Ornette Coleman's Tears

In the early to mid 90s I went to see Ornette Coleman and Prime Time play at the Duke Ellington theater in DC. My friend Futch had bought the tickets and come up from North Carolina with his girlfriend at the time and two of the seats were excellent, up front center as I recollect, while the third was not quite a nosebleed but up there on the mezzanine. I was happy to take the mezzanine seat and let the lovers get down close to Mr. Coleman; it was Futch anyhow who'd first told me to listen to Mr. COleman's music--I think I chose Chappaqua Suite or one of those improvi records--which I was none too wild about. But soon after I listened to Tomorrow is the Question and Something Else and The Shape of Jazz and soon everything else about Ornette Coleman became clearer and I could listen to all of his music with pretty clean ears (even Dancing in Your Head!).

ANyhow the show was great. Denardo was magnificent of course, powerful and driving that chariot, the skootelly-doot guit player with the big goofy George Benson-style f-hole and pleated khakis was pretty far out but certainly part and parcel of the beautiful weirdness of the show and of course the tabla player sitting there in full regalia--sitting right there on the floor in front of Denardo--well, it was all too much. And then Mr. Coleman, light, elegant, a still dancer, standing up front and center.

At some point I recognized from my seat way up there that Coleman would periodically stop blowing into his alto sax and bow forward, touch his chin to his chest almost, his shoulders shaking...between songs he'd look up at the audience in a pose I can only call beatific--face upturned, seemingly joyful at the praise from the audience's acknowledgment that we knew or could feel something was being made right there in the Ellington Theater that would make all of us different afterwards, a group rite--and his face would be shining in the lights, his eyes closed.

After the show I met up with Futch and his gal and we walked into the DC night. Futch asked if I could see Ornette Coleman's tears from up where I was sitting, that he was crying throughout the concert.

"Was he upset about something?" I asked.
Futch looked at me.
"The opposite I suppose," he said.

Have been away for awhile; will get back now.

Lion in the Road

In all the time I knew him, I saw my grandfather in two primary costumes: his pajamas/bathrobe and a business suit. He wore his pajamas every morning while making us bacon and eggs, his leather slippers softshoeing on the oft-sand scattered linoleum. The kitchen faced east; sun broke through a huge magnolia in the side yard. This was in Hampton, Virginia, located where the James RIver empties into the Chesapeake. Every day en route to my cousins' house on Chseapeake Avenue we'd pass the historical marker describing the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac, which took place right there in front of my cousins' house. After making breakfast my grandfather, who we called Big Daddy--emphasis on the "Big" and not the more pimp-like "Daddy"-- would take a shower and put on his suit, always wearing a hat and overcoat, say goodbye to everyone and walk to a door in the upstairs apartment my mom and her brother mostly grew up in, open the door and walk down a flight of steps to his office, which was on the first floor. He owned and ran a funeral home, all of which lay below the apartment. Cousin Bryan taught me how to play Super Freak on the chapel organ. I'd seen more dead bodies by the time I was 7 then most Americans who have no tbeen to war see in a lifetime. Adults tried to hide it from us but kids are curious. One body still haunts me, a fat woman, completely naked, in the white-tiled lab, the embalmer looking up from the gray body.

I don't mean to start off my first address to the interweb in months so morbidly. I don't have death on my mind any more than you should, which is to say, constantly. Anyhow, I was spooled back through time in a very pleasant way as a result of this interview with David Berman. My grandfather, who died in 1985, my freshman year at college, was an extraordinary man who I think about every day, literally. I couldn't go to the funeral because of ice storms acros the South. I've never felt guilt, if you wondered.

I met Berman for the first time sometime in the early to late mid90s, in Charlottesville, when he and Will were first getting together to plan out the Silver Palace record...actually, I think they were prepared to record, as I have a very dim recollection of guitars and mics, maybe even a DAT, a mixing board, a stool on an oriental rug. Tea bags. Maybe they did make some songs. Chris and I had driven out rte 20 to Berman's rented place, Will and Paul were there, and a friend or two. Will and DIanne were responsible for supper; it was a baked rice dish that I've eaten with the Oldhams before, maybe a family recipe, grandmother perhaps, where you bake the raw rice in liquid and vegetables. There was a big bottle of jug wine, some beers. It was summertime so the woods around crowded you even when you weren't near to them; insects creeched from the swollen greenery. We watched the Heidi Fleiss documentary. Berman was arguing with Paul, challenging him to defend Can, who Berman loathed. Paul was using the Henry Jamesian mechanism of "I like Can; that is enough", but Berman was having none of it. Hectoring--where does that word come from? Wasn't the Iliad's Hector the only honorable guy in the whole war?--anyway, hectoring comes to mind. We were all younger then, but Paul most so, and Berman is a tall cat with a good loud voice that comes out of his mouth with a directness and an absolute lack of confusion that I've always admired...Paul, having grown up with Ned and Will, had long ago learned to defend himself but at the same time you could tell that having someone yelling at him about Can, forcing him into the position of explaining why he liked Can was jarring, used perhaps to more intensely quiet lines of questioning--Defend them, Paul! Berman yelled. Why on earth would you like such a shitty, pointless band? Explain it, please. I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why this band is so great, and you're not doing a very good job of it, either.

