Storytime

I carry secrets in a baby basket. The day care kids appreciate the stuff I bring -- it seems to strike their fancy.

The cooking pot belonged to Tante Liny, who stood for hours, I imagine, stirring berries from her bushes. I can see her labels scrawled in foreign markings on the jelly jars she gave us. Gooseberry, current, raspberry sweetness from the sides scraped smooth. The lid is blue enamel, rusted in the dips and scratches. Am I not, a storygirl, enamored of this pot?

The knitting needles are my mom's. She once decided she would knit her man and children each a cardigan of wool from Nova Scotia. Deers and antlers come to mind, pine cones and snowflakes interwoven on the sleeves and backs and pockets of her intricate design. She labored and she loved and warmed us in the sheep's soft magic. Her patterns soothe me still.

The purple pouch of velvet is a gift from one dear friend and there's a wand of silvery ribbons from another, sisters who evolved with me through motherhood to worlds within the moment. Friendship permeates the tales I tell.

I cover up the basket with a loopy zigzag afghan made by Glenna. Projects, like the ones you do in day care, were this woman's middle name. How many newsprint Christmas trees did her Julie, my-best-friend, and I spray paint in Glenna's basement? Nowadays from Memphis Avenue to E 140th her easy kindness gleams at me from variegated faces.

You've only one known chance at love, a chance that lasts a lifetime. You're inclined to get it right when Aphrodite's angels travel with you.

Rules to live by

In life, nobody gets no trophies for winning. So what I've come up with is you live, and you love what you do, and you do it well, that's success. But at the same time, nobody wins life. You never see nobody jump out in the middle of Peachtree Street and say, 'Give me my trophy!' You don't win! You live and you learn, until it's over.
-- Young Jeezy, Rolling Stone

Jeezy looks good in his arm long tatoos and diamond wrist band, tucking his thumb in a low slung belt buckle. Atlanta rapper getting shot at by the Rolling Stone. Star studded famester standing tall.

One frigid Sunday my photographer takes me to the lakefront to reproduce a photo shot in August when the air was hot. The plan is simple -- he sets up the shot with his subject, moi, coated up for winter. At his sign I shed the layers, step bare feet and arms into his frame and plunge my brain into the fantasy of summer. Voila. Click click. Suit up, load out, drive home.

Sometimes life is funnier than fiction. The exact spot of the earlier shot has ceased to exist. A huge sign says DO NOT ENTER, but, doubting this, we peer beyond the boulders in our path. Nature rears its evidence -- one Erie storm too many wrecked this dock.

Cameraman and diva set up camp a little ways along the shore. Wind devours us like an ice belching dragon; our fingers freeze; our nostrils stream. The man behind the camera sets his sights. The woman leaps and dares her feckless muscles to respond to ancient memories of the sun. Exhausted by...

'Battery exhausted!' he's announcing as he clamors down the boulders to her bag. Together fearless artists -- I'm above them now, out of body picturing the pair -- prod the batteries from wee compartments. Numb fingered miracle accomplished, the bold ones soldier on.

Once again the perfect shot's a poofy breath away as gray waters crash against the pier. And once again, the battery's exhausted. Impossible! She charged it full this morning. But the camera never lies -- it is too cold to say the everready's ready. It lives too far from summer to comply.

We pack it in, load away, spin the wheels to home without a pixel to our names. I ask you brother Jeezy, are we happy? Did we win?

You lovin' what you do?

Sure.

You got your trophy, sister. Run it in.

Setting

When Kathy says, 'I like the settings of your songs,' she borrows from a theater world of furniture and lighting, chandeliers and sofas, creaking boards and thunder. She conjures atmosphere and texture, everything (besides the script of words and notes) that brings a song to fullness on a stage.

How wise, this knowing maven.

Musicians who deny we're 'acting' -- with a mild disdain for thespians, who trick us by pretending -- forget that acting is the purest form of being; it is song eluding silence, it is truth escaping numbness, it is life unmasking death.

Setting is organic to the fever of a song emerging skyward with a sinner in her arms.

Tepid skin

Despite all the controversy surrounding the veil, the woman behind it remains obscured. The debate has fixed our attention on her body or her face instead of herself, her freedom or her subjugation, her rights or their denial -- instead of who lives behind this portable wall and the moderating role she has often played in the Islamic world.

Farzaneh Melani, professor of Persian literature and women's studies at the University of Virginia

Troll the MySpace nation if you want to see the masses clothed in veils. Digital reality fixates our attention on selected features and ignores the rest. Avatars in busty-babe or handsome-hunk regalia never quite reveal what needs revealing. Why should they in this voyeuristic scape?

Walk the streets of Cleveland, Lakewood, Shaker Heights -- again you see the veil. America the beautiful is thickening the distance from the plexus to the epiderm. Our bowls of jelly jiggle when we laugh. What's more daunting to the human form, this roly-poly camouflage or yards of flowing burqa cloth?

Have you seen a live show lately? Tell me there is freedom in the land when audiences stoical and mute behold a panoply of artistry on stage, malaise ensconced in tepid praise for stunning feats of physical expression.

I'd love to see us slip outside our shadows. The concept of 'the veil' as something only worn by Muslim women blinds us to our formidable walls.

Wonder be

My brain homes in on words and music like the swarm of germinator bees returning to the hive. Sweet buzz of creation -- my lustful predilection for the muse. No two honeys taste the same. Unique as the composer's dream.

What is the role of music genres? Quell the chaos -- satisfy the need to know -- squelch the innuendo? Hard. But true.

Radio promoters, says a friend from California ("he should know") distill your style into a coded text the gurus scan to cull the honey hopeful sent by fools who drink the madness of the rose.

Entourage

Man, haunted by the world, acts. ...The works of the arist... must be interpreted as modifications of the world.
-- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (Sartre's Saint Genet)

Sometime in my youth I read the Goethes and the Kants, played the Kabalevskys, trembled in the shadows of Monet -- and lost my nerve. Great Art had come to call and Cinderella's nasty sisters told the prince to try another hovel -- this one held no candle to his flame.

There is great art -- a world class museum here is spending millions to house it more comfortably -- and there is the endless tide of ornaments the experts' hall of genius has no use for. If you're no Rembrandt, if the muse who taps your sholder is a char maid and the art you make has all been done before -- why bother?

Because you are haunted, says Ms. Sontag, by a world that can't forget you. The incompleteness of existence asks you to make love the only way you can -- body, mind and soul. You may decline, treasures buried, will intert. Or, you can modify the world.

Who will rule your love life? The tastemaker? The genius meter? The millionaires who fund museums? Or you, the country bumpkin with your sleek bewhiskered coachmen driving Cindi to the ball?

Contingency plan

Nothing reveals man the way war does.
-- Oriana Fallaci, journalist (1929-2006)

Having never lived a war, I can't test the writer's theory: war, the ultimate revealer.

I have seen people die, in ERs, in hospital rooms, at home. Tragedy in peacetime -- mourners flee the scene into a grueling sameness fed by ghosts of plenty.

I hope Fallaci's theory is ultimately proved wrong, that war becomes a phantom in our nomenclature, that depictions of war's grit and grandeur fade from gray to black. That humans turn to art and thought and openness to paradox to crystalize their deepest doubts and dreams. That sorrow need not marry pointlessness to give its shadow to the shape of life.

I wonder this: once art and culture rise to their revealer role, do war and war's accomplices reluctantly stand down?

Heartland security

On the corner of Fairmount and Green there used to stand my heart. I didn't want to see the twisted branches laced into a heart against the winter sky -- cliché abandoned me when I became an artist, or so I claimed. But when I waited for the light to change a million times I failed to not look up and see, unerringly, that kindred shape against the gray.

With summertime I took my heart on faith. A flush of green obscured the tree's design but I drove by unworried.

One day, my heart, my faith, was whisked away. The tree was gone, a mound of dirt remaining. Great wells of nothing gaped at me like traffic lights that yammered in the wind.

What was the point, this massacre? Who had stolen virtue from the womb? From whence betrayal this obscene?

Time that followed brought its erie changes. Shiny stanchions black as oil erected overnight began their vadaresque intrusions. Metal beams shot out across the roadway. Lights were hung that dwarfed the feeble fixtures they replaced.

I find myself imagining a stuffy room of conscience bound officials taking stock of dangers on their turf, calling in the experts -- upgrades recommended, moneys allocated, papers signed and notarized, security assured. Civic leaders meet the starry night with conscience clean, virtue spent and not a thought for what they lay to waste.

I drive along from time to time beneath the deadly safety.

I mourn the photograph I didn't take.

Aboriginal enactment

Wake
take a pee
sleep
wishing day break speedy.

Walk the ancient hallways
European old New Orleans.
Kids in smudgy faces
wound with grins
politely let you pass.

