• Recently Written

  • abstractions
  • coming home
  • from India
  • here
  • change of season
  • at JED
  • in time
  • new CD
  • first real day of spring
  • an entry that has nothing to do with my skills as a writer

• Categories

  • artistic process
  • Buddhism
  • miscellaneous
  • musical
  • poetry
  • political
  • songs

• Archives

  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • December 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007

• Links

  • Dharmasong Publications
  • Nyokai-An (Phil's shakuhachi dojo)
  • Other writings by Phil James
  • Phil James Music

• Miscellaneous

  • Login
  • 

Let’s lose the big abstractions, all they’ve done
is cast shadows.
So we fight poverty instead of caring for poor people,
who are never anonymous;
we talk freedom through the mouths of marionettes.
Let’s burn these words — they’ll leave no ashes.
Let’s not consume happiness to dull
our raw en-joying,
or profess love to keep from loving,
and no more wearing death, the elegant suit
that hides our dying.

Coming back to the US from India, I suddenly realized I hadn’t been lonely for three months. It hadn’t even occurred to me to be lonely in India. In fact, it was difficult to carve out a quiet space for oneself. But here in America entire systems had been developed to keep us from interacting with each other, to insulate us from the lives of others and from the sometimes harsh realities of nature. The streets of New York seemed desolate: no haggling over fruit, no beggars, no crazy babas approaching you, only the merest pastel hint of the wildly careening spectacle of life in a concrete maze optimized for consumption. Cars were private bubbles floating serenely along the avenues, so different from the motorcycles piled high with families and buses vomiting their brightly colored passengers. The squeaky clean aisles of supermarkets seemed to have little to do with food and everything to do with packaging. Shoppers wandered with a dazed look, and even the fruits and vegetables, with their mortician’s makeovers, awoke no memory of earth and sun. It didn’t feel like coming home, it felt like leaving home for a cold gray colony…

Kolkata before sunrise — it feels like the aftermath of a huge natural disaster. The air is thick with smoke and all the usual Indian smells, only more intense, and thousands of people are still asleep on the streets and sidewalks, those who don’t even have the protection of cardboard-and-tin slum walls. Of course this is the aftermath of a disaster, though not a natural one. The disaster was colonialism, and its devastation continues after 60 years of independence and so-called progress.

The sun rises. People go about their work. A man signals the start of the day making nails from pieces of scrap metal — he will use these to repair shoes for a few rupees. Rickshaw drivers emerge from beneath their rickshaws, their only home. Taxi drivers asleep in their taxis with all the doors open yawn and stretch. The families of hotel workers asleep on cardboard in the lobbies get up before the guests can see them. Street babus with ancient typewriters start typing letters for hire. Food vendors stoke their wood fires. And the traffic — more and more insane snarls, more and more horns as the temperature rises, and rises, and rises…

But I am ecstatic to be back in India. I love it here, for all its problems. For every horror there is an equal or greater beauty, and the always-fulfilled expectation of small wonders amidst the rubble becomes addictive.

Now we are out of the mess of Kolkata and high in the hills around Rishikesh. The air is cool, at least for part of the day, and monkeys play in the thick trees. There are ashrams everywhere, and the everyday greeting is “hare om” instead of “namaste.” Families from all around India are on pilgrimage to this sacred site along the upper Ganges, where the water is cold and clean and wild, making for a fun collision of cultures. Yesterday we saw a large group of pilgrims from Rajastan, looking very out of place with their colorful desert costumes and without their camels. It felt like running into old friends. And of course there are the well-off European backpackers, munching their muesli at so-called “German bakeries” and complaining when their room price is five dollars a night instead of four fifty.

We were in Thailand for a month. Thailand is everything people say it is and more — cheap,amazingly friendly and easy to get around, spotlessly clean, and “sabai” (laid-back) like nowhere else I’ve been. It’s like an ultra-efficient Margaritaville. If you want something, you can get it, with a smile. Internet in the middle of the jungle? No problem! A quick massage on the street corner? No problem! Delicious healthy food never more than a few yards away? Of course. Alas, this tourist-friendly infrastructure comes at an extreme cost — deforestation has wiped out most of the tigers and elephants, and Westernization has greatly weakened indigenous culture, which in many areas is forced to make a comeback as a tourist attraction. But there are pockets where the old Thailand still survives. We started our journey in the Mae Tang area north of Chiang Mai, staying for a week on an organic farm situated in a small village. The farm was owned by a Thai man and a western woman (the reverse of the Bangkok formula!) who were passionate about seed-saving and natural building. We worked in the gardens and on adobe buildings, plastering with mud and enjoying the wonderful local food. The farm was not at all separate from the village — there was an easy-going cooperation and sharing with the villagers, and we spent much of our time around the fun-loving residents at the farm who had come there from an even smaller village in Isan, north-eastern Thailand near the Lao border.