Since then Berman's always occupied a part of my mind that I don't always want him occupying. We are friends in a distant but tangible way in such a way as you might be friends with twenty people; there's that sense that you know someone well enough, but not too well. He did not answer any of my emails for a year after I made passing reference to the Ravens' beating of the Titans in the AFC championship a few yrs ago, nevermind that I entirely agreed with his negative assessment of the Billick-led Ravens, and I even think that in the Pitchfork interview he subconsciously utilized the word I used to describe the Ravens so many years ago, which was "unlikable". He pestered me to send him a copy of my languishing Mali book so I, at great expense, made a copy of the thing and took it to him in Nashville when I did a few tiny things on the Best of Palace record last winter. When I asked him a few weeks later if he'd read it he yelled at me in an email, accusing me of being an asshole for "dropping such a huge book in his lap". I suppose this was at the height--or the depths--of the lifestyle abuse referred to in the Pitchfork interview.

Even so, there's a very short list of people whose modes of navigating life seem unique and admirable to me, and whose work seems to reflect some distilled essence of their lives rather than an ironic put-on or "art exercise", and Berman is one of those people. Perhaps the line between "ironic put-on" and "distilled essence" is remarkably thin, so thin as to be invisible. Who's to say one can't create the illusion of "distilled essence" as I suppose Ryan Adams, Sons of Leon, the Magnolia Electric guy, and Jay Farrar attempt to do?

Many might accuse Bonny Prince Billy of art-school artifice, of too rigorous an application of intellectual concepts of identity to his music-making, but anyone with an even remotely objective take on what Will's been doing for the past 15 years knows that the opposite is true. There's a corny stereotype about the great artist being physically unable to do anything but exactly what they're doing--the assumption that the great artist is unable to make the compromises that you and I make hourly in obeisance to the life of the consumer gods --but in the case of both Will and Berman I believe this to be true. Then there's that notion that people occupy their place in contemporary mythology not due to any effort on their part but because unknowable conditions and forces have eddied them to where they are, sort of dropped them off in some tidal pool not of their choosing. Maybe this is it more than ambition or desire. Who knows. Oldham and Berman. I could see both of them being lawyers but certainly not antique store owners, or label magnates. It's not even an issue of purity, a moral concept I think both Jew and Catholic alike would take issue with, but instead limitations and an ability to focus energies (at least in Will's case). I'm not saying this any better or more honorable than what you and I do, for as we all know the line between stupidity and solipsism and selfishness and childishness is all one, and choosing instead to settle in to Cohen's House of Mystery, like Sam Gamgee at the end of Return of the King, as anyone who's done it knows, is the wildest, weirdest, hardest adventure there is, infinitely more difficult than being by yourself and like a little lost boy leaving everything behind every few years...

In the early 90s a friend worked at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. One morning before opening--it was early, just past dawn--my friend, broom in hand, was interrupted by a banging on the door. A man stood there, hooded in a grey sweatshrt and matching grey sweatpants. A skinny woman with long red hair that sprung out from her head in a sticky halo not unlike cotton candy stood impatiently behind the man sucking intently on a cigarette. He wore white Chuck Taylor hightops which my friend noted appeared brand new, glowing there in the dawn; also, interestingly, the man, for even though the creature was slight of frame is was clearly a man, the way it bounced on its toes as it stood on the other side of the plate glass, had a white towel draped around his neck, on the outside of his sweatshirt. The woman finished one cigarette and lit another.

The museum had had a problem with homeless loiterers using the bathroom. My friend yelled at the guy, threatened to call the cops, told him then politely, embarrassed, maybe considering that the guy might in fact be a visitor, that they opened at 9. THe figure nodded and began to shadow box. The woman shook her hair; her mascara began to drip; she stubbed out her cigarette.

After a half hour or so the guy banged on the door again. My friend approached the door with nothing like anger but wanting instead to settle the man's impatience, to prove to the man and woman that they'd have to wait until opening. But then he knew he would open the door, because the man was Bob Dylan and he, my friend, already had tickets to the night's show at the Mosque. Dylan asked for the lyrics to Dixie; my friend gave him the lyrics from a faded folder and gave him a tour of the museum.

That night Dylan opened the show with Dixie but he did not sing the lyrics.

A number of years ago we played some shows in California with a band called the Supreme Dicks . They'd gone to Hampshire College at the height of the 80s hippy revival and said they'd come up with the most obnoxious name possible mostly in order to tweak dorky earnest hippie sensibilities of their liberal Yankee counterparts. One of the Supreme Dicks looked familiar to all of us. (Another guy in the band was perhaps apocryphally the source of Buck in Chuck and Buck ). We grew to like the Dicks quite a lot. Sweeney played drums for them. I've already mentioned that in LA Sweeney knew somebody who invited us over for a swim. So we drive up into the Hills to a producer's house. A starlet was there, pretty but with bad skin, and Adam Goldberg , who sat poolside reading a gigantic tome made out of pressed leather whose pages were yellowed and crumbling. So intent was he to figure out the book he did not look at us as we all striped down to our bathing suits. This is where I saw Sweeney try to jump off the diving board; Liz Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance was there--she was the road manager for the tour--and this is also where Ned splashed Goldberg with the cannonball (in retelling this story, now referred to twice in this account of things now and past, to someone who knows Goldberg, I have learned that what I understood to be arrogance was instead nerves; AG was a big fan of Will's...the tailor re-tailored).

There's no reason to pretend that the upcoming exposure of the familiar Dick--Sam Dylan, son of Bob and Sara, brother to Jakob and Jessie, the guy who directed Kicking and Screaming and How High-- might hold any import whatsoever, but as Berman claims in his interview, it's often more important to be a witness rather than the witnessed; these little nodes of information are recorded in public places and the public translates them as they will...on the same tour we ate Indian food with Phil Ochs' daughter and watched Cher's son play a video game that involved maneuvering a skateboarder through a cityscape.