You need the door
but doors are blocked or locked
or leading down to rail-less stairs
you ask the office workers
and the dean of hope
the pale clerk in rimmed glasses
people nudge you
one by one.

Women speak from beards and heavy braids.
Their skin is earth.
They parley Boston and New Amsterdam
the street is only motion
yeast arising
termites hatching
rubies boiling
workers oozing royal jelly
to their future queen.

You find your music store
pour it in glass bottles
which you leave behind.

Language in a vacuum.

Sontag

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
-- Susan Sontag

Sarasponda

Experts say how sound effects the brain. Dissonance annoys it. Concord sends it purring to the couch. Igor Stravinsky's 1913 debut of his Rite of Spring, a case in point. Anarchistic sonic structures plunged the hearers' brains into a vat of neural chaos, followed by rebellion in the park. Sirs' and madams' canes and elbows bloodied up the lawn.

Sound is more like touch than cool abstraction. Sound waves burrow into open ears, excite the neural pathways to the brain. Here ensues a politics of nature, conservative and liberal at odds. The brain abhors the new, stores wine in ancient skins, tames the shrew with slews of rules and regs.

The enemy of sameness is the muse. Her work implores the snoozy brain to reconsider fondness for the lounge. With stealthiness and cunning Venus mollifies the comfort seeking neurons which, relinquishing their guard, allow the unexpected birth of a new child.

Most of us are ravenous for quandry. This scares us if we've lived too long in sameness. Enter art, the zenith of cognition, the subtle blend of homeliness and dashing, the beautiful extravagance of focus, the tender recognition of the new.

Art. The gaudy stranger at the gate.

Ramses one

That's how it is. Everybody says they like creativity, but when the chips are down, it's three people.
-- Christopher Reynolds, musician-songwriter-teacher

Christopher is featured in today's Plain Dealer (circulation 356,286), an expansive piece about his creative work. As usual, a brush with Chris is a breath of authenticity. I remember meeting him 10+ years ago at a CD release party for a compilation we were on. Even then, his version of a small talk was something like 'what is the state of your soul?' -- garbed in cloth less static.

With Christopher we peer at truths through infrared lens until we see ourselves reflected back, vaingloriously weary, trumpeters of wisdom on the airless dune, but somehow not so lonely as before.

At 45 he's far too young to be so wise but age, like freedom, has no rule but honesty and neither one enjoys a backward slide. I told him once my favorite song of his replayed a childhood ride in a red truck with a favorite uncle -- or was it grandpa? I think I understand the joy I felt in that. It's like he says in the paper today, creation boils down to three, regardless of the madding crowd as Ramses II parades across the Nile:

Thou and I and wheels of expectation.

Touch-me-not reunion

Ideas swarm like bumblers.
Tiny gilded trumpets
glitter on the wind.
A dozen pair of human lights
strain their beams
into the lair of shiny ripe.
Michelangelo's unprecedented pleasure
finger perfect yearning
sprung to life.

Nuff said*

Leaving before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom."
-- George Bush, at a GOP fundraiser in Lancaster, PA

*Mick left his extended comment list of why war in Iraq is wrong. Not sure if he's admonishing George Bush or this blogger, who posted the quote in disbelief ~ that a president who supposedly represents freedom can warp its meaning so completely. Regular readers of this blog read the 'Nuff said' in that context. The photo illustration of our oil addiction underlines this. Maybe I'll dispense with subtlety when it comes to the war in Iraq where the stakes are high and every vote against it counts. Thanks for posting your list, Mick.

Apparition

It's rude to rouse your lover in the street.
Better charm with virtue
lure the dazzled beast
into your ritual of blindness.
Some think we see the face behind the
politics of culture.
These would be the daftest of the batty.
I once assumed
the food of life is sight,
revelation steaming in a pot.
But ladles hung like rafters in my belly.
Stainless steel is useless.
From the fog
emerges madness
with a lantern in her hand.
Her eyes embolden you,
her chosen view.

Mr monday

Poor Carl -- there you are minding your own business = minding everybody else's -- and the web buttinskis exploit your exposé. Now you're the brunt of blogland. Says one blogboy of your report:

Honestly, it cheers me up every time I think about it, let alone watch it.

We've slumped to this, have we?

I'm working on a music video with a film artist. Music's what I know -- recording and live performance. So I'm asking old questions of new media. What gets left in, left out? Is everything artful in the right context? Can anything be compelling to the right audience? Composition, framing, texture, focus, perspective...

I watched 2 chinese students lipsync the BBoys. Saw the scientist dudes shoot off a couple hundred coke bottles. The bulldog riding a skateboard -- saw that too. Laughed. Admired. Here they get my last hurrah, there they go, into oblivion.

Is the measure of an art work the desire of humans to pay attention to it, stand in awe before it, wonder how another human could accomplish such a thing? Is the charm of non-art how superficially it grazes the skin of 7,942 bloggers for maybe 3.8 minutes?

I want to know what it feels like to step out of your footprint, turn to look, see it fill with strangers' sighs.

Portico

Have all the great songs already happened? Is today's songwriter mootly barking up a non-tree in a pantheon of lesser gods? We are a tribe of ubiquitous song. The digi-sphere loads us down with sound and should we listen for content... hmm...

Should we listen for content?

Maybe songs are evolving from containers of truth to parsecs of individuality with no pretensions of greatness. Hearers don't intend to be moved within so much as swept along on a trail of amorphous comet clusters, bathed in sonic light.

Visage

Sometimes truth yanks me skyward to its natural parapet from which I view my life unfolding as a gossamer veil on drifting sanded limbs of lush toned beauty. This, not the shuttered hurt of the flood plain, is my birthright, one I've yet to fully embrace. Once I do, there is to be no stopping me from knowing what I know.

The first brush of immortality tastes like hyacinth.

Divatrance

Ear drums grafted into songs slung on pony hides that slide into the last galaxy on polished hooves. Who are the trapezers who pay 5 bucks to hear three people beat up a frenzy? How do we fly out over the ramparts with them, hover on the mist? We are descended from dinos, ancestors of birds -- we fly in our dreams by the cells of our past. DNA remembers. The pterodactyl heard a hit on the song parade last Friday when the static on the mountain leaned just right into the wind.

I want to know when humans tuned their guts on academic side shows, when songs became ditties and hymn singers yawned in the pews. I yearn to hold latch keys between ten digits, blue glass that shatters on the hard rock hall and makes you fidget your scruffy dance toe until you want to sanctify the wrinkle in your eye.

Handbaskets

Yesterday I caught a radio piece about online 'museums.' The hook: do online collections qualify as museums? The Museum of Fred features thrift store paintings from the collection of Fred Beshid. Another site displays scans of skate park IDs.

Students of Museology like to quote Mirriam-Webster's (online collection of) definitions:

museum: an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value; also : a place where objects are exhibited

Fred, sniffs the museologist on air, can hardly be counted on to enlighten us about art. It's the old high brow low brow debate with intrepid interneteers chafing at the experts.

Today the paper reports another debate. This one's about whether the present collection of global conflicts qualifies as World War III. Newt Gingrich and George Bush say it does. Academics ponder various definitions.

When people today talk about World War III, what they mean mainly is that there is a great threat or ideology that transcends national boundaries and brings nations together to fight it.
-- Jennifer Delton, associate history professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY

We live in a world of war, rather than a world war. But nothing's connected. The world is so regionalized.
-- Donald Miller, history professor at Lafayette College in Easton, PA

The world war is a war not of nation-states, it's the rich against the poor, it's men against women.
-- Donald Goldstein, professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh

What do the low brows say? Ask Talia, who's 2 and too young for college. She lives in Nahariya, Israel. Her parents, wanting to calm her, say the bombs are only falling eggs.

When two rockets suddenly landed back-to-back in the distance, Talia offered her own analysis: 'The Eggs are breaking, the eggs are breaking.'

Puzzlathon

Did you see WordPlay, the crossword puzzle move? Puzzlers tell the camera they're addicted to putting a lot of useless information into small boxes. Their glee at besting their puzzler competitors at the annual crossword puzzle tournament is palpable. By the time you sweat your way through the final round with the front runners, you want to go out and... Well, I wanted to go home and play guitar, my gleeful addiction.

My point at bringing up the movie is the who's who of puzzle fiends it outed. Ken Burns, documentarian. Mike Mussina, Yankee pitcher. Indigo Girls, folkies. Jon Stewart, comedian. Bill Clinton, statesman. Not one of them makes a product you 'need' to live, you know, like food or clothes or espresso machines and stuff. These dude(ette)s are devoted to filling in little squares of our lives with films, ballgames, laughs, ballads and maybe some kind of peace treaty or high court nomination. There's so much 'useless content' provided by all us artist types and whether the world takes note or not, we're gonna do our puzzles, religiously, and jump at the chance to crow about our latest triumph to... the cat or the blue sky or the dear impresario who loves our little art form as much as we.

