Smoke and mirrors

My lyrics and I adore electric guitars, effects boxes, drum kits and moxy rock and we abhor taking them out to smokey bars to play. But at this stage, we don't have many choices.

Tonight I gird my loins in machine washables to hear my friend play in one of the best listening venues of the land. John's impressive songs and sounds will permeate my insides and so will a whole lotta smoke. Then I'll go home, disinfect the hair and wardrobe and wonder how tomorrow's recording of vocals will fly, post smoke inhalation.

I went to the White Stripes' unforgettable show in the State Theater downtown Cleveland. Nobody smokes there -- the joint's too classy. Did the audience miss the foggy hipness of the rock club? Did we squirm in our velvet seats, gawk at the ornate ceilings? Hardly. Jack and Meg White obliterated our sense of space. They had us on our feet the whole time and who could notice anything but their art? I took deep gulps of exquisite sound waves cutting through clean air. It was delicious.

How much am I willing to sacrifice for the music I love? Until rock bands taste the big time, we play in 'clubs' (to spiff up the image a bit). It's a simple formula: alcohol sales=revenue=$ to pay the band. In Cleveland, smoke and alcohol are joined at the hip; health and music got divorced in Vegas way back when. You've got to prove yourself worthy of a better formula: a zillion avid fans=ticket sales=$ to pay the band (alcohol and cigarettes can go make out in the parking lot).

There's a statewide movement toward the clean indoor air embraced by Florida, California, New York City, Toledo & Columbus OH and even pub-rich Ireland. Meanwhile, musicians play the hazy halls: we love this music even more than health itself. Logic tells me our non-smoking listeners, who make the same sacrifice for their favorite bands, would gladly pay for a ticket to hear them smoke free. Bar owners tend to resist this formula -- the old one is so easy, if you suspend your better judgment long enough. The crusade is on to shed the obfuscation. Stay tuned.

Burnt umber

Jada Pinkett Smith compares fronting her rock band, Wicked Wisdom, with movie stardom:

In acting, you're basically someone else's paint on the canvas, which is cool. I enjoy that process. But in music, and in this particular genre, I can bring more of myself. I can say the things I want to say.

A Cleveland artist applies her paint to great effect. At a recent screening, local filmmakers introduced their cast and crew with much ado, thanking the paint that gave their movies life. Shahin worked alone on Born Lucky, a film about her son's deployment to Iraq with the British Royal Airforce. With no production team to introduce, she thanked her family for opening their lives to us. The film drew us in with close-ups of Neil, talking with his family on the eve of his departure. We followed him to Iraq and home again to be interviewed by his kind videographer mum. By film's end, we understood our role in the project: witness to change from innocent to veteran, carefree to careworn, open to guarded. We recognized the young man's paint, and ours, on the tragic canvas.

Public or private, we are the stuff of each others' imagination. Psychologists warn about projection -- the friend who paints her world and you in shades of envy, the child who gives you devil's features dipped in the sin of 'no.' We are painted as we paint.

I hear there is a Dave Matthews cruise where Dave and his band meet the cruisers on a tropical island. Picture yourself in the palmy theater; Gaugan soaks his canvas in the jam band's sound. If you are a fan, this could be paradise and I don't hear $100,000/concert DMB complaining about being the paint. Ah but I've tainted my handiwork with tell tale tinges of resentment. Forgive my crass vanity -- I can do better.

If there is a difference between paint and painter, it is in the mind. Consciousness melds discipline with intent in the imperceptible migration of hand to brush.

A slender line

As I looked for a link to Narnia, I happened on a site that opens playing music which will accompany you very well as you read this posting. If you'd like, open it in another window and then, keep reading...

How are you? I'm in my place of solitude on Saturday morning; all is still. I just finished the Saul Williams poem you gave me. At the end he says:

May these words bring worlds.

I smile -- there is only a slender line between words and worlds, a line the poet crosses like Superman merging through walls, Harry Potter in his invisibility cloak, Lucy finding Narnia within the wardrobe.

When we cross this lowly l, it becomes t, a symbol of sacrifice and redemption. It is the muse who beckons us across the void to a world of depth ignored by surface dwellers.

I know she calls you through literature and music. Your generosity of spirit is her emplem and you wear it well. In truth you are an artist, passing into worlds beyond the present or the past, moving with the poetry of ancient bards, the wisdom of tomorrow.