PS: I'd totally forgotten about that nut-job who followed the Dicks up the whole West Coast dancing and gyrating. Apparently he's the Kapelovitz who started the page. Any clarification on the issue would be appreciated.

Sniff My Freedom

I am truly enjoying this book right now, by Max Rodenbeck.

My good friend Gordon over here decides to do something and by golly he sticks with it, through thick and thin, including putting up pictures and words every day for those of you who make it a habit to wander from one of these blogs to the next, while at work or play. Me, not so good: Some people not have way, I guess.

But below, in lieu of freshities, and again in honor of Gordo's stick-to-itness, another excerpt from the long lost Mali book (I will honor the dailies soon with fresh words):

I happen one day across a group of musicians I know gathered casually around a checkerboard and so I sit and play with them while they pass the ngoni from one person to the next. Chris and Tabb are walking through the marché together and I am excited to be able to yala---to wander---by myself. A young unsmiling man in bubu who will not tell me his name, calling himself only Le Vieux (The Old), takes the ngoni from my friend Amadou’s hands. The other players whisper behind their hands, “Donso.”

Within Banimotie and Wasulu society the donsos are given a great deal of respect for their very devotion to the donso lifestyle, to the sacrifices they make, and for their dedication to that part of the donso’s code that disallows them from entering mainstream Malian society. Hardcore donsos don’t run cigarette stands, they don’t sell bread, they don’t fix bikes. In short, they don’t kiss anyone’s ass. Being a donso is not a hobby but a complete lifestyle choice, and clearly Le Vieux is having second thoughts about playing for the curious tubab. He doesn’t sing and seems caught between wanting to impress me with his skill on the ngoni and breaking the donso’s code of performing during the day without his uniform. At first he plucks sheepishly at the ngoni, not even opening his mouth, avoiding my gaze. I play the nkerenye with him, using a blunt homemade knife in lieu of a nail, and soon he is playing dizzying runs on top of a low E drone that sounds like a harmonium. Upon finishing he hands the ngoni to someone else and walks away without a word.

Not too long ago I was invited to a donso ceremony in Kolondieba, where the barefooted donsos, all wearing brown mudcloth uniforms with the odd, baggy jodphurs, hats, and matching frocks, fetishes dangling from their lapels, gathered behind a central leader holding an ngoni, who began to play. They commenced to shuffle forth, snaking through the crowd in a neat half-step dance, some playing nkerenyes, ngonis, some holding their muskets aloft, huge and ancient with primitive handmade stocks and long scarred barrels. The leader sang the first few lines of the song. His fellow donsos added a repeated vocal chorus, sometimes consisting of a line from the song, sometimes a nasal whine consistent it seems with a gospel chorus’s amen, naamooaaah or namooo. A sort of secondary donso’s acknowledgement of the primary singer’s vocal and intellectual power, the phrase, I am told by a regional Peace Corps volunteer, might also be a slang version of I hear you. An emcee with an ancient microphone and a long cord walked next to the hunters, holding the mic up to the lead ngoni player. A distorted howling came from the single horn speaker placed above the crowd.

Throughout the ceremony, the hunters reached into pouches hanging around their waists to retrieve goathorn-fulls of homemade gunpowder, which they dumped by the ounce into the barrels of their guns. They’d squeeze off a shot, another, as great billowing revolutionary booms whose echo had the percussive depth of a cannon rolled like great iron drums across the expanse. Kids scattered with cries and regrouped holding hands to ears, now transfixed upon the hunters. Rings of smoke drifted upwards and directly I smelled the pleasantly acrid scent of gunpowder. Incidentally, when hunting en brousse, each load is handpacked with powder, wadding, balls and ignited by what in many cases appears to be a flintlock. I am sure I have seen flintlock rifles out here en brousse, and I could see many of the old donsos in Kolondieba thumb-cocking their pieces before they held them up in the air. Surely some of the men have come across more contemporary firearms but others, without question, are using rifles that are all but homemade. Bullets are expensive: they only fired blanks during the show, just powder and wadding. Off to the side an old man followed them with a large tray of black powder. Presently he put it on the ground nearby so they could easily scoop into the powder and refill their pouches without much interruption of their progress through the crowd.

I am reminded of a story an American who worked for a small company that supplied funds for building rural schoolhouses told about a donso he met while building a new schoolhouse. Naturally, the villagers said to him, it is tradition in most villages to invite local hunters to any important ceremonies to sing and to play their ngonis and nkerenyes and to have a feast. The American agreed to pay for the donsos, a few chickens and bowls of rice.

So, as he said, one afternoon out among a low collection of mud huts in another village outside of Bougouni, the hunters gathered, already drunk, in a cluster of rare shade and without any acknowledgement to one another the ngoni began and a strong voice rose from the crowd. They began to parade in a tight circle in the courtyard of the village. Between them lay the communal pan of gunpowder, from which they periodically filled their muskets. Some were too elderly to do more than shuffle along, heads down, while others danced foot to foot. Some punctuated the singing with enormous blasts from their rifles.

A., the American, continued the story. He said that the donsos were very drunk and firing one salvo after the next. Huge fireballs of flaming wadding rained down on the group like spent fireworks as the hunters kept firing. He noted with concern that the calabash full of gunpowder seemed vulnerable to attack. Balls of fire were raining down upon all and it seemed only a matter of time…And of course a ball of expelled wadding eventually ignited the calabash of gunpowder. A crackling explosion followed. One of the hunters dancing close to the flaming pan reached for it, hoping to extinguish the fire in order to save precious gunpowder, and was burned horribly, third degree up both arms.