Someday I will sing for the whole world. I've always known this without knowing how such a thing might actually come to be. Lately I catch myself thinking it's probably what I'm doing already, absent about twelve billion ear drums.

Fractal music

I only know how to do two things. Garden and paint.
-- Claude Monet

William F. Allman, in The Stone Age Present, quotes studies on the physics of sound that suggest music structure

echoes the structures found in natural formations such as mountain ranges, trees, and perhaps even the brain itself... The ebb and flow of river banks, variations in the beating of the human heart, the electrical activity of the brain's cells, the branching shape of a tree, lung, or river delta, all share this mixture of random and predictable variation... Indeed, several modern composers are experimenting with creating fractal music, using the equations of nature to generate music that sounds remarkably like the melodies that come from the human mind.

If the random-predictable equations of nature generate melodies akin to the ones composed by human minds, I wonder what the equations of thermo nuclear explosions, mall sprawl, oil spilling into Prince William Sound, Big Mac attacks on our tele tubby kinder might sound like. Too many variables? Too much random, not enough predictable? Read the headlines, deary -- the stories chime the bell curve.

Intriguing -- the melody I come up with might be tracing the curvature of my brain. And if my brain's a steel trap this fine day --- snapping up PR particulars and PA imbroglios -- out pops a rusted cog of a tune. Writers often lament how songs wont come to them on tour. All that time between shows and sound checks and gas pumps, your inner mind is mute, its curvature sequestered like the Speedway clerk, sliding you the ballpoint under the plexiglas enclosure.

Other days, between the birdsong and the showers, you let your wonder undulate at nothing; Monet is in her garden on her knees.

Quotes

The people of New Orleans weren't just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago -- to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.
-- Barack Obama

I have a grandson who's already received a Purple Heart in Baghdad, and they just put him back to duty. One Purple Heart wasn't enough... I just wish George Bush would step up to the microphone and say, "Folks, it's about oil."
-- Merle Haggard, the country legend who wrote the pro-Vietnam War song 'The Fightin' Side of Me.'

It's the oil, stupid.
-- Bob Herbert, NY Times

But this war never ends. It just goes on and on, in different places.
-- Laurie Anderson, The End of the Moon

Nothing remains but what rises above the abyss of today's monstrous problems, as above every abyss of every time: the wing-beat of the spirit and the creative word.
-- Martin Buber

...it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog nosing before you and a dog nosing behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.
-- John Millington Synge

I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They'd serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, vibrate with life, and stay up all night.
-- Amy Hempel, in In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried

A mature woman in Europe is considered sexually powerful.
-- Catherine Deneuve, NY Times

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.
-- Katharine Hepburn

Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.
-- Audrey Niffenegger, in The Time Traveler's Wife

The purpose of human life is to create ~ to penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution.
-- Paul Klee

If an idea in a poem is too complicated and too arcane, the poem begins to lose its emotional power. Conversely, if the poem is too emotional, its intelligence will diminish. A good poet intuitively knows how to strike a balance between thoughts and emotions.
-- Ha Jin, in Crazed

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle

It seemed to me... writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege. Augustus Caesar had sent... Ovid into exile. Why would Caesar fear Ovid, except that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry?
-- Tobias Wolff, in Old School

I believe the truth is we form a family with other poets, living and dead, or we risk going nowhere.
-- Philip Levine in So Ask: Essays, Conversations and Interviews

Music can't be owned by musicians. It comes through the universe. At best, we're skilled presenters.
-- Serj Tankian, singer with Systems of a Down

The conventional wisdom is that a singer sings because they're feeling something strongly and the song is the way to express that. I think it's the other way around. The song is the lever or the tool that allows the emotion to be extracted.
-- David Byrne, singer

Singing is 90% brains and 10% voice.
-- Marilyn Horne

All these guys play so fast, but the guy that wins is the guy that plays the melody and reaches the heart.
-- Les Paul

I was contemptuous of "facts" for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
-- Joyce Carol Oates, in The Girl with the Blackened Eye

Diamonds are magic, she said, and that is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved.
-- Charles Baxter, in Gryphon

I don't know what I think until I write it down.
-- Joan Didion

When I was 11, I began keeping a diary. Most people don't need proof of their existence. But I always needed that. Being alive is not enough for me.
-- Agnes Jaoul, Parisian filmmaker

There is always a delightful sense of movement, vibration and life, ... color and luminosity (in the work of Claude Monet).
-- Theodore Robinson, 1892 in The Century

I only know how to do two things. Garden and paint.
-- Claude Monet

Moats

I was contemptuous of "facts" for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
-- Joyce Carol Oates, in The Girl with the Blackened Eye

People tend to appreciate great songs, so the typical songwriter interview digs into bard 'secrets' with questions like,

Do you write lyric or melody first?
Do you write every day?
What (or who) inspires you?
Do you keep a little book handy to jot down ideas?

I can imagine Bob Dylan, should he be enticed to suffer the little children, evading every one.

The educated mind assumes you can penetrate mystery by amassing facts about it, but I'm skeptical. I think you get to sense the unknowable by plunging in to fiction, your fiction, whatever one occurs to you in passing.

There was an art piece at iNGENUiTY yesterday that called itself Kaleidoscopic Cleveland. A darkened space folded a smattering of trudgy humans (factoid: 93 degrees at 48% humidity downtown) into a smallish room where heaps of glittery materials formed a circle on the floor. Images of words and color leapt against the walls too quick for minds to capture. I re-emerged, apparently unmoved as new earth walkers filed past me when, suddenly, a sliver of mystery pierced my spine. There I was, a shifting fleck in a kaleidoscope of anonymous droids, dust mote in a late afternoon kitchen, ordinary spectacle of soundless light. Did the artist intend for me to feel this way?

Why would I even need to know?

As lowly does

So the paperclip guy trades up and up until he has in a year a humble house in which to think and write and wow the world with words on paper, fastened with a clip.

I dig inside my pocket
find a pick
a plastic pick
which I will trade you for a coconut
you'll hand me if you're stranded
on a desert lonesome island
with your Martin (rather spartan)
I will float this nut to Vegas
on the Milky Way and bargain
with a Vegan up from Venus
who will give me hugs and kisses
if I make pina coladas
for his mama who disarms me
when I trade my hugs for coffee and
a kiss or two for chocolate
which I hear is better for you
when it's dark and rather bitter
so I hire a baby sitter
and a baby and her sister
and we all sit down for dinner
(cocoa quiche with buttered cherries)
and they serve me bloody marys
which I never touch for breakfast
but the neighbor lady lets us
have a taste of her meringues
she says are great with Russian vodka
and I crush her portulaca
when I sidle off with latkes
in my fancy fanny bag for which
a wealthy Polish heiress says
she'll give her gold tiara
and a view from her veranda
which I'm eying as I wonder
how's the weather in Tahiti
how's the music in the city
how's your pick and are you pretty
sure you've heard the last from me?

Rollerblades

Well, I had a stupid income for what I do.
-- Angelina Jolie, actor, on why she gives one-third of her earnings to charity

I am poor not in material things but in the truth. I've been called a thief, the biggest ever... [Philippine officials] think they have taken everything away from me, including my shoes.
-- Imelda Marcos

What happens to a person visited by extravagant wealth? Imelda stockpiled shoes. Million-bucks-per-show Seinfeld collects cars. Bono trots the globe for the down trodden. Angelina, Bill & Melinda, Peter B. give it away.

I'm curious about the effect of wealth on an artist's creativity. Starving artist -- a nice internal rhyme -- but is there synergy between hunger and output, desire and truth, satiation and barren wombs? Not being a rich girl, I can only speculate.

Water seeks its level. Artists seek theirs. Does a world stage pull unknown capacity from an artist? Or would the Claude Monets, Bob Dylans, JK Rawlings paint their master works on cave walls if canvases were scarce?

How should I know? There's only this: minute by minute you do what's possible with an eye, an ear, a skin cell to the impossible. You don't need money or fame or servants or limpid pools to help or hinder, you need your soul wide open and your wallet sewn of grass.

3D-construction

On the way to the pool today I caught a radio piece about Susan Barry who, at fifty, couldn't see in 3D. Her visual world was mono, everything laid out on the same plane. Born cross-eyed, which surgery corrected when she was two, Susan's brain lacked a capacity to interpret data sent to it from her eyes to perceive depth. Nobel prize winning scientists declared the condition irreversible, so that was supposedly that. Until she consulted a specialist who taught her a series of exercises and proved that even Nobel prize winning scientists can get it wrong.