These words by Marc Chagall revere the artist's vigil:

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

I look forward to talking with you again but in the meantime, I will see you on the ramparts, holding sway against the night.

Lunch-pail hilarity

Plain Dealer Style Editor Kim Crow's breaking news: pantyhose don't look modern.

Even if you ignore their stodgy status, there's the discomfort factor. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more irritating than the crotch of your hose creeping down to midthigh as you sashay through the office.

Crow's got the self-effacing savvy of comedic pro, Phyllis Diller, who explains why she often made fun of her looks on stage:

That's a good way to make friends with an audience, to let them know that you are not up there to show off, you're there to entertain.

The style maven, the comedian, roasting her pride over that eternal flame of humble passion known as art. This is not self-therapy on the audience's dime. This is an artist with an agenda à la Ani DiFranco:

I understand the use of humor in performance. You’ve got to get people laughing so their throats open up wide enough to be able to swallow something bigger.

The artist lures us with a promise of something bigger than other possible claims on our time. Anybody, especially a newbie to the public stage, can be tempted to squander her listener's time. This is something you really don't want to do.

Impetuous Paul Hackett, running against a 'lunch-pail-liberal congressman named Sharrod Brown' for the US Senate from Ohio got this assessment from Joe Klein:

In the end, Hackett seemed something new under the sun: a blogger candidate — all attitude, all opinions, very little information.

Ouch. Congratulations bloggers! You know you've entered the big time when the critics have you typecast. But the lunch-pail candidates (or bloggers) have no swagger rights either unless they aspire to be libraries, of which there are quite a few already. In order to deliver 'something bigger,' a writer, a politician, an entertainer has something to win over: an audience's precious time.

In writing as in performing, when I'm true to the call, my first audience is my own mind. Before anybody is even listening, I satisfy her discerning smile. Before anybody is even reading, I track her subtle yawn or burst of pride. I try to get her thinking, maybe laughing, and I never waste her time.

Moxy dames

At a Georgetown University speech, W's legal lickspittle ignored a few student protesters, but he might have learned something from their banner, emblazoned with words of Benjamin Franklin: 'Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.'

Maureen Dowd does have her way with words. I don't plan on positioning myself between the lady and her spittoon any time soon.

Elsewhere in the news, Carly Simon and Susan Sarandon support a documentary on Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion. Carly wrote a song for the film, Susan volunteered to narrate the life of the woman who said

I touch the future. I teach.

According to the film, pioneer womens' journals were required reading in Christa's classes to balance out male centered history books.

As for male centered reporting, today's Plain Dealer lead stories: Wayne Hill's addicted to his Blackberry and might get cut off, Governor Taft's approval rating has tanked, the B-52 bomber will not be set out to pasture quite yet and

Hamas, the militant Islamic party sworn to the destruction of Israel, won a large share of votes in the first Palestinian legislative elections in a decade, depriving the more secular Fatah party of its longstanding monopoly on power.

Continued on page 2 and here she is, her caption reading:

A supporter of the ruling Fatah party celebrates in Gaza City after exit polls were released following Wednesday's Palestinian elections.

Babushka covered hair, kafia draped shoulders, eyes squinting skyward, a Fatah supporter poised against the night, her right hand on the trigger, her left hand hefting the gun.

It's tempting to draw conclusions. Rather, I draw conclusions without thinking; it's tempting to write them here as though I have a clue about her world.

I'll tell you what I'm feeling. Regret. She wields a weapon. Awe. The photo doesn't blink. Humility. Conviction stands against the night. Dread. I feel the danger bearing down.

A leader of Hamas says this about the election:

The Americans and the Europeans say to Hamas: either you have weapons or you enter the legislative council. We say weapons and the legislative council. There is no contradiction between the two.

Dowd lampoons the beltway, Simon and Sarandon laud the teacher and a million lifetimes away, a nameless woman stands watch as leaders around the globe make speeches wedding governments to guns, liberty to surveillance and the future to a danger bearing down.

To blab or not to...

I'm sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have time to
write a shorter one. -- Pascal, 1657

A friend admires the brevity of my postings.

You've always been a good editor, speaking or writing. You choose your words carefully.

When I was growing up, this came off as shyness. While I paused to formulate my thought, conversationalists around me rippled along to new topics. As an adult I lived in Europe for a time. My hosts liked to tell this story:

Susan didn't say a word for a month; suddenly she was speaking in perfect German sentences!

