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:yes and
form for formal
texture of meta-surface
my coin-operated satisfaction
killing time after a grueling hunt
staying awake long enough to know better
I keep crying at the wrong parts of my life
I always think I want to thank but so rarely do it
In my name are letters used in thoughts I'm ashamed of
Meta meta meaning meaning post post na na natural like life
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Cough up the third lung.
so here is another one...an ion
a prism made of fluid
a quail quailing
a quill quaking
in its boots.
If quail quills had boots.
Staid or stayed?
Staid or Plaid or Played?
Creamscicle.
a totally revolutionare
creamed potato and leek soup (a winter dish mainly)
Corporate sponsorship of all of the above.....in the first trimester
and grants on out.
Poised and ready..but bored in the meantime.
Your knuckles stop growing cells after 30
that is why so many people stop dragging them in later life
not read into that, it just sounded good
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oh I forgot
"When people see some things as beautiful other things become ugly"
I just wanted to repeat that quote because today I am in love with everyone
and Joy is as mysteriously false as Fear
I can't help it
sometimes I feel like I want to hug more than just
everyone
and cry too
I think that I am at 20x
in the Marvin Gaye Piece of Clay listening marathon
excuse me while I puke
On a Brighter Note
"When people see some things as beautiful other things become ugly"
Oh yes by the way
I am gonna give St Francis a knuckle sandwich next time around
and buy you a pony
and a mocking bird
and a diamond ring
and a little Nemo
Preppies beware
Super-blue-green greasers are in ezzifezzect
and mommas gonna buy you
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ellemenofabuloso
shifty and weighty and wild and please later tt tt tt
toi et moi
cinquant dollars a fine wedding forty centavos
you billowing and me winnowing
softer vs sharper
queen of all the Latifahs
skilled with simple trade
a mark
a trade mark
mark is the name of my roomate
What do you want?
a medal or a medallion?
a meddle or a metal-lion?
crap my knee will never get better unless I start accupuncture and stop coffee
I will be on the radio soon
I will be very powerful by my own standards soon
I will be happy enough to crap
soon enough
soon
trooper!
its gonna be ok
chin up
chest out (by the way can you touch your elbows behind your back?)
pointedly stated.
you are too much
I want to love you for who you are
not what you say or do
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timothy and killer whales
tripped and lifted a skirt or two
with consent
taped a concert at the gorge
and
whistled dixie
wondering what time it was
we left a message of chicken talk
for Mr Mayor
never lifting a finger
to help the needy
they are the tax broken
and sponsored links for
frozen daquiris, margheritas and side cars
they are the peopled islands
and wedding registries of
time shares and road kill
wait and your temperature will drop
while the worlds rises
fructify is a word I just learned the etimology of
but I will not use it in any creative endeavor
because it sounds yucky
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N O
no yes no yes no yes no yes
do you ever feel conflicted?
no yes no yes no yes
have you ever been in transition?
no yes no yes no yes no yes
When I was a kid my mother got a phone call from my school teacher (we were living in Japan by the way--that is a totally vital part of this story) and my teacher sez--->"Your son said a very bad word to me and keeps saying it over and over! I had to call you and address this very serious issue." My mother (thinking...oh shit JP is teaching the Japanese 5 year-olds how to say motherfucker or cocksucker whatever) sez--->"Well what did he say?" teacher--->"He said 'No!'" curious in Japan apparently "No" is not said especially by a younger person to an older person in the 1970s in Fukuoka. My mother did not have the heart to tell her it was my first word. And will probably be my last.
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sunny again!!
pink shirt with airbrused cat and puffy "monterey" printed on
glasses with out glasses in them
white shoes
black socks
biking
on the sidewalk
icecream sandwich for lunch and egg sandwich for dessert
my cat scratches in a fever like a pepper sprout
dancers (lots of them)
a phone number with only 6 digits (10 trys!)
a mixed cd for a girl named Christmas
the sound of purple
breathing in
breathing out
posing in front of a dirty mirror
forgetting to brush the only teeth I have
a Cage score made of circles and dotted lines on plastic sheets
a stack of new art
a photo of Dana that looks just like the painting that looks just like May
an ever larger glass of water
style points for everything
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take that mr positive!
the confessional never ends..there is a reason Catholicism is "better" than the various degrees of protestantism if only for the fact that who wants to worship is protest all the time? but mainly because of confesssion...but Protestants have blogs! And anyway we are all mentally ill so thanks to Freud we can have professional confessors so who needs the clergy.
