middlebury, but in fact she was minutes away in Kendall Square. Alas. Anyway, it was great to see her. We talked lefty politics and Shakespeare and Stanley Fish's Milton book and families. I hope to have her over to dinner soon.

Immediately afterwards I packed up my car with musical gear and bolted to Nahant for a bunch of recording. Zack's got a fab Macs-r-us based recording setup. And so it came to pass we did some Frank Drake numbers, including one of my attempts at a bluegrass number entitled 'Johanna Jubilee'. [Hey, at least this one isn't about menacing-looking gangs from another planet.) Zack's engineering was right dope and we worked fast. I think the basic tracks were just fine. Art was having a spell of Life's vapours, though, so that was a bit tough. I compulsively want to fix everyone's brokenness. (My mother (another story) told me, when I finally saw her at age 21 for the first time since I was 5, that as a toddler I would regularly give my toys away to my older brother in an attempt to placate his cyclops-like rages.) So that had me a bit abstracted. When Art left we moved into the basement for 'something completely different'. Turns out Chris (the only banjo player doing jazz guitar at Berklee; ever?) had an assignment to do a twist-o-flex arrangement of a well-known tune. So of course Chris picks 'Frosty the Snowman,' which he did as a damned spiffy mid-tempo swing thing that would've been right up the alley of one of the eight million Red Garland imitators hanging around. I'd gotten the impression that this was going to be more of a shredding exercise, so I brought serious rock climing gear. But it was fine. I was able to to get a kinda nice Tal Farlow/early-Pat Martino sound once Z. shut my fucking delay off. But the undisputed highlight of the evening was the drum part. We'd gone all the way from trying to recruit all-world guys like Curt Newton, to my 18 year old next door neighbor, to Art's 16 year old son Nikko, to my Roland drum box, to figuring we'd just stick Art in front of a couple of empty Poland Springs cannisters. But after a fine seafood dinner at the local dive, replete with delightfully NO BULLSHIT waitress, it was clear Art wasn't going to be the guy. Not a problem. In classic world-weary jazzbo fashion, Zack blithely sets up my snare and high-hat, grabs my kid-funkified acryllic brushes and with Chris and I literally holding on to each other to suppress monumentally epic explosions of laughter, lays down the baddest skagged-out de minimus max roach you could possibly imagine. And thus, for your listening pleasure: Frosty the Snowblower. Zack, you rule; even if you did tell Anne I'm a skid mark.

Tuesday was another plenary session at the Cantab. Adam Dewey, my new friend, made off with my guitar, so I spent an unusual amount of time upstairs. But the band was kick and so was the improv after. I finally got my guitar back and joined some of the fahn reglahs for some cornpone and the sound was: OK. And when I'd had enough and was doing a header off the stage, who decides it's time to channel the living ghost of Tony Rice: Yes. Zack. Infinity may devour us, folks, but we're gonna make sure we stick in his throat w/ joie de vivre and mugambo.

Following days were filled with pretty intense meetings about the new venture and, almost orthogonally to those, we've set up an embryonic instance of the newco; for which I'll be working part-time. It actually looks like this could be a pretty cool way of riding out the current funding seasquall. And it's in Cambridge. woohoo. Paul, you actually do rule.

Friday, I took Quentin to see 'Spiderman'; all-in-all a pretty rewarding, nonsense free piece of hollywood excess. Tobey 'fit as a fuckin fiddle' Maguire is an inspired choice for Peter Parker.

Anne went to Falmouth for the weekend to do some more painting in prep for her parents' 50th; but also to attend a ripping freakgrrrls party in Truro at the family home of her buddy Erika ("Okay, gang, first thing: let's take these goddam bras off"). The place sounds wonderful and I got a call from Anne at 6:00 a.m. Sunday morning sounding all yum, strolling the beach, w/ lots of waves-smashing-on-rocks audio in the background. Gosh, I love Cape Cod.

Saturday the guys were all spooting around at Fun Fairs or seeing 'Spiderman' (no wonder it shattered all box office records) or doing ERG tests. Bridget came over to do some more recording. We layed down a few things, including this rough mix of I Go Out; which is lacking the beach boys harmonies I have in mind for the chorus and a Stereolab-ish counterline melody over the 2nd verse. Plus I need to play the vibe part correctly. It's also distorting for some reason. [Listen close and you can hear Bridget dissing me about volume levels during the opening.] She introduced me to her buddy, Larry, a Cambridge 70-something who's sadly about to be evicted from his apartment; which happens to be chock full of an amazing collection of weird stuff. Larry was very cool and seemed omnivorously curious and observant. For instance, he made a bee-line to my Bill Collings OM-3, noting, God knows how, from across the room the extra-terrestrial quality of that hand-made wonder.