Then we went to the beach — the small island of Koh Lipe in the far south of Thailand, near Malaysia: Tropical-paradise white sand beaches with turquoise water, almost ridiculously beautiful landscapes and weather. But all of these islands are getting quickly ruined by tourism. Next year there will be a pier on Koh Lipe, destroying the livelihood of the local longtail boatmen (some of them sea gypsies) who as of now provide the only way to land on the beaches. If you want to go, go fast. There are exceptions — such as a wonderful tourist-supported sanctuary for orphaned and injured elephants we visited — but much of the tourism rampant in Thailand is a new type of colonialism that eventually could, at its worst, cause the same sort of havoc as that wreaked by old-school colonial powers.

Even in the paradise of Thailand I felt the pull to get back to India, where the
culture cannot be completely overrun because it is so deep and embodied in such a mass of people, most of whom are living as they lived fifty years ago or even a century ago (except of course for mobile phones) — this in spite of the so-called “new India” of Bangalore and the high tech industry and booming middle class. Thailand is like a good smart friend, India is like a crazy dirty old grandmother who never dies.

My parents thought they’d raised me,
but that was a stand-in boy I’d
sculpted out of wonder bread to fool them.

Meanwhile I was off with the deer
learning to jump fences,
I was off with the bees, learning how
to make honey and annoy people,
I was off with the cats and fish
riding a great wave of blood.

I never came home
until there was no more home
but here.

The leaves are bright green
but the nights are cold now.
Listen closely — everything’s rattling.

The sun rises over the pines and unfurls
a broken stripe across the pond.
I paddle into it, my canoe a needle.
Waterbricks, sunsparks, narrow road to the other shore.
The sun climbs, the gold road falls apart.
It is no more a road than the surface of an eye.
The whole pond quivering with gray light.

You are an artist, you are always saying Look at that! Listen to this! Notice the smell of the lilacs! You want all people — because you love all people — to experience the world with the same hunger that gnaws at you. And you want them to know, to really know as you do that all this beauty is constantly disappearing and reappearing, and that the coming and going of vivid sensation is exactly what makes it beautiful.

But counterpoised against this acknowledgment of beauty in death and death in beauty there is the muscularity of your own work. Each of us has a particular discipline, a craft that stands gnarled and brave in the face of time, a carving of the wind, a sinuous dance, a nuanced shout.

New solo shakuhachi CD out now — see http://nyokai.com/newcd.shtml

Through winter the world was flat. I often skated right off it into the night sky. Now the world is round again, and because it is round I can wrap my head around it, I can embrace it.

I am a little off balance, on the verge of dance. All day I play flute because when I stop I fall in love with the first thing I see.

why do I not have goats?

coaxing Blake’s invisible worm into the light

subway riders
small accidental violations of private space
a delicate beating of wings

in the clinic waiting room
a man holds a CD from radiology
“his images”
holds it nervously and somewhat reverently
like a new friendship with a celebrity –
maybe death sidled up to him at a bar
and has his number?

and back to the subway…

Met an old man on the road,
he looked wise, I said Tell me what you know.
He said My day is done, I’m almost gone,
come closer, I’ll teach you to carry on.

He said
One, be lively;
two, be true;
three, find beauty whatever you do;
four, each day be still an hour;
five, rise up with quiet power;
six, give away your broken heart;
seven, make your love your art.

Art, as an experience, is the transformation of matter into energy. Art as object — visual object, sonic object, whatever — is material at the far edge of materiality.

…and unfinished things are my monument for a while.
What I made was always provisional, that’s my justification for this light-weight architecture.
Now I become my world.
Fire and wind lap my ribs, a flood polishes the inside of my skull.
I lack foundation and pretense, and when I go
I will be gone completely.

The twentieth century began with the widening of public discourse. The twenty-first begins with the narrowing.

I’ve always loved the ping and hiss of radiators, which announce themselves so much more lustily with sound than with heat. Sound is their plumage, as it’s mine.

Each day I start to become a musician again.

In improvising you find no great Truth. But there is the possibility, if you dare, of saying something simply and sinuously, without irony or lies.

