Homo Musicus

This will be a place to regularly talk about all things musical.
“…our capacity to ‘read’ rhythms, melodies, and pleasing harmonies, like our uniquely human ability to learn language, was genetically prescribed. These three elements were found by anthropologists to exist in all musical cultures. Our ear for harmony was hardwired. (Furthermore, without a surrounding context of harmony, disharmony was meaningless and uninteresting.) Understanding a line of melody was a complex mental act, but it was one that even an infant could perform’ we were born into an inheritance, we were Homo musicus; defining beauty in music must therefore entail a definition of human nature…” –Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Claire and I got home from work the other week to find a giant wrapped gift in the entry way. My emerged explaining that Santa had come early. We debated opening it now or later, though I was mostly doing it to tease Claire, seeing how curious she was and knowing Benny is the kind of guy who doesn’t make you wait to open gifts. Dad tipped the scales by saying, “I don’t know why you’d wait to open it when you can start having fun with it now.”
Now, after a certain age you sorta say goodbye to fun gifts, especially ones the size of bike-boxes, and so hungrily, cluelessly we tore off the wrapping paper, and peeled open the FedEx box.
It was a glittering ruby red Fender Starcaster with pearl pick strum guard, complete with amp, tuner, a stand, carrying case, extra strings and picks. It was totally f-ing awesome. Dad proceeded to demonstrate what could be done with the device, particularly in the way of fuzzy blues-rock, something to shoot for. Is it any wonder I have an easy time imaging the character of God the Father?

Seeing Red

Oklahoma soil is red, the Red River banked in clay.  Our white dog comes to the back door with a reddish brown dipped beard and paws.

We are also the reddest state politically, every county going to the Republicans, topping Utah in percent of voters voting right.  Here people are still excited about Sarah Palin.  I say this to inform, not to judge. 

Red too, crimson, is the color of the local sports team.  You would be hard pressed to find a corner of the globe where the culture is as needlepoint focused on one particularity as Oklahoma is on the Sooners.  Sooner magic seems to hang in the atmosphere.  I very much enjoy watching these college students play football, but can’t quite understand the emotional investment people can have in sports teams.  It reminds me of patriotism, also known as nationalism.    

Before the election I twice heard a certain candidate referred to as the antichrist.  No explanation for the label was given.  This happened at the elementary school where I work.  It was a teacher speaking.  

Every morning we gather in the gym and pledge allegiance to the flag and sing a patriotic song, and every morning I wonder, why pledge your allegiance to a flag?  Is this not an odd idea?  I pledge allegiance to the kingdom of God, give thanks for the freedom I enjoy in this country, and believe that when politics and religion join, both suffer.

The fourth graders put on a musical a few weeks ago.  The theme was the Fourth of July in Edmond, Oklahoma.  Edmond has one of the top rated celebrations in the country, as judged by people who judge these things.  One of the songs the children sang was titled ‘Free Enterprise’.  It contains lyrics explaining why regulating industry is a bad idea.  I was reading the paper the day I heard this song, and a picture of Alan Greenspan was on the front page.  He had explained to a Congressional Committee that he might have made a mistake when, as chairman of the Fed, he insisted on a strict deregulation police regarding the financial industry.   

From Emerson’s Essay ‘The Poet’

For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.

Last Night

I unlocked the doors

opened the windows

and slept like God

Seriously.

After living abroad for a year my wife and I decided to reintroduce ourselves to American culture by checking out the latest blockbuster.  We were stunned right from the start.  The previews were louder and more strobe lighty than anything we’d seen.  It was difficult to watch the screen, and even staring down into the darkness helped little, the volume of collisions and explosions was so high.  Then the feature presentation began.

I sat through another torture scene.  So provocative a few short years ago, they now seem to be written into every other movie.  How many will we endure?  How many will our children see in their lifetimes?  I watched what they’d done to a children’s comic.  I’m all for serious writing, but the sickness, the terror seemed unending.  My wife kicked in the seat beside me. 

Is it the dark we love?  The streets slick with blood and pornography?  Do we enjoy our nightmares? Violence, sickness, death, we celebrate it.  Chaos, fear, the Angry Man.  We eat it up.

The movie’s leading actor said he didn’t think children under thirteen should see it.  I’m thirty-one and wish I hadn’t.  I’d heard that the actor playing the villain was spectacular, but I wonder.  Is evil a difficult disguise?  Is this character dynamic, deep, developed?  Or rather shallow, easy, a caricature, a one-off sketch.  Have these people seen Brando in Streetcar? 

The truth is, we’re happy the actor is dead, that he died in violence and darkness. 