After we finished my stuff Bridget recorded a half dozen of her songs. I tend not to like modern folk very much. Mainly because, unlike plenty of stuff in the canon, it never seems able to get weird or trippy. Genius acid-flipped chamber folk like Ghost would almost certainly be hooted down at a place like Club Passim. Why do I want to blame Joan Baez? But the stuff Bridget did was really lovely. And edgy. And she did it in about as long as it took to play the songs. Everything one take. She even did a guitar solo that was fantastically stoidal, like something out of a Raincoats song. I'll see if I can get permission and put something up here.

Saturday night the boys and I went to dinner at my friend-since-elementary-school Dave's. He was there with his new s.o. Dominque and his two boys. Everyone commented on how giant Gabe was. And everyone played hallway soccer with 5-year-old Jesse. And Andrew sang a completely un-PC song. We got home really late and were all a bit droopy doing the Walk For Hunger next morning: The highlight of which was my neighbor Ed bringing this tiny, but amazingly playable nylon string guitar.

Anyway, at the end of another strange week I'm happy to confirm post-Hegelian convictions about not seeking a once-for-all fulfillment in anything and can even see the beauty in unremitting flux. As Dave kindly, encouragingly wrote me this morning, in a way only a stand-by-me friend from elementary school could write it: "don't let a little work interfere with your unemployment dreams"
:: 11:42 AM [+] ::
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Today we have:
1. Anecdote
2. Poem
3. Rant

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1. Anecdote

Here's a Small World But I Wouldn't Want to Paint It moment: At the Cantab a couple weeks ago, Steve P. and I were talking to Carolyn and we got onto the topic of Interleaf. It turns out Carolyn had once had a temporary job at Interleaf. What was her job at Interleaf? Listening to a tape of Steve describing in his indescribably intense, speed demon fashion, the future of Active Document technology, or something, and transcribing his every utterance like the last speaker of a lost language.

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2. Poem

Where's May Been?

I was walking from treetop to treetop
Unable to find May and boring myself half to death;
Unlike the naked racoons playing cribbage
With the nobody you've been trying to buy a noose from.

May plays the dulcimer. Poorly.
But knows how to build a campfire
Of druidic grandeur.
And what to do with an erection
And with the ghosts that visit
From time to time
Right here, in the middle of infinity.

May wants me to be a good man
And I want nothing but good things for her.
And our enemies will be punished.

And I watched May sleeping this morning.
She hadn't even changed out of her jeans, May,
Just her shirt, which I held, and she was so beautiful
And the gods and devils swirling
Around our paisley smoke just went, "Whoa. May.'

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3. Rant

As one grows up and becomes intellectually lazy, it's important to have a few forensic hammers to go after argumentive nails with. One of my favorite air hammers is something I'll call 'telescopic fallacy'. It's what I use on arguments (usually rightist) that are underpinned by the claim that everything in the present is going to shit and that things used to be fine, or at least pretty good. As one who's read a fair amount of literary criticism, contemporary and ancient alike, I found the writer of the Wilson Quartery article that Steve referred to recently to be suffering from a definite, though admittedly mild, case of telescopic fallacy. In this instance of everything-going-to-shit, the thesis is that academic writing is in a 'deplorable state' and it's because of Wittgenstein and the need of literary critics to prop up what they do with pseudo-rigor. While there's some truth to the latter part of that statement (I'd substitute Chomsky and Levi-Strauss for Wittgenstein as early pseudo-scientific litcrit's prime poster boys), the underlying complaint of the piece is that the vast quantity of academic writing is lousy. With statements like "There is no feeling, no humor, no spark of what is human," implying that this was not always the case. I call this a mild case because the writer does acknowledge that bashing academic writing is not new; trotting out, as if on cue, an amusing Mencken quote. But I have my doubts about whether or not the ratio of shit to genius is suddenly vastly different. Interestingly, the most detailed moments in the piece involve a dustbin-bound academic bowling pin named Patti Lather. Foucault and Rorty, on the other hand, get only dismissive handwaves.

Similar arguments are regularly made (though typically with much more toxicity than in the WQ piece) about music ("where are the Beethovens!!?"), art ("My fucking seven year old can draw better than Picasso!!"), politics ("where have all the Lincoln's gone??"), literacy ("no one reads anymore!!") and so on. Some kind of Gotterdammerung has occurred, fuelled by fast food or TV or Wittgenstein or Derrida, and now we're puny. (Figuratively puny.)

