:: Why The Kimono Is Beautiful ::

:: Sunday, June 30, 2002 ::

Taking a beach break here in sunny seaside n. falmouth. Got down Thursday night after a) a busy yin-yang week of roisterous musical eves and strangely battling business days; b) a brief ships-passing interlude with Anne in brookline and c) a pounding commute through a zero-visibility monsoon out on rte. 93 somewhere. Though I was late, Zack had somehow managed to keep the kids from eating chair legs and so he and I, plus Q-ball and Andrew, had a fine gourmet tuna melts dinner in the setting sun. Afterwards Zack abracadabra'd us a magical bottle of Liberty Spy hard cider from Ithaca, NY and we yakked over that before eventually making our way to the screaming appliance for a desultory viewing of Rocky I, enjoyed by all, to the accompaniment of copious stallone trivia from Zack.

Next morning, after dropping Quentin at camp (it was 'Western Day' and he wore his kerchief and dude ranch shirt of Z.'s, though sadly not the authentic Montanan green headpiece graciously given to me by Chris following the previous week's Drakus Gloriosus, which I'd left in brookline), Zack and I spent some time going over the more performance oriented pieces I've been doing with Bridget. [I would put up some audio but I'm digitally hobbled at the moment. B. and I recorded some more cool living room stuff Wednesday, despite earlier gin-and-tonics with Art, Gabe busying himself with prep for his 3-day trip the following day to Philadelphia for the Independence Day Regatta; and prior to B. spinning and unspinning, like a neo-penelope, a casual torrent of stories, emotional, hilarious, surreal, weird, all vividly told. I would've said, 'Hold on, Penelope, I'm getting my recorder,' except I'd already heard enough about what she sometimes would like to do with her right fist.] As usual, Zack learned the stuff pretty instantly and we dug in a little on arrangements and color; stuff Z. is quite excellent at. We talked about x-ferring a bunch of stuff over to his Mac 'n Motu unit as a way of better doing long-distance labwork on this stuff. Zack also played me a badass recording of a passacaglia he'd been commissioned to write for a dance troupe and which is actually being performed in Boston tonight. It was kind of Harry Partch played by Bang on a Can and Ghost, w/ Moby at the controls.

After a good weirdo lunch with Andrew (who just left for Putney, ["This place is cool, Andrew." "Dad, this place is a uTOpia"] Vermont to play cello for a couple weeks and be enfolded by high school hippie girls), Zack and I started making preparations for the arrival of Chris and Art and the main event of the day, round II of The Frank Drake Recordings. They were running a little late, but it was okay because trying to install AOhelL had somewhat ravaged Zack's laptop. Thankfully, by the time they arrived things were all working fine.

I have to admit when Art pulled out the gin and tonic accoutrements upon arrival it seemed for a moment like the 'main event of the day' was actually just a fig leaf for the ocean and bingeing in the bars of Woods Hole. But after touring the grounds ("The poppies are gone, Chris; but did I show you the pictures?""Yes," (rolling eyes) "ten times, dude?""Ok, ok, man." Those fuckers get me channelling the posterized ghost of Terrence McKenna, what can I say), we got down to work. The recording process was smooth and the environmentals made for some fine, relaxed takes on a bunch of new stuff, better takes on some old, and some finish work to pieces that were left undone.

After recording, Anne dropped us all at Old Silver Beach and we splashed around like various sea oddities from an aquarium out of a dennis hopper dream. Upon rearrival at Spooting Creek everyone flew into action for a lavish mixed grill Anne had stocked up for. My sister Mary, brother-in-law Pete and nephew and RISD about-to-be-sophomore Zack joined us. It was mostly random levity and listening to Quentin plot against Chris and Zack; though Chris told us about having had Half Zantop as a teacher and the aftermath of the double murder; which was both chilling and sad. And Art and Mary struck up a pretty good rapport, trading confidences. Next came the requisite and refreshingly bizarre free-form music making session, including a John Entwistle tribute featuring Zack, plus bluegrass versions of stuff like 'Camarillo Brillo' and 'Dancin' Fool', Quentin bellowing every word.

Drake bus then debarked for Woods Hole. We parked a few blocks away in front of my cousin Vicki's house and headed right to Captain Kidds. Chris had insisted I wear my boater (picture to come) and preposterous CAPE COD tank top, complete with red lobster in the center of a savagely ugly red-white-and-blue design, so we had every expectation that I'd be beat up and tossed into the marina. We hung there for a few rounds, bashing whichever one was out of the room, until the place was mobbed with local weirdos and imported dock-sider and izod weirder-os (like the asshole with the 'no boundaries' t-shirt who sat down and asked us for weed). We tried to go to a couple of outdoor places but everything was full or closing down. We did end up at some dive in n. falmouth, with a kind of Riviera-in-Hades view of more docksider jocks, one tribe of whom Chris knew and loathed. So we finished our daiquiris (bartender:"It's 12:45, have beers." Zack: "I said we wanted strawberry daiquiris."), while Chris, hiding underneath my boater, exited over a railing and waited for us at the car.