With the imperfect tool of this body we cut through time, even as time cuts us up.

Many people are like birds who never soar but fly laboriously a few feet above the ground, knowing neither heaven nor earth.

It’s not the soul should clap its hands and sing — the body in all its chaos would be enough.

Moments of drama are the jewels on this bracelet. A momentary vision of shattered bone — a test. Can I see the beauty even in that?

Three beginnings:
He did an ecstatic Rumpelstiltskin-like dance around the fire.
London, 1869 — for some reason the most frightening place and time.
The sun was the color of lemon pie when Ma called the girls in to dinner.

Night has always meant for me an escape from the civilized, a temporary return to that which is not a movie set, not a construction of the human economy and mind, not nature tentatively held captive but totally beyond capture. Night is the crackling of electricity, the pounding of waves, the emptiness of sky. If you have a cellphone with you it is no longer night.

Night is a negative nourishment. Rather than providing material sustenance it provides the radical absence of the human, and without occasional doses of this absence we become stunted cramped animals.

The mind is a mansion of dark rooms, but there is a courtyard. We’ll find it again.

When I took walks it was always to the most remote solitary places I could get to — I was comforted by how immense architecture and nature seem when unencumbered by population.

But now, a few minutes into my aimless wandering, I find myself turning away from Casco Bay and toward the ordinary downtown streets, where the sight of people intrigues and warms me. I don’t think I ever learned about everyday interactions, how to hang out with guys watching football, how to gab about the kids and their schools, how to act cool around beautiful women. A little past halfway to death, maybe I can watch one more time and finally learn something. And just maybe one of these people will penetrate my solitude, suddenly talking with me about something simple and profound.

Starting to give Thai massage again — it’s almost as fun as playing music. In fact, it’s really very similar: you watch your breath, you find rhythms, you enter into an intuitive state as you work your way along somebody’s receptive body. And the bodies are receptive, it is as if they are thirsting for this kind of attentive touch and you are water.

what I want to say to everyone is:
thank you for being in this beautiful dream

For a long time I had an attitude about John Cage’s late music, his so-called number pieces. Though rigorous in some of their compositional methods, I felt they were nevertheless marred by prettiness. Despite is avowed distaste for artistic taste, here was a very tasteful body of work. It was music in which the balance of sound and silence had become a stylistic signature rather than a philosophic declaration; music to be played by professional musicians for the most part on conventional instruments in conventional concert settings; music which included only the politest of “non-musical” or noise elements. It left me craving the yawps of his middle period, the loud sensuality of Cartridge Music, the courage and stamina of Empty Words, the sheer exuberance of Roaratorio or Apartment House. Clearly, the sonic world of the number pieces was much closer to that of his early and lovely string quartet.

I have changed my mind. Though I still often prefer the noise of middle-Cage to the politesse of old-Cage, I understand that for every age there is an appropriate expressive stance. The great Noh playwright and theorist Zeami wrote of “the flower of returning.” The idea is that after a great artist has explored the limits of skill and daring, he or she returns to the simplest of gestures, to the same basic forms of expression practiced at the beginning of a long career. This returning, according to Zeami, is the final creative phase for the very greatest of artists. And the number pieces, for all their contrived gentleness, seem mystically imbued with what has come before, or seem to float on an inaudible sea of noise.

When you’re in good health, dreams are like people who live in the same building but another apartment. You are civil to them, greet them by first name in the hallway or elevator, but you never get too close, never invite them into what you think of as your life.

In sickness, you befriend them. Dreams are suddenly your most intimate companions, or your only companions. Their strangeness no longer seems stange. The dreamworld is seen for what it is, the underside of the fabric you’re made of.

Or you think of ilness as a deviation in gravity. The body, with its web of mind, becomes as a result of pain lighter or heavier than usual, seeing the comings and goings of life from a few feet in the air, or sunk down and swimming through subterranean sounds and images. In either case who you thought you were is just beyond reach, and much smaller than you are now.

The pearl is everything the oyster isn’t. It is the oyster’s accidental foray into capitalism. It is too often cultured, like buttermilk and opera-goers.

The oyster, unlike the pearl, is slovenly and naked. It is scrotal. When you taste an oyster’s juices a veil parts and you are plunged into the immensity of the night sea, your first and last home.

The pearl augments its value by accretion, thanks to the oyster’s constant weeping. For this reason, among others, I am a communist anarchist.

