Street Musician

Someone tells her to seek the key of A

around and around the evening stays lit

it's a wonder there are tunes, most of space is silent

she seesaws her bow, her chin dips

the theater-goers catch her last chords

think of supper, marriage, of being alone

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Art Song

Her voice in the chanson so that I'm in that evening orchard,

in that peach odor, at silk, the soft plush lipid layering, too,

the savory of her in my ear, body gone to mind,

the experience of her, the reason for her, clear

voiced in the chamber of the SUV, she, and me

embarking for Cythera, still living in the idyll

hearing the night fiddle of crickets from the fields.

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Post-Modern Rhapsody

The sedan, its sound system at medium-high volume catching the diamond tosses and pearl droplets of Donizetti bel canto, stops before a business intersection at a long light.

Across the way, dressed in a long smock, wearing a rubbery tiara spiked like the Statue of Liberty, dances a bearded man waving a sign promising 50 dollars if we do your taxes.  Boogaloo, his 50-year-old lip twist seems to say.  Get with the rhythm, gesture his fingers and fists.

His highs hit Donizetti highs

His hip-pivots, orchestral swoops.

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To Think Of This Is To Be Part Of This

Sleep trembles in its throat-sound off a bear-cave wall, women

wandering in cloak-long dream coats back at the white glaze of past time

Night blackens except for the fixated speckle of TV and the township's occasional street lamp

The odd father garage opens for a last table saw

All's tinkering last minute, as in the sound of a hairbrush fluffing out a parrot's hot feathers, water being shot off into the rank fishmouth of the bay

Inside the best head of us, Mozart quietens, the intimacy works at the knees of the cellist, at the breath lips of the flute, and fingers bring order to the violin, light wondering at itself

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Ten Things I Don't Like

 *

                                                                                     **

1)  People walking and conversing on cell phones as if the person were actually 'there'

2)  Living off the same adolescent 'oldie' music for 20 . . . or 30 . . . or 40 . . . years

3)  Being monitored on the job in order to 'document' the 'quality' of my work

4)  Power tools on quiet mornings

5)  How -- almost anywhere, certainly in politics -- cheap words drive out the worthy ones

6)  Film titles with any of the following words: 'chocolate', 'deadly', 'hell', 'kill', or 'wedding'

7)  The violence inborn in humans that is exercised for just about any excuse

8)  Customer service being redefined as irrelevant, pre-recorded phone options -- or -- pages of FAQ

9)  Full-body tattoos executed by a needle-man who thinks cartoons are 'high art'

10)  Having to pretend I'm having fun

* Great country, very good cast,  bad idea

** One good player, vastly overrated director, worse idea

.

Enjoying Good Entertainment, Just Like The Next Fellow

The women in question didn't know who Tina Turner is.

Next time we meet up, Ike and I will have a good laugh over that one!  But they did know Kurt Cobain.

Cobain, Coshmain.  At his death, I remember one woman I knew kept expressing her shock -- she was turning 40, mind you -- her shock that such a monumental figure would die in such a tragic way.  Equivalent to John Lennon she managed to say through her grief.

First. Lennon would probably deflate the idolization of his own cold body.

Second. Lennon's music was better and more influential.

Third. Lennon came to appeal to the public's better nature.

Fourth.  Cobain's partner was Courtney Love.  'Nuff said.

Fifth.  Lennon got shot by a crackpot.  Cobain was one of a line of celebrity O.D. artists, and not really measuring up to them.  Say, Jim Morrison.  Or Janis (it's okay -- we were on a first name basis after our third child).

Sixth.  This is just pop music, folks.  Just pop music!

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A Place In The Sun

Those who love this movie often point to this scene and the lingering close-ups of beautiful actors.  

I love this scene for another reason.  The film is based on Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and we do indeed get oppressive class structure, a pathetic marriage, a universe where human effort inevitably gets trumped by malevolent circumstance, punctuated by a scene wherein Raymond Burr demonstrates a murder by smashing an oar to bits inside a courtroom.

I love this particular scene for the musical theme, and incidentally for the lovers (Liz and Monty) caught up first in dance and then on the verandah, orchestra still within earshot.

The plans, the passion.  

Despite the utter improbability of any social acceptance, they race at doom.

That moment motivates.

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Lone, Stranger

The time in Berkeley, at fast food, when two panhandlers, young, drugged, came to O and F and asked Have spare change?  

And O and F, respectively, right away, said No and shook head (right away) with pursed lips No.

And the two panhandlers, drugged and young, rolled back in their lunch booth seats, holding their sides, laughing till there was no sound.  

A Cosmic laughter, one where the social rubber hits the existential roadway and draws high beams on one's own fate.  It was written!