One morning, after dutifully practicing the eye-brain routine, Susan got in her car and found 'the steering wheel floating above the dashboard.' Since I was glued to the story in the pool parking lot, I looked down to see, indeed, my steering wheel was hovering in mid air. Surreal. The narrator went on to describe the woman reaching up to adjust her rear view mirror which, amazingly, popped out at her in space. I looked up to see my mirror behaving in much the same obstreperous fashion. The story ended beautifully with Susan Barry hurrying from work on a lunch break, stopped in her tracks by the snow. Instead of falling in a uniform plane shared by buildings, shrubbery and pedestrians, the pudgy flakes drifted in a tapestry of depth which drew Susan into their choreography, cradled her with joy.

And as I stepped out on the asphalt under the storm cast skies of late June, I was two years old again, blinking at a visionary's wonderland that laughed at this flatlander's mindset, caroling, 'honey, let's play!'

Solstice

Last night's concert was rain on the roof in the middle of the night. Live music, live audience, live thunder punctuating wet extravaganza. From my onstage view, I could write a book of imagined stories about the listeners who entertained the entertainers. Instead, consider the rainbow that is Eric.

I can't say how we met; it happened via the radio, I the musical guest, Eric the regular listener. When he did eventually come to a concert, he struck me as shy, gently incapable of small talk. His thoughts run deep and unrelenting. Should you tap into Eric's underground, prepare for graceful candor.

After that concert Eric said, 'Susan, the only difference between you and a mega celebrity performer is that you don't know your music is in that league.' Eric has a way of challenging your wisdom, rewiring your expectations.

During the gabfest after last night's show, Eric the loquacious barely pauses to gather his thoughts. They spill over and into my own.

'Susan,' he says, 'when you talk to people you are completely present to them.'

'I guess it's just my thang,' equivocates Susan. 'I don't really know another way to be with people.'

Eric steps across to his next observation. 'Some can feel more free to communicate openly with you, a public persona, than to someone they might know better. This is a burden I'm not sure I could handle.'

Usually when you hear mega celebrities grouse about their lack of privacy, it's a litany of crude paparazzi maneuvers and obnoxious fans in the checkout line. You don't hear them say, 'people confide in me with more trust than I can handle.' Eric thinks I represent something to people because of what I sing and how I perform. I offer a mirror, a canvas, a challenge to conventional wisdom, a sharpening of the lens.

In this capacity, Eric the philosopher priest and Susan the singing mermaid are droplets in the self same sea.

Underworld

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.
-- Katharine Hepburn

There's a book that recommends the morning splat (my term) -- a writing catharsis where every inchoate denizen of angst and spin is sprawled across the page at dawn to cleanse the dreamer for her art. I don't buy this theory. It might have been Ms. Hepburn who said a man doesn't need to know everything a woman thinks and feels and so it goes, I guess, with muse and artist.

At the railing of an ancient steamer, bundled in tweed coats and soft scarves, we stare at the sea, let silence speak, more eloquent than we in all our bluster. Glistening creatures rise and fall and spray our open eyes with plunging tails.

Our tongues rapt in reverence. Our minds wrapped in awe.

Eden's tongue

Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.

The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it.

--Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

We who paint language on yawning canvases taste truth with parched tongue. Understanding is a thirst quenched, tenuous and rare, by the masters. Why does a mind crave masterful prose, poem, lyric? That she may see. That she may live brief moments of clarity within her cluttered span.

The information age is here. Googlbloggopedia connects us to a swarming ether fog of fact and fiction. We are sucked into a pixelated vortex of ones and ohs, these and those, cons and pros. We know this even as we hazard educated guesses, publish hunches, wax and wane the starry night away.

Some words draw attention to themselves or to the mastermind who chose them. Smudgy windows. Meanwhile, l'artisan exhales her crystal globe around a paradise so good it must be true.

Gen dig

Sometimes you have just a couple of squat minutes to press a fingerprint on a lined page before the practice itch stitches you to your stratocaster for two prescient hours of godland. So here it is and there it went.

Two boys, preteens, on a bench by the pool, fully clad, porky but not rotund. The smaller one twiddles a baseball cap in dimpled hands, the larger fondles a silver walkman into which his ears are plugged, dipping his head in rhythmic jabs at the cool morning, ignoring his companion as utterly as olympus scorns the toad. From my vantage in a lap lane 10 foot hence, I watch them.

Music man, affecting coolness, is not cool in stature nor aplomb which would make him almost laughable were this voyeur not a mother by her rights and therefore fond of children in their wayward ways of aging, foibled and oblivious, fits and spurts and acrobatic anecdotes withstanding. When my kickboard brings me back around to budding teendom, there is cool one chatting on his cell phone, pacing in his pocket laden shorts and burnished tee, replicating someone with a deal to broker. He now flips his phone shut, snaps it in his holster, rejoins the mute companion.

Just as I would sigh for the lost boys of tetherland, doesn't this mini-borg turn to his bench sitting cohort with a sweet grin and say a word of air on cords through tongue and lips and doesn't the twirling cap master hunker down to pour his lonely heart into the daybreak which has Susan in her water home, admiring.

Disciple

A song requires a feeling, a knowing, a desire. A certain fulness. This fullness asks for space. In the mind. In the body. I think it may require a need. A songwriter needs to shun the prepackaged conclusions hyped by media, religion, business, politics and even, dare we say, relations. She needs her slate blank. Because if she already knows what her song has got to say, believe me, she might as well chronicle the rain -- yesterday's, today's, tomorrow's -- every dull rumbling of a temperate clime. I don't say a writer seeks adventure. Thrill. Abandon. Rock stars and hippies preach that mumbo and maybe a song leaks through but rarely a masterpiece. The master sets her peace on a pristine tablet long before commandments chisel in. She crouches in her work worn rags and asks the world one favor.

Come.

Things you know

Two thin women. The tall one, neatly clad, is hand in hand with a lady who's easily lost six inches to the curving of her spine. Out from under penciled eyebrows and rouged cheeks this small creature grins at me warm as the midday sun on Thursday's cars and asphalt. Her escort is not a nurse, home helper, neighbor -- she is the woman's daughter. I know this as I eavesdrop on their lives.

'What a fantastic store!' says the smiler.

'They fill the bags just right. I told the checkout woman this is a farther drive for us but we like it.'

'Oh yes!'

This is all quite loud -- I'm setting my bags down several cars over.

'It's nicer to come where the people are the same.'

The same what? Same as 'we' are? Same as each other? Same ones who've always worked here? I don't know, but I'm fairly sure these two do.

I'm watching them before I back out of my space. The mother's ample stretch pants float above her ankle socks and gym shoes. Her checkered jacket celebrates the outing. I'd like to say she wears a Yankee cap down over her fine white hair but I can't make out the logo as she turns to clamor up the steps into the van. Daughter pulls the seat belt deftly out across her mother's chest and tiny arms.

And here I am all soggy eyed, recalling.

I once held my mother's veiny hand, took her on excursions that slowed me down and perked her up, talked in code and pushed away the coming of her leaving. Enchantment followed us, and perfect strangers, with our charms.

Ghandi walking

His greatness lay in his doing what everyone else could do, but doesn't.
-- Louis Fischer, The Life of Mohandas K. Gandhi

Any songwriter can start a band.
Any player can get better.
Any brain can launch a business.
Any jock can handle touring.
Any will can self control.
Any dame can gaze beyond her navel,
hear the neighbor's belly,
feed the children amber waves of grain.
Any fool can fall in love,
or schmooze the anaconda in the briar.

Love the righteous, baby,
when you set your world afire.

Obsidian

No one wants to grow up. But everyone needs to grow.
-- Jo-Ann Armao, The Washington Post

The 'grown-up' bumps her head on the glass ceiling of molten sand and broiled air. She crouches in the vestibule of time, making notes on match books and candy wrappers, puzzling the odds of her escape.

All the world, a google eye of warning, calls her mad when she glides her mind beyond the artificial strictures of her station.

Growing. Glowing. Gone.

Peace

Clichés' Eden

It cannot therefore be said that God 'wonders' -- because the knowledge of God is perfect... Only a being who does not know fully can wonder.
-- Josef Pieper, The Philosophical Act

So. God. You can't wonder.

You say you're the rich dude in the gated community, eternally bored by your velveteen lawns and angel buds, camping out with us hobos one fine night? Here we are, calling you wise and, what d'ya know, you're just a logic man, hungry for the salty stew.

Are you telling me (pass the corn) you'd rather be human, it's no fun knowing how the movie ends and you don't dream because imagination's moot? You're not making sense, brother -- what's not to like about the infini-cruise you got floating up there? No fuss. No muss. No bills. No ballyhoo. You're kidding, right? This is one of your domestic eavesdropping stints, that's it, right?