In the dark generative pit of my libido live two archetypal Barbie dolls, barefoot hippie girl and doe-eyed twink boy. Neither would look good accessorized with pearls. Pearls are for Presidents’ wives. A President’s wife is never seen laughing as she takes her socks off and throws them at the camera. Similarly, you’ll never see doe-eyed policemen giggling with pride as they jay-walk with tupperware bowls of fruit salad, but that’s another story.

Some compare the full moon to a pearl, but tonight it dangles like a bare light bulb high in the Baja sky, illuminating oysters all around us.

I’ve begun to accept, in fits and starts, the impermanence of everything, and I have become calmer and happier. It’s the sugar pill hat comes in the second half of life, served up with a staggering variety of pains and losses. I’d like to think it is the inclination toward wisdom if not its acquisition.

I wish I had meditated on impermanence more sincerely when I was twenty. Just as youth is wasted on the young, the prospect of death is wasted on the old.

We wake up,
look at each other and laugh.
Who put these amusing
costumes on us, these
white wigs,
this padding,
these crinkled masks.
There must be some way to
get them off.

My old man was an old man. Sixty-four when I was born, facing death when I was a teenager, he served as a monument to his past, a sagging reminder of his moment in history. As he looked back on his life so did I, his trusty sidekick. His dresser drawers, my foraging grounds, were full of artifacts from the gone world. He, and I through loving him, inhabited a snow globe where the snow was yellow newspaper clippings, top hats, World War I medals, quaint locutions. I was entranced and ashamed.

Now I am old enough to look back on my own life. I can put it next to his on the examination table, see the remarkable similarities: the dogged dedication to art in all its manifestations, the apparent calm marbled with desire or dissatisfaction, the stubbornness and lack of patience, etc. But there is an essential difference. In daily life, even more than music, he was a composer while I have always been an improviser. He turned what he knew into something of substance, while after all these years I continue to privilege process over attainment. I have flirted with the idea of being a “life composer,” but it has never lasted. And so his lesson to me is something else, it is not the usual fatherly sort of thing. And my lesson to my own children, too, must be something else…

My friend Pauline got me to try Facebook, and as a result I’ve heard from several old high school friends. Though they are almost unrecognizable from their photos, in the composite sketch you can put together from their words they seem essentially the same people they were thirty-six years ago. I find this somehow gratifying, as it makes me think it’s true for me as well. Despite participating in the discouraging history of late 20th century capitalism, despite becoming an ecstatic father and grandfather, despite chasing after numerous rewards that turned to smoke or shit, I still stumble happily along the path I happened upon at the twilight of the sixties. My aesthetic and my politics remain unchanged, or have come back around, as has my lifestyle. Only now the dope is stronger, the stakes are higher, and unfortunately at my age I see a tunnel at the end of the light.

We fall asleep into something like our ocean origin, we wake up into what is by contrast the thinnest air. The sensation of tiredness is similar to dropping into the sea. We move our limbs only slowly in the water, the world takes on a darker and darker cast as we sink. We close our eyes, and when we open them inside-out we experience a world as strange, and as strangely familiar, as the ocean floor.

But waking, that is the real shock. Everything is dry, delicate, brittle and bristling. There is always a moment, at least after a night without nightmares, that I think “Do I really want to be here?” Maybe that’s what any artist thinks. We are the caretakers of ocean memories.

Thirty-five years ago nobody except a masturbating Ed Koch or Rudy Giulliani could envision the absolute Disnification of midtown Manhattan. Times Square was all glitter and sleeze — rhinestones in a pig trough — and its edges were among the tawdriest edges in New York. Consumerism then wasn’t Starbucks and Lion King souvenirs, it was getting propositioned by a midget hooker, or the guy with a sandwich board endlessly shouting “Take a sneaky peaky, leave da wife outside!” I liked it much better back then, the syphilitic city still wheezing on its deathbed, before the corporate undertakers traipsed in, snuffed it, and put Mouse ears on the corpse.

The old New York, or more specifically the old Theater District, is epitomized for me by the long-defunct Jimmy Ray’s bar on Eighth Avenue, a little piece of heaven, purgatory or hell depending on how liquored up you were. Jimmy himself was a saint — a stocky Irish ex-truckdriver with baby blue eyes who would let just about any loser run a tab. I know, because I was eighteen at the time with no prospects of material success and ended up owing Jimmy hundreds of dollars before I moved on with my life. And you felt safe, because once you were part of the family Jimmy or his well-muscled bartender Huey would defend you in any scuffle.