Our acquaintance watched, horrified. The man’s life was clearly threatened; he was clammy and going into shock. A., half-panicked, motioned to his nearby motorcycle but the hunter refused the two hour ride to Bamako, refused the thirty minute drive to the aid station at Bougouni, refused any sort of help from the American whatsoever. He was whisked off on the back of a bicycle by a brother donso, holding his streaming redblack arms into the air.

Later the American visited the hunter in a darkened hut. The man’s burns were severe, his arms caked and oozing pus. He moaned terribly and had a high fever, attended to by hunters with medicaments and powders. They brushed the flies away from his wounds with a goat’s tail. The American, smelling in the close air of the hut the reek of rot and death, asked again to help. Again the hunter refused assistance.

A month later the American returned to the village expecting to find the old donso dead. Instead, the American was greeted by the hunter, his arms scarred but fully healed.
“Needless to say,” said the American, “we don’t let the drunken donsos come to any more school opening ceremonies.
“And,” he added, “some villages have refused to allow us build schools there for that very reason.”

One afternoon Chris, Tabb and I pile into a Land Rover with literally twelve other Malians and leave Bougouni for a village called Bougoula. It’s about an hour and a half from Bougouni, and easily an hour of it is spent on one of the innumerable dirt roads crisscrossing the brousse. In the way back of the truck Malians are piled atop one another like luggage. At one point Tabb begins to look peaked; we unload him from the truck just as he vomits onto the ground. He is starting to get sick regularly, but we remind ourselves that he isn’t even two, and don’t all toddlers get sick? I clench my teeth as he retches again into the ditch, and as the haphazardly piled Malians in the back watch us through the window. Chris wipes his mouth with her shirt. We pile back into the truck.

We get to Bougoula when the sun is straight above us. It is unimaginably hot. Crowds of children gather around Tabb. What was once a cute ritual has become an invasion: initially Tabb loved the attention but now he is frightened when the crowds of children push in on us, and buries his head in my shoulder. Little brown hands reach in only to touch in what can only be described as a very unchildlike tenderness, a conscious attempt, it seems, to be delicate and to not paw. After the children rush him he looks over his shoulder and sees that the crush has dissipated. He climbs down from his perch and ends up playing unknowable games with other toddlers and young children, running through the shaded side of the courtyard of the village. Someone points to the kids.

“Ça c’est bon,” he says, winking at us. “Baashi-te. It is fine now. It is safe there.”
“Safe?” Chris asks. “What are you talking about?”
“Serpents,” he says. “The snakes are only deep in the forest, not on the edge.”

Presently a jester-donso bounds out from the forest. Two dancers wearing antelope-masks, the chiwara, follow closely behind. We hear the sound of drums and presently a three-man jembe and doundoun troupe lopes out of the shade. Chris, Tabb and I are seated in homemade chairs on the front row in a band of shade as just a foot from us the yellow earth seethes with heat. A woman griot follows the dancers and sings the praises of the VIPs in attendance, Bagayoko, Berthe, a few men from the cotton factory (this is after all a ceremony honoring the agricultural gods). We are the only non-Malians there. The great griots of Mali’s history, including Mali-founder and folk-hero Sunjata’s own Balla Fasseke, are men, though today the most popular singers in Mali are women, many of whom sing with pop-style accompaniment the long, oriental melody lines of what I hear in Bougoula; Oumou Sangare, Rokia Traore, Nahawa Doumbia, Djeniba Seck, all of whom have roots down here near Wasulu. In fact, Nahawa Doumbia lives not far from us in Bougouni.

The jester-donso begins to whip 2 antelope-masked dancers into a frenzy, helped by the syncopated explosions of the sweating drummers. One of the dancers spots us among the crowd—-a tubab man, woman and child—-and leaps towards us, curious, his head held cocked like a young goat. He clutches short poles on which he balances his muscular torso in an eerie and dead-on accurate portrayal of a bounding animal. He is channeling the chi wara—-chi means “men”, “between”, as well as “farming”, while wara means wild animal—-the mythical antelope-beast born of a woman and a snake who, some say, descended from the heavens to teach agriculture to the Bamana peoples. It is not yet hot season but already the villagers are preparing for it and for the rainy season following by beseeching the gods to be sure to send rain…Through the thin slits in his mask I can see his eyes wide and glittering, twitching manically to the beat of the drums. Behind him the drummers play a slow, loping beat, somehow ominous and off-kilter, like a wounded animal limping into the shade. The dancer peers at us more closely, his head turning eerily on his neck, as he becomes this curious spirit-animal. Dust clouds rise and billow across the yard. Tabb sinks into Chris and begins to wail.

The jester, thus emboldened by the cries of his prey, screams and leaps and following this sudden signal the jembes begin a furious salvo and catch the dancer’s feet. The chiwara dancer’s head remains completely still, his eyes locked on mine, as his feet thrum the ground below. Tabb is fully wailing now. Around the dancer’s ankles are braces of hundreds of bottlecaps, which hiss and shake like a prehistoric armored animal shimmying in the dust. The loud drums echo across the barren space while a hot merciless wind pushes rivulets of sweat into my eyes. The band of sun has crossed into our previously shaded spot. I can almost feel my bodily chemistry being re-worked by the heat, by the excitement of the performance, and I can almost hear the reversion of my molecules to some baser state. Sometimes I feel like I have to grip my chair all the more tightly or else I’ll find myself leaping up and dancing with the animal-man.