I need help and I wish it had anything to do with this post.
1:11am...I have to get up and go to French class... "have to"....."class"
So now Chris does not want to talk to me...I am nixed from the latest "cool show"
6 people have not returned my calls
5 not returned emails
lots of maybe laters
stubbing toes
shitty tips
annoyed roommate
at least I am still trying
and I just discovered some totally rad shit on the guitar that if I ever am asked to play a show again will blow peoples mind
or actually in Portland people will say "Oh yeah I was doing shit like that back when I decided to give up guitar"
I wish i made that quote up...
I wish I made this one up too
"When people see some things as beautiful other things become ugly"
take that mr positive!
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please give me a fucking break
this pillow biting and friend crapping on and poison thinking and functionlessness and presuppositions and preambles to nothing and same curry for every shift meal I work and running out of toilet paper twice a week and not talking and talking and gathering ideas and not thinking at all and smiling for effect and walking with head bowed down and typing slowly with lots of mistakes and killing time and killing anything at all and sleeping poorly and hating and hating specific things and drinking too much caffeine and working at a job that is frankly silly and staying up past my bed time and avoiding yoga class and playing music with an audience in mind and thinking about the thousands that will gather at my funeral and taking books out of the library without reading them and telling people you will call but not and calling people who will not and stopping or starting the exact wrong thing and having dreams with subtitles you cannot read and leaving sinks full of dishes and having lame parties and having great sex with the wrong person and waking up feeling guilty for no reason and being hungover from tea and staring at yet another 20 year olds ass and making of stupid lists
HAS GOT TO STOP
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Elephonic
so so suck my toe all the way to mexico
while you're their cut your hair
don't forget your underwear
in the immortal words of Joe Foster:
"Theres a NEW Mexico?!!"
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Some Questionable "Compositions" or Knock Knock Jokes
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Horses Donkeys Mules Burros Ponies -from the bathroom wall of 3 Friends Coffee Shop on 12th Ave in Portland OR ---------------------------------------- So the wind is blowing in your face. If it was your friend you might be insulted. Get insulted! Now blow back. Make as many insulted blowing back sounds as you can think of in a row or just one really good one. Take out a handkerchief and wipe off your mouth. You are done. Blowing against the wind is a total waste of time. ---------------------------------------- Can you make some thing rattle without touching it? How quietly before it stops? Is it bigger than a breadbox? Can you throw it over your shoulder like a continental soldier? Will it rattle more if you touch it? Go ahead and touch it. How does it feel? Does that matter? ---------------------------------------- Think of a string vibrating. How long is it? Make it longer by the x power. Now put your ear as close as you can to the 1/2 way point, the 1/3 way point, the 1/5 way point etc until you are ready to make it longer. Listen for any of the notes in Gymnopedies that might be in the string. ---------------------------------------- Conceptualize and play a perfectly balanced sound event made up of multiple timbres and tones lasting no longer than 2 or 3 seconds. Allow it some space to breathe. Compose another one and play it. Do not allow any of them to bleed into one another. It will ruin the effect. ---------------------------------------- Think about who you want to talk to. Is it serious or a knock knock joke? Do they speak the same language as you? Does their dislike of your playing affect your conversation? Are they even alive? Are you ? ---------------------------------------- Hearing something Hearing something that goes with that Then hearing the individual pieces of those things- Now listen for where you are inside them. Now listen to where I am inside them. What is not being said? Lets hope it is not because we are afraid to say it. ---------------------------------------- Make a drone but think of it in short segments like a 1/60 of a second photograph projected by memory back and no decay, never any decay. ---------------------------------------- Falling off your bike but relaxing into it. Calmly not cumming. The feeling just preceding a diabetic coma. ---------------------------------------- Alice Coltrane a work in progress First off I can't speak about things in a particularly definitive way because I don't know that much about "real" details. I can only discuss reality in the sense that maybe Bob Marley uses the term ie meta-reality or the reality of trancendance...Zion is the reality, Babylon is the fantasy...seen? Anyhoo Transcendence is a great album by Mrs Coltrane and maybe that is a good starting point. A strange album to be sure but maybe a representative one if I think about it. Several veins of her thought permeate it. Piano, choir, string writing, organ jams etc. Maybe not the best examples of any one of those. Actually, as I think about it the details are irrelevant. Alice Coltrane represents something specific to me and maybe that