j.o.y.

When did you last fall in love? Remember -- waking to desire that flowed into your daily ritual, no feeling too mundane to capture the light of this new love?

Love found. Love cherished. Love tamed and groomed in friendship, family, sacrifice and gratitude. The secret we don't always want to hear is that we are creatures of desire. If we tamp it down with civilized love, we are contented, perhaps, but our bellies growl for the deep wild pleasure known as joy.

I can't think of a form of entertainment that brings joy. But art, whether you pour it out or drink it in, is the elixir of your passionate self, multiplied by swirling image, potent metaphor. It's the dance of you in exceptional pivots and reels, breaking your trance into a million blinking stars.

Listen

The world is awash in sound, much of it humanoid.

No matter where you go on this planet, you will most likely be visited by the sound of civilization within the hour. If you live in a people zone, you can become a lazy listener, passively tuned in to human sounds (or anthrophony) -- talk honks cussing roaring gushing burps ringtones soundtracks laughtracks cheering bleeps booing sobbing and of course the ever present amplified placebo that is sold in the name of music.

Imitation music abounds. It is often called 'music' because of the look of the people who make it -- divas with microphones pressed to their lips, bands populated by suave hipsters. Musicians, right? Only if they teach you to listen.

Like anyone else with a humble guitar and a handful of lyrics I once fancied myself a troubadour bound for stage and glory. The friendly people who clapped at my act, I understand this: they reared me. I am forever in their debt. One day I left that stage to take guitar lessons from Michele Temple of the band Pere Ubu. This woman set me to the task of listening. In time, she sent me to the cable-snaking gear jungle of Adam Lake to relieve him of his starburst Fender Telecaster with a Zoom pedal and scribbled instructions on the care and feeding of my new exotic life form.

People tell me I "went to the crossroads" in 2003, from which I returned to voice my sonic rain of poetry and electrons. This sounds dubious to me, as though I sold my soul to the devil who taught me a trick or two about the arrangement of sound and cypher. I don't buy this since the devil cannot hear to save his life. Isn't he the incessant whisperer who saturates the atmosphere with blather?

The only roads I took to with my tele and my strat were crossings where a poet lets her conscious mind unravel, where passions of a lifetime filter through a new kind of song. If she is patient, and lucky, she may acquire the capacity to teach, lobe by lobe, the errant will to listen.



photo by Bruce Jennings

Dame Cognito

Why is my underslept gray matter punch drunk the morning after a concert?

Doubts ensconce themselves in the boudoir of Dame Cognito. In pink lamé, she drapes her curves across my spongy couch as one by one her suitors kneel and bow. These are pudgy little men who promise bells and baubles made of compliments and preen. Bored, my noble madam does her nails in deepest purple; she ignores the manikins and looks at me.

So, she asks again. I scrape the sludge out of my dredger.

You thought your show was over
when the stage went dark?

With this my handsome lady reels into a laugh that would uncouch her.

You are mad (she frankly whispers)
you are mad to be an artist
there is no reprieve
this mind of machination
is your gift and your despair

Wear it bravely, mavin,
wear it boldly and enchanted
and exotic in your hair.

There is movement like a cancer,
there is healing like a balm.
You are present you are absent
you are song.

With this I take my smudgy pencil out of my jeans pocket and a crinkled store coupon too shiny for words. I would lay them at her feet. Make me sane, I say. Make me normal like the women who are happy.

Dame Cognito's purple toenail flicks my pain aside.

You are as normal as they, she mutters.
they as mad as you.
Somewhat sleepier perhaps,
or better actors,
who can say?

They spend a lot of words on wallpaper and gardens, I suggest.

So do you --
refurbishing unconscious thought
for public consummation.
This is risky
and embarrassing
and strange.

I sit dazed, considering. Normalcy. Not in my timeline?

You are captivated
by the sounds that would be born.
Lilliput adores you.

Play the cords that bind and set you free.



photo Britters Szatala

Semi quaver

Music welcomes everyone.

You don't have to be gorgeous, hip or suave. Music asks you to be authentic and maybe a little bit crazy. It takes a kind of deranged love for your instrument to press on until anyone besides your loyal friends will listen.

