Ten of Fifty # 1

 One; SONG

The first impulse is to celebrate. An Image, a person, a memory. In this case SONG. Make a Joyful Noise was the title of a song I had on a white vinyl record, ‘Leaps and Bounds’ by the band Singers and Players. If by the time it was released the trump cards played by On-U master, Adrian Sherwood were almost set in stone, and the fan knew what sounds nearly every record would sound like, this one song was a revelation. The main vocal was recorded at nearly a whisper, floating in and out of the mix, suddenly falling into some back land soaked in a reverb as if it had fallen into a pool in paradise. As for the band, restraint is the motif, calmly moving not forward, but in a drift. Dub techniques developed in the early 1970s here reached a new level of artifice. The studio was a canvas and the musicians were paint.

I cannot decide this morning if Nina Simone or Townes Van Zandt is called for to officiate this cold and windy November morning. The undertone of grief in either voice often functions like a sail, and the movement along with the song as a ship makes the journey much more comfortable somehow.

Songs in the Key of My Life;

Sukiyaki by Kyu Sakamoto

Penetration by The Stooges

It was a Pleasure Then by Nico

Mind Train by Yoko Ono

Alone Again, or by Love

And my favorite songs of all time are tied;

Something for Derek Jarman by Zero Sound Liberation Organization

Aguas De Março by Tom Jobim and Elis Regina

 Two; MEMORY

Of late afternoon light forming a shadow in the indentation under a collarbone, which subsequently became a symbol for everything beautiful.

 Three; AUTOMOBILES

My father was for a time a mechanic. Because of this daily working on cars he often found an owner wanting to sell his or her car. We often had ‘new’ cars. I remember once for my mother’s 28^th birthday he bought her a yellow sporty ford with blue interior. I remember them both coming downstairs, dressed to the nines and going to celebrate with dinner and a drive. Another time he bought me a 1950s Chevy, telling me I could fix it up and one day when old enough it would be my car. There were days of the T-Bird convertible, and days of the fully functional car with no body. One time my sister fell out of the door of a very old pickup truck while we were driving. She lived. Still another truck memory is of my grandfather’s truck complete with rifle rack and 8-track tape machine that would play either Nancy Sinatra or Ray Charles. Though the automobile is most likely the worst object to befall the planet, I have loved having and driving them. When I was very young I made model cars. I cannot decide if it was due to an innate conservatism or if it was owing to a youthful queeniness that unlike most young boys I eschewed the hot rod modifications for sleek whitewall tires, clean paint jobs and luxury modifications. Currently I am driving a zippy old Honda CRX missing a front end and with a sunroof that will not close. I love it!

Four; WEATHER

My favorite seasons are Spring and Fall for the revolutions they are, sweeping away the bloated self satisfied nature of Summer and the cruel despotism of Winter. In fairness though to the other two, the clarity of Winter always impresses me, the forms of trees become their prominent feature, often clearly outlined in stark white of snowfall. And Summer days, long, bright and hot are loved by me not for their crushing heat, but rather for the swooning, delirious pleasure found in their nights.

Five; CITIES

Long have I been enchanted by this form of organizing human endeavor. At a young age I drew maps of imaginary cities, giving them exotic names and placing them in all finds of climates and geographies. I would pour over encyclopedias and look at drawings and photos of how people would dress in cities at different times and epochs. I would lament the famed loss of the ancient library in Alexandria, or picture myself as a thief or bandit in some dark, European city in the middle ages (yes even then, I suspected my lot was not among the aristocracy). I have loved Athens the many times I have visited it for its sheer chaos, the packs of wild dogs roaming the heavily trafficked streets and sidewalks, for the scars of architecture where an atrocity of a 1950s utopian housing project would share a street with an ancient ruin. I have loved Paris, London and New York for feeling as is the world had arrived, and you were not so much living in a place, but were a citizen of the world and life. Studies of cities have greatly informed my appreciation of them. Jane Jacobs, “Death and life of Great American Cities” is a wonderful read, and important in this climate of homogenization through gentrification. Lewis Mumford is a great writer on cities, with “Sidewalk Critic” being a favorite. New Orleans, Chicago are greatly appreciated by me. Tiajuana is fascinating for the way it articulates the hostility between the United States and its southern neighbor. A fantasy city is Buenos Aires largely because of Wong Kar Wai’s setting it as the backdrop to his film, Happy Together.

