Monthly Archives: May 2012

Sunset Junction memories

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(email from I dunno when, but back aways)

My standout musical memory of the Sunset Junction Festival was Universal Congress Of…it was the year they held it in Echo Park along the lake and as usual back then the festival was great but the music bland and then UCO hit the stage and were intense. Play some more of that outside shit! somebody bellowed, and they did, Steve Moss screaming on the sax, Joe Baiza just gone on electric Ornette, and Jason Kahn’s self-taught drumming driving it all ahead. They got so funky the people danced. I also remember Pygmy Love Circus ending the event year after year…loud, fierce, drunken, funny as hell/ Once Spaceland took over and pulled them ya knew it was the beginning of the end. All those poppy “Silverlake Sound” acts they’d book…. That wasn’t the Silverlake sound we remembered. Our’s was much harder and weirder, but Spaceland slowly squeezed that out of the Sunset Junction. But it was also fun to always see your friends play there, though usually in the lesser slots (11 a.m.!) I remember my brother Lex’s band last ever gig was there and they were awesome. My brother Jon played there I don’t know how many times. It was all punk and cholo and aging hippies and leather queers back then…and you couldn’t go twenty paces with running into someone you knew….glorious times. I used to love that fair. For years we lived on Edgecliffe three doors up from Pig Park (the little triangle where Jack Zinder died…Fyl named it in memory our of guinea pigs)…back then our pad was party central, three days non stop partying all Memorial Day Weekend year after fucking year. The best stage was right there at Edgecliffe & Sunset. It hadn’t completely transformed into the gay stage yet. One mellow afternoon I went down and caught Jesters of Destiny and Universal Congress Of back to back. I have that on tape (I had a blaster and recorded everything back then…I have hundreds  of hours of stuff from about ’85-’90). A lot of the other music over the years blends into each other now in my grey matter; nothing specific stands out. Once they began bringing in rock stars, though, they fucked it all up. And the booths got so expensive local vendors couldn’t afford them. No more Silverlake Militia selling tee shirts, no more local merchants.no more people you knew trying to sell their art or their music or whatever local people sell when booths cost a couple hundred dollars.  We moved over the swish alps to where we are now about 1991 and in the mid-nineties the partying switched to our pal Sketch’s pad off just off the Bates stage and early on they had great bands there and the cover was a voluntary $2 then $3 then $5 which we paid. Cool hangs at Sketch’s….best ever time there was maybe twenty years ago and getting there at noon and parking in front of Sketches (Fyl would cab it later in the day) and it was so hot we wound up hanging inside all day…DVH showed up early too and pulled out a jay and then another and another and I got soooo high when we finally went through the gate it was like Checkpoint Charlie and I was gripped by paranoia and all the colors shimmered and the sounds were like Ives or “Section 43″ or heavy heavy dub and it was like being at the Festival on acid….

(What a difference twenty years makes. The Sunset Junction Fair is dead, killed by greed. And if I smoked three joints now I’d melt.)

To Serve Ants

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(2008/2012)

From Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Pantheon, 1999); in Chapter 3, “Underlying Mysteries of Development”, pp 64-65.

In an unrivaled reproductive success story, expeditions of leaf-cutting and harvester ants blaze trails across the forest floor, while battalions of army ants terrorize mammals in their path. Bees and wasps dot trees with their nests, and termites infest rotting wood. One-third of the animal biomass [total weight of living things] of the Amazonian rain forest teems, climbs, and swarms with billions upon billions of these social insects.

The secret to their success is, quite simply, the most dedicated and efficient daycare in the biosphere [total area of where life exists on earth: on the surface, underground, underwater, in the air, and inside each other]. So what if some army-ant queens can lay up to two million eggs? A woman starts out her life with more than three times [7 million] that many egg cells [an egg is an egg cell; even an ostrich egg is one cell]. It’s not the insect queen’s fecundity that is so special, it’s her success rate translating eggs into adult survivors. What makes social insects so amazing is the dedicated assistance of all those allomothers [sociobiological jargon for nannies]. Even if the mother dies, so long as the colony persists, her progeny will be cared for. It is a mother-centered world geared toward one aim: the survival of progeny.