People do listen to exceptional music in any genre. It reminds them of something. It remembers them to love. Strange love, desperately wanting to cohabit the molecular space of an other. Truthful, vulnerable trust of atoms smashing. Kids know this. Teenagers surely know it. Old people -- I think they do too. It's the vast middle earth of our lives that deflates love, dispenses it in cannisters.

Enter music. Throbbing sound waves crash against our ear drums into self. Legions of composers juxtapose intensity-duration-pitch -- endless variations of the vibratory muscles of our minds. This, when executed skillfully, unfetters our desire for the wordless union.

Some praise the lyricist for haunting images or exquisite rhyme. But words, in the signature of music, are also sounds that break the barrier of thought. Songs don't speak, they sing. They're less tasted by reason than swallowed whole by desire.

Certain music sweeps you off your feet in a ball room crammed with strangers you could love if you were younger or older or merely intrepid enough to feel. The tipping point between caution and candor is a billion angels dancing on a pin. And the pin -- you know it anciently -- is extraordinary music that will touch you like a hand along your spine. This is the pin pulled out of your elaborate headdress. The pulling lets the mind relax. Its raw heat tumbles down your shoulders into hurt and laughter as you slip into the world.

Leadership

I think we have to rethink the concept of "leader." 'Cause "leader" implies "follower." ...I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.
-- Grace Lee Boggs, Bill Moyers Journal

This interview is worth watching -- I recommend it highly!

When I can devote myself to the pleasure, I'm going to dig into this as well.

There are cells in my brain, sleeper cells, awakening to this exceptional woman's clarion call.

Rock solitude

I’m a performing songwriter who craves solitude and adores the stage. Fronting my rock band feeds all that.

Monet’s Orbit is the name of my new CD. It’s a distinctive sound imbued in the songs we play. Monet’s Orbit is my bandmates, my audience, myself and all our respective muses.

Until recently, solitude was hard to come by. Making a CD -- my mind was a swamp of details. When it was done, acres of psychic real estate opened up. This is where the muse lives, where songs erupt and evolve.

Surprisingly, there can be a lot of solitude happening in performance. At our best, our shows create a transcendent space for musicians and listeners. Solitude is where you ask who you are, what you love, what you want and what you’re going to do about it.

In my case, rock music answers those questions well. I grew up playing classical piano, then took up the acoustic guitar, followed by electric guitar. Rock feels more native to me than classical or acoustic guitar based music. But my classical and solo acoustic roots inform the rock songs I’m writing now. Acoustic music honed my lyrical side, classical immersed me in sonic complexity. I give all that to the genre of Rock, this majestic ode to life. Passionate and humble, both.

Inspiration is humbling because the only part of it you can take credit for is being prepared to receive it, then keep running until you fly. Here I am with my Strat, writing a song that seems to have a pulse and purpose of its own. Here we are performing for an audience that amplifies the intensity of the show. Inspiration is humbling -- and electrifying.

If you ask me about the relationship between my experience and my imagination, I’ll say you’re talking to a person who sleeps in her tree house, swims in the rain and wonders out loud if literature’s best characters have souls. Imagination and experience are one. Don’t be afraid to befriend them relentlessly. Separate them at your creative peril.

I remember the first time I performed a song of mine in front of people. I was so nervous, I had no voice -- gasped out every note. That’s kind of a metaphor isn’t it, when you’re silenced by your own fear? I love the positive impudence of rock. It pushes fear aside, will not be silenced.

I swim almost as fervently as I create music, and there’s a synergy between them. Practically speaking, rock musicians schlepp a lot of gear. So fitness helps. It’s a physical job, before, during and after the show. Swimmers breathe deep, so do singers. Swimmers desire the water; musicians need to play. Both practice discipline, but the payoff is huge. There’s a community around a pool, a locker room, a clan of water rats not so different from musical kinship.

One thing that motivates me to expand the audience for this music is the response we have noticed so far. People use words like positivity and connection. Anything that strengthens our best impulses gives us more freedom, and a lot less fear.