I left the movie running and stumbled into daylight streaming through the mall’s nearest entrance.  I saw children at an arcade, overweight and playing a ‘first person shooter’, a senior photo sample of a pretty girl with a shotgun, videogames for sale titled Manhunt, Combined Assault, and Grand Theft Auto. 

American Media:  you make me sick.

I Am Resting on the Lips of Flowers

I am sitting in a windowsill

sealed, still, taped, encased,

blessed, washed, watched

 

birth is real, a real-live true thing, it happens, actually.

I’ve seen new humans, even held some.

people pass in and out

brushed here and there by love

swathed in God’s swaddling clothes,

nursed on air and light

 

each of our days we alight

rise out of dust each morning

dig up from brown earth bed, crawl from the wrinkles of sheets,

we wipe the remnants from the corners of our eyes,

the specks of that other world,

our tearducts unblocked

we touch and tuck into the new wings of the day,

we learn its name

we gather arms around us, tune our fiddles and cough

 

today I sit a man in love

with infinitesimal flowers and yellow fields and ripples on water and

the clatter of Italians hanging pots and children surfing leaves with speech

a canal carries bubbles, travel join and burst

air comes rushing up the walls from water pregnant with pollen

spirit carries life

light carries heat

 

I sit cool beneath cloudshadow and listen

rainwater boils white in the stream below and it is spring

a wavy peace

staring to the water, through the water, I combine my spine with the shimmery sun,

wiggling, dashing—returned from heaven, beauty beyond reason, trillions in the circled water

 

I am woods walking

clapping hollow sticks together, one per hand, creating a straight rhythm,

adding my small noise to birds and brooks,

creaking trees and sugar pine cones, catsized, falling from the heights, whistling down until the crash with branch or ground

 

they say you are an opiate and they are right

you open me up to the sparkling world

this is your madness,

and you are one

Chet Baker Jazz Club

punch break cleanly

ice stirring the glass

a thimbleful of chaos and moonlight

some city traffic-light charm

some shadow, deep and multilayered, cleanly gleaming

simple windows glowing

populated drops plunked down in puddles

footsteps hopping lightly, the air pulling up pools’ reflections

curb sitting Italian leather shoes shining in streetlights

filigree in silver

pool cues pushing white and blue and red

solid over smooth sea’s green

bar smoke and swirling oak

–tip the man

tip the glass, tip your brown suede hat,

drink the barrel soaked liquor to your granddad and splash on some cologne

 

go on home to the clean cool sheets of a single room

a silent black lump of telephone

night dies in morning’s light barred by thick dumb blinds,

no lines on the walls, no dust alighted above the deep carpeted floor,

he’s dead and gone

asleep and alone

Shocking Secrets of Mountain Towns

we walked around creation endlessly gaping, laughing and pointing, peaking around corners, sunny bricked streets, creatures, creatures

shining hi

our hair and breath—that’s the rub, heartbeats and perspiration, the spirit echoing from the pores, the rub, the rub, (when you awaken me make me tea or don’t bother)

we’d brunch in boulder, together, each a private love to smolder, rubbing on against the other

I threw sparks at you and you moved and threw to someone else, some other, another,

we saw the steepness of the mountain sun, its perversity in heating us so,

cold shadows beckoning towards the sitting conversant life, the outside looking,

falling sun on your cold nose life,

I strangely know the layouts of various Rocky mountain towns, these engraved along my spine,

the details of my backbone igniting in sleep, reaching up to me or not, just existing there,

how our dreamlife exists only semiconnected to us, we’re hosts at best,

(and yet, and yet, at special times I can peak into myself, that is, my other self, my soul, and I can go inside the envelope, the walrus shot, the music beam holding afloat, the world submerged, we’re balancing in water)

and where was I?

I know, I know, the holy ghost, the certain times when balancing we breathe seeing the other’s fuzzing, the shocking edges ethereal, we are windbreakers, our forms float elastic, passing unevenly into dust, into space and starlight

I buried Colorado,

its mountains hidden beneath my dreams

A Vision while Listening to ‘Shake Our Tree’ by the Rosebuds

Oh let me stop sitting in the dark and sing the warmth spreading among us—
this is why art, to sing together, not to fucking gape at—
but please let us sing, sing, sing together,
oh my friends, why are we not playing together?
what’s wrong with this world?
you here, me there, pathetic