In a sense, then, humans (and most mammals, I’d reckon) are similar to marine invertebrates (like clams, for instance) whose females release vast numbers of eggs in order that at least one survives to adulthood. Of course, marine invertebrate males also fertilize huge numbers of those eggs, from many females. (I’ve tried explaining this option to my wife to no avail.) Without water as a medium in which to expel all those eggs and all that milt, most human eggs are never given the opportunity to be fertilized. Then again, the extremely small amount of eggs that humans (and mammals) do allow to be fertilized have a much better chance of reaching adulthood (that is, reproductive age) than do all those millions of eggs released by marine invertebrates, the vast majority of which are eaten or drift away or die. But ants and their entomological ilk have mastered a way to not only fertilize vast amounts of the egg cells the female contains in her, but to ensure that nearly all of them are raised to adulthood. In human terms, one woman would mate with one man and his sperm would fertilize all seven million eggs she has within her (not at once though, the sperm would be retained and used one sperm cell at a time as the babies are conceived.)  The babies, fetuses only minutes from conception, would be expelled (i.e., born…marsupials “give birth” this way, a tiny, undeveloped fetus leaving the reproductive tract and making for the pouch) and raised by allomothers, all of whom would have to be prevented from breeding themselves to prevent massive over-population. (Social insects use chemical agents that repress sexual capability, as well as killing excess queens; some honey bee workers occasionally do lay eggs but the eggs are killed.) The naked mole rat of Africa is the only mammal known to use a reproductive strategy like that of the ants, with a queen, sterile workers, etc. (They even live in tunnels underground like ants, but like other mammals only allow a tiny number of egg cells to be fertilized and born.) HOWEVER…there have been many examples of human societies that control reproduction among their own kind, in myriad ways. The recent scandal caused by that Mormon colony in present day Arizona where polygamy is practiced and extra males (always teens) are banished and driven out (sometimes literally driven out, to be dropped off alone in neighboring towns) is just a recent variant on this.

Far more brutal a human method is starving a population. Consider the Nazis, they deliberately starved the Slavic peoples in the Ostlands (Poland and Russia) they had conquered. They needed some Slavs alive to serve as slaves, but a carefully managed population size, used as a resource to be managed like any other resource. Reducing food supplies not only would kill off excess adults and newborns (which it did, dramatically), but also severely reduce the actual rate of reproduction, since reproduction is reduced dramatically when food is scarce (a handy built-in biological comtrol.) People die off, babies stop coming, and more room opens up for food production to support the planned increase in German population. And that population would be increased by a state mandated increase in female fertility–women would have more babies. Indeed lots more babies. If necessary, one man could father babies by multiple women.  The Aryan race would thrive and increase, Nazi genes would spread across Europe.

Now it gets weird.  In the Nazi totalitarian Reich all Aryans were obedient members, obedient subjects, their very existence one with the State. (On a good day, anyway, but that was the idea.) All Germans were of the German race, the Volk. The Volk and the Reich were the same. Their genes were of the Volk and thereby belonged to the State. The Nazi State–that is, the Reich–was like one organism, all it’s reproduction was the Volk’s reproduction, and the Volk itself was like the queen ant, creating endless generations of genetically perfect Aryan supermen, and the state was the allomother. It was a bizarre mirror image of an ant colony. And as ridiculous as this all sounds, it could probably have passed for a position paper written up by an RSHA intellectual and sent off to Heydrich and then Himmler for comment.   

Thankfully the Nazi’s were annihilated so none of this could be put into practice. We’ll never know just how feasible it was. Somewhere, no doubt, someone regrets that. But genetics itself put a limit on the notion a generations of Aryan perfection. You’d have to be pretty strict in weeding out variation. No doubt someone regrets that too. Off course, eggs can be implanted now. A small group of nazi mothers could have their perfect Aryan eggs installed into women to gestate the perfect Aryan babies. The state would take over upon birth, impressing Aryan values onto Nazi babies from the very beginning. Embryo implantation would have been a perfect solution to the problem. My god why am I thinking about this? I began thinking about ants. 

