Sunseeds

I'm at a hospital or rehab center, visiting family. Simultaneously, I'm in Greece or Isreal with O & N, my niece and nephew. One wing of the building is noticeably run down; it's where the welfare patients live. I want to fix this, eying the foyer to the wards, wallpaper stained and peeling. I could pull down that paper, fix and paint the walls. I have skills in this work. Surly the authorities would approve. I consider getting permissions as I shrug off the fact that tackling this job will keep me inside for days.

O & N clamor for the great outdoors. I feel them pull my hands and laugh and clown around me. I reach like a woman obsessed for a peeling corner of pink flowered paper and rip away a good sized chunk, blinking with equal satisfaction and dread. As I wonder if the institution might finish the job, a couple of nun type characters show up, nod their approval, leave the completion to me.

The foyer has modest walls and painted ceiling. It opens into a giant hall with infinite ceilings that, lo and behold, are plastered with more flowered paper. Walls and ceiling have cracks and grooves begging a professional's hand. Away I peel into the vast hall, vaguely cognisant that papered walls need endless scrubbing before the paint goes on.

The place takes on a dingy feel, a musty smell, a hopeless sound of muffled laughter as two Israeli bikers rev up along the sparkly sea with its blinding sand reflections. I hope and hope, against all evidence, for rescue, working wildly, perplexed by my choices.

In the end, I wake up, panting, aware. My bondage to pink fading flowers never was nor evermore shall be.

Womb II

Once upon a cell, you did divide. You piled up cells unthinking, happy to comply with nature's plan. But even in her womb, your mama's booze, your dad's cigar, your older brother's angst took shots at you. Or maybe you were met by gentle souls who jellied up your appetite for calm.

Infinite possibility flooded by finite mitigations nobody planned so precisely as to ready you for this, life on the outside.

I call it second womb.

Once here, you would build your perfect womb -- your well stocked home, diversions and routine -- to serve more cell divides. But with second womb construction and maintenance, scant time leaks out to lube your passage into the wilderness you're bound for the minute ovum joins sperm.

We're conceived as cells. We grow more cells in utero, and once outside we pad our cells with matter no one asked for. We form thick walls around the impetus, the spark of life, the only part of us that's born to thrive.

Can't buy me love

"What consumer culture does is to privatize people. It makes them focus on their own personal well being. And not just material well-being. Why shouldn't people be concerned with their material well being? But they see in acquisition of material goods a kind of self liberation, a kind of upward rise socially, and a kind of freedom. And to the degree that consumer culture captures your imagination, you lose a social imagination. You no longer see yourself as part of some kind of collective."
Steve Fraser on Bill Moyers Journal 6-13-08

You get one chance to be proud. This can elude you, but don't be discouraged. One day, or sleepless night, it may come to you without the slightest provocation. A sense of pride in yourself, your place in society, that has nothing to do with status or consumption. A sense of human worthiness.

Still, trouble will come as messengers barrage you with one request: that you lift a wad of money out of your workshirt, stick it into the seller's fist. Marketeers lavish you with images of actors pretending to be incredibly satisfied with stuff.

Monks and shamans warn against selling your soul for the coinage of the realm. They sound so quaint and angry, quite the opposite of your suave superself out to buy the world and rest content in the lap of acquisition. Now you have your toys and baubles, your sleek car, your sleeker game console. You can live forever in the cosmos of your dreams. The hustlers cherish you you you my child: so important as statistic, insignificant as self.

But are you worthy, sister? Are you satisfied? Do you stealthily resist the huckster parade, blunderbussing you in its tractor beam?

Let the junk mail flutter down the ad soaked street. Let the superheroes flap their capes and flex their talons at your new found sight. Deny them any power to impress you. This is a great day where dead men walk and manic women lay aside their cloaks of unbelonging. Proper ladies take up megaphones to bleat their poetry at the lawless night. Image consultants weep themselves to sleep and the sweet elves of tomorrow tuck them in with fierce communal pride.

Everything youtube

So I was testing the capabilities of iMovie before plunging into more robust video editing software. Showed it to a few people I knew to get some feedback before posting it on YouTube, yesterday. Today, 1,690 views and counting, I'm surprised by something happening (as I cruise around YouTube gathering inspiration and toolkit ideas) beyond me. Makes me wonder what's going on in the lives of the people who take the time to look at it. Here's the flick... enjoy! (and leave a comment, so I'm not left completely clueless...)

Suckerpunch

It's one of those memories that only comes when a fresh wound conjures the ghosts. A bully on the school bus bound for Loveland Elementary pulled back a fist and belted me in the gut as he strode down the isle. I couldn't breathe at first; I sat in mute confusion, blinking. Who was this kid? Why did he attack me?

I recently learned that my friend once endured unthinkable brutality by a stranger. Her rage has festered, dank as its cave, poisoning the well. But now she stalks the demons, hunting down the details of her attacker's horrific childhood. She throws it all at the sun -- the rapist, her self-blame, systemic failures that breed violence, day in day out.

Her relentless pursuit invokes my courage. As a woman, as a citizen, as a mensch.

I have choices. If I want to, I can see the bombings of 9/11 as a cruel attack that had nothing to do with me or anyone I know. I can condemn Jeremiah Wright for saying our nation of imperialists provoked the bombings. I can ridicule others who denounce torture as a sanctioned government response to terror. I can define patriotism as unquestioned loyalty to a system that produces humanitarianism -- as well as bullying, rape and torture.

Or, I can dig. Not because it's a citizen's fault for being bombed any more than a woman deserves to be raped. I would dig to understand the broken system of have and have-not, victim and aggressor, remembered and forgotton. I would dig to unearth a lie that grows lethal in the dark -- the lie that blames the victims and ignores systemic origins of abuse.

In the end, no matter how distant the memory, it's up to the little girl to decide, with her lunchpail clutched to her sore belly, staring out the window at her new found knowledge of the world.

Buffalo

Diane: I listen to Buffalo every single day. It has shaped my character.

Susan: Can you elaborate?

Diane:

I can elaborate in that
I wake up each day
as a person
who feels like a mat
on which people walk
but the strong voice
in the song
and the strength of the beat
makes me feel my spinal cord
has much more give
and I want to go out and live.

Listen to the hoofbeats here.

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

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.