Got to admit, though, you had me going. Seemed almost likely (life's that crazy) you might need us more'n we need your type, all dripping in hyperbole and what not (Thought hobos stuck to small words, did ya? Honest mistake -- naw -- didn't steal a thing, it comes from reading -- still free, last time I checked). Imagine, the boss man bummin in the skids with a bunch of losers, tryin to convince us he's loony up there in his great white way. Got milk, mister? Ha ha! Just yankin your chain! Heard about your wife, though. Derned shame how she died in childbirth. Say again? Oh -- it was her heart give out cuz her kids never called her by name and you, her good companion, we kinda forgot about too?

You know, you do have a story or two up your sleeve (is that polyester -- I notice it don't wrinkle) -- and as for being Mr. Know-it-all, I beg (respectfully 'course) to disagree. I doubt you'd a come all this way lookin for handouts if you already figured we'd share what little we had with a big shot like you. I doubt you even know my name. Well it's Leander and if you're wonderin if I'm a man or a woman, how old and what manner of believer or disbeliever, welcome to planet earth. Wonderin's common as dirt around here and you do appear to have a knack for pickin philosophers for friends.

Go on. Dig in. Grub's gettin cold.

Toil and moil

I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole. I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

The German painter, novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist, philosopher and chief minister of state at Weimar died in 1832. The quote is found in Josef Pieper's essay, Musse und Kult (Leisure the Basis of Culture) which makes a case for 'a contemplative attitude, a receptive attitude... the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.' If you would drink this holy brew, try silence:

Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed."

Pieper's 1950's world is enamored with work. Rational thought is king. Action and effort are gods. The essay lays out a society's frenetic absorption in accomplishing goals to the point of... sadness. Cognitive striving rooted in a person's 'despairing refusal to be oneself.' (Kierkegaard)

Metaphysically and theologically... a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being... Behind or beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not one with himself, or, as the medieval writers would have said, face to face with the divine good within him, he is prey to sadness.

From Hemingway to Cobain to (your name here), artists have a leaning toward sadness. My theory, that hypersensitivity to the groanings of reality gnaws at the artist heart, is upended by Pieper, who pairs sadness with a profound lack of sensitivity, a driven hyper insensitivity to that divine good inside you. Prozac according to Pieper: be quiet and listen up.

It is in these silent and receptive moments that the soul of man is sometimes visited by an awareness of what holds the world together, only for a moment, perhaps, and the lightening vision of his intuition has to be recaptured and rediscovered in hard work.

And here, it seems, perfectionism finds a worthy companion to her unrelenting mad devotion.

Vetted sperm

'So what's the life span of the African water frog?' she asks.

'No idea,' says the woman handing her the can of floating food sticks and calling, 'Hey Lester, do you know how long water frogs are supposed to live?' to the groomer heading out to lunch.

The frog owner elaborates. 'The frog's 4 inches long and still kicking. It was a tadpole when my son was in kindergarten. Sunday, he graduates from college.'

'No kidding?' -- three mammals grin in unison at the amphibian's accomplishment.

'Your frog's got some serious longevity going there,' says the groomer.

Serious longevity.

A friend tells me she stopped writing songs once she moved beyond her divorce. The songs soothed the monster but as grief gave out, my friend laid down her pen. We stand beside the circulation desk, in sisterhood, pondering. The poet's strangled need yields squawks of rage; acceptance finds her famished but inert.

'Words fail me.' Oh sure, observes the lexicon, blame your writer's block on words you can't come up with. Diaspora is not of words but of the pen holder's nerve endings, dissolving in shades of gray. What does it take to bundle synapses into the fire breathing, word snorting, talon flexing wonderbeast? Agony gets the job done. But who endures that hell for long?

Longevity.

Pollywog in captivity: sprout legs, kick up sediment, scrounge for factory food in a glassed pond. Or, it's goddess incarnate, checking out the humanoids.

Ribbit, dollbaby, let's go boogie down tonight.

738 mph

Ha Jin. Decorated Chinese-American writer invited by Cleveland's public library to read his work. He chooses a short story about a composer's devotion to a mute parrot. The library's air, stagnant. The author's accent, heavy as my narcoleptic lids. I'm impressed by the holding power of the man's non-theatric presentation. Easily two hundred Clevelanders belie the culture's inclination toward glitz. This crowd could be just as happy in our own recliners, hammocks, porch swings -- surveilling the writer's words incognito. But here we all are, literature groupies, entranced.

I scribble some words that don't make sense now, two days later. 'Affectionate without being soft. Sorrowful without anger.' Ha Jin might have used these words to describe his protagonist. They fit the writer perfectly, too. A man without guile or affectation.

After the reading, he answers questions. He would not recommend to anyone to be a writer. Friday's newspaper quoted him on the physical demands of writing the novel:

Just to carry the book around in you is exhausting. A good part of your mind must be devoted to it.

So we circle around like the story's laconic parrot to the question of devotion. A young man asks Ha Jin if he writes for his audience or for himself. The writer says an ideal audience is neither a group (too fickle) nor yourself (too partial?). Find one person you respect and devote your writing to this audience of one.

I accept the golden kernels from the master's hand. He's earned my trust several books ago. I think about the yackety parrots of this world, each with her own glib affront to stillness. I wonder about the decorated Chinese American author and his solitary audience. I consider the burden of carrying around your book, your composition, your painting for the sake of one winged miracle of receptivity.

I listen to Ha Jin and marvel at the velocity of silence.

Tarnished opal

Jack Benny had an adage: 'A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.' An art form has a language its best practitioners master as the wannabes effortlessly mangle the nuances. How mysterious, creative minds. How can one spin out poems, another speak oil-on-canvas or hand-on-keyboard? Why can most of us dream stories while very few dreamers translate their imaginations into novels?

Another mystery: Harvard's Kaavya Viswanathan, the young writer accused of plagiarizing Megan McCafferty's work. Was Viswanathan naive enough to think nobody would notice the similarities or, as she says, had she internalized the passages so completely, she thought they were her own?

Readers, bloggers, finger waggers assume the worst, a get-rich-heist of another author's intellectual property. But many a songwriter has wondered, when a phrase comes dazzlingly into consciousness, 'did I really write this, or did I hear it someplace?' The cauldron's a thick soup of old bones and grizzled memories.

Intellectual property is vulnerable to poaching. Who will keep watch? Maybe someday a computer will have 'plagiary check' to run creations through, so the art vigilantes can take a break and, who knows, go throw some clay, carve some wood, sculpt their own fictional masterpieces.

Girdered loins

Acrophobia's my middle name, notwithstanding the Swiss blood flooding my veins. This worker apparently has no such qualms about high places. The Empire State Building on which he sits was the world's tallest when it opened 75 years ago today. Immigrants and Mohawk ironworkers melded steel, aluminum, granite and limestone into a life sized tribute to our nation's primal instinct. Pride un-toppled by the World War II bomber that lost its way in a fog, butted the fortress' north side, killed three crew members and eleven office workers. Pride incumbent still.

It's the worker's nonchalance, not the panorama, that takes my breath away. If you told me the gentleman fell to his doom after wrestling with strongmen, I'd be shocked but not surprised. If you wanted to show me an artful film about the struggle, I'd pass.

United 93 debuted to the tune of $11.6 million over the weekend, music to Hollywood's collective ears. Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal Pictures says,

It's about the fact that the American public spoke out... This is a wonderful result. What they said was that it wasn't too soon for a film about Sept. 11.

Fling wide the gates, let the disaster movies roll. Shall we stoke down popcorn and slurp cokes from our stadium seating as the entertainment moguls fatten up their bottom line?

Our local paper had the grace, in weeks following 9/11, to forgo the ads in pages covering the tragedy. No maidenform bras, no cellphone deals, no turbo charged wonder cars vying for our bucks. I appreciated the restraint. In retrospect, I guess nobody knew how to do business as usual with a gutted public. Over time, the gleam of glamour stuff resumed its chummy relations with the news.

I won't be going to United 93. I see it as a for-profit distraction from the liberties being whisked away as we watch. Around here, musicians have their sound unplugged by stage owners who don't like the band's anti-Bush tee shirts (or lyrics). A woman faces jail time for 'abusing' policemen who manhandled her for refusing to take down anti-Bush flyers.

Freedom's on a lunch break, nodding off. Taller the skyscraper, more perilous the fall.

Oblations and obligations

I ask my father what his mom was like. I'm curious because a childhood friend of his who hadn't seen me for a good decade once burst into a big grin to say, "Susan, you remind me so much of your Grandma Frieda!" Thinking the resemblance might be deeper than skin, I wonder what else I inherited from our clan's Swiss matriarch.

I have her obituary, a yellowed clipping from a country paper of the day. She was a church woman, she helped people and organized other people to do the same.