What terrifying possibilities lie within an ant colony for the future of mankind. Read enough E.O. Wilson (try Journey to the Ants) and you’ll get the creeps, the little bastards start looking dangerous. Wars of annihilation, colonies as big as Califonia, an overwhelming and ominous ant-ness. But there was a time when no one really thought of them that way. They were just amazingly organized little creatures, quite charming. I remember reading a classic text, the Social Insects, way back in my college days, not sure where I’d found it. Ants seemed like these fabulous little civilizations all about our feet. I’d watch them do their scurrying around thing and think gosh, amazing. I found another classic text, written between the wars, in the old Downtown L.A. Library. This was before the fire, the singed fluttering pages, the visions of Alexandria.  I sat in the garden outside, feeling vaguely ancient Greek, reading about ant civilizations and wondering as they marched endlessly past my feet. They were Argentine ants, they were everywhere, but the vastness of the colony was unknown then. Not even imagined, acftually. I saw tiny little city states, a colony by the tree there, another under a nearby shrub, others trailing between ant portals dug in the cracks in the sidewalk. Instead it was an empire of several hundred square human miles. I’d eat my liverwurst sandwich and drink my lemonade and disappear into a fascinating ant world, trying not to think about my shit job at the brokerage firm. Or was it at the law firm where I spent all day in a small office with a drop dead gorgeous Assyrian girl with long powerful legs and perfect tits. I wanted to mate with her. I didn’t, but wanted to. The ants at my feet there in the library garden never wanted to mate with anybody. Only a few males did. When the weather was fine they’d fly in scattered swarms trying to find a little queenling to fuck in wild desperation and then die. I wanted to mate with the Assyrian girl but, well, maybe mate isn’t the term. I wasn’t thinking offspring. Actually I wasn’t even thinking. I wasn’t even twenty five  and my balls were doing half my thinking then. The fear of death was what would happen if I did mate with her and the wife found out. Which just goes to show you how different my world was from an ant colony. Or from Nazi race ideology. Himmler would take one look at a big, strapping, fit Celto-Aryan like me and the last thing he’d want would be for me to mate with an Assyrian girl., no matter how long the legs or perfect the tits. (Ridiculous hair though, the early 80′s was a bad time for chick’s hair.) What a waste all my Aryan milt would be. Think of the Aryan supermen I might father, he’d say, in that reedy little voice of his, and you wanna create little half Celto-Aryan half middle eastern untermenschkins? Had I no sense of volkisch respect? What part of the Nuremberg rally had I missed?

But I was just being a normal horny young stud. Himmler was a berzerk ideologue. Channeling horny young studs into a genetically mapped out  master plan is just, I dunno, too weird. Unnatural. Wrong. For people anyway. But lo the ant…. just be thankful they are so small. Were ants big, smart, and Nazi there wouldn’t be a human left on the planet. We would have been cleansed a long time ago. Exterminated. Eaten. To Serve Ants. It’s a cookbook.

.


The giant ants were in the L.A. River, you know, just a couple hundred yards from where I am typing this right now and what’s that formic acid smell?

Regretting things in the morning

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(Presidents Day weekend, 2012)

Nice long weekend it was. On Friday we went out to the 322 for a pizza and there was a not very good screaming soul singer (with three back up singers in matching outfits) and a  a bar band trio…it was all oldies and date night for the parents and divorcees who were getting drunk. The table of couples next to us, oh man. The women got drunk and soon all of them were talking about 80′s porn. The guys were driving apparently so were fairly sober and the women regretted things in the morning, I’m sure. As the night wore on the place got more and more crowded and the female percentage was probably 60% at least. Someone requested “I Will Survive” and the floor was flooded with bad dancers and it was surreal…I’ve lived in Silverlake so long I’d forgotten that that it hadn’t always been a gay anthem. I was expecting they’d segue into “It’s Raining Men” but no. Anyway, we left long before the evening ended. I didn’t get outta work that night till 7 and we didn’t get down to the 322 before 9 so this is what happens when you go out for late dinner on a Friday night. Actually all the people were having one helluva good time, it was funny seeing the 322 turned into a bit of a meat market. They used to book jazz on Fridays but the bills gotta be paid somehow. On Saturday we went to Farmer’s Market for the Mardi Gras thing….there was a good New Orleans style band doing funk, zydeco, etc and the people were drinking too much and throwing beads. The crowd was relatively tame this year and the drunkenness was toned down and I saw no wanton behavior…beads were being handed out but no one had to show anything to get them. Some years that’s a requirement. Well, it’s not, but some women pretend it is. Some men pretend it is. Most are drunk. I wonder about the sober ones. Like what do they do for a living. Are they teachers, secretaries? Lawyers? Were they in the office just a few hours ago? We’re they sitting in dull meetings answering dull questions and thinking about beads? 