At about 9 in the morning (i'd been up since 6:30), Quentin decided it was time for Chris to hear reveille, so he got his trumpet out and blasted the fucker with a chorus of 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot'. Chris said he was bolt upright, having awakened in the midst of some dream about a bunch us, Anne, Art, me?, singing in a variety show. We pretty quickly got our acts together enough to stumble down to the exquisite N. Falmouth diner, after which we bid our friends ado. Last night we partied at my sister's along with my two younger brothers. But enough for now. Quentin is insisting we need some beach time. And I agree.
:: 11:43 AM [+] ::
...

I got to the cape on Sunday after staying in town Saturday night for a pre-wedding party at a neighbor's house. Was a cool time. My 'new pal' Adam Dewey was there cuz he teaches banjo to my friend Jim. Adam was trying to fit in by helping out at the bar. It's a kind of chi-chi scene. A Jim's-wife-is-Katie-Couric's-sister kind of deal. So Adam was in a pretty good mood as far as that goes. But when the corkscrew fucked up a few times and he started calling people names that he seemed to pull randomly out of his guitar case (including one byotch who really looked like he'd committed mayhem when he gleefully called her 'Louise', when her name was in fact 'Carol'), things began to get a little inside out. I think Adam's world view is best exemplified by the following exchange: Swanky rich guy comes up to the bar. Rummages around in the stack of wine for a bottle he likes. Uncorks the thing like Roger Moore. Dewey says, 'Looks like you know what you want. Why don't you stick that one down there with the empties so there'll be some left when you come back.' I crack up. The guy starts hooting as well and then walks away. Dewey looks at me, pumps his fist and says, 'Goddamit, I won that one!' Eventually he grabs the bottle of Jim Beam he brought, sans glass, and pronouncing 'This isn't a fucking Jim Beam crowd,' gorillas off to sit in the back yard chugging at it, eating Redbones barbecue. Apparently he also insulted the bride's father who happened to be sitting out back as well; I guess the guy's pretty ideologically vegan and Adam just went on a little too long and a little too graphically on the aesthetics of carnivorous delectation. Hey, but when we started playing music he made a righteous noise, the noxious smoke cloud from the ever-burning fashion ciggie sticking out of his headstock notwithstanding.

Sunday was like an instantiated hundred slokas of kama sutra down in Falmouth; despite the passing of the poppies. Zack had arrived on Friday as part of his month-long stint away from Nahant, hanging out with everyone's main man Quentin, whom Zack has christened Q-ball (a fine name, I must admit). We spent a bunch of hours at the beach, in the water, playing football and just splashing like the joyful clumps of nature-in-action we're supposed to be. I think Zack was surprised at how warm the water in Vineyard sound actually is. We all pitched in and whipped up a fine dinner out on the lawn. My sister and brother-in-law joined us. Quentin roasted 300,000 marshmallows on the embers. And on and on. Later, after Anne and Gabe had left for Brookline, Zack, Andrew, Q-Ball and I decided to rent a movie. Andrew and I went out for it. The full moon was an extraordinary gargantuan strawberry. Andrew kind of sighed and said, 'I want to go to the moon, Dad.' I said, 'You do?' 'So badly,' he said, almost in pain.

:: 10:12 PM [+] ::
...

And by the way, a fine night of epic cantab gutter-probing on Tuesday. Once again. Featuring a most attitudinous Frank Drake Band, arrayed in non-matching big fucking western headpieces and opening with an Escher-esque, tour de force Foggy Mountain breakdown in which each of our left and right hands played a different instrument. If I recall I was right-handing a guitar and left handing Chris 'J. D. Grope' Pandolfi's banjo. Very fucked up. Somebody may have a picture. Anne would have but she didn't show UP until we were finished. "L". I really thought we were gonna have the BBS morals squad hauling our asses into the abattoirs of backalley Central Square. But no. There's no paucity of public imagination at the cantab these days. The show went on. Guest appearances from Nashvegas' finest young dobroist Andy Hall, who plays the thing like a circular saw custom-designed by Stephen Hawking for cutting wormholes into smoke-and-whiskeyed space/time; and Nick Sanders, doing equally intergallactic foobar and tossing brahms bones around like the ghost of fritz kreisler. Last things I remember: a) trying to levitate Jeremy with applause; b) Anne and Bridget hitting up a bizarrely violin-less Gustavo for a portuguese translation of 'Dandelion,' which, if they got one, seems to have disappeared as mysteriously as did the one I originally got from Lucia. What's up with that?