Jimmy’s was a watering hole for theater people, but a watering hole at the crumbling outskirts of that world — of any world.

Some of its denizens had seen much better days, such as Cecil B. DeMille starlet Olive Deering who was collapsed on the bar most nights, or Front Page director and old-school queen Harold Kennedy who pranced around boasting of his enduring friendship with Kitty Carlyle. Or the non-theater regulars, Mosely and the Judge. Mosely was a business man of some sort who wore polyester suits and a gigantic pinkie ring. After he heard in passing that I was a fledgeling writer he used to buy me drinks (on his eternal tab) and shout “You’re the best damn playwright around, kid, you’ll make a million.” His best friend the Judge — I can’t remember how he got that moniker — inhabited a chair in the corner, doubled over in a ragged overcoat, coughing himself to death and occasionally sitting up long enough to tell a few war stories.

Some of its denizens were yet to see better days, the up and coming stars who weren’t always comfortable with the more sedate and ferny world of Joe Allen’s restaurant around the corner. I got drunk a few times with Al Pacino, for instance, and I remember him showing me his fancy new watch over and over, the first digital watch I’d ever seen. Other up-and-comers were more interesting. Carol Kane became a friend — she was only two years older than me, and we shared the solidarity of angsty youth.

But most of Jimmy Ray’s denizens didn’t quite fit into either of these categories: they inhabited a twilight world between up-and-coming and already-gone, a sort of purgatorial showbiz realm that seemed to have its own language and code of behavior. They were settled in a fog-machine fog. They got smaller parts than they used to get, or slightly bigger. They played villains in cop shows, or prostitutes. They knew everyone on both coasts, and they were career alcoholics. An example: Robert L. As a child I had watched him on TV, when he’d been the heroic handsome star of a popular adventure show. I’d even had a boyhood crush on him, wanting him to be my father, and I suspect that my later interest in flying was not unrelated to dreams of Bob in his leather flight jacket. Now, oddly, he seemed to have a crush on me. He used to come into Jimmy Ray’s high on some combination of booze, cocaine, and who knows what else. He often had his “LA friend” in tow, a boy a little older than myself wearing a fur vest and hideous makeup. Bob was still very handsome, with a chiseled masculine face and a deep booming voice, a sort of Jason Robards for dummies. He draw pictures of me on napkins that I gave away to some of my girlfriends, who were not impressed. Our conversations were surrealistic at best, dadaist on average. Bob was pretty typical of Jimmy Ray’s customers, and I had many similarly strange relationships.

I doubt that anything like this exists these days, a meeting place free of class rancor, gay-friendly, and only slightly racist and sexist. There was a we’re-all-in-this-hell-hole-together feeling that I can’t imagine in the new New York. If home is where you can hang your hat even if it’s a very funny hat, we’re all homeless now.

Should I write an autobiographical novel? It would have to start something like this:

” Time itself is a time-bomb, he thought: at first ticking unbearably slowly as you wait for the sun to rise on Christmas morning, for your half-drunk father to move his checker piece, for the afternoon school bell to ring, for the swirling chemicals of puberty to settle in calm pools in your body. Then one day you realize the bomb has exploded, noiselessly, maybe while you were napping, unleashing its terrible radiation that kills your grandparents, turns your schoolyard buddy into a fat-assed banker, withers your lovers, one by one fells family and friends until you are left alone at the cold heart of the blast, facing the absolutely unknowable.

“Or sometimes he thought: It was just a quick succession of colors, from the achingly delicate chartreuse of spring to the bitter green of summer to the ironically self-congratulatory reds of fall to the broken brown of winter, just a speedy anonymous and ultimately meaningless transformation that buries personal history. And if we’re going to do the season metaphor, he thought, then why not the time of day thing too: my youth so vivid I shivered with delight, waking to the sun and wind both in the pines, etc.

“He thought these thoughts, but we need not be concerned with them as truth or myth, as apt metaphor or stoner head-trip, but only as momentary mind events, in themselves tiny elements of his story, for we are dealing with particulars here, yes, though we cannot build a wall that stands up to the sea we can fashion a net of tiny shimmering knots, permeable and strong in its permeability, a lived life.

“It was a makeshift life, improvised with little thought to staying in one key, held together, as they say, with bubble gum and rubber bands. Since he came from some privilege it was very good bubble gum and very good rubber bands. The bubble gum (money) went toward piecing together a life spent in the arts, though often in the shallow end of that pool; the rubber bands (a family tradition of discipline) held together wildly disparate elements of a personality that threatened to spin out into the farthest galaxies of insanity.