Mrs. Weber, having raised three sons of her own, was particularly interested in the religious welfare of young people and many times would go out of her way to see that some boy or girl had a ride to church or Sunday School. One of the last things she did was help to organize the Singing Club of the Dingman’s Ferry Methodist Church. Without her help, and that of her devoted friend, Mrs. Paul Schuepp, this Club would never have been started, since almost half the young people relied upon these two kind ladies for transportation.

Dad has told many a story about their early days in a New Jersey enclave of Swiss immigrants. His mother learned English, put up with cockroaches and kerosene lights after leaving a bug free, electricity emancipated life in Europe, raised three sons and buried her husband before he came to old age. Spinster sisters Lisa and Liny joined her at the homestead in PA adjoining Child's Park, a place of magic for the grandkids. The Swiss inflected voices of my grandmother and her sisters laced their plum and apple pies with a certain old world flavor.

As far as I know, Grandma Frieda published no words (her husband Theo and his father were the poets). She left us no recording, she never formed a band or went on tour. So what had she passed to me besides a strong chin and earnest eyes? What was she like?

My Dad, just rebounding from his own health imbroglio, spares few words about his mother. "People said she was serious. But she was friendly. And she was happy."

And if she left me these ingredients for my own swiss-english pie, I smell a rite of passage baking.

Squirrel traps

What fascinates me about the film, Capote, is the elusiveness of the protagonist's character. It's as though Capote is walking around in one of his books, not quite sure if he's the hero or the villain. Harper Lee, his friend and counterpoint, punctures the messianic bubble with her blades of integrity.

Business schools take a page from Harper Lee.

At Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, about half the grades are handed out for work that's done in teams; members of each team provide one another with anonymous feedback, and the school has hired counselors to help students absorb the lessons from this criticism. "In the past, you could go through business school and nobody would say you were coming across as a jerk," says Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School. "But that might have been the most important factor in your future success as a manager."

Experienced sound engineers pay attention to the way a recording's inner workings come across to the listener. George Massenburg recently told a Sweetwater masterclass:

There are two types of balance with any kind of mix: internal balance, referring to the relationship of the sounds in a piece of music to one another, and external balance, which is how your mix relates to the outside world...

I see the internal balance in a mix as not being so technical, I see it as more musical. An external balance would be, "okay, when I play it in my car, I can't hear the kick." Or "I can't hear the cowbell," or the playback circumstance is such that it just doesn't work.

On the world stage, our I'm-the-decider president reminds us who's boss as Rumsfeld digs the mass grave in clueless spades, behavior coaches nowhere to be found.

Why we fight

Fear is the main reason. Hubris the second. Ignorance the limping third. Ironically, it all boils down to love, the milk and honey of desire.

What's the point of a loveless life? What if there is not enough love for you to get your portion? You can't make people love you. It's not a thing you earn. It's not a right. It's a gift. So you wake up in the morning, you don't feel particularly loved (or lovable?) and angst crawls in under the covers. Abandonment. Loneliness. Emptiness. Better fill the void. Stockpile ambition, ostentation. Erect billboards that tell the world, 'look! I exist! I've got all this stuff. I'm important! You gotta love me, right? Right?'

You're after love, you fall for pride instead. Ah, but hubris wears the tailored suit with a rosebud boutonniere. Hubris tips the maitre d' in twenties. Hubris parks the SUV in VIP garages. You think I'm talking rich people here? You can have your biggie fries and a chip on your shoulder, both. Vanity is classless, and clueless. From Donald Rumsfeld to Ronald McDonald, all you need is empty calories in your hungry gut to send you off to fight your wars. Once you're weaned of love by demon pride, respect is what you're after and nothing fills the bill like the cantankerous guns of Generalissimo Ignoramus.

Contrary to the staid annals of rational inquiry, thought is not well served by the passionless mind. Passion comes bundled with conscience. Love is a lubricant, if you will. Without it, heat and friction wear your brain to smithereens. You begin to think in riddles. What's the best way to signal Stalin we can crush him? Nuke the Japanese! How to tell jihadists we're the superpower here? Occupy Iraq! Terrorize civilians, here and abroad, in the wake of unmitigated angst, unconscionable ego, unfathomable ignorance.

As I watched Why We Fight, frame after frame of military-industrial-congressional-thinktanking crowded me, gasping, into the shadows. Eisenhower warned us not to follow love lorn weapons dealers to this monstrous state. We ignored him and now we are citizens of New Rome. Who am I, a serf, to stir the ashes?

If there is a merest spark of hope in this, it is to be found in the finest capacity of a human will. In a word, love. Not the smarmy pretense that got us here, blind and foolish, breathless at the sight of the headless maiden's breast. My countrymen and women can do better than swallow Caesar's vapid lies.

We can study the curves in the broad sands of compassion. We can liberate our flawed logic from a tendency to expect love, respect and wisdom to bore into us from without. We can fight with impassioned desire to create an empire of expansive beauty that emanates from within each unblemished being.

And when our children ask us why we fight, we'll have an answer. We fight for milk and honey, dear, we fight for you, we fight because we love.

Yellow submarine

On a dust plain, much is made of a hot air balloon the Beatles plan to ride. One by one the dear lads coaster in on parachutes, John and Paul intrepid, Ringo with a prone thud, George an afterthought. Their handlers herd them brusquely to the blimpish buggy. John and Paul go arm in arm, the sherpas. The airship owner sways and stokes the flame. Reporters ask him where he learned his trade -- he shrugs and says he never really learned it.

Beatles entouragers climb inside to party for the boys who can't be bothered. Someone's whisked them to a private berth. The crowd gets motleyer and louder as the hot air rises. At the last minute, a young man offers me the sky. "Sit on this platform, you can join the party once we're in the clouds." I don't believe him, really, but I'd love to meet the Beatles so I fool myself, pretending I can handle heights -- I do it in my sleep!

Cut to later. Amidst the mill of revelers, a sober woman dubious of entropy, a lighter and a kid anointing boxes that fall into the cosmos and explode.

Through a glass

Sometimes, in the studio, I forget the performance angels floating just beneath the skin of engineer, producer, session player, writer. But a strange thing happens when I listen back to a freshly minted song, like Wide Open, with a Hammond organ whirling its signature sound from intro through denouement. I remember watching Chris play the part, sideways to the keyboard, nonchalant and focused, both. But when I hear the finished song, I see a band in full regalia, pounding out the sounds, organ player juiced and joyful. My mind flips back and forth between these images of studio and stage, session and performance, focus and abandon.

To say there is a performance artist in every human is to recognize this flip-flop game of the mind we play out on formal and informal stages. Some of us never step beyond the studio -- kitchen, office, gym -- to serve our muse. Others of us leap onto stages at the least provocation, flashing our potential at the wide eyed crowds.

After all is said and sung and done in either sphere, there enters excellence. This is where the artist sheds her mortal skin and for some time bound eternity, reveals her muse's world. This can happen sitting sideways to a keyboard, it can happen under colored lights and amped up airwaves. Its requisite preamble is a passion honed to near perfection over years of unquestionable fondness for the muse.

Miracle road

Christian bikers did not spoil Walter's sound check last night, nor did the dog poop. When you book a rock show in a folkatorium on April 1st, I guess you take your chances. The bikers took their confab elsewhere and the next door neighbor's guard dog lost all interest in my bassist-manager and his freshly odoriferous loafer. Walter, the road warrior, spritzed his sole with holy water Fantastik and proceeded with load in.

Midway through sound check entered the Hendersons and Krista. Peter, having recently stared down countless health demons, looked terrific, though his smile-at-the-ready can often fool you. Ann and Krista settled him in and beamed their own beacons around the shipyard. One by one, the listeners -- weldor, therapist, contractor, teacher, chef, working mom, Marine -- docked at Scott's Folkatorium, dipped into Ann's meatless chile and Dottie-mother-of-Scott's potato salad and plopped down to feast on music.

A successful show feels to me like some kind of miracle. With theater, suspension of disbelief is to be expected, as stage sets, costumes and extra ordinary scenarios draw you in. Music, where imagination reigns, has neither bread nor circuses to prop up the puppet regime. You rely entirely on the integrity of your songs, the quality of your musicianship and the willingness of your audience (and you) to be transported. And inspired.

Last night's show seemed all the more miraculous because my laryngitis-laced voice was still recovering from the flu. It occurs to me at times like this how fragile is the borderline dividing earth and heaven. All the careful song craft and disciplined practice, in the end, brings you to a lover's leap where anything, from bikers' alleluias to canine skank to audience malaise might land you on the rocks below, hugging your broken bones.

As we tore down the set, Doris showed me some of her filigreed poems and one by Daniel, her son, as husband Kevin looked on and spoke of his sculpting muse. An artist family, honoring my art. The road to miracle is paved, it seems, with delicate invention.