Yesterday spent another day of recording and rehearsing with Bridget, who can now motor through two of my brand new songs on guitar like the long lost daughter of Charlie Christian. I had a plan to write something for her to stick some of her withering words into. But I wrote it on piano and it's sort of pianistic and I forgot she doesn't have a piano. So I went ahead and finished the thing by therapeutically unburying a repressed memory. Except, as much as I love concision, I now think it's begging for a second verse and a little more time to make its point. It's here and it's called Target Boy. Ouch.

:: 2:22 PM [+] ::
...

First Day of Summer

Birds shit while they sing
The white butterfly sips wine left in the glass

And I'm looking for my toy trumpet

-Charles Simic

:: 10:18 PM [+] ::
...

My new name is Green Piece, btw.

There aren't a lot of practical consolations to writing poetry. But I can think of two. 1. If you have a sausage-maker's assistant's attitude to song-writing, you have no need to scramble to write lyrics when a song arrives. 2. You always have something to fill the maw of a hungry web log. Since today was a pigpile of arranging for Dr. Anderson to vivisect my computer and beat a wild LSP with a stick until it stopped moving, of writing a usability script for a new product (one test subject of which will be Anne tomorrow morning), completely missing my much looked forward to lunch with my buddy Dave, getting a spec for install and setup done and otherwise being effervescent around the office, and finally of having to cancel dinner with Curt and Julie, I haven't had time to get my little yak w/ Chris on Napster into shape. A couple of poems then? And then some sleep. I'll lose what's left of my mind if I don't sleep. Also, my cosmic pager seems to be fucking up.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Dream Posse

I got into it
the other night
an actual knock-down,
physical fight
with respected dream doctor
Sigmund Freud.
My evenings, I'm afraid,
are hereafter destroyed.

Permanent damage to my fragile enough beaming way
came of the bastard's offhanded pointing out
the window through which emitted
tropic shafts of an erotically deranged wind,
no further than the vermin hatching airshaft
separting the dive across the way from mine.
The one with mullions attached by a madman
and hell's dogs biting the blinds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Finding The Moisture

I have long sensed the paradox of charity
And know well the devil carries a briefcase.
But you I found, nonetheless. In an empty beach parking lot,
Sick and cold, on a day of unexpected warmth.

Upon the one clean bench, inside a sun portal,
Seven times fired and pure as silver, you dried
Away a damp spot for me; though one churlish junkie
Demon boy after another had speared your leafy imaginings.

We could see a window washer
Suctioning up the decrepit blue motel, The Vista,
A tarantula's guardian angel,
Struggling with the sashes.

A storm brewed like witches tea
Across the black bedspring sea,
Scaring a girl in a bikini sucking a straw.
And on and on we played with each other

(But even that's not quite right)
Till sudden doordogs piled out of a parked van
And fell flat onto the pavement; giggling streptococci;
As a plumber on the next bench over wove a tale

About a toilet plugged with condoms
In the home of a long vascectomized man.
And we laughed at something.
And I licked your fingers.

And you wiped them off. And we kept each other company
Throughout the afternoon. Found new forms of help, through things,
Though it was all much faster than I wanted.
And I'd left my camera at home. And my eschatologist.

We managed to stay on until eve, vespers, the dry season,
Whose yoke is easy and whose burthen is light,
Before the outside thing could crash and rain its sad snares
And intone in finite: "This shall be the portion of their cup."

:: 8:29 PM [+] ::
...

Had a fine weekend, despite the depressing facts of unseasonable chill that put me in mind of Henry VIII's favorite poem:

Western wind when wilt thou blow
the small rain down can rain
Christ if my love were in my arms
and I in my bed again

Saturday did some more recording. My yuck period of whatever from the previous few days up and mostly moved on. Bridget came over. It was less recording, actually, than conducting exeriments with some more intentionally 'performable' pieces I wrote last week. I would put up some audio, but my setup is currently encumbered. I think it all came out pretty reet. Anne and Quentin were in Falmouth. Gabriel and Andrew stayed uptown. Gabe and I did sushi dinner. Gabe regaled me with school stories, including a character sketch of a republican who's enough of an articulate idiot to be fun to hone arguments with.