This is no show for the tourists; there are no tourists in Bougouni. This is no empty ritual, but instead is a mystical reconditioning of the people of this village to bear out the hot season once again with strength and patience, and a beseechment of the gods to bless the crops once the hot season ends. The Sahara is creeping ever closer. Little over a decade has passed since the last deadly drought resulted in the death of the majority of livestock in the entire country of Mali. Granaries stand empty in barren fields. Cows’ hips jut evermore sharply from their scarred hides. Children’s bellies protrude, phallic malformed bellybutton flesh dangling lewdly from drum-tight abdomens.

This is what we in the West have lost, completely.

Girls with buckets of water continue to follow the goat dancers, splashing it into the dust with their fingers. Still sizable clouds of dust rise angrily from the dancer’s feet. I have my shirt over part of my face but am staring at the mask hanging in front of my eyes; the jembe players behind appear to be rising from clouds of smoke. And before me the dancer remains planted, his powerful legs hammering the earth like pistons, his head yet unmoving.
Intimidation, standoff, the ancient peering into the future.

Late in the afternoon we eat tige dege na, a peanut-based stew, from the huge communal bowls with the villagers. As we eat with other village elders and Malian VIPs young village children stare at us from a few feet away. They will only eat after we have finished. It is difficult to break apart a large chicken breast with only one hand but every time my left hand drifts towards the bowl I can feel ten eyes instantly upon it. In any case Tabb reaches in to the bowl with both hands and shovels handfulls of rice into his shining lips, nodding with pleasure as the children point to him and laugh.

We arrive home as night is falling and collapse into our beds. The harmattan howls outside; next door the donkey knocks and snuffles against its stall. When the wind and the donkey calm there is little but a great, lonely silence.

I speak to Chris, telling her about my perceptions of the day, about the thrilling dancers, the jembe drums, the seriousness with which the villagers’ seemed to take both the chiwara ritual as well as our presence at it. It is more clear to me now how difficult it would be for someone like Moussa, or any other Malian student or teenager with a passing notion of the Wu Tang Clan or New York or Bill Clinton, who is interested in joining the modern world outside of Bougouni, to separate themselves from this powerful human magic in order to make better sense of the plastic modern world. There is something purely frightening and collectively nightmarish about this essence of man-as-animal, this shade of that dancing ur-beast lurking at the root of everyone’s heart, that forces one to recognize how easily our ancient past could obliterate our plastic future if we might, Kurtz-like, succumb to it. The ritual we witnessed today makes our contemporary world seem ridiculous. One feels one’s self being dragged backwards into the earth’s harsh breast; the modern world and all its glossy, repressed greed makes less sense.

I wonder about the donso-jester. He was wearing the donso’s uniform but didn’t play an ngoni, and seemed more an enabler, a guide, and less a real donso. Perhaps a bogolan costume festooned with gris-gris does not a donso make. The drummers were incredible, I say to Chris, eyeing the mosquitoes already gathering on the net, their hind-legs hiked up like elbows, working against one another like oil pumps. And did you see the beautiful jeli? Those infinitely black eyes, that knowing, pre-fall smile, but still so innocent somehow…a country girl who knows nothing of the world outside of this village but knows more, perhaps, of man…I wonder what’s going on with the band back in Baltimore. I’m in a sort of droning trance.

Then Chris twitches, snores; she is sound asleep.

But I cannot join her, not yet: I am unable to erase the frightening image of the dancer’s manic eyes from my imagination.

Feeling a Little Wiggly

So said Maxwell yesterday upon awaking.

I'll post some wiggly photos of the recent tour avec Billy and the Wolf-Nutz when I can find them. The pictures, that is. For what it's worth, the photos I took with the Lomo fisheye turned out well. Shoot real close.

Wiggly-wise, Max was feeling physically wiggly--he moved his body not unlike a fish while standing in hid bed, which is where he was when he said this--while I am feeling brainly wiggly, on account of it being 50 degrees and raining here in Baltimore. But also because there's just too goddam much to do. Sleep is a waste of time, isn't it? I could easily work 20 hours a day. And spend 17 hours of that work doing nothing but staring out the window. That's work. Sometimes. I roto-tilled the whole side yard; was that work? It was so easy. Thinking about how to continue forth through the writing project on the table, having that span of time in which to empty my brain, that's work, that's hard if not impossible. Calling up the ghosts, that's hard. Also, there's this:

* * *

Andrew Lytle said the following in his essay THE HIND TIT :

"When we remember the high expectations held universally by the founders of the American Union for a more perfect order of society, and then consider the state of life in this country today, it is bound to appear to reasonable people that somehow the experiment has proved abortive, and that in some way the great commonwealth has gone wrong.

There are those among us who defend and rejoice in this miscarriage, saying we are more prosperous. They tell us---and we are ready to believe---that collectively we are possessed of enormous wealth and that this in itself is compensation for whatever has been lost. But when we, as individuals, set out to find and enjoy this wealth, it becomes elusive and its goods escape us. We then reflect, no matter how great it may be collectively, if individually we do not profit by it, we have lost by the exchange. This becomes more apparent with the realization that, as its benefits elude us, the labors and pains of its acquisitions multiply.

To be caught unwittingly in this unhappy condition is calamitous; but to make obeisance before it, after learning how barren is its rule, is to be eunuched."

But Lytle also talked a lot about "living in the world", saving a great deal of bile for those who choose to remove themselves from the ebb and flow of society. This is work, thinking about this stuff: There are no alternatives, are there? There is little choice but to dive in, no?

* * *

A Rare Quick One

Here's a short thing I pumped out for the sinful Vice Magazine.