Butchers cut both ways through language. Some would heap slabs on the plate, others whittle down through the blabber to the meat of the matter.

I don't always mind when people talk a lot. A woman at the pool, call her Flo, describes her recent correspondence with the swimsuit company regarding polyester vs lycra vs nylon or she might recite the transcript of a conversation with a stylist over beauty products and the challenges of hair and she doesn't stop for air she is our own suburban rapper; Flo flow filters through the locker room, her patter soothes us all.

Then again, word choice can blight or spark a conversation. This has to do with space. Conversation is the taking of turns. In spoken word, this is obvious. What about the noble pen?

Conversation asks a writer to be merciful to her reader, merciless with edits. Every time I cross out a word, I leave you space to respond. Ah but the words I choose can be fat and juicy, filled with imagery and innuendo. This is the poet's delight!

There is Flo, the worthy spigot. Along comes prose; the gold necklace on bare shoulders trumps the online catalog of rhinestone baubles any day. The merciful writer spends time teasing quality out from under the hassock.

From prose, poetry and songwriting split off in tandem. The poet chooses precious orbs of meaning. The songwriter merges poetry's sparse opulence with a slew of allegiances: to rhyme, rhythm, music, etc.

Well, if potent words, the fewer the merrier, is the goal, what about music? Potency sans words -- the muse's ultimate creation, no? You're talking to a wordsmith here so, no. Beethoven's a salty dog but I am in love with song.

My novelist cousin came to town on a book tour. I sat with her fans at a signing. One reader asked Ms. Weber how she captures pathos and hilarity in her spicy fiction. The writer said she's kept a personal word book since childhood. She writes down favorites for future reference. At this moment, my ugly duckling, word-infatuated lineage began to please me.

My approach to language is born of reverence for its power to express elegant thought. My friend Mim recently sent me the sweetest of praises:

I love the interview. You are a poet even when you are simply speaking.

Mim, you may be right. Then again, this is my longest posting to date. Duckling or swan, there is ever more to learn about the shy abundance of mercy.

Citizen in the middle

Army troops from Fort Riley, Kan. listen to President Bush deliver a speech about the war on terror Monday at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan.

There's something strange about this photo. Something haunting. Dozens of young faces in a sea of camouflage. Smack in the middle, one young man dressed in suit and tie. Who is he? Why is he here?

President Bush is explaining his terrorist surveillance program. His enemies call it warrantless snooping and domestic spying. Don't listen to them, he tells his audience. I've got legal experts, key lawmakers and the Supreme Court on my side. Listen to me. Trust me.

Trust is something earned. In my line of work, an audience trusts a performer who delivers the goods with integrity, respect and competence. The performer needs to be a truth teller and she needs to guard her audience's privacy. Like a doctor, lawyer, minister -- an artist is working in the realm of human vulnerability. Audience + performer + trust brings participants to an open, protected place where new thought and ideals flourish. I can't ask my listeners to trust me with their guts until I prove myself worthy.

I think about the photo. The soldiers may be bound for Iraq, the land our country attacked over a weapons-of-mass-destruction mirage. A land of constant sorrow. The civilian in the middle is being called up for active duty now too, on the home front. His commander in chief requires his loyalty. He gets to keep his civvies, his stateside address, personal computer, telephone. But the government needs to monitor his email and phone calls to make sure he's a loyal citizen soldier. All his leader wants him to sacrifice is his privacy.

Army soldier + citizen soldier + commander in chief plus or minus trust? There's something strange about this picture. Something haunting.

String theory

It is quite possible that if we could not imagine hypothetical hidden worlds, then the world of our experience might become intolerable. -- Lawrence Krauss, physicist

Searching for 'infinitely large extra dimensions (that) have remained hidden from all of our experimental probes' may be the heady stuff of string theory, but the desire for sensual, cognitive texture erupting within the ordinary -- this is not so rare.

I hear about a woman who is lost, her every day as gray as the one before. One morning, her neighbor sees her singing down the street. The woman explains that she finally went to get voice lessons. She is enthralled by the process. 'I have a crush on singing,' she says.

Falling in love, into the richer dimension of existence where pettiness and tedium subside, that is powerful stuff. I notice this in performance. I might have a wicked pre-show headache but while I am performing, I have no consciousness of it. The ache must be someplace, grinding away at the nerve endings, since it returns after the show. Meanwhile, I'm attending to my true love, the transfixing live performance.