Bloomsday, I mean Sunday, I mean father's day, I spent chaperoning Andrew and some friends for an afternoon of combat at BostonPainball. So weird. There I was sitting near a large open window on the sixth floor of a very condemned-looking ancient Boston building between North Station and the North End, reading Celine's uniquely black, comic take on the absurd and the horrible of fighting in the muck and mustard gas trenches of WWI, while my son and his Brookline jr. high buddies ran around in this cavern-like 'hot zone' pelting each other with gel-covered shells filled with vinegar, water and gunk. At first, the weirdest part to me was the number of grown-ups participating. Eventually that seemed to be okay. These guys weren't fanatic McVeigh wannabe psychos. Just a family doing something eccentric for father's day. Then some younger kids came and they were a drag. They brought their own custom equipment. One kid apparently had a $3000 air gun capable of shooting shells at 400 feet/second, about twice what the house-issue guns can do. Andrew's buddy Adam wound up with a massive, double ringed welt on his shoulder from the fucker. He and Andrew decided to play ghandi for the last Rambo round, unwilling to face the presence of these weapons of mass destruction.

Anne and Quentin and Stan (aka Max the grinch's reindeer) arrived from Falmouth in time for dinner. Anne had got me a couple of books and Quentin had gotten me an "Incredible Hulk" comic. Kind of reminded me of Anne's story about the time her father bought her mother a 'drill' for Mother's Day. But it is true I'd told him just the other day that Hulk was my fave growing up. He was so excited giving it to me.

Last night Art and Zack and Chris came over for a rehearsal/party in preparation for our gig tonight at the cantab. Chris was pretty rattled having just witnessed the aftermath of some kind of murder, probably drug-related, about two houses away from his. Once we started buzzing away into the music, all was sorta right with the world again.

SF Chris and I have been having a back-and-forth about Napster. I'll post some of that later. Steve m'man Yost has also written thoughtfully on the topic. Steve Yost Progressive Disclosure Fact #42: He's a fine demacracy-in-action musician who's played in a number of berserk post-punk attack bands in his day.

:: 2:12 PM [+] ::
...

I loved Napster. I loved what it implied for the moribund pimping that serves as music's distribution system. I liked that it was a kind of radio-on-demand. I also scrupulously practiced what Napster claimed its users were up to. If I downloaded something and liked it, I went out and bought the music. Unfortunately the more I discussed Napster with others the more I realized that what Napster was doing was eliminating the purchase of music altogether by some of music's most passionate apostles. Certainly, I began to think, in our socio-economic episteme, that part couldn't be good. I mean, like it or not, this isn't The International. We vote with our wallets. What we pay for we get more of. What we won't pay for, we lose. And while going to Virgin or Amazon or even Twisted Village (my preference of course, since I'd like more of that) to buy the music I'd gotten to know via Napster, isn't exactly going for the jugular of the current distribution system, it was nevertheless the only way I knew of to compensate artists whose products I felt like 'voting' for. Moreover, the implications (as well as the fast-footedness) of this new technology of distribution made me quite comfortable my relationship to the old system was that of feeding a cadaver. And yet, here I am, forced to acknowledge I know people with thousands (really) of songs in their music libraries, none of them paid for. With no thought of paying for them. Ever. Somehow I can't but think that's theft, not fair use.

I started off on this because this morning Dave forwarded me a link of a guy rhapsodizing about how beautiful and utopian it all was. The guy recalls the famous story of Mozart transcribing a religious work, the score for which was considered sacred and therefore not available to the public, as an example of a proto-Napster swipe. Though as I recall the story, the issue for Mozart was not that the music wasn't 'free' but that it wasn't available. (There was probably an element of Mozart having some fun with his goddam otherworldly transcription prowess in there as well.) That kind of hermetic unavailability is patently not the case for the music on Napster. For the price of a Bay Scallop ceviche at your favorite urban eatery you can have just about any CD you want. Unless you buy your music only at Walmart. The writer also gushes about how much better the notes sound for his having had a hand in creating the copy. Meaning, he downloaded it. Huh? I don't know. While it's easy to go 'well, yeah, but it's just another blogger trying to swallow the sun,' the article is representative. Particularly in its wrist-flicking gloss of the issue of compensation for musicians. That comes at the very end. Really briefly. This phlegmatic 'oh yeah' about 'tips'. Oh, and 'patrons,' whatever that means. (Consult God or Maynard Solomon if you care to know how Mozart fared at the hands of 'patrons'. In the days when there were patrons.)

