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?