Of course it's a problem that's easy to understand. For those immersed in the business of critically sifting through the mediocrity of our times for prizes, helping us to determine who our age's Johnsons and Paters and Hazlitts are, it can look like there's an astonishing volume of mediocrity vs. quality when compared with The Past. Telescopic fallacy, however, suggests that genius has always been vastly outpaced by mediocrity; but that we needn't bother ourselves with the past's contributions to the latter category, only the present's. Why? Because history has already done so. The work of the mediocrities, like the mediocrities themselves, is dead and gone. There must be, for example, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of mouldering cantatas written on commission over the past several centuries by Kappelmeisters in the employ of one church or another. Yet only Bach's are regularly played and regularly recorded; that's because, as my friend Tim once put it in a perfect tautology, 'not only did Bach write a cantata every week, he wrote a Bach cantata every week.' And, of course, this 'history' I'm referring to consists in the exact same process of critical sorting of the avant garde by contemporaries. Which is why every generation has its contingent of grumbling telescopic fallacists, swimming in the chaos of the roiling contemporary episteme, pronouncing on how puny the current generation is when compared to the past. Read Dryden or Pope or Plato on Socrates if you need some entertaining exemplars.

But maybe it's easier to illustrate the point by looking at a couple of these analogous cases.

Take music. Well first of all there's only one Beethoven. But if you look at the entire history of western music, it's true you can quickly get a pretty good sized list together of first rank composers. However, by my reckoning that aggregate number breaks down to approximately half a dozen composers of the first rank per century. By that measure, if you accept, as I do, that Stravinsky, Debussy, Shostakovich, Ravel, Messaien, Webern and Ligetti are all composers of the first rank, then maybe the 20th century doesn't look so bad after all. And that composers of the first rank actually don't come along all that often.

With fine arts the same argument could be made. But let me make a slightly different but related point. If someone hates 'Guernica,' well, de gustibus non est disputandum. But all you need do is look at Picasso's student work to realize that not only can your seven year old NOT paint like Picasso, but that Picasso was in fact one of the greatest technical prodigies ever produced by the west in the fine arts. I make this point to refute the implication by centre-cannot-holdists that the increase in mediocrity is correlated to degraded competence; that non-representational art, e.g., is a clever scam perpetrated by incompetents trying to make a virtue of necessity. The Picasso or Pollack critiques (or for that matter, those of Schoenberg and the dodecophonic composers) then turn into more interesting discussions such as what relationship 'quality' has to 'popularity'. [My own candidate for Modernism's Big (Unanswered) Question.]

Literacy: well you get the point. I was going to go off on how literacy is vastly higher than it was a hundred years ago and then make some other points. But my attention span is buckling. (Plus I accidentally left this stateless editor once before and lost this whole damn rant.)

One last point about everyone's favorite pomo whipping boy: Derrida. There may be many who can write a paper 'deconstructing' some text or other. But I think that Hilary Putnam is correct in noting that the problem with deconstruction as a methodology is that it requires Derrida, in the way that Bach cantatas require Bach. Derrida is sui generis; and what he did with Rousseau in 'De Grammatology' is not illustrate a technique to abstract and deploy to deconstruct 'The Simpsons'; he wrote a Derrida deconstruction. Which is something special. Unique. A work of genius. Not a template. Necessarily.
:: 9:44 AM [+] ::
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Today I sent in my poems to the-hold. Late. But Cait will put them in. She's redoubtable and a sport. Another of my candidates for clearing the Northwest Passage. I'm not really writing poems these days. I'm not even thinking poems. My dependable surreal stream is a frozen density waiting for the thaw. Both the poems I sent are oldish. Don't tell Cait. Though she won't care. They haven't been published before. I'm thinking about doing cartoons again. Maybe differently. I gave up after losing the motherlode in a cataclysmic hard disk crash. One thing I'm thinking is: fiction, not real life. Also, perhaps shitty line drawings that I scan in, instead of the jittery MS Paint method.

I've been having a hard time expressing certain things recently. Helpfully, I happened to be reading a review of a new bio of Flaubert last night. In 'Madame Bovary' there's a scene where Emma is effusing romantic notions. Rodolphe is becoming morbidly bored. Defending Emma in an editorial aside, Flaubert says 'As if the soul's fullness didn't sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.' Exactly what I would have said if I weren't suffering from Bovary syndrome.

Someone once posted this ledbetter classic in a poetry room, using a pimp avatar and under the name: 'stangs_swang'. Why was that so funny? Maybe you need to have heard Raffi's version for the joke to fully combust. Maybe it's because Swang had it as 'pick a bale o' hay' instead of (the correct?) 'pick a bale a day'. Just another thing I've enjoyed w/out having any idea why. I need to reread 'Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious'.

"jump down
turn around
pick a bale o'cotton
jump down
turn around
pick a bale o hay
ohhhhhhhhhhhh Laudy
pick a bale o'cotton
ohhhhhhhhhhhh Laudy
pick a bale o' hay"

:: 5:35 PM [+] ::
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