But let me suggest that there's something to be learned here. For one, as attached to the musical notes as this guy feels he becomes through the act of raptly clicking 'download' in Napster, I ask you to try and imagine the attachment to the notes a composer/performer of a recorded piece of music feels; and how she might feel, having written the song, having written the lyrics, having rehearsed it with or without other musicians (pain in the ass either way, let me tell you), and then gone through the laborious, tedious process of recording, mixing, sequencing, mastering and releasing the fucker, only to have the theft of the song rhapsodized by someone who says that Mozart's transgression was against the church's 'ownership' of the music. When Mozart's rationale was based entirely on wanting to propagate and share. Trust me. This is a guy who said: "I am willing to write an opera, but not to look on with a hundred ducats in my pocket and see the theater making four times as much in a fortnight." "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" says Mozart. Over and over. God knows sharing and propagating is in the heart of every musician I know. But so's putting a roof over head and some food on the table.

I can certainly buy the argument that a new distribution system that vomits away the stupid go-big-or-get-out economics of distribution is a good -- I'll says it -- disintermediating one for musicians. It unburdens the musician of disporportionately compensating a distribution system heavy on (happily obsolete) capital investment and scale and nowhere to be found on the decisive question of artistic merit. But the writer of the article would have it that the musician either needs to go the tips-and-patrons route or she can 'become one with the vampires'. I say that ought not to be the question. The question should be some kind of benthamite one of what to do about compensating the musicians who make the music we love, of letting us 'vote' within this fine new system, once its cool new technological mallets finish pounding stakes through all those vampire hearts.

:: 2:01 PM [+] ::
...

I'm not feeling so hot. It started with flu-like cramps in the middle of the night. So I slept badly. Then when I got up my neck ached. Plus, since I'd overslept (because I'd underslept), Gabe was established in the bathroom and I couldn't brush my teeth. Also it's the middle of June and 50 degrees out. So I have a bad attitude about doing anything. I played the piano for a while. Surfed Arts and Letters daily; got off on this Lucian Freud tangent. We saw a bunch of his hideously lovely existential meat portraits at the new Tate a couple years ago. There's a big show going on there right now. Back in dot bong I might've just hopped a plane. But now... Well, we take a trip via http to an online gallery, of course. 'Interior in Paddington' and 'Factory in North London' are especially freudening. And don't settle for the damned thumbnails. You won't, for example, see the creepy kid outside the window in 'Interior in Paddington'.

You've got to watch your prejudices. Tina Brown was such a stinking nepoticratic editor at the New Yorker (much as I would've been) that I developed a really bad attitude towards her coterie. In particular, Julian Barnes, for some reason, got on my teat. I think it was a good practice in general. But my Barnes prohibition was a huge mistake. I've just read Flaubert's Parrot. It's the best 'novel' I've read all year. Especially if you like Flaubert. No. Espeically if you like his amazing letters. It includes fine retellings of bits from F.'s life, such as the story of the 'Young phenonmenon' from the letters and from DuCamp's memoir. Let me see if I can pull this one out of an email. I've sent it to people in the past. And, just to be clear, F.'s 'young phenomenon' bears no resemblance to various musicians I'm currently associated with. Ok. Here's my probably somewhat barnesified retelling:

There's this ridiculous thread in Flaubert's letters that starts with he and this jaded, aristocratic acquaintance travelling here and there. Flaubert loved freak shows and would drag the appalled proto-yuppie, Du Camp, to every variety of fair in order to investigate the side show attractions. Once he saw a scruffy looking sign that advertised 'a young phenomenon'. The young phenomenon turned out to be a five-legged sheep w/ a tail shaped like a trumpet. The thing delighted Flaubert, who insisted on taking its peasant owner and it everywhere he and Du Camp went over the next several days: including restaurants. For years after Flaubert would do things like walk up to trees and bushes and say to Du Camp, 'May I present to you the young phenomenon,' and laugh uproariously. Du Camp, who despied both the young phenomenon and its owner, remained steadfastly unamused. Once, when Du Camp was quite sick and bedridden, Flaubert even made a surprise entrance into his sickroom with the young phenomenon and its owner and made a dramatic business of how fortunate it was that the two of them just happened to be in town AND available for this timely sick visit. Du Camp had them all immediately evicted and the floor washed. Apparently, to F.'s dying day, some of his hardest laughs came as a result of finding any opportunity to bring up the young phenomenon in front of Du Camp.