There is a music professor at Ohio State University who understands the athletic demands of the saxophone. He trains his whole body, not just fingers, lips, lungs. His students emulate him; the veil is torn asunder once again, the deep, jubilant world revealed.

From whence comes passion? I don't know. The Aviator portrays Howard Hughes, obsessed with far more than germs on the door handle, lint on the lapel. He can't not design airplanes. He can't choose the comfortable millionaire's life as long as there is a sky to be pleasured by his craft. His downward spiral into mental illness is interrupted when a government probe threatens to shut down Hughes Aircraft, that beehive of invention, indelible monument to Hughes' overarching sanity.

The nutty scientist is about as rife in our cultural mythology as the crazy artist. But I wonder if the flatness of the passion-free zone isn't today's insanity. Tell me that preoccupation with amassing gold and prestige makes a dent in a person's soul and I will ask you for irrefutable evidence. I need to see the woman singing down the street, the man defying gravity, the sax sustaining the weight of the world on its extraterrestrial sonic wave.

Power perversion

Peter B. Lewis, Progressive Insurance magnate, on why he's reluctant to give more money to Cleveland institutions right now:

Cleveland is not high on my list because it's all palaver. It's individual palaver. It's people not cooperating with one another. There's no apparent leader to the enterprise.

Palaver. This word has synonyms: hot air, empty words, empty talk, idle chatter. Why doesn't Lewis speak his mind without the insults, leave it at that? And why does the arts and culture community put up with the patronizing language?

My dust mote on the tea cup perspective is this. Lewis has the power. He's got the money. He's given about $52 million in NE Ohio philanthropy since 1990. Arts and culture institutions need money to realize their goals. Their leaders turn their cheek away from his barbs. They are the workers, he's the boss. They are the kids. He's the parent. What else is new? Progressive sells insurance to lowly car owners, premiums that apparently exceed payouts to body shops, car dealers, hospitals (thus the wealthy insurance magnate). I wonder if Lewis' model of leadership, which he derides Cleveland for lacking in the sphere of culture, is the corporate one. I wonder if he sees himself at the helm of Cleveland's arts enterprise.

I would pay my share of a regional tax for arts and culture projects here. It might take the wind out of Lewis' sails and the palaver out of his vocabulary.

Wings over 480

Commuters sail across the 8 lane highway spanning the Cuyahoga valley on a gray Wednesday, in pursuit of the daily bread.

I'll earn mine at Hillside School; it's Joshua's birthday so his Grandma commissioned a storyteller, moi, to celebrate the day. Maintaining speed, direction and safe distance from other drivers, I see a scattered pattern of black birds cruising the morning sky. Then, instantaneously, black wings blend with the massed clouds beyond them, turn black again, flying in a new direction. 'Oh,' says my brain, catching up to my eyes, 'as the birds turn, the angle of their bodies catches the light differently.' The grayscale spectacle captivates me until I break from west bound traffic on my route south.

Something similar happened at practice this week. I left out the last verse of Knight in Shining, going straight to the bridge instead. Wishbone and Walter did not miss a wing beat. Their synchronous rhythm turned with me, a seamless course alteration that is not so uncommon in the music world. But uncommon does not equal unremarkable. I felt a mixture of pride in my bandmates, sheepishness in my lapse and wonder in our common flight.

I've heard it said terrorist attacks in the U.S. changed us from a people of trust to a people of fear. Recently, in brief conversation with President Bush, a scientist said, 'this is killing us.' Foreign scientists who want to attend conferences and students who want to study in the U.S. face months of red tape waiting for visas, then go elsewhere. Their contribution is lost. The researcher is planning a conference in Vancouver because world scientists can plan on getting there.

I wish I could assure myself that our communal path is changing, or predict the inevitability of a course correction. The wings have been black so long now. Maybe there was a wee hopeful sign at Hillside School last Wednesday.