Exocoetidae

Simple Machines describes his experience awaking from a dream. He discovers he can go to places in his subconscious that induce a childlike euphoria. The experiment has a surprise twist:

And then I "went" to one of these places (in my subconscious state, mind you) and it caused what I sensed as such an intense feeling of elation that it was too much, too intense, and not pleasurable -- so disturbingly so that it was enough to wake me up!

What is there about my mind that it allows me to experience a sense of well-being so intense that it was excruciating?

I wonder if our wiring maps our feelings in a continuous loop.

I once looked out from a 90 passenger tour boat scooting across the Caribbean where turquoise sun and flying fish are no surprise. My smile was nearly big enough to shade my eyes, impossible but not at all unlikely. When my brain arrived at Aphrodite overload, I realized later, I skulked away to our thrifty cabin by the engine room to ground myself in words on paper as paradise sped by.

Words on paper through the years have told me stories of tortured prisoners who reach a certain painless state beyond the agony. A woman told me once of running out her front door to a bleeding child who'd been hit by a truck. While she soothed and whispered him from this life to the next, he said it didn't hurt -- she saw a beautiful place reflected in his face.

I've written here before about the symphony conductor who suffered brain injury. Music that once charmed him was excruciating to his altered wiring.

Controlled euphoria, now there's a buzzword for the marketeers. Package a sound, a look, a taste, a feel, a scent that takes consumers to the crest of the wave but holds them back from Hades. Extravaganza makers accept the challenge. Arena rock shows take aim at the wonder bird, kick up the decibels, lay on the spectacle, song after song. Even after all that, the kids are OK, euphoria aroused and contained.

If you think elation's worth the gamble, race your wheels along the coast road, windows down, radio up. Belt the songs into fourth gear. The world is round, the ocean's wide, and even fish can fly.

Disambiguation

Vivid threads brush my thoughts since reading Memoirs of a Geisha. It's not her untamable yearning for a certain man that visits me, it is Sayuri herself, and the eyes through which her geisha culture asks me to see my world.

A geisha studies the art of filling the emptiness that haunts a man's unexamined impulses. She draws her clients out of their functionary minds with dance, music, ceremony, kimono, conversation, laughter and sometimes, if a man is worthy, the intimate touch.

Rock artist would seem as far from geisha as slug from silkworm, but look again. Performance rock elevates the listener to the region of complicit passion woven into existence, invisible to many. In the hands of the diva, her tools -- lyric, rhythm, sound, musicianship, choreography, costume -- dissolve into the audience's palpable pleasure. Like businessmen at a tea ceremony, listeners sip their own thoughts in the presence of the diva whose deference, like the geisha's, is to unquestionable beauty.

Peer review

Coldplay. Impeccable musicianship. Stunning visuals. Lush sounds. Infatigable energy. Flawless choreography. Expert production. Winning message (what was it again? -- oh -- right -- 'emotion - it's all good'). Friendly personas. 'What's not to like?' as I told the tipsy dancer to my right.

I liked it well enough. I liked my concert companion. I liked the spectacle. This morning when I went for the paper, I did a little Chris Martin scamper in the grass, so I guess it changed me. Got me lighter on my toes. What if Chris sprained himself doing one of his leaping knee slides? Ouch -- tour hiatus for sure. See how the show awakened my compassion? What if the fan behind us, beer in one hand, cocktail in the other, lost his equilibrium, or his dinner, in our laps? See -- Coldplay really got me thinking about intimacy and trust.

Quicken Loans Arena, the Q, is a well oiled pleasure engine. The rafters groan with techno borg enhancements, the cavernous UFO scoops up humans, snaps us into numbered pods, tranquilizes cerebellums with massive waves of light and sound until we're synchronizing nicely. Community. That's a good thing, no? So why do I feel like I just woke up from a funky dream?

The Coldplay boys are not to blame, they've earned their fame, the humanoids adore them. I'm the one who bucks the norm, likes a little warmth in all that playfulness. But hey, I'm an alien myself, guitar enamored troubadour who'd rather be the purple cow than see one.

Silver palaces

He eulogized the bad boys,
James and Jack,
but Marilyn was sacred.
Her sultry innocence
regarded him through tilted windows
hung on tacks
that pocked
the adolescent's lair.
A girl who breathed his air
and hoped for more
desired in vain.
She came no closer to his pen
than moistened hands
to sighs of platinum
in velvet seated night.
Mortality denuded him,
he burrowed in
delusions of the screen.

Every girl on earth
can bow to Marilyn,
her rival from beyond,
a feminist unblemished.
Once a daughter walks the halls
of headless boys
enamored of the goddess,
she is free.

To love the holy rites
of imperfection.

To offer them
unblinking
to a man.

Egret's brood

The furrows in her father's brow
who held the plow?
Botox he never knew ye.

Gott sei dank
with his beloved Jane to care for
doctors found recalcitrance's boney shadow
strangling his heart.
Just in time they told him
just in time
their science and the blade
would save him from arrest
and certain death --

Arrest for what
this Christian man
and why?

The temptress was cholesterol
his appetite desired her
Delilah to his samsonite
her time bomb peaceably begrudging him his days.

Good the surgeons pacified the terrorist.
Good the husband lived to tend his sweetheart to her grave.
Good the father's hand
implanted rows like wings
across the brow
as herons glide
from tree to tree
remembering
their path.

Emily

Wren of a girl in a gauze dress
tramps the wilderness
in the wry company of words

Beauty queens of boiler plated armor
serve her up on beds of ridicule

They ache and dine
on emptiness
to party out their feigned desire

In this age
a poet swathed in muslin
could be hallowed
but the paparazzi shutters
find her not

Diminutive Ms Dickinson
slips between
the misted evergreens

Boys with bras

Put a guitar in a woman's hands and let her play. If she gets good, damn her with feigned praise à la Patty Larkin's ditty, Not Bad for a Broad.

'Girls with guitars' sounds like 'bros with bras' -- not what you'd expect but, hey, kinky's cool, it's still a free country, man. Let 'er play -- she's not hurting anybody and it looks kinda sexy, no?

Pop culture says there's no such thing as bad press. Janet Jackson's name recognition got a respectable jolt when her body amour faltered on the football field. OK, maybe not so respectable, but the jolt was real, ask a zillion bug eye witnesses.

So, is the female guitarist blessed or cursed by the music writer's ubiquitous chant: gee, the dame's got a strat strapped around her gilded frame so what the heck, let's write an article about THAT!

More pop wisdom: sex sells. My elderly dad expressed amazement that a mini skirted glamour girl at the auto show knew all about transmissions and fuel efficiency. Huge convention hall, car lovers agog over white wall tires and shapely legs in good working order. Sexy makes the world go round, that's show biz baby.

Maybe.

Then there is art, and tools that fuel the art, hands and minds and guts that use the tools well. Listeners who respond to the depth of a performer's skill honed over decades thank the writer who plucks the genderless nerve with imagination and skill.

Last night at band practice I fumed, 'if I see one more 'chick with guitar' article I'm gonna puke! When you see a woman player, do you think Oh my God, I can't believe she's got a guitar in her hands?'

'It's just an angle for a story,' says the elegant bassist. 'It's a stupid angle.'

'When I see a female guitar player,' says the eloquent drummer, 'I prob'ly think I want that guitar.'

Thanks, amigos. I needed that.

Groundswell

A spine doctor's personal alternative to work induced stress is running.

The solitude creates an environment for quality thinking. I can't do anything else when I run.

The president of a design firm who works 70 travel heavy hours a week, turns to high speed biking for release.

Some people drink, some smoke, some carouse -- I keep myself active.

A musician I know has lost 30 pounds in 2 months keeping himself active with weight training, biking, swimming. He packs it in around a full course load, household duties and art projects, the latest involving digital photography, photoshop and paint on fabric.

When I work on something with my hands, I think about things differently.

I swim in water or in air. The air swim happens in performance when listeners have brought their solitude to bare. They come for the music, nothing less. Composition, practice, recording, marketing -- all this informs a moment of release that may last an hour or more. Intimacy gathers in a hall of strangers wrapped in the sweet sweat of a song, unwinding.

Fife n berry

Andy Griffith told The Associated Press on Saturday,

Don was a small man ... but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions. Don was special. There's nobody like him. I loved him very much. We had a long and wonderful life together.

I call her my giant begonia. Wing span one meter plus. Jolly green leaves veined in deep salmon. Every time I get near her with pruning implements, I see she's given birth to more pale bloom babies at the furthest reaches of her solar plexus; I leave her to nurse her young.