Lastly, had a great, animated dinner in Cambridge with Curt last night. I'd been thinking of Curt recently, in part because Chris had me put on a video of Inner Beauty (my noise band w/ Curt and Art and Gretchen) from some vh-1 show about local clubs, that also featured the Lemonheads, Helmet and Green Magnet School. We talked kids and his divorce shit and the bizarreness of things; and caught up musically as well. He says I need to check out The Pee Wee Fist. So I will as soon as I can find it. It wasn't at Newbury Comics or Tower or HMV. And Twisted Village was closed. Maybe I'll look there today. I told him I was digging 'Whip-Smart' by Liz Phair, which I knew would be a little controversial cuz all his Chicago vandermark scenesters think she's lame. But I sang him part of 'Shane'. Dude. I sang it. I also told him about Ghost and how we all need to go to Terrastock 5 cuz it's at the Middle East this year and every fucked-up psych band around is going to be there, including Ghost, Acid Mothers Temple and (really) the new, revitalized Jim O'Rourke augmented Sonic Youth. If that's what it takes to get us all in one room together w/ tabs of 'e' metabolizing in our sockets. So BE IT.

:: 11:01 AM [+] ::
...

Better than prozac: Vmail from Quentin.
:: 12:33 PM [+] ::
...

'That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.' J/k. But I thought of Johnson's quote when Steve P. forwarded me the New York mag piece on the music industry by Michael Wolfe. Fun and well-written, except that the whole analogy/thesis -- that publishing was once what rock-and-roll became and that it's now music's turn for the dustbin -- is specious. I think. Certainly it's not the point. Hemingway may have been 'iconic' to the literately inclined. His private life made the news now and then. But so did Frank Sinatra's. Moreso. So, in our time, does Martin Amis'. No doubt some of these guys made good dough. But so do John Updike, Philip Roth and Amis (to cite some comparables). And I'm certain none of these 1st half of the 20th century 'iconic' writers comes even close in terms of earnings to the rock and rollers (or Sinatra for that matter); my guess is it's not even the same order of magnitude. In sum, I'd say a) the differences between writers now and writers then isn't as yawningly vast as Wolfe contends; b) the idea that there's comparable 'iconic' mass-cultural impact between the Beatles and Dorothy Parker is laughable; c) the forces that are hollowing out the music 'business' are only superficially analogous w/ what's going on with publishing.

The entire story behind why the music business as we know it is toast is the emergence of technologies that have enabled an alternative, democratized distribution system for music that is 'good enough,' from a consumer standpoint. There's no comparable force at work (yet) in the world of publishing novels. Wolfe obviously knows this and indeed covers it. But there's nothing novel about this post-Napster part of the story. The novelty in the piece is the analogy between publishing and music. And it's weak. 'Salinger was Kurt Cobain. Dorothy Parker was Courtney Love.' You're shitting me, right?
:: 11:41 AM [+] ::
...

The blurb is the great american art form. It's different from an adage. The blurb wants to take something from you. The adage gives. Here's an adage Andrew made up: "A good loser never loses."
:: 12:43 PM [+] ::
...

Yesterday was a first for me. I played a wedding with a bluegrass band. Absolutely gorgeous setting at the very bottom of Rhode Island, on the Connecticut border. Right on the water. 'Playing to the tide.' Reminded me of a more precious Falmouth Heights. I've played maybe a hundred thousand weddings in my life but always doing some combination of jazz, tin pan alley or disco. Moreover the gig was w/ a hybrid band that's only played together once, at a practice on Thursday night. Some Bagboy, some Frank Drake, couple laughing methuselas, couple young phenomenons. Same was true for a gig last Wednesday, done with yet another combination of people. That's the thing I like best about bluegrass. There's this body of material and for anybody who plays it there's almost certainly enough sharage to be able to make music. And even when there isn't overlap, the form is so mannered that music can always be made. It's kind of the musical equivalent of what the sixties was like as a milieu for relationships. Everybody kinda happily whoring around. Of course, that's what makes it harder to take as a listener. For me at least. As the competence of the players has grown, the form hasn't. I find a lot of modern chopsgrass fairly offputting and slick; buzzing around w/ brawn and machismo inside a form that started out so hardscrabble and raggedy-assed full of quirk. I feel the same about much of the curator-like overly reverent imitations of the Miles Davis 60s quintet in jazz. But that's a rant unto itself.

Weird, I've found a journal from my 21st year. So strange reading. It's winter. I'm writing short stories, substitute teaching, applying to graduate school, hanging out with townies, going to New York a lot. And, most amazingly, dealing with a friend going through a divorce. That would be my friend, neighbor, drummer from childhood, Gary; who got married about five minutes after we got out of high school. Literally. Here it is a few years later and all hell has broken loose. Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme:

Wednesday, 12/6: A kind of impasse day today. I've now become a key 'witness' (!) in Gary's divorce trial as I spent the morning witnessing and then discussing witnessing and Gary's obsessive apologies and crazed fucking guilt about involving me, his "only" friend, and he's such a sad figure these days. All very sad if you hadn't grown indifferent to it or deflated rather. Right and wrong are so clear cut to each of these two. How is that possible? Even when I manage to get Gary to admit to certain less admirable doings of his they make no dent and his cataloging and verdict mongering keep firehosing me like an idee fixe. There's no longer any reason to it because the given 'reasons' are so far from the essential problem that the essence has been lost and is no longer I suspect even part of the division. It's just this crazy cataloguing of hates, recriminations, the mess of love. Saw RH [name suppressed on advice of cousel] today. Pompous ass. Made me think of Churhill's 'There, but for the grace of God, goes God.'