Six; ANIMALS

Elsewhere on this blog I have posted an essay on birds, but my love of animals does not stop there. I admire the relationships that can develop between creatures so different from us, in fact I find it a measure of compassion and empathy. I grew up with dogs, a few of which became close friends. I do not think I would have found adolescence even bearable without my dog, Shep, with whom I would take long walks, often ending at a plum tree on a rise overlooking a high School track, where we would sit next to each other, and often I would sing a favorite Pink Floyd song. Household pets aside, I love the color and pattern changing cephalopods, and the behavior of many animals I long have been curious about. A certain species of ants comes across the larvae of some other creature and becomes addicted to the defensive secretion oozing from its skin, they take this drug of a bug back to their colony and it promptly falls to ruin. There was in the Monterey Bay area once a serial killing otter. Raised in captivity, it never learned how to mate. There were reports of mutilated baby sea lion cubs whose bodies had washed ashore. No one could find the culprit until a team had filmed this delinquent otter dragging a corpse around, sometimes landing on a rock attempting to mate with the murdered sea pup. There recently have been studies that seem to show birds in the wild mourning the loss of one of their own. They gather at the body and forego food and foraging to stare sadly at their immobile colleague.

Seven; HERESIES

I love constructed systems of logic. Here on one hand we have whole theologies built around speculative thinking, which is the nature of religion, while on the other hand we have these often rigorous and complete systems altered to suit the needs of human justice. Heresies follow desire, and strain to accommodate the human need for sex without guilt, for redistribution of wealth or a leveling of power. They would not be named heresy if they were not subversive, they simply would be philosophies, faiths, codes or ways of life. But these subversive teachings and ways of living always flew counter to whatever or whoever had a monopoly on power (usually the Catholic church). Among my favorites were the Gnostics of the early Christian era, who simply rejected the whole dominant cosmology and inverted it. By letting the mythology stand, albeit inverted, EVERYTHING was to be treated with skepticism from the creator on down.

Eight; ROCK AND ROLL

Like a fucked up family, Rock music has a lineology which is difficult to trace. Who (musically) was the grandfather? Whose cousin married a sibling? The titles are also debatable. Is Michael Jackson REALLY the king of pop? The family reunion would and could still take place with many generations attending. There could be black folks who wrote the songs that made their white cousins rich while they remained poor who are still alive. The Rolling Stones could feel uncomfortable feeling as if they should sit at a table with the remaining members of Throbbing Gristle, but are not sure what is really behind the clothes. Trent Reznor could talk with Peter Murphy about how the young folks do not really know what “it” is all about. Justin Beiber could talk to his favorite Aunts and Uncles in Fleetwood Mac about hair, lighting and cover art. No, REALLY…..I love Rock and Roll. Never had an ear for Elvis until this summer when hearing “Little Sister” on the radio, but when I did I completely got it! The experimental frivolities of the Beatles were always appreciated, but I liked the danger of The Stooges, or even the Stones of the early 70s more. Still I hunt out good rock bands, contemporary or retro. Favorites of all time, and right off the head without thinking are The Velvet Underground before John Cale and Nico left, and any Throbbing Gristle.

Nine; 1930s-1960s

Excluding war and repression, which were rampant, my love for these years is expressed in the objects of everyday life. Furniture, appliances, cars, pop music, art; these times were the heyday of modernism, and strove to put any distance between the present and the future as far as possible by becoming the future. In design, one imagined objects not yet seen, the same impulse was enjoyed in music and in art. While arguably conservative to fetishise these times in a manner called ‘retro’, at the time the trend was anything but kitsch. The last gasp of utopianism fell into discord as the dream moved aside to make way for the lies and the shortcomings of western ideology to take center stage. From one perspective the harshness which characterized the late 1960s could be seen as this epoch reiterating its hold on power once the objects of late modernism no longer held sway over the masses.

Ten; WATER

That water is born through the formation of stars makes the dancing of light upon its surface something akin to touching the face of a beloved, or a long, lost friend. The discovery of a mass of water found near a quasar in deep space with more mass than our own earth provides another scenario in which God sees his face reflected upon dark waters, instilling him with a loneliness which can only be remedied by creating another world. The thought that all water on earth is finite, and has been here from its near origins, and has been sustaining all life since makes me wonder why it has not been more revered, more mystified, more cared for. But Water does have its place in rituals of Ablution and Aspersion, and the Koran tells us that all living things are made of Water.