This often happens with an audience in league with live performance. That morning, the kids were a little antsy, chatty, preoccupied with the business of being 4 and learning to listen, take turns, delay gratification. I was a stranger but I had good puppets and an amazing story which drew them in, one by one. Or, truthfully, at some small tipping point, it drew them together and they changed course. Their imagination and curiosity aroused, it seemed they could not fidget or poke or comment impulsively. They absorbed the story and let out 'ahs' in unison. And something else happened which Joshua's grandma noticed. 'You can tell a good storyteller by the way her listeners move closer and closer to her as she tells.' Sure enough, the little bodies were nearly as close to the storyteller as their minds were to the story.

I don't understand the synchronicity that permeates our world. I look to the gray sky, keep my hands on the wheel, my mind on possibilities, my imagination on the uncanny ballet unfurling in the distance.

Naked in the shower

In the women's shower at CWRU there was a culture of nakedness. The swim team set the bar. The ladies flooded the shower stalls with their nubile fitness -- turned up the steam, the gossip, the lather -- and doused their nakedness under shared nozzles. Their team spirit rubbed off on some of us -- kind of liberating, truth be told.

It's different at the community pool. Early on, I resisted pulling the shower curtain across my cubicle like a wild mare fights the rope. But in this culture of privacy, I felt a subtle pressure to sacrifice my anarchist principles to the greater good. What that good is, I cannot say.

The Michigan Wymen's Music Festival offers a unique concept of naked showering. One thing you notice at the festival is what can be accomplished by women and girls left to their own devices. They build stages, raise eating tents, drive garbage trucks, manage the whole extravaganza. The shower set-up is a waist high railing adorned with about 20 spigots spitting out very cold water. I was sleeping in a tent with my sister, sister-in-law and niece. For their sakes if not my own, I thought I might shower. They came along, and so we were four grubby campers joining a line of women awaiting their turn at the spigot. Another thing you find at the festival is that females of all description are welcome; many are lesbian. I did think about the long row of eyes watching me strip down and get clean under the Michigan sun. I felt kind of cold, eventually clean, and free to accept myself and the many sets of eyes belonging to sisters, daughters, nieces and aunts waiting in a long line.

Spencer Tunick recently came to town to shoot pictures of naked Clevelanders amassed on the East 9th Street peer. I caught some of NPR's coverage):

A naked female reporter -- The women had this definite feeling that there were men ogling them.

A naked male reporter -- Meanwhile I stood with some other husbands and boyfriends, watching the women's shoot. In awe we shared with each other our impressions of this stunning mass of beautiful smooth female forms.

Showers naked to the sky leave a permanent curve in my memory. A Girl Scout roundup at Camp Drum had open air showers in converted army barracks. When copters of army guys chopped along overhead, we dearly hoped they were ogling us.

Once, after a raft trip on the Youghagany, Diane led me to the showers. 'Here's my favorite part of the day,' she told me. Sure enough, sun and spray bearing down on exhausted muscles and burnt skin enveloped the day in a sheen of unadulterated joy.

There is an island in Canada I have sometimes visited. The shower on the hill looks up at pine needles and out on sails and the bay and the evergreen islands. There is more to this shower than getting clean. It is a timeless shedding of privacy, an everlasting reminder of the greater good.

Underly couth

Asinine.

You don't see that word in the Plain Dealer a whole lot. I had to look it up to see if they left out an 's', but the paper got it right. Stupid, obstinate; relating to or resembling an ass.

Asinine.

A federal judge used it to describe Mark Fleisher's research that finds rape and sexual assault in prisons to be rare. Judge Walton says his 30 years in the criminal justice system tell him the anthropologist's position is...

Asinine.

Refreshing, in a way, the blunt talk. Reminds me of Paul Hackett, seeking nomination for the US Senate:

The Republican Party has been hijacked by the religious fanatics (who) aren't that different than Osama bin Ladin.

Oops -- Bob Bennett, speaking for the GOP, demands Hackett's apology. Nope, says Hackett, pointing at Pat Robertson to illustrate his point.

Asinine.

I remind me of some boys who used to eat macaroni at my kitchen table. Once they got hold of a wormy word, they squeezed it like a wet noodle in a small fist, just to see what it would do. The outcome was always the same: it was fun, but the noodle lost its integrity in about a millisecond.

That's the downside of the hyperbolic jab. It grabs your attention but lowers your expectation of reasonable discourse. Guess who said this:

This is asinine! A Cesar Chavez Day in California? Wasn't he convicted of a crime?

If you guessed Rush Limbaugh (er, before the drug bust), the quintessential noodle squisher, you'd be right. Oddly enough, a number of bloggers also use the word to describe their favorite conservative pundit.

