Hello!
Yesterday I played or performed or talked about music for around 10 hours, an aggregate of time bordered in by two drives of semisignificant length. At the end of my drive home, feet from my house, I felt something in the car shift; turning down the music I’d been blasting (Suicide, This Heat, The Animals, Bo Diddley - the four horsemen?) revealed I had a flat. No big thing, no philosophy, just length and a slow leak resulting in depletedness, so of course I pushed off dealing with it until this AM.
The start of this month has just been that. Exhaustion, kicking the can down the road. Hence the lateness, sending this out a week into the month.
Or, you could be generous and chalk up my delay to the combo busyness of current activity and anticipatory excitement. I have two records coming out next month: Myself, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff (March 1); and Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, Four Guitars Live! (March 22). This month also sees me involved two major recordings: Floating City, Erik Friedlander’s band featuring me, Mark Helias, and Sara Serpa; and, blessedly, the recording of Editrix III. That’s a lot of music! Lots of camaraderie and friendship, which, at the end of the day, is why I got into this business. Lots, too, of remembering, which is what the practice of music repeatedly proves itself to be — sometimes, in the midst of that crazy presence required for a good performance, I find myself just Remembering something; on stage, I remember writing messages on the bare floor before retiling my childhood kitchen, or the first time I smelled a person who was drunk and had just smoked cigarettes, or sometimes even the right note or cue.
Despite the overwhelm of both activity and memory, I’m proud to say I’m managing to stay really inspired, and am filled with gratitude to an almost sublime degree. My friends are doing amazing things and I’m either watching them kick ass from my distance or doing it with them. What great fortune. And with all this flurry, somehow a few new dear people have cannonballed my life with a lot of force, and with the hopeful shining promise that they’ll be in it for a while. Life shakes something. The dice rolls, and everything looks a little different in all the different rises of the year. Though you may forget how to read, you can usually remember to count.
Here be the shows:
Friday Feb 9 - playing some free music at the record shop on van brunt in red hook, w lou koonig (dr), gabby fluke mogul (vln) and lester st louis (cello); we play quartet and sandy ewen (gtr/brain) opens up, solo. 9pm
Saturday, Feb 10 - The Stone - performing in a beautiful new trio with Rebekah heller (bassoon) and Brian Chase (drums) for Rebekah’s stone week. Our blend is actually astonishing. It’s a major event, unmissable band. 8:30pm
Monday Feb 26 - playing Angela Morris’s wonderful Brackish series at st lydia’s, either duo with Ryan Sawyer or in beautiful Darlin, depending on Lester’s schedule. The bill also features poet Kat da Silva, and a duo of isa crespo-pardo and Anna Abondolo. show o’clock pm!
On my stereo:
Wendy & Bonnie - Genesis
Osibisa - Woyaya
Slapp Happy and Henry Cow - Desperate Straights
Bo Diddley - I’m A Man: The Chess Masters 1955-1958
Cypress Hill- Unreleased & Revamped
Crass - Penis Envy
On my bookshelf:
Mario de Andrade - Macunaima
Simone White - Of Being Dispersed
Nastassja Martin - In The Eye of the Wild
Gary Lutz - Partial List of People to Bleach
Javier Marais - The Infatuations
William Maxwell - Time Will Darken It
I have to say the best book I read last month was Girlfriends by Emily Zhou. Run, don’t walk. You shan’t regret it.
On my mind:
There is a marked difference between Divorce Guy music and Alone Guy music. Some friends and I have been refining this theory of late. A summation: Alone Guys do things for their own musical (and otherwise) amusement and Divorced Guys make choices out of a kind of solitary, warped orientation towards something imaginary or against a mis/understanding of something from their past. Alone Guys play, Divorced Guys glint. An example - The Nightfly? Divorced. Rare Whack Demos? Alone Guy. This, my 3nd favorite Ween Song? Divorced. Todd Rundgren? Peak Alone Guy (all his love songs, even the most devastating ones, see him so excited to be making music that they transcend the stuckness of the Divorced Guy iconography that they transcend into Alone Guy). Wicked Game? Divorced. Without Tears? Alone Guy! JJ Cale? Alone Guy. The For Carnation? INCREDIBLY Divorced. Haruomi Hosono? Alone Guy!! Come up with your own in the comments! The game that keeps on giving!
In times of this level of saturation, non-thought is so seductive that it reveals itself to have already been your spouse. You have been married to non-thought for almost 30 years and are just now aware of that; non-thought seemed only a dull, industrial hum buzzing stability around your life, waiting for you to be turned on by their distance from you as you went around your own business, thinking. To keep them in your life, to keep being seduced, I suggest you probably take them to a very nice dinner; they’ve been waiting for the kind of attention you’re not paying them for so very long.
One way to be in two places at the same time is to be very long.
I am trying to derive a metaphor from the fact that I cannot, or at least not with any depth, comprehend the human ability to control a ball’s spin, distance, direction, speed, etc. via hand or bat or racket or any number of tools. It seems like that kind of facility would be identical to any other kind of fluency - the practicing of technique to facilitate letting go, not exactly chance though not-not-chance, instead of mastery. So why can’t I understand it? I’m hyper fluent on guitar, and most of the time I can’t gauge how the thing I’m doing will actually sound before I do it. What does it say that I genuinely think it’s a divine, nonhuman feat that one could manipulate a ball with any deliberateness? Is it my unwillingness to trust in the powers beyond touch? Last month I read a sign in that said “Let Go Or Be Dragged.”
I like when Yeats said this: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.”
Later in that same writing he wrote this:
An old artist wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. “I wanted to paint her,” he wrote. “If I denied myself any of the pain I could not believe in my own ecstasy.”
We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never be a portion of our being, “Soon got, soon gone,” as the proverb says. I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.
Debate amongst yourselves whether these quotes are Divorced or Alone!
See you out there,
Wendy