They laughed half-way through our happy meal.  They laughed until the dribble dried on the side of their chin.

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Flamenco Interno

Inside me, claps and slaps,

Wings, something Iberian

A Cool And Bitchin Halloween

I remember Shindig.  

I remember (a living) Karloff.  I remember "The Monster Mash".  

I remember Pendleton shirts and Fairchild mocassins.  

I remember talk of 'cherry' cars and 'power sleds'.  

I remember the way back to NHHS so well -- How well do you remember? -- I remember it so well that last summer when I went to Los Angeles, walking down memory lane, I found the quad as open and square as always, but infinitely smaller; all the teachers not only gone but having no institutional record of their having ever taught there; three times the surrounding traffic; and the public phone ripped from the cafeteria's exterior, a ghost mechanism cold above the blacktop's chewing gum scars.

I remember enough about high school even though I don't want to, since one day when I'm least expecting it, a physician, testing me, may ask for details.

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Project Blue

This late morning, still cold, blustery, wet

Wanting a harmonica, wanting to be fit

To measure-out Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,

And then find rest, having in my art, that.


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Four Brothers

Here's the Four (no gender requirements):  

Weetabix (pulverizable wheat rafts)

Grape Nuts (pellet-shots of barley)

Kashi Autumn Harvest (woven wheat floats)

Great Grains: Raisins, Dates, and Pecans (muesli-esque)

Plus yoghurt

Plus raspberries

Every morning the energy of a stage show.

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To The Tune Of Eva And Ava

Being an invitee to Willow's Ball -- among that Who's Who -- I plead a special case: indulge me, do.  Indulge me deux.  I'm bringing the good and bad twins, Eva-Marie Saint and Ava Gardner.  Both know how to dance quite well.  Tango, samba, cha-cha-cha.  Ballroom de rigueur.

Ava, panther woman, follows her own beat, no doubt's got an agenda to prowl out once she's there, so all males:  watch your step!  Eva, soft hands at my back and in my grip, dances like a sylph, her presence light, her words sweet whispers.

Eva always by my side.  Ava always back to me.

.

How Enlightenments Work

In Amadeus, 

Where Emperor J's bureaucrats

Insist opera can show no ballet,

This being The Marriage of F,

Mozart has them dance to no sound

(Choreographed by Twyla Tharp),

Their steps go thunk to a musicless beat --

So irrational (They're like waxworks)! --

And the E must rescind his own law.


Artists must always work in the cracks

For the greatness of art to proceed.

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The Measure Of All Things

On my way to coffee, a segment of lecture, Aristotle.  

On mature, self-disinterested friendship being the fullest

On friendship as the basis for polis,  polis for family, even.

On reaching a pause, going to a classical FM, a guess at Haydn

On later finding that correct per online playlist

On taking an extra ten to drive the neighborhood here, high

On the hill, on the alpine horn, string tremolo, and fresh Fall air

On shutting it off, the car, the sound, the responsive eyes and ears

On figuring, then, the shortfall from the best -- how far we are.

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I Happen To Like New York

Along with Bobby Short, Cole Porter, and millions, NYC is altogether a sentimental, personal, patriotic, almost sacred symbol of America and what America means to the world.

Forget the contentious local politics.  Put aside how America's dynamism -- surely centered in the Great City -- breaks things as it builds, roughs-up as it tames, eradicates as it invents.  This is what humans do, and human energy has at its vanguard, for now, us, the U.S..

Our cultural heart is NYC.  It's who we are.

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Retro-Neo-Post-Nostalgia

Years ago at a job that played music softly throughout the office, I asked my boss What is that they're playing?  

(I think I'd heard it on a movie soundtrack, a 'standard', popular before my birth).

He pondered and listened and said Moonlight Serenade.  I think he was right.

Cut to years later, same movie whose soundtrack did indeed include Moonlight Serenade.

But.  It also had this other song, this other tune.  Probably not the one my boss and I were hearing, but another one I'd confused then and kept on confusing for decades.

This morning, Starbucks.  Ella's singing it, the 'big screen' showing its name:

I'm Getting Sentimental Over You

In the head, it's a trombone melody, a Tommy Dorsey sound.

.

Artistic Concentration

New York Times Critic Anthony Thomassini on Mozart:

"Though he lived through the French Revolution you search his letters in vain for anything other than the most oblique references to this continental cataclysm.  He had no feeling for nature and no interest in the visual arts.   In his letters home during his wide-ranging travels he describes everything he heard and nothing he saw."


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3 Times Three Little Words

Food

Home

Love

Sing

Draw

Act

If

Unless

Because

.

One Touch

Berlioz

Bizet

Chabrier

Chausson

D'Indy

Dukas

Fauré

Franck

Gounod

Massenet

Saint-Saëns

...