Fighting absurdity

I don't spend any time thinking about what I am or what we do means. I spend my time doing it. I focus on the task and try to do it as best we can...

I think that, if we do anything in a positive sense for the world, is provide one little bit of context, that's very specifically focused, and hopefully people can add to their entire puzzle that gives them a larger picture of what it is that they see.

...this is how we fight back. I can only fight back in a way that I feel like I'm talented. And I feel like the only thing that I can do... even a little bit better than most people, is create that sort of that context with humor. And that's my way of not being helpless and not being hopeless.
-- The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, Bill Moyer's Journal 4-27-07

Mr Dime

You sometimes see your friend through new eyes when the shutter speed stretches out over time. Back in the Concord Coffee days, I was singing treble clef; you were up there with the bluegrassers, high and whiny like the wind. Gold pans in our patient hands, we sifted well through chicken scratches, flummoxed chords, believing there was treasure in the wild.

They say silver turns to fuzzy globules in the hold of a ship lost at sea while gold coinage gleams as the day it was forged. A rather risky method of detecting counterfeit but no far cry from the performer's gamble with time.

Listening to you last night, it was clear to me the years have brought a luster to your holdings. Your definitive essence speaks through your taut frame and intelligent glance out over the proceedings; your amber toned guitar fills in the crevices of your deepening voice; your listeners, we lucky ones, rise up to grasp your thoughts without a drop of vanity between us.

The best part about your show, for me, was the certainty that this man I know so well has found a way to voice his goodness to a world broken and afraid to be.

Hank, God rest his soul, is likely proud, with just a touch of envy on his wings.

Mother T

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
-- Mother Theresa

Piccadilly circus

I value accomplishment. It feels normal to create a thing of beauty. Or, am I merely programmed to succeed?

I don't have my mom here to ask how it was for her as she pushed her last starling out the door. She was 64 by then. This astonishes me. She didn't need to work and she didn't have the internet to just go ahead and publish her masterpiece, Random House be damned. I'm wondering if her blue moods took hold on this desperate hydroplane toward revealed beauty.

The coupling of work to public attention to measure worth is a theory many an artist ponders to her dying day. My mother, if she did let it go superficially, may have harbored its sails and anchors deep in the underbelly that plagued her unremitting as she pulled into the dank unknown.

A writer, by nature and culture, is one who stands outside the mortal beast and with her stylus pokes its hide to let contagion in. It would make sense for her to give no credence to rumors of praise or neglect from the world she visits with her scepticism.

But sense is rational and common. Consciousness intuitive and rare.

Some will tell you all of us are born to be artists. If this is true, where do some find the grit to claim their inheritance while the rest make things that challenge nothing and no one? Could I lay down my stylus filled with ink, invisible to many, indelible to me?

Make way for the butterflies

The children sleep in separate beds, one bed at Mommy's, one at Daddy's. Separate bedrooms. Separate dreams, save one -- the dream of reconciliation.

These children are like any of us, caught in struggles we don't understand. One such struggle -- the estrangement of our body from our spirit -- finds our body irked by the spirit's piousness, the spirit scandalized by the body's joy.

So the children, you, me, our gentle selves, pack our pajamas, wishing. If only Mommy could bend, just a little bit, to see what Daddy's talking about. If only Daddy could listen and try something Mommy's way. If only they could get along. If only.

Mom and pop turn to us in the midst of another royal ballyhoo. Some absurd look about us makes them drop their scorecards, ink smudging their rude cheeks. Oh. The children. We almost forgot.

Let me tell you a story about my spirit body split. Like you, perhaps, I want to know how I feel about the boy who shot the innocents last week. Do I hate him? Is it pity? Disgust? Rage? Sorrow?

I feel an ancient sorrow for the people he killed. But when I try to take the pulse of my response to the killer, I feel...

Some have compared the shooter to a suicide bomber. Both are ideologues for whom human life has no value. Both chill me to the bone, but there is no bone. No marrow. No sinew. No blood. In the face of their murderous certainty, I feel only ice white fear.