It started out innocent enough one spring when Barbara, my botanically gifted neighbor, plunked a pot stand of flagrant foliage on my porch like so much ripe squash. I carted the monstrosity up to my tree house, left it for dead. Goddess knows, the tooth fairy must have shed some star dust on the grand dame. She thrived in my abandon, thrust her downy petals into summer's watch. A wistful Barbara told me the lady had never blessed her former mistress thus in all the years they'd lived together. I began to understand the allure of the unlikely lover.

Don Knotts died last week. He was the hyper inflated underling, least likely to thrive, late bloomer cast on the shores of a sit com unaware of its destiny: to unfurl the pink extravagance of this comedic hero. Barney Fife transformed Mayberry into the best vaudeville stage TV itself might conjure. Perfect chemistry on a summer's night, fans held a flutter, laughter caught high in the rafters of somebody's chicken barn eight miles south.

My parents, especially Mom, loved the Andy Griffith Show. When I was too little for sit coms, I drifted off to the sound of laughter downstairs. Deputy Fife, blustery, insecure, homely, endearing fool that he was, held my mother spellbound and neighing in the palms of his gigantically scrawny hands.

Pray

fold the paper
fold the hands

Reporter in Baghdad
her deadline
is past.

Inmates, Kabuli,
have captured
Block Two.

Paris has kidnapped
and murdered
the Jew.

Sunni jihadis
have tortured
the mosque.

US extremities,
innocence,
lost.

fold the paper
fold the hands

pray

Macon's lament

George Will says conservatives are happier than liberals (he's got research to back him on this) because conservatives

acknowledge the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is: The unintended consequences of bold government undertakings are apt to be larger than, and contrary to, the intended ones.

Conservatives take comfort in this. Meanwhile, conscientious liberals deprive themselves of the simplest delights, even automotive ones, because

there is global warming to worry about, and the perils of corporate-driven consumerism, which is the handmaiden of bourgeoisie materialism. And high-powered cars (how many liberals drive Corvettes?) are metaphors (for America's reckless foreign policy, for machismo rampant, etc.). And then there is -- was -- all that rustic beauty paved over for highways. (And for those giant parking lots at exurban mega-churches. The less said about them the better.) And automobiles discourage the egalitarian enjoyment of mass transit. And automobiles, by facilitating suburban sprawl, deny sprawl's victims -- that word must make an appearance in liberal laments; and lament is what liberals do -- the uplifting communitarian experience of high-density living.

Will calls Liberalism

...a grim and scolding creed. And not one conducive to happiness.

Recently, foreign oil workers got caught up in bold government undertakings:

Macon Hawkins, who was one of nine men seized by heavily armed militants in the restive Niger River Delta a week ago, told reporters yesterday that U.S. President George W. Bush and the United Nations need to help resolve the standoff between oil companies and the people of the impoverished region.

"They get nothing out of the oil, and they produce all of the oil," Hawkins said as he sat on a small boat among hooded young men armed with machine guns and one rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "They're tired of it, so they're going to fight, and they're going to fight until death."

Despite his captivity, Hawkins appeared to be in good spirits:

Hawkins, who said he was from a small town in Texas, said he would turn 69 on March 1. Asked what he wanted for his birthday, he replied "freedom," and laughed heartily.

Hawkins' hearty laugh would seem to pose a conundrum to George Will's happiness theory. On the one hand, the Texas oil worker has a firm grasp on the consequences of bold government undertakings. On the other, despite his consequent capture, the man is laughing heartily. Both hands place him squarely in the conservative boat.

But then there's Mr. Hawkins' comment about giving Nigerians a piece of the action before they demand it, to the death. This is sounding more like the automotively conservative liberal lament, affability notwithstanding.

This is the beauty of research and statistics. Whether Hawkins or the Nigerians are granted independence anytime soon, they can be seen as the insignificant tail of the curve, hardly a challenge to the great Law of Unintended Consequences, flapping unperturbable on George's orwellian flagpole.

Ester's sister's wine casserole

Today I'm vacuuming -- first time in weeks. It brings me to tears. If I hadn't set out on the mindless chore, I might have forgotten Mimi, the woman I met yesterday when I told stories at Judson Park. Little kids and their moms sat on the floor, the elderly occupied couches and wheelchairs. Teddy and Kathleen could not be sure if my puppets were as intriguing as the ant colony traversing the carpet. The ants definitely got the staff's attention. Judson is a meticulously clean facility and proud of it.

While the young ones passed the cookies, I greeted the elders. That's when I met Mimi who looked as though, were she more agile, she would rather be pruning begonias. So I didn't expect her eyes, swimming behind thick glasses, to widen and shine into mine. 'So glad you could be here,' said Mimi as she must have said hundreds of times in her life, and just as true. Of course, she reminded me of my mom, who exchanged her wheelchair for wings over a year ago. The kind, quiet woman with a gentle hand in mine; I couldn't cry for Jane in the middle of the day room, though I'm sure Mimi would have understood. But here I stand the day after, wand in hand, poking at blurred lace and faded sills.

I bring this up because it's in vogue to debunk the routine. Creativity is hip, career trajectory is cool, networking on all fronts, now that's hot. Oh, really? Define exotic: excitingly different. Define different. Elaborate on exciting.

Drummer Bobby Sanabria grew up in the South Bronx. When Maestro Tito Puente showed up at Bobby's housing project with his Latin Jazz, the boy had an epiphany: here's how I will spend my life. He travels the planet, making music. Exotic? Excitingly different? Any musician will tell you, to be good enough to globe trot your music, you practice. A lot.

I have a theory. Routine's not the demon. The real challenger is choice. Every minute brings a slew of possibilities. Routine is just a choice you make to organize your day into a reasonable subset of choices lest you go mad. Kids and the elderly often have choices made for them. And we, the middle dwellers, do the best we can, sculpting our flutes from the tree of life.

So I wave my wand, make a choice, my epiphany c/o Mimi and Jane: to play the exotic instrument of graciousness every day. If I do end up being tended by strangers, as many of us shall, I plan to be so practiced in this skill that it never leaves me.

So glad you could be here. May I pour you some tea?

Burning bushes

The Institute of Medicine, federally chartered to conduct research requested by Congress, noted that service members are often exposed to prolonged loud noises -- from guns, rockets and other weapons, plus heavy-duty vehicles, planes and ships.... By comparing the hearing of those who had served in Iraq with the hearing of those who had not, researchers concluded that soldiers sent to battle zones were 52.5 times more likely to suffer auditory damage.

Ball players suffer chronic injuries. Miners get black lung; their dugout is deeper. And soldiers, if they survive, often come home to a less audible world.

As more is revealed about the selective hearing practiced by this executive branch that led soldiers to its war, I ask: can we the people tune in to reason and integrity, or are have we been permanently deafened by our leaders' raging fictions?

You say terrorism's real as coal dust, somebody's got to step up to the plate for the sake of the citizens? Terrorism is real. We are told not to question our government's motives or means in this conflict. Why? Because it is the government? If terrorists are lurking in the bushes, the best defense is prolonged loud noises -- guns, rockets and other weapons, plus heavy-duty vehicles, planes and ships of state?

You may be right about terrorism lurking in the bushes. And, just as plausibly, terrorism is the bush menagerie, perpetually aflame with black gold, imitating the gods.

Limping olympia

When that race was over, her coach Peter Foley covered his mouth with his hands and fell to the ground. Her friends and relatives stopped waving their American flags.

It had happened in 1986 when friends and relatives and the television public watched the Challenger explode. Victory roared up to an airless gasp in one millisecond of techno-phantasm, spiraling off into blue screen.

Fast forward 1.5 decades. You are living out the American dream: love conquers all and eco-military prowess conquers the agape holdouts. A co-worker murmurs in the hallway, they think we're under attack, two planes just rammed the twin towers in New York. Lips frozen mid greeting, brain torn up in impossible meanings, you follow the coach to his knees.

Lindsey Jacobellis was supposed to win the gold. For us! For all the non-snowboarding klutzes who love to stand on that top block with her, our white smiles and sculpted bodies quivering in the wind. It's a tradition by now which, Ms. Jacobellis has found, you mess with, you bring on the scorn of the masses. She has been grilled, psychoanalyzed, insulted:

Lindsey Jacobellis had gold within her reach. Instead she went for one last roar from the crowd, stupidly trying a flashy trick when all she needed to do was slide down the hill.

So say the pundits: All you needed to do, NASA geniuses, was get those O-rings seated right before blast off. All you needed to do, CIA honchos, was coordinate your vaulted intelligence with your potent mainframes. And all you had to do, Lindsay J, was slide down the hill... you robbed us of our gold with your last minute tricks, wounded us with your pride. And if there's one thing we can't stand around here, it's hubris.

Ask Jack. Ask Jill. Ask the Greeks. There's tragedy at the foot of that hill.