Asinine.

The poets take a different tack, distilling a universe into few words. Words with a taste for eloquence. Words that consider the consequences of their utterance. Words that sense a listener's wariness of generality. Words that savour truth more than victory. Words that populate the dictionary, and the world, with meaning.

Wine and bread

Each of us in that circle of friends had our own affection for Gordon. I revered him as a creature not quite human, veering off from the species on the positive side. We were about 20 when we met. Rumor had it he'd lasted a few months at college and quit because, he said, it deprived him of thought. I believe he built things of wood when I knew him.

Gordon was beautiful. His body held the grace of Michelangelo's David, his face the independence of a Moriarty or a James Dean, but with more kindness. For me, Gordon was untouchable, perhaps unreachable. It never occurred to me to love him in the way of a woman and a man. I remember hearing (not from him) that he never watched movies or TV because he wanted to experience his life in real time, not second hand.

My clearest memory of Gordon is getting completely winded running down a hill in a small town, both of us panting at the deserted intersection below, waiting for the others to catch up. He placed one strong hand on my back, the other on my chest and cast his crazed, pleased excitement through me. 'Do you feel that?' he almost whispered. 'That's life.'

I never needed to know Gordon as a mortal. He was the scent of baking bread for which I hungered and hunger still. He was a human embodiment of a spirit world. An early harbinger of spring. A sure knowledge of my unencumbered birthright.

Do you feel that? That's life.

Goose step slideshow

Sunday morning flyers pass through security at Hopkins. Seasoned vets of the new order, they know the drill. Working down from head to toe, they wordlessly pile their personal contraband in government issue bins, convey their beltless abdomens and shoeless feet through the lie detector portal, look to the authority figure to confirm their innocence. Over to the side a longer line of travelers than this would be duly impressed by a glassed in display case of sharp and shiny objects fanned out on purple velvet like drumsticks at the Rock Hall. There is seemingly no end to the cutting tools foolish travelers try to smuggle past the experts. By now the gaggle of passengers is buckling belts, zipping up computers, shouldering packs and striding toward the ever more secure aircraft of the USA.

The scene reminds me vaguely of the gym where strangers strip and stow their identities in lockers, throw their anonymous bodies in the pool and shower, duplicate the process in reverse to rejoin the working world. It's a ritual enacted with a higher good in mind. Committed swimmers believe in this good.

There's a scene in Jarhead where marines in Gulf War I follow orders to play football in the scorching dessert dressed in full chemo regalia to impress the visiting press corps. The marines do their duty, as the veterans of air travel and the denizens of fitness do theirs. It's sacrifice for the cause, whatever that cause might be.

There are degrees of freedom and elements of faith. Workout is good for the body. Science and a million glossy magazines confirm this. Get the body to the gym and make it fit. The price we pay for health (and did we mention beauty?).

Airport security is good for the nation. 9/11 and a rainbow of homeland alerts support that, right? Appreciate the need, ignore the hassle, the price we pay for peace of mind.

US military is good for the world. The soldier is our last best defense against senseless evil. Isn't history a billboard for the necessity of war? If you answer yes, your faith requires obedience to rituals of combat (not to mention PR). And if you answer no, or maybe not, or what if? -- you divorce yourself from the inevitability of misery. Once you do this, you are responsible for your own thought. Which, liberating as it may feel, is enormously expensive.

The price we pay for freedom.

Good buds

What's so bad about comfort? It's what humans deserve at the end of the day -- the easy chair, the good book, the pot of tea, the crackling fire. You work to pay the bills so what's wrong with enjoying the life? For the record, nothing.

But comfort and complacency are friends. When they get chummy their stereo enhanced entertainment station almost drowns out their second cousin Ernie, outside banging the door. Ernie's persistent; they let him in and he stands there in a deep green poncho dripping sky all over the carpet, obliterating their view of XTreme Makeover, Disperate Housewives, whatever. They start throwing sofa cushions at him because they know beer cans would wreck the wide TV.

Ernie says, 'let's go make a movie,' and they gape at this joker like he just said, 'let's go wipe out world hunger.' So he says, 'come on, everything's set, I need you lazy bums to be my key grips,' and now he's almost got 'em because they never could firgure out what key grips do -- what is it they grip, anyway?

'Besides,' says Ernie, 'Gertrude's gonna be there and she told me to get you guys rollin'.'