I'd reserved this morning for work but the fourteen thousand Mexicans on my roof have other ideas. Something about squatter's rights...

And so to the post office and afterwards to teach my second to last class of the semester.

Recent listens: Aeolian String Ensemble, Jonathan Coleclough, MIA, Double Leopards HALVE MAEN.

It's important to me to finish this one by 10:59: a productivity goal, you unnerstan, so I must...

Yesterday's Wine

So our mini-tour with the Bonny Billy/Sweenoid Super-Wolofing Band was great. It really was like a Wolof supershow, what with ninety-three guitarists up on the stage by the end of the night, jamming out into some especially African vibes. The Wolfs were: Will, Paul, Sweenoid, Fike Mellows and Pete Townshend, with much help and love from 5th member Jessie. We were Ned, Willy, Aram and me, what with Human and Walker off with the 'Retum cats, with moral and filmic support from Justin of the Long Live Death krew. The glowing Jodie Jean Marston and PonieHeart began the night with their lilting hypno-byes.

There is oft a gravitational energy to one of these tours, the openers and the headliners two sympathetic bodies floating in a shared space. At worst, there is an utter lack of energy and the bodies are blackholing in on themselves. At best, the bodies are fully locked into a centripetal dance, where one would go flying off into the outer rim of the universe without the other, and where a certain type of sustainable but precarious balance is achieved by the hyper-aware bodies. This, I feel, is what happened between the Ano and the Billies (though in Charlottesviile, as per usual, the time/space continuum was rippling in an unpleasant way).

New York less mad than the usual; for the first time in forever I did not see the sun rise as I strode down dawn streets but instead it rose while I was asleep in Justin's parents' guest room in Wyckoff. I awoke to glowing yellow drapes backlit by a viciously bright sunrise. Any physical or mental pain was duly sidestepped, with help: Justin's Mom esp'd my movements behind the closed door and there was coffee awaiting, followed in short order by bagels, delicious lox, coffee cake, strawberries, quiche, more coffee, upon my emergence. She'd reserved a corner of the table for Justin's vegan products, clustered as they were tightly in appearance as to not even come close to the dirty, dirty meat and bacteria-encrusted non vegan products that Ned, Willy and I (Aram spent the night with wife in NYC) so wolfishly pushed into our mouths. It's always fun going into someone else's house and seeing the pictures of them when they are young and braced, standing atop middle school ski-runs with the world below them.

Bowery Ballroom smaller than I remembered last from so many yrs ago, when Al Licht came out onstage dribbling a basketball. We all Sharpied it after; he claims he still has it and will not sell it on eBay. Thence to Philly, quite fun this go 'round. No disrespect to my barely more northerly brothers and sisters, but The Phil has never treated me real well, the Ano neither, and I recall that one night we played at Nick's the very same night the FLyers lost in the Stan Cup finals. Some angry vibes out on those streets that night, electrical and not electric! We thought we were going to get our anos kicked. But this time, much love. And after some of those spanish fries the show; the Theater of the Living Arts seemed absurdly big; I walked to the back during the BPB/Sweeney gig and was disappointed; they looked so shrimpy up there and the sound was boomy and arena-like. It seemed a passage of sorts; Will could play big dates like that constantly, but I don't suppose he will.

We ate larb at a Thai restaurant thereby introducing into the tour vernacular our word of the week: larb. Found one of the old bootleg cds of HARVESTER'S Hemat at the Philly Record Exchange , wondering now if I should trade up.

Thence to the leafy bower of Swarthmore, where it seemed paradoxically that there was less swarth than in Philly, for example, but not, I suppose, compared to the rest of Pennsylvania which, on balance, seems to contain more pink honkies than any other state in the eastern US. An art major had built a gigantic modernist teeter-totter out of plywood and painted it in 70s Germanic primary red. Two solid wooden seats sat opposing one another on each edge of a large semi-circle; that formed the rounded shape on which the teeter would totter. The thing had heft. Maybe Paul and I jumped up on it first, sitting in the seats, knees pointing at knees, finding it very teetery. And thence to the fun, whence the hyperactive Matt Sweeney and the oft-mellow tour hustler Jessie started going at it NY-stylee, trying to bounce one another ass over teeter. It reminded me of the time I watched MS trying to jump off a diving board at some hilltop aerie in Los Angeles, a producer's house, where poolside a recognizable actor--who didnt speak to any of us the whole two hours we were there--was lounged out on a recliner reading an antique hardbound book as if to develop it, a book that got splashed when Ed Oldham hit him sideways with an old skool cannonball, not even a can opener. Matt had a unique way of running off the end of the board without benefit of a bounce. But he knew how to handle this teeter totter, he really did. Those New York guys, they got style. We all played a fairly small on-campus joint but really rocked it hard. A high point of the mini-tour, to be sure.

In all the excitement Will had a yogurt explode in the pocket of his fleece.