“But the particulars, the particulars. There can be no net without the knots. Let’s start, for no particular reason, with Doctor G.”

Just started a new project, Dharmasong Publications, dedicated to the relationship between Buddhism and music. Check it out at http://dharmasong.com and download a PDF copy of my pamphlet Listening.

Suffering is universal but individual. We each have different attachments and aversions. One man’s amused complaint is another’s suicide note.

And yet despite a huge range of emotional reaction to circumstance, there are clearly some circumstances that increase the probability of individual suffering. First and foremost is poverty, with its henchmen starvation, ill health, and crime. (Starvation, ill health, and crime would not disappear with the elimination of poverty, but would become chance woes rather than routine systemic violence.)

How strange that the largest factor affecting the probability of suffering could be completely eliminated by human agency, having been invented by human greed. This is what makes me political, what makes me an anarchist communist. It is not enough to counsel individual non-attachment. I am still left crying for a billion children.

You’re out walking in the woods or through a meadow. You start to notice details — distant sparks of color, faint odors, the sound of twigs cracking, the precise texture of the ground against your soles. Hundreds of sensual details bombard you, and your attention becomes more and more refined as it races from one to the next until suddenly everything fits together in a unified whole that includes even you. Subject and object are not clearly demarcated: It would be hard to separate hearing from sound, for instance. You no longer reach out from your body to grab discrete experiences, you are simply a part of it all, as if in an art museum a painting magically sucked you into its design.

The bombardment of the senses with nature’s detail has not caused “sensory overload” and fatigue but has instead awakened you to a state of alertness beyond that you usually experience. In this state you are endowed with powers, too, that you don’t usually possess. You can run full speed across the rocky forest floor or rough meadows without tripping. You can hop across creeks fearlessly. You can find your way.

There is nothing mystical about this state of grace: It is simply our neurological birthright as a predatory species. It’s the state that let’s us see or smell still-live food in the distance, find a particular plant in a thicket, sense the danger at our back. And our attention to these minutiae triggers the brain chemistry that weaves it all together into whole cloth. This is the pleasure of rediscovering our animal nature, our humanity.

the storm

(knocks down walls, unhides lives
as they are now, as they’ve always been,
the poor a nation huddled between stores)

reveals our mundane catastrophe

Often I have mentioned the beauty of the broken. And yet after years confronting my own brokenness — a broken childhood, a broken education, a broken marriage, several broken careers, maybe even a broken mind — it’s nothing aesthetic I see in this wide swath of ineptitude. Oddly, it’s something practical: a resolute repeated privileging of possibility over form. In my ruins the worms can do their necessary work — and I, too, am one of the worms.

For many styles of music, a significant component of the art is the small subtle ornamentation, sounds often referred to as “grace notes.” These sounds are most effective when they go almost unnoticed, executed with such precision and delicacy — such grace — that they flit in and out of consciousness like a slight change of lighting or a momentary (was it really there?) odor of lilacs.

In some styles, for instance the Japanese shakuhachi tradition I am most familiar with, these grace notes are the essence of the music. Besides the quick note preceding a longer one, there are dozens of “grace effects”: tiny downward or upward pitch glides, barely audible finger taps, slight variations in breath as transparent as a breeze, sudden short pauses in an otherwise unbroken melody. The larger gestures — the basic notes and rhythms — provide a framework on which to hang this subtler world of sound and silence.

And I think that if there is any grace in life it is also in the grace notes: not in the grand gestures or the larger life events that infect us all with similar joys and miseries, but in moments of untranslatable revelation that we only notice when we’ve acquired the habit of stillness.

Because so many do not play, because so many are bound to a suicidal work ethic, because so many have lost the ability to loll inside their imaginations…

because of this, I must play more fully. And I must find ways to bring play back to those who most need it, to help in some small way to keep uncommercial unmediated art from disappearing.

For many years I was a connoisseur of loneliness. There was the loneliness of the broken midnight streets, that was dry white wine. There was the loneliness of bicycling through the empty country, or through sunny towns full of unseeing townspeople, that was bitter coffee. It was all delicious in its strong flavors, in its infinite precise variety.

Then I had a family. When you have a family you have a world, and you carry it with you, and you are not lonely. (Atlas had a backache, but he was never alone.) For years I did not know loneliness. I knew everything else: joy, grief, contentedness, despair… but the subtlety of bitter tastes was no longer available to me.