Spiritual purists and worshipers of the senses are doomed to everlasting strife. Both define themselves by their martyrdom. The body politic finds the effort of self-discipline unconscionably harsh. The extremist extinguishes the sloppiness of hedonistic culture with a bullet or a bomb.

We, abandoned children, make no sense of our emotions, benumbed by tummies so damn full, no butterflies alight there. Traumatized by spirits that have lost the urge to play.

Largesse

Victory is what happens when ten thousand hours of training meet one moment of opportunity.
Coach Jason Hill, Beachwood High School

A certain student earned his 'exemplary young man' moniker yet again over the past year and a half as he transformed himself from a rather likable teddy bear to an affably self-assured lean mean competing machine. Last weekend he completed his first ever Olympic-length triathlon in two hours and twenty six minutes, exceeding his own, his teammates' and coach's expectations. Hearing him exude pleasure while consuming post-race calories momentarily washed me clean of the grim tragedy of Virginia Tech.

A swim workout can sometimes cleanse my wounds in this world gone mad. Lately, though, with images of 32 precious students and teachers etched on my retinas, I can barely make out the Coach Hill quote that hangs over the pool deck.

Last night I saw Miss Potter, a film about an artist spurned by mother and world. When Beatrix loses the love of her life, she withdraws to her painting space to drench her sorrow in creation. Her images of bunnies grow dark as crows peck at Peter's blue coat and bloated guppies swallow up the sweet green frog. 'I must leave this house,' she tells her savior, Milly. Beatrix escapes to the countryside where her grieving mind and hands embark on endless hours of training. In time, with earnings from the most widely published children's books of all time, Miss Potter rescues 4,000 acres of rolling farmlands from developers, preserving them for the British people.

The question of this mournful day of innocents downed is ever, 'why?' The shooting, the disregard for life, the horror? The constancy of atrocity worldwide, pulled down around my senses, numbs my strumming hand. Ten thousand hours of training, coach -- why bother, when the shooter's aim can maim another child?

In a race between good and evil, firepower obliterates fairness. But it doesn't win. Your lily pad, your cabbage patch, your cotton tail, your puddle duck, your fifty yards in fifteen seconds flat -- your hope within the madness.

Victory. Another name for love.

Mrs. Monet

Our minds are familial search engines. They know our clan, flash point quick. They feed us reliance, surround our doubt with possibility. Thoughts remand, remonstrate, remember. They play our questions like loquacious kin. Search ignites vast comfort within the complicated otherness of nature. She steps into the sea with brush and pallet, turns to her childhood coastline, carves her darks and brights into the work the waves can't have.


by Claude Monet Wikimedia Commons

Killing me softly

The soft drink industry gets rich delivering recipes like this to your blood: carbonated water, caramel color, natural & artificial flavors, phosphoric acid, aspartame, potassium benzoate, citric acid, potassium citrate, caffeine, acesulfame potassium, calcium disodium edta.

The American Heart Association tells us this about you:

The human heart is one powerful pump, propelling six quarts of blood through the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body -- twice the distance around the world.

How does Big Cola get you to contaminate your insides with its brew? Ask me. I just quit.

My addiction started when I worked night shift in the ER. Cola tasted better than the oil slick they called coffee. I took my first swig and never looked back.

For a few years now, my doctor's had this annoying habit of suggesting I lose the caffeine-aspertame dependence. Better for the bones, the brain, the heart, the kidneys -- there's no part of the body it's not better for, according to the doc. But my friendly neighborhood addiction told me otherwise. Denial ruled.

Until the first day of Spring. Finally, something clicked. I read about Fosamax, a drug you take if your bones begin to waste away. The side-effects of Fosamax broke through my denial. A split second of mental clarity said, if you take a powerful chemical with potentially gruesome side-effects to counteract other powerful chemicals that erode your bones, you are insane.

This reminds me of our national Big Oil fixation. We love our SUV! Of all the vices, how could this one kill us? Our survival instincts have been bullied by habits we picked up like a can of pop on the midnight special. We don't like the voice of rationality -- the eco nut with his wishbone shaped stethoscope -- asking us to breath deep.

Until this fine Spring day, a feeling in our bones, a shot of innocence, an inkling of self-determination.