Charlottesville's a town that is important in the grand scheme of Ano. It's where Ned and Aram first met in the 80s (they were in the same class at UVa with the Malklerolian and Nastoid from...what the hell was that band called? Helmet?...) and where Ned, WIlly and I first got it together in the early 90s. Growing up in RIchmond as I did I heard far too many references to Charlottesville as being a sort of Virginian's Valhalla: it's where all the hale fellows well met would go when they die, out to Jefferson's glorious mountains to ride winged horses and to sip bourbon from pewter tumblers and to talk about the sanctity of land. Maybe the chilly vibes about the place are just family ghosts; we have a photograph of my grandfather and his brothers outside Mountain View, an old family farm in Greene County just north of Charlottesville, a house that no longer exists, plowed under by the thousands and thousands of acres of overpriced tract housing one has to muddle through into town on rte 29. The supposedly fancy restaurant we ate at before the show had a typically confused list of appetizers that summed up perfectly a general blandness and indecision typical of Central Virginia (spoken as a proud native): bruschetta, an egg roll of the day (I swear), satay, hummus, calamari. Bonnie Band drummer Pete ordered a "kalamata salad". My gorge rose when the salad arrived tableside and we all espied a handformed baseball-sized clod of rubbery black olives from a can resting on about three big spinach leaves. The damn salad cost 10 dollars.

But any night I get to hang out with SB and SM, not to mention Ned, WIll and Paul's Mom and Dad, is a good night. I felt clumsy and slow behind the kit and wasn't hearing things right...this happens often after a high, and the previous night at Less-Swarth was most certainly that.

Baltimore was great, as per usual.

Re-entry back into the day-to-day is always difficult; from staying up all night sampling distilled products and sleeping 'til noon to being yerked from sleep at 6 a.m. and hitting the ground running, pouring Luit Froops into bowls-- M. demands two bowls, one with Kix, the other with Froops, and two spoons--getting Elder to school by 8ish, then Two Bowls to school by 8:30. If it's nice we walk. A magnificent Spring here in Baltimore so far, cherry buds lasting, azaleas coming out. And getting back to work, such as it is, with very little seeming real, or fake, but neither...

* * *

Yesterday there was a great interview on TGross's Fresh Air with RCrumb. He said something about Timothy Leary claiming that after a serious psychedelic experience one begins to realize that the world exists on numerous metaphorical levels. This gives rise to the more simplistic hippy ideal that "all is connected" but nevertheless there is, to me, some truth to both claims. Tours with the Anomoanon have come to represent a metaphorical world, a complete one, that still hides much of itself from me, but which is mos def formed and informs my mostly domestic life.

It's got to do with being on the road.

Before I had kids and before I had a wife, and before I had to go to work to pay for living, and long before I had a house to pay for, and when my primary concern of the day was what spreadable product would go on my bagel, cream cheese or hummus, and when it was perfectly alright to take an afternoon nap in the hammock under two gigantic white oaks, my favorite thing to do was to get on my bike and ride for long distances. I still have the bike, a Bridgestone RB-1, a great bike, but it sits pretty much unused in the basement. This would've been really when I lived in Charlottesville, near the mountains, and then again in Tallahassee, right before Eldest was borned in 1998.

The thing I liked most was this feeling that, as you left your well-defined nexus of comfort--your neighborhood, then extended walking space, then your greater city--you really understood the essence of freedom in a way that you just can't reckon in a car: you are so connected to the physical world on your bike, and it's easy to overstand how, as you leave your house, this unlinking from your home base comes at a physical cost (excuse the tense confusion). You move through air thick with pollen; you feel the heat coming from car engines as they roar past; you smell the swollen road kill, maggot-laden and crumpled in the ditches you roll past.

It wasn't uncommon for me to go fifty miles on a good day in Charlottesville, and more often than not I'd end up on some lost road winding up through woods and past dilapidated farmhouses, asbestos shingles falling away from burnt frames, rusted carcasses tumbled into ravines, bone-white enamel of appliances shining through the redbuds. If the sky grew dark you were stuck to ride through rain, maybe thunder, for hours. Once I was totally lost but I knew that miles behind me somewhere lay the road back into town. All I had to do was to turn around. But I couldn't. There was a road in front of me and I was first mentally then physically unable to turn my bike against the force pulling me towards it. There was an element of humiliation in having to turn around...or was that it?...something ahead of me kept calling, even as thunderheads billowed black above the mountains and thin white men half-hidden behind screen doors watched me from beneath baseball caps...rolling through lost crossroad towns.

Then a brown figure boiled out from under a porch and before I heard its bark I heard the clacking of its giant nails on the tarmac. A German shepherd with teeth ablaze was on my wheel, close. I could feel its breath on my calf. It was fast but I was faster. It gave up but sat in the road behind me. I looked over my shoulder; the dog watched me, Cerberus' mutant descendant standing sentinel on the very path I knew would take me home. I knew I couldn't turn around and try my luck with the shepherd again. I'd have to keep on following this road, wherever it might lead. A good rule of thumb: all roads lead somewhere. The skies fell, I was surrounded by horrendous lightning and thunder and wind howling down from the mountains (one of the deadliest tornadoes ever in Virginia occurred in Ivy, a town just wnw of Charlottesville). I truly considered that I'd never make it home. It didn't matter, I knew, at the heart of it. No one waited for me. My life really didn't effect anyone in any measurable way, no one relied on me for much of anything, and those people touched by my loss would get over it in time. I was out there, man!

An hour later I came up on a crossroads that I recognized. My relief went beyond mere relief. The next day I went out and did the same thing. Rode out into the mountains and near got lost, but found my way.

Freedom was dependent on that very real idea that no one relied on me. That was true! It is no longer ...This gives any leaving of home a slightly sinister, melodramatic cast, and given that these tours are to all who don't go on them nothing but the purest of escapist fun, well, they aint that for me, dog. It's easy to feel even more out there in the unknown, knowing that you've stomped on the world a bit more, cast things about, made a shape onto it that isn't you...

Memory Chaining

There was a time not too terribly long ago--then again, what is long? what is ago?--when I made my living writing ad copy for a company that made gigantic sewage processing machines.