I won’t stop being your best friend, all of you
please get off your asses and come to Italy and bring guitars,
tambourines, walking shoes, drums and dresses,
come humming in corduroy suits or nothing,
come with your hair on fire, combed back for the plane ride,
come with cartoon bomb shapes in your eyes for pupils
come ticking of love or tick off
come we into the ocean, frothly splashing, frankly peeling,
dying together to live together in a large cool house with ceiling fans and blankets
we’ll sleep on the carpeted floors, the pavements hot outside
I want, honestly, to walk the world’s city streets with you
singing love and revolution
I don’t care where, just that we sing our parts as clearly as we are able,
when we the sunny children awake

I remember each of you in my dreams

Criticism

‘A Death in The Family’ by Agee.  Apparently there’s a new edition on its way with previously deleted chapters.  This is one of the best and one I need to read again.  ’The God of Small Things’ by Roy, one of my very favorites. I just finished ‘Ishmael’ by Quinn, and though as fiction it’s not so great, it’s extremely thought provoking.  Philip Roth ‘Goodbye Columbus and Short Stories’–Claire and I have loved this one.  There is something wretched in negative criticism. To destruct someone’s art, even deservedly so, seems to me cowardly and malicious (and also fun in its savagery). I find a twisted joy in, for instance, scoffing at the choice of best picture or stating that most of the new album by (celebrated singer-songwriter) is painfully boring. At parties or dinner, surrounded by friends, is where I inevitably spill the beans—I watch the faces of my friends fold, the air becomes painfully quiet, and isn’t it natural that, identifying ourselves so strongly with what we like, music, books, fashions of every kind, that when these things are insulted, so too are we? Of course its only opinion, and the occurrence of art and beauty in the beholder is so mysterious that its hard to blame people their choices, for running, for instance, to the theater to see (some action movie), of which I haven’t had the pleasure. And who of us has not the critics to thank, whether in the form of professors or Pitchfork, for introducing some holy artifact into our lives, some conduit for exploring the face of God? And so I hope that if I were, say, a professional music critic, that I would publish only positive reviews and ignore what I disliked entirely. But Scott, you might ask, wouldn’t your silence itself be condemning? Yes, but much more subtly so. There is so much to talk about, in the realm of indie rock alone, that the omissions would be easy to miss.I will start writing reviews of things here, under the title ‘Criticism’, but more accurately ‘Positive Criticism’ and will discuss anything lovely, from the Tortelloni of 15 Mirasole, the lovely tratorilla downstairs from us, to the performances by the Brad Mehldau Trio and Joshua Redmond at the Bologna Jazz Festival (the latter of which was opened by another famous musician who, unaccountably ‘stank on toast’ to borrow my father-in-law’s appropriate phrase).And so, wandering into the northern Italian city night after Brad Mehldau, we felt grateful, swollen with emotion. He drew figures in the air, blue and gold twisting shapes hovering in the theater. The three led us down under water through cavernous rooms, the sounds of discovery resounding throughout the mystical halls, voyaging for the joy of it, of bliss of existing at all. His hands played different melodies simultaneously. Different time signatures in different keys, leaving the bass and drums in bizarre flight above them, and returning in time effortlessly.And Redmond, outrageous, the clarinet making a jumbled perfect puzzle of bright colors perfectly—a sound that I’d never heard, never dreamed of, on a song for his mother. During his solo, Redmond’s ridiculous drummer had trouble with his kick pedal. The bassist, Redmond, and a stage hand were on their hands and knees searching for the drum key, the drummer still playing and then stopped quickly, searched his pockets, held the key up towards the audience and facing us said, “Oh shit, it was in my pocket the whole time”, and the solo resumed. Great live jazz is hard to beat, releasing the rhythm of blood in your veins.I read Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ recently and recommend it. I’d not been very excited for a book for so long and within four pages I was laughing with the discovery, thinking, “This is what I’ve been looking for”, and later, “This is how I want to write”. Please read it. It was perfect for me here and now, missing, always missing my friends. I’ll not summarize it; I’ll spare you that, but the writing, the story, if you can call it that, is fantastic. I’m currently reading her ‘The Years’ and enjoying it also, its language and lack of plot. It seems more accurate to life as I know it: time moving, experience flowing, little, hardly related stories occurring.‘Look! It’s El Perro Del Mar!’ by El Perro Del Mar–for anyone who’s ever felt melancholic.Joanna Newsome–you know you’re and adult when you begin loving the exploratory childhood music of this harpist/singer. This is one of the many musicians that I’ve been surprised at liking so much. Also, I wouldn’t have guessed that the gleeful pop of The Go! Team, The Avalanches, or Mylo would be my styles of music—but they are and I’ve had hours of glee listening to these bands. Similarly Sean Hayes, whom I hadn’t heard of before seeing him open for Jolie Holland, is wonderful. Again, I’m surprised, I’m usually into singer/songwriter types, but him I love.