:: 9:17 AM [+] ::
...

I don't defend my poetry. If pressed, I typically apologize. In an interview I did for The Hold I backpedaled like a chicken: "In poems I use private imagery to construct a topo map of my psyche, my peculiar wiring. I think it's a very interior, narcissistic kind of writing about which I have regrets." Robert Penn Warren put it more existentially: a poem is "a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography". Which isn't to say I'm indifferent to that ancient Forsteresque impulse to 'only connect'. No. Any sliver of intersubjective overlap with something so personal I find delightful. Amazing to me, there actually are some people who resonate with it. Gretchen, a fine poet herself, quotes obscure lines from my poems in contexts that seem utterly perfect to me. Art certainly. Even some poets I don't know personally. Anyway, I'm continuing in a vein of doing musical settings for poems. Actually the way it seems to be working is, I write the song, which becomes a procrustean bed, and then pull up a poem and shoehorn the fucker into the song. On Wednesday I wrote a one minute dancer into which I gaffed this bit of SF verite:

The Girl Who Laughed Like Unmortared Brickwork

There once was a contestant
His hair like laughing gas

Sadly loved a girl so beautiful
She brought the clouds down to the tree tops

Sad, his not knowing just up the hill,
In the swirling underbrush of Sutro forest,
She shared her finitude with winos

Unfurled her Cole Valley wings
Into slack coffee scenes; found a kind of meaning
In the arithmetic of poured excess over damp gravel.

On Friday I had the day off and was intending to do some recording. Unfortunately, Coolidge Corner experienced one of its regular Keyspan (or whatever they're called) power outages: exactly coincident with my block of record time. Thank the heavens for acoustic guitars and grand pianos. I wrote another song, of course. This one I stuffed with an obscurantist meditation on the interiorities of the working condition:

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.

Though we're probably just kidding ourselves and people really have nothing to say to one another, it's all a lot of fun.

:: 8:34 PM [+] ::
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We played a gig last night. An end of year lawn party at the BB&N school. Rich folk sprawled out on blankets; still life urban pastoral. The rain holding back, but the pretty sky graying ominously; wearing warmups. Made a plan afterwards for Chris and Jeremy and Art to come over and watch NBA action. But when I got home I checked email and there was a message from my friend Eric. Header was 'Sad News'. Oh shit. I opened it. A woman who had worked for me in sf had killed herself the night before. I tried to watch the game. I mean I did watch, but my mind 'blank[ed] at the glare' of that news. She wasn't someone I knew intimately, though I knew her well. In a way that everyone who knew her did. She was hyperactively social. A kind of social anthropologist who used humor to pull off outrageous, radical intimacy. So she knew everyone. And your kids. And their ages. And where you were born. And some good gossip about you too. She was materially Alive. And a gift because of that. Death can never be cheap when people are that alive.

:: 1:34 PM [+] ::
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Alas, elly's reaction formation to dot bong seems to have been to go a bit over to the benignity of newage wingnut consciousness. An understandable thing, but still, slightly disappointing from such a pioneer. Not unreminiscent of the various rural retreating that succeeded the implosions of utopian haight street, circa 1969 (cf, e.g., Emmett Grogan or even Peter Coyote).

As a guitar-wielding Junior high schooler I started out firmly on the cultural side of 'the revolution'. Then, sometime in 8th grade, a couple of my more radical teachers took long-haired-me and my friend Nils to a black panthers rally. I was hoping to see Huey Newton or at least Bobby Seale. It wasn't either of them, but the 'representative' was effective enough. He was the scariest guy I'd ever seen. Steely intelligence. Transportationally articulate anger. He verbally slapped around the mealy-mouthed, earnest peaceniks who predominated the rally and I left certain a violent revolution was imminent and that these guys were definitely going to win. I did what I could. I started a chapter of the SDS (it would've been hard to get a chapter of the panthers going in tiny Sandwich, Mass. with its one african-american family). We had some rallies, abolished the dress code, did a newsletter. I got my 'Strike' shirt ripped off my back by a high school senior who used to be a friend; saw my friend Dan get punched in the stomach, in school, by a drunken moron; saw the town go temporarily insane cuz my friend Bill wiped an egg salad sandwich up with an american flag, in response to which the American Legion (half the town effectively) staged a rally that marched past Dan's house. Our response was to get Dave Surdut to outfit Dan's bedroom with a couple of borrowed, gigantic Vox SuperBeatle amps and attach them to his stereo and completely outblast 'The Stars and Stripes Forever' with Side 1 of the first MC5 album. Eventually my political ardor waned as I attended more meetings and realized the overwhelmingly male leaders in the SDS were as piggish and power-hungry in their way as any corporate executive. I flipped back to the cultural side and fell in love with older sylphy, flower children: Priscilla and Beth, notably.