Then the children grew up, and loneliness returned. But it is plain and simple now, a single flavor. You cannot be a connoisseur of the coming all-consuming nothingness.

Remembering Peter van Riper’s beautiful hologram of the dancer Simone Forti repeating one simple movement, the small glowing green image of her body suspended in space…

But how much more beautiful if it had been a flipbook, passed around from person to person…

Not long ago “American independent film” meant Stan Brakhage, Yvonne Rainer, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren. Now it means Sundance and big expensive mediocrities supported by the same old media giants on dress-down day.

Not long ago modern literature meant modernist literature, intelligent language constructs that challenged our sensibilities and explored the mysterious deep sea of our humanity. Now it’s object lessons and cautionary tales, bedtime stories for big babies. For the large publishers, Paul Auster marks the far fringe of experimentalism.¹

Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany saw a similar privileging of trite advice-art over innovation. In both those cases it was the state that dictated the swing toward mediocrity. In our case it is the corporate world, which has largely replaced the state as the primary agent of intellectual repression. The little fables of Nazi and Stalinist cinema were designed to keep monsters in power; the mediocre narratives of today further the corporate monster’s dream, a world of easy-going liberal consumers who scarcely see the reflection of their casual misery in the shop windows.

1. To be more precise about all of this, modernism did not mark the end of narrative or even the subversion of narrative, but rather the expansion of narrative to include our non-linear inner lives. [↩]

Photography, film: images hidden on celluloid until chemically tricked into revealing themselves. I could not know exactly what would be brought to light — the time between shooting and processing was a pregnancy, an artistic silence full of potential energy.

It was not so different with writing. I wrote by hand in a barely readable scrawl. I experienced the stories and poems as rough and unformed — embryonic — until I had them typed. It was only then that I felt I could really see what I had wrought.

Or music: I could hear in my head what I wrote on manuscript paper, but the music itself lived in a shadowy world of potential until performed by instrumentalists. It was always a surprise.

All these dark seed-in-the-ground pauses have been eliminated by digital technology. What have I lost?

There was an excitement that seemed at times erotic, like the anticipation of a lover’s visit.

There was an imposed pacing to the work that always reminded me I was collaborating with chance.

In short there was night, real night, without 24-hour convenience and car sirens.

I must find new ways to get night back.

The “rock and roll moment” coincided almost exactly with my youth, and so I really have to write one of these songs:

I was born in nineteen fifty-four
when rock and roll came knocking on the white man’s door.
Through the driving New York snow
I heard some noises on the radio.
With a sound that promised to set me free
the rock and roll angel’s been looking after me.

I learned to shimmy and to shake with joy
(that’s not easy for a smart little Jewish boy).
I learned to twist and I learned to shout,
started wearing boots, let my hair grow out.
One day it was robots and collecting stamps,
the next day it was reefer and lava lamps.

You know Jimi Hendrix can still make me cry
cause guitar feedback was my teen lullaby.
I coulda been a scientist or mathematician,
I coulda been a lawyer or a rich physician.
Instead I play music and try to stay free
cause the rock and roll angel’s been looking after me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(I don’t usually like to talk about angels, either. They’re fucking creepy.)

Check out this literary ebook that I just put together, the mind is a terrible thing to cut and paste. It’s a selection of my older writings, mainly from the 90’s, written for my own amusement and the amusement of friends. Enjoy!

one leaves a daughter
one leaves a son
one leaves a prayer in the muzzle of his gun
one leaves his innocence
one leaves his sin
one leaves his childhood dreams
one just leaves his skin

one leaves his dogtags
one leaves an arm
one leaves the parents who kept him from harm
one leaves the sisters who taught him to be kind
one leaves his body where another lost his mind

one leaves in pieces
one leaves intact
one leaves in uniform
one leaves in a sack
one leaves in a blaze of glory
though one bullet would suffice
one leaves on fire
one leaves on ice

one leaves a daughter
one leaves a son
one leaves a prayer in the muzzle of his gun
one leaves his innocence
one leaves his sin
one leaves his childhood dreams
one just leaves his skin

Already the news media are announcing the run-up to the presidential election. Thank goodness, at last they’ll have a really good excuse to avoid reporting on the slaughter in Darfur, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, populist insurgencies in Mexico and South America, and other distasteful topics. But there’s one personal announcement I better get out of the way before all meaningful dialog is subsumed by the noise of political showtime.

