Chron us

My nephew drives his invention, pictured here, around southern California, for no apparent reason.  Were he selling busses, boats or amusement, he’d have the perfect schtick.  Crazy contradiction gets our attention.

His cousin, new college grad, went from cap and gown to shirt and shoes in a day, writing code for a midwest start-up.  He loves his job but sometimes wishes he’d majored in design, a place he gets lost in.

Losing track of time while cramming it with pleasure is what artists do.  The problem being, of course, that unless there’s somebody minding the store, monetizing all this pleasurable time, artists starve for lack of food - or recognition.

Venues stocked with savvy patrons did not seem to be a problem for early jazz musicians.  Nor did time.  Charles Hersch explores the role of time in the emergence of New Orleans jazz.

‘A defining feature of slavery was its near total control of the slave’s time... Emancipation held out the promise of, so to speak, time recaptured, but sharecropping and routinized industrial labor monopolized time in a particularly dehumanizing way.  Improvising musicians controlled time and how it felt - for what is music but sound unfolded in time? - and created a variety of experiences (rushed, languid, tense, or relaxed) with the rhythmic figures they played.
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Musicians who tinkered with time in rhythms that challenged long established norms found a willing audience in the beleaguered workers of New Orleans.  Jazz was escape from and revolt against oppression.

‘In this liminal state, individuals exist both ‘in and out of time,’ as if the clock were stopped as timepieces become useless or a hindrance to the flow of activities.  As a contemporary jazz musician once said about the trancelike ‘groove’ created by good jazz, “it’s about feeling like time itself is pleasurable.”’
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Time is not so pleasurable when monopolized by the boss, unless that boss is muse or spirit.

‘I came upon a photograph in a book; it was a small statue of a woman... But she had no face.  She was crowned with waves of water, covering her head, overshadowing the face.  It was her entire body which spoke, her breast-belly body, a thick bulb rooted, pushing up a halo of water, the water which moved within me.  I’ve been looking for her face ever since.  I had then, and still have one essential prayer: “Show me your face.”’
Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother

Yesterday my phone rang as I hunted down gifts at the mall.  My family wanted to know if I’d join them for lunch any time soon.  Jaded by the numbing assault of ten thousand consumer items blinking and winking their wild desire for my cash, I wanted to interrupt the time warp of shopping.  But I still needed smart socks from Dick’s and a book from Border’s.  What to do?  Drive home in my busboat of crazy contradiction?  Tinker with a day’s rhythm, shrug off the new (old) oppressor: stuff?  Prove I’m an artist, not a drone?

A funny thing happened on the way to Dick’s.  I lost the impression I had to be there for any other boss save the muse.  Art had its way with me.  To this end, time and I eloped, by busboat, to the Aegean archipelago.

Photo credit razielthomas