is really what I want to talk about. The phrase that I keep quoting is the name of an album by a fellow avant jazz piano player: "Evidence of things unseen" (by Don Pullen by the way). In a nutshell, thats what her music does for me. Often she inspires a sense of loss of self. I have the experience sometimes that an idea that happens in music opens a door to a room that is an idea and that may open another door etc...with A.C. the doors keep opening so fast that there is no way to keep up and the resulting sense of ego loss is like a physical experience. The music is generally modal or at least has a very strong sense of a central key area. Not surprising since she is heavily influenced by Indian Classical music. I think that is a large part of her appeal. She uses relatively simple materials in a very sophisticated way. There is always a sense of ground so even the most abstract flights feel like they are comfortable. It's why I often use it as an introduction to "free" music for the uninitiated (and all to often why it is where their exploration ends). As a side note, is there a better makeout album than Journey In Satchinanda? Sounds kinda callous in the light of the subject matter but I can tell you from personal experience, you might as well call her LL Alice C because the Ladies Love it!! Where was I? Oh yes ego loss. The textures are part of that. It is hard to hear the individual parts often because she uses very dense string arrangements which smear around like wind or smoke leaving key distinctions by the wayside. I always feel a little confused but comfortable with it which is sort of a metaphor for an ideal life. One thing this approach gives her music is a feeling of New Agey spiritualism that I am sure is offputting to some. I embrace it. The New Irony of the 90s is an unfortunate byproduct of a time when every thing seemed like it was done and any serious consideration of anything at all could be sneered at as been there done that. Alice Coltrane is unafraid of being branded hokey. It takes courage and determination to create something that uses sounds and ideas generally relegated to the Windam Hill cutout bin and breath a life and an honesty into it. I mean her "gospel" choirs singing Hare Krishna are some of the cheesiest music I have ever heard but it is the absolute sincerity that comes through that makes them some of my favorite of her work. Furthermore who ever heard of avant-guard harp before her? I can't even express the joy it gives me even as I write about it. The sort of new rationalist european improv that emerged in the sixties seems almost pedantic and ill tempered in comparison. It genuinely takes a huge talent to create in the face of the evil shit America puts on us all and to do something that not just evokes love but seems to generate it is fucking genius. I cannot think of a single musician aside from her late husband who had the kind of directedness about their work and it never seemed like a musical exercise like the music theory junkies of the Boulez school or the sweating brow phenomena of the New York Free Jazz folks or the post post of people like Keith Rowe or Otomo Yoshide. Not to say there is a hierarchy but it seems easier to sound avant when you are using serialism or extended technique and she rarely goes for anything other than a very personal neo-classical approach. I mean her take on the Rite of Spring on her album Trancendance is surreal. I know she studied with Stravinsky and in truth I can see the similarities but the differences are what keep me saying what!?!? Mostly I am enamored with her organ playing. Eschewing the usual Jimmy Smith Hammond "Organ Trio" schtick she manages to sound like a manic late era John Coltrane on the trio tracks I have heard and uses an incredible cutting tone that is anything but smooth. It makes me wonder why so many people favor the silly mush mouthed "chicken shack" sound that Jimmy Smith popularized. But maybe that last word is the answer popularity. "If it works for someone else why not me?" right? I think one of the great things about her is that in spite of all the inherent schlock in her methodologies the intent never seems to be increased sales. She seems happy to explore this surreal place in music and music history that is seemingly anathema to any kind of serious appreciation yet succeeds at having depth and sophistication. A corollary might be Duke Ellingtons use of trumpet growls (East St Louis Toodle-O) or Bill Dixons use of static echo effects. The covers to her albums just reinforce that. Especially World Galaxy and Universal Conciousness...??? Why Peter Max? I think my favorite thing about her is how much I keep listening to her all the while asking myself and her "Why"?". Now I ask myself why did she make the choices she did on her latest album, "Translinear Light". I suppose it is not that odd that after 23 years out of the limelight and with her last album being 1980s "Transfiguration" which is one of the most "burning" free-jazz albums out there, she comes back with a sort of retrospective of the various strains of her career. I think that if suffers from over production and her sons are frankly only competant saxophone players. She is, as always, an interesting player but the Ravi Coltrane production credit might point to a source for the failings of the album. My own take is that about 1/2 the album is great and the other is okay. I love Alice Coltrane so I cannot vouch for anyone elses reaction. |
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