Now there's one of those rare flickers in the space time continuum where the TV goes blank because comfort's remote hand has a reverence for Gertrude his brain has not yet comprehended. Complacency finds herself wading through empty Budweisers, one arm in her jacket, the other hand fluffing her matted bangs.

'Gertrude?' they murmur in unison as Ernie nods and his second cousins' minds whir and click to the clarion call of the ancients and their four hands grip with inconceivable certainty illusions of life they have yet to imagine.

Cliché away

If I were a lusty artist (I suppose am) reading Susan, I'd wonder, 'why is she dwelling on the uniqueness thing? We all know cliché is the death of art.' Do we? I'm now 189 pages into Hakuri Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, relishing every syllable. I am intrigued by the mind/gut capable of this writing. One Susan enters the wonderland, a different Susan shall exit at the end.

I want a listener to exit my performance a changed beast, her inner world rewired. I doubt this happens often with mass entertainment, even the live version. You would think, with all the high technology applied to arena spectacles, a ticket holder might expect some inner rewiring in exchange for her investment. Does she get it? Rarely, I think. The arena's mega light-sound extravaganza ricochets off the balustrades like a fistful of change in a tin bucket. Stimulation can be bought; the leisure class has cash to spare. Imagination -- you spend a lifetime cultivating this.

Here's hope for original music: digital distribution side steps the profit interests that hawk cliché to the masses. Artists, who measure satisfaction in persons touched, and seekers, who risk their comfortable assumptions, have a better chance of finding each other when the profiteers move aside. Record companies are nervous. Their industry thrives on a culture of bland thrills. Our industry, yours and mine perhaps, rescues 'livelihood' from cliché's drowsy empire.

Intimate lifers

As for writing to the ‘world at large,’ there’s a disconnect isn't there? I could pick up a thread of a dream, ignore the distance between us, and simply write.

There’s a green gray soot caked on the table, one of those enameled steel constructs of the 50’s with drop down leaves and shiny u-shaped legs looping to the floor. I clean the grime with a raggedy towel, notice some viney weeds winding up the legs to the built-in silverware drawer that fascinated me as a kid.

What interest could such a thing possibly have for you, unless you collect antiques or remember tables like this in your granny’s kitchen, or have a penchant for cleaning. Ho hum, yawn, I feel you reaching for the clicker.

Songwriters do have an edge. We get to use all this gorgeous music to bring artist to listener; sound poems sweep down the canyon joining our respective mesas. Granted, music, like words, in the hands of a hack can leave a listener with nothing she hasn’t heard before. And ‘new’ is the essence of art, yet another sign that life and art are siblings, twins, alter egos. What is a life if not unique? Some kind of human robot. What is an art work if it tells what we already know? Some kind of waiting room decor, the tribute band, cliché on a sucker stick.

All of which strays from the occasion: how to bridge experience, writer to reader. The way to be discovered via the risk of setting out.

Artful blogger

Is Blogging the new techno-art? Or is it the trusty newsletter, sans postage?

What is art? It isn’t science, business, politics, sport, entertainment, but it borrows from this trove.

Defining art is like studying language. Different cultures come up with unique words and structure to express experience. Linguists study the roots and branches of language but there it is, time tested, thriving: people basically love to yak. Nobody says ‘how’s language different from science, business, politics, etc.?’ Language is. People talk, and if we didn’t, we’d be more incapsulated and less savvy -- or else we’d dance a lot or maybe thrust elaborate cuisine at other humans to whirl our dervish.

Which is what humans do -- evolve the language, explore the inner, yak about it in vivid technicolor muscularity, cacophony, drama and sometimes, when the dust settles and the crowds blink in wonder, there is art, perched on a toady stool, croaking at the night, unabashed.

Crust of bread

I am 61 pages into Hakuri Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The writer filigrees a tempting spell. Between his meanings breathes the reader’s own. Here’s one: my long abandoned novel opener. A woman offers bread and stew to the storm tossed traveler. He thanks her by collapsing on her rutted floor. His unknown and hers, the story’s innuendo.

Prior to the technowindfall that brought the blog, countless pen-addicted humans hungered for the common meal, the fuel consumed by strangers. As I offer up my blog, I wonder: will this fuel ignite our strangeness? Will the night end well?

Don’t keel over yet. The story’s young.