I don’t vote.

In America, where Democracy rides sidecar to God down the highway of illusion, this is tantamount to calling yourself an atheist. (Oh yeah, I’m an atheist too. A non-voting atheist. You wouldn’t want your daughter to marry me. Probably not your son, either.)

I don’t vote because I don’t accept the authority of the state, it’s as simple as that. Voting assumes that the ruling class has a right to rule, it implicitly grants them dominion over us.

Here are some of the reactions I encounter when I tell people I don’t vote:

“But as a citizen it’s your duty to vote. You receive the benefits of our system, so you owe it your participation.” Or more succinctly: “Voting is a duty, not a right.” (Make it short and punchy and it can sound like the Truth. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.)

Nope, I don’t owe anything. I never signed up for any of this, the genocide or the lattes. Yes, like any beggar artist I accept what’s given me, but I will not lift a finger to perpetuate a system I don’t accept.

“Though it may not do any good in the long run, voting for particular individuals may improve things in the short run.”

This is true. I’m not forcing you not to vote. For me, it is more valuable to abstain from participation and to get my point of view out there. I’m working on cultural change, on the popular non-acceptance of arbitrary authority. You take care of the short run if you want.

“What if nobody voted?”

That would be so fucking cool!

it’s allah, and yaweh, and jesus h. christ
killer gods on the loose, better run for your life
it’s the gangbanging ghosts with their capitalist-t Truth
better run for your life, killer gods on the loose

they wanna kill free speech, they wanna kill free love
cause nothing can be free when there’s accountants up above
they wanna kill evolution in their holy name
cause keeping people stupid is the name of the game
the wanna kill what women gained in the last hundred years
replace cultural revolution with a culture of fear
you know however hard they try they can’t make me afraid
cause I’ll always shoot back, that’s the way I was made
so they can keep their bibles, jihads, and gospel songs
I get my love from my lover and my visions from a bong
they can shoot from above and they can shoot from behind
but I’m still here dancing crazy with my body and my mind

it’s allah, and yaweh, and jesus h. christ
killer gods on the loose, better run for your life
it’s the gangbanging ghosts with their capitalist-t Truth
better run for your life, killer gods on the loose

The central fact of a piano is its weight. Its immobility. Its inertia. Its monolithic thereness. A keyboard that you can pick up is not a piano, no matter how well it imitates the piano’s sound. It’s the ghost of a piano.

I suspect there is not a piano player in the world who has not at some point dreamed of:

• a grand piano in a meadow, glorious and gleaming;
• from at least three stories up, dropping a piano onto a sidewalk or street.

In all these ways a piano is very much like a father.

Long term strategy: To change the world, change the culture. Short term strategy: To change the world, fuck shit up. Intellectual property damage combines these two strategies.

1. To change the world, change the culture. Yes, I believe that through cultural work — art — we can temper selfishness and greed by promoting a gentle and loving attitude toward fellow beings. Virginia Woolf said that war is a failure of imagination — that if you can really imagine the life and struggles of another being, killing becomes rare. Likewise, I think that bigotry is also a failure of the imagination, of the faculty that allows us to empathize with our brothers and sisters and see the commonality of experience. The favoring of capitalist gain over environmental health is a failure of the imagination, too — a failure to envision the future and the potentially bleak lives of our grandchildren. One role of art is to exercise the imagination, to encourage its blossoming and thereby change the relationship of the individual to the world.

2. To change the world, fuck shit up. Old liberals with rose-colored memories will tell you that the changes of the sixties came about through peaceful protest, nonviolent resistence, etc. I remember it very differently. While Martin Luther King may have been a gentle figurehead for the radicalism of the era, it was the riots in Watts and Newark that really woke up the rulers. Nonviolent resistance is a whispered plea to tweak the system; property damage, an inherent affront to capitalism, challenges the system itself. I believe that writing your tag on a gentrified wall is more valuable than writing your representative, and each paintball fired into a Wal-Mart parking lot is worth at least a few presidential votes.

1 + 2 = 3. Though it has trouble creating it without the artistry of the disenfranchised, the ruling class seems to think that intellectual property is among its most valuable assets. Therefore, intellectual property damage, from bootlegging to culture-jamming, is considered a great threat to the capitalist system. And where the king sees a threat, the court jester sees opportunity! Through the subversion of dominant iconography and a general free-wheeling disregard for the sanctity of intellectual property claims, we not only threaten the capitalist structure but also transform culture itself.