Much obliged

It comes out of nowhere, and it feels like you've stepped out of yourself. Oh man! That's the best part about singing!
Mary J. Blige, Rolling Stone 1018

I probably think too much. I can be slow to act, relentless with perfection. I'm frivolous with smiles, though, and lavish with ink. I gravitate toward kindness and admire the humble soul. I'm patient with old people and charmed by certain felines. Integrity holds me in her trance; I value her suggestions.

Every now and then in song, like Mary Jane explains, 'I'm gone. I've lost myself.'

And found myself in every creature living.


photo by N Gallagher

Pricey habits

Luckily, I've always thought of myself as a musician more than a guitar player. Since I'm always changing as a person and my tastes are always changing, that is reflected in the ways I approach my instrument. I never feel like I'm running out of ideas, because it is clear to me -- music is infinite.
-- John Frusciante (The Red Hot Chili Peppers), Rolling Stone

If music is as infinite as the inventive mind, the same could be said of the lyric edge of song: poetry defies boundary.

When songwriters say they've hit a dry spell, there's an air of longing in their words. They miss the keen aphrodisiac, the fire, as they putter about the house, keeping up appearances. Originality feels so good on. Rehash tastes like dust.

I spoke with a former fan of mind expanding drugs, a holy father of the sixties, who reassured me it was OK I'd never done any. Never have I sought absolution for my cognitive extravagances: listening, waiting, watching, risking.

These indulgences cost nothing but time. And patience.

Their side effect is art.

Post dramatic breath

Spent from sheer elation, my essence stretched around the open air of careful minds expanding. There sits my audience a breath away from sentient cousins once removed. Its members know but dare not name a certain yen for meaning. Some of them ignore the pangs. They reach for comfort food, the confluence of friends and conversation. Heady stuff, this syrupy concoction brings them high without a whiff of expectation.

There are questions in the songs my band and I infuse into the smoke-free wonderland of sound. We are not gods and goddesses; we only whirl the orb within the dervishes' devotion. Few embrace the madness in the songs but these emerge eternities the wiser.

The nether realm entrusted to a troika such as our emancipates the neurons ever after, nature's soft impressions in the snow.

What -- again?

Yes, again. Happily. Because of the lovely encounters with good people this process brings me. Take this conversation with John, an elderly gentleman at the pool.

"Would you cast a vote for me, John?"

"Sure, I'll vote for you. You know that Mitchell's Icecream? They won an award for their store. I didn't think much of their icecream until they won the award. I went back and tried it and it was pretty good!"

Sanity bastion

Ninety nine percent of all live rock concerts are stupidly and dangerously loud... It seems the height of folly to have a musical concert be so loud one needs to wear earplugs to mute it and then hear it with the sound messed up.
Bob Ludwig, Recording 9.06

Music is not my quintessential sonic form. First comes silence. After that I'm fond of wind and water, birds and bugs do a nice soundscore and the human voice intrigues me. Music has a tendency to mess with my neurons. I never was a background music lover.

Music gets to me completely. I create it out of self defense. I have a useless mental filter. Bad music -- lacking soul and depth -- does not engender boredom in my psyche. It's more like sitting my brain cells in a waiting room with a TV set on soaps, no place to hide. Excruciating.

I want to enshrine Bob Ludwig in the sacred halls of musical integrity. No need -- with mastering credits including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, Steely Dan, the Police, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, Nirvana, the man is already there. I once assumed the point of pulsating rock concerts was to merge the listeners into a gelatinous mass of frayed ganglia, a kind of communal electro shock treatment. But if the music isn't good enough to transmogrify individuals into world class citizens, making it louder won't help.

Are we all ad-slingers on the lost highway, riding techno bare back? No. But the voices in the wilderness are few.

New Year Resolution USA

The average weights of American men (191) and women (164) have increased 25 pounds since 1960. And according to one study, in 2003, Americans' 223 million cars and light trucks burned an extra 39 million gallons of fuel for every additional pound of passenger weight. So Americans are using almost a billion gallons of gasoline more each year than they would if they were as (comparatively) svelte as they were in 1960.
-- George F. Will, The Washington Post