Priscilla is worth mentioning since she is in part muse for 'Why the Kimono is Beautiful'. Let's see: Long ago Priscilla lived far away, but her parents had a summer home on cape cod, where i lived. I fell in love with her in the summer of 1969 when she was fifteen or sixteen and i was in junior high; she had a river of wavy dark sprawling hair and looked like a rossetti painting if mattisse did the color; she was a small-breasted mysterious sylph, put together in layers of shepherd clothes, carelessly sexy like willows dreaming flute & sitar backwardness (know what I mean?); she flirted with me; she liked to take her shirt off; i felt certain i didn't exist for her; she moved in the non-dancing way we had, while i strummed soundtracks for her, sitting on the floor of her parents' house; in the basement; they seemed never to be there; no one's parents were; the parents of my youth existed in some orthogonal cocktail plane; she sometimes gave me a kiss; a high school guy came over and priscilla and he went into this den couch thing and shut the flimsy door; i sat around just outside the door fiddling with her nylon string guitar and felt profound contentment; 'why the kimono is beautiful' is partially a celebration of a time and place where many people had sincerely stopped worrying about what happens next.
:: 10:07 AM [+] ::
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I haven't written up the vast amount of excitement that's transpired since last post, but I shall.

In the meantime, some lists of all-time favorite music stuff, which will change tomorrow:

Popular:

* Beatles, White Album
* Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica
* Beach Boys, Smile (bootleg)
* Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat
* Raincoats, Odyshape
* Joni Mitchell, Blue
* Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville
* Todd Rundgren, A Wizard, A True Star
* Can, Ege Bamyasi
* Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
* Grateful Dead, Live Dead
* Rip, Rig and Panic, Attitude
* Stereolab, Sound-Dust
* Cat Power, Moon Pix
* Soft Machine, Third
* Cream, Disreali Gears
* Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted
* Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime
* Sonic Youth, Evol
* Dr. Dre, The Chronic
* Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding
* Elvis Costello, Imperial Bedroom
* Beatles, Revolver
* Clash, Sandanista
* REM, Automatic for the People

Classical:
* Beethoven, String Quartets, Emerson String Quartet
* Beethoven, piano sonatas, Richard Goode
* Stravinsky, Les Noces, Symphony of Psalms, Lamentations of Jeremiah,
Robert Craft
* Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Andreas Schiff
* Bach, Mass in B Minor, John Eliot Gardner
* Bach, Sonatas and Partitas for violin, Christian Tetzlaff - violin
* Schubert, Quintet in C, Alban Berg quartet +
* Schubert, piano sonatas, Mitsuko Uchida
* Schubert, Trout Quintet, Cleveland Quartet w/ Alfred Brendel
* Brahms, German Requiem, John Eliot Gardner
* Brahms, 4 symphonies, Cleveland Symphony, George Szell
* Brahms, complete piano music, Idel Biret
* Schumann, Carnaval/Kreisleriana, Mitsuko Uchida
* Debussy, Preludes, Kristian Zimmerman
* Debussy, Nuages/La Mer, Cleveland Symphony, Boulez
* Ravel, String Quartet, Alban Berg Quartet
* Ravel, piano music, Jean Yves Thibedet
* Dutielleux, Le Double
* Messiaen, Quartour pour la Fin Du Temps

Jazz:
* Miles Davis, ESP
* Miles Davis, Cookin
* Miles Davis, Miles Smiles
* Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
* John Coltrane, Ascension
* John Coltrane, Love Supreme
* John Coltran, Interstellar Space
* Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz
* Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come
* Roscoe Mitchell, Sounds
* Sonny Rollins, The Bridge
* Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Collosus
* Wayne Shorter, JuJu
* Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil
* Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity
* Pharaoh Sanders, Karma
* Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nice Guys
* Jimmy Giuffre, 1961
* Charlie Parker, Legendary Dial Masters
* Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um
:: 11:24 AM [+] ::
...