The machines were called Belt Filter Presses and one of the company's selling points was that their BFPs created lighter "cake" which was nothing more than de-watered "floc", short for flocculant. Flocculant was the word they used to describe the millions of gallons of enzyme-enriched waste that would, by design, flow across the porous belts of abovementioned BFPs, which would then be squeezed together, thereby removing the liquid portion of the waste leaving, um, the "solids". The solids would then have to be trucked elsewhere. Therefore it was best to buy a BFP that would make your "cake" light because you, as the municipal party responsible for paying tax dollars for trucking the cake elsewhere, would desire to have to pay less for the trucking as possible, and everyone knows how heavy water is. And if you had light cake, that is, with less water, obviously it would be easier overall to truck it away. So our company wanted us to emphasize the angle that their BFPs squeezed more whiz and liquid krad out of the floc, thereby making lighter cake. Conversations with the clients were always funny, though I remember I was the only one who thought so. Straightfaced people making helpful suggestions into a speaker phone:

"Well, we've done some tests and we get maximum throughput for the floc, better than company x."
"So your floc, so you can not only get the lightest cake, but your floc moves more quickly through the press..."
"Exactly. Exactly. We've designed them for maximum throughput, even including an enzyme bath..."
"An enzyme bath?"
"Yeah, yeah, really exciting stuff. A tank full of enzyme polymers that not only make the floc *softer* but actually chemically separates water molecules from the more solid flocculant."
"Great. Great stuff. Got a lot to work with here."
"And the polymer is reusable."
"Awesome. So there's that, that environmental angle..."
"Right, definitely, and with the light cake, because we've pressed so much liquid out of the floc, with that light cake your muni trucks use less gas, less pollution, all that good stuff."
Me, so far silent: "So what exactly does the cake look like? Is it really that dry? Totally dry? Or can you still, you know, sense that it was not too long in the past, you know..."
My boss looks at me. Speaker phone says:
"Ummm. Good question. Actually, I see your point. It's really not unlike, well, cake, in fact. A dryish brick of brown sugar, say, a chunk of...let's just say the word *cake* is apt..."

Floc. Cake. Maximum throughput. (close up on my boss's mustachioed mouth): *enzymes*.

It was during this job, wondering about where the cake got trucked, that I recalled having a summer job as a yard-boy at a retirement community during high school. An awful, awful widowed crone led Teddy and I around to her azaleas, having us dump something that I remember being called 'Milagronite' on the beds. It had a sweet, not unpleasant grainy smell, like feed at a zoo or dry dog food or something. That is, nothing you would directly want to eat, but which you could understand without too much of a stretch why a donkey or ape or dog might want to eat it. We pitched it onto the azaleas with our bare hands. One day I read the fine print on the bag only to find out that it was treated solids--cake--from the Municipal Wastewater Treatment facility of Milwaukee (the "Mil" of the name). Milwaukeans' turds. Lots and lots of jokes about beer and cheese that summer.

One of our coworkers was a semi-retarded fat man who wore overalls and brogans every day, holding his Hitleresque mop of greasy black hair in place with an ancient Mack Trucks baseball cap. Charlie, the loudmouth bigot, and Mr. F-, the drunk boss, both called the fat guy "Puddin'" and told Teddy and me to do the same. After a time I grew uncomfortable calling this mildly retarded man who looked like a mole "Puddin'" and asked him his real name. It took me the better part of two months to find out what his answer was: Homer.

I worked with him all summer and understood about three words he said, one of which was cocksucker, used to describe pretty much anyone. I gathered that he'd been in the military and had been posted in Germany.

* * *

I'm ashamed to admit that I've punched my first cell phone, cracking its little windshield. The phone still works. Man, do I miss Sprint. Verizon is just the worst here in my 'hood in Baltimore, and also where C- works in DC. The pits. We switched because last summer they were running a special on family plans, better than Sprint. And everyone told us that Verizon was so great. Buy or beware, as Clodagh sings.

* * *

Finally, I love looking at the art that gets wags' tongues a twitching--Twombly, Hirst, Koons, etc.--but I am always more impressed if I find out that the expressor or impressor was first a drafstman, an artist who paid their dues drawing and designing: DeKooning, Picasso are examples. This is at odds with a strong part of my character, which is as my name implies: jack of all trades, master of none. I can do a silly number of things pretty well, well enough to fool a lot of people into thinking I can do said things better than I really can, but nowhere in my makeup is the kind of patience and dedication to craft that would EVER allow me to do one thing perfectly. This, for me, is a huge fault in my makeup and I am sometimes envious of people who are not hypomanic and who can remain undistracted for longer than a week or a month: I admire people like my Dad, who worked in the same field, still works, in fact, since 1962.

So I love it when I read something that someone has tried to manipulate through unclarity, confusing pov and ambiguous character orientation--obvious examples being Faulkner, Joyce, Kesey's NOTION-- but more often than not I consider that the writer writing this way might have something to hide. I am a lot tougher a critic on writing like this, possibly since I read a lot of student fiction and most students do try to hide behind confusing narratives. Their characters are focused too intently on some solipsistic issue; the characters seem nothing more than outgrowths of the writer's psyche, again, that taint of solipsism; and because the character is so often *them* it is impossible to be objective about the idiotic things that character might or might not do.

Straight narratives are hardest to write, for me. Just no-trick storytelling: Got a funny story? Good. Tell it. That's why even after loving all the efforts of the writers yer supposed to be confused by I always am so moved almost to tears by the beauty of a simple story told well: Peter Taylor comes to mind. Getting back to the roots, the dirt, the unpressed floc.