On Sunday we went to the York and saw Elliott Caine tear it up. He owns that place when he brings his band in there. It’s all Blue Note stuff, at least in spirit, and the crowd, hip and young and boho and most of them not strictly jazz fans, go nuts. A standing ovation even. At a bar. The band looked astonished. Elliott blushed, I swear. I wish it was like this all over. I wish it was like the old days. I wish and a lot of good that does.

Yesterday we did nothing but think about presidents, all day. You’re supposed to think about Washington and Lincoln, but I wondered about Millard Fillmore and Chester Alan Arthur. Somebody has to.

Ralph Penland

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(Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly, 2010)

So maybe your idea of a good time ain’t hanging around a church on a Saturday night. Maybe church is something better left to someone else’s wedding or someone else’s funeral. But jazz has a way of popping up in churches, good jazz, even great jazz.  Like pianist Patrice Rushen this Saturday night at the Holy Nativity Episcopal Church in Westchester. You get Ms. Rushen’s splendid piano chops, the brilliant reedman Bennie Maupin, superb bassist Darek Oles and drummer Ralph Penland, who swings like mad and has a very personal way of framing that beat that we just love. Many years ago, in fact, we tried explaining what we dug about his playing, something about how he gets into the basic meter of the music and works out his ideas there…and (we said) his solos are variations on the framework he is laying down, as if he is trying to draw the most perfect square imaginable, how the patterns build a perfect latticework for the other soloists to build on…. Not exactly sure what that means now, but Ralph Penland sure lays down some solid syncopation, and the soloists really do fly over the thing. Maupin definitely will, on sax, flute, and bass clarinet. You’ve heard him on Bitches Brew and a dozen Herbie Hancock sessions, and you ought to know his own subtle, grow-on-you releases Penumbra and Early Reflections, both on Cryptogramophone (a label you should also know about).  Rushen herself is playing so beautifully but recording little lately, hopefully something is coming. But we’ve been going on way too long about this gig, so just remember it’s at the Holy Nativity Episcopal Church (6700 West 83rd Street, Westchester) on Saturday, at 6:30. It’s $30, but the price includes a “fabulous New Orleans-style dinner” and a drink, even. The money is to help keep this excellent jazz series running, god bless ‘em (well, obviously, it’s a church.)

Zoogz Rift

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(Journal entry, c. 1982)

Later we went to the Anti-Club. It is not identified as such, announcing itself over the door as “Helen’s Place”; luckily we heard the give-away sounds of a slapped, ill-tuned snare and over-amped keyboard: Art! This had to be the place. Indoors was, ah, “refreshingly different”: Helen’s Place is a country music bar, and dangling from the ceiling were saddles, and covering up large portions of the walls were large wagon wheels (I leaned against one a good part of the evening)—between these were various accoutrements of the Old West. Of particular interest was a large display, labeled and all, of a collection of barbed wire.

Three bands played that night. First was Earth Dies Burning: singer, aged circa sixteen, two on casios, one circa fourteen (the singer’s brother; their parents sat next to us, adoringly), the other circa sixteen (and who played drums one night for Nervous Gender at Al’s, subbing for Don Bolles who was with 45 Grave in Arizona; the kid was a real formlessly energetic drummer and lots of fun), finally, a drummer, circa thirty. The latter’s set was cruder than mine, his crash looked to have been run over by a tank. They played a real short set, including a version of “Heartbreak Hotel” retitled “I Like Fishsticks And So Does Dad” (you see, father was injured in an auto wreck and is paralyzed from the waist up—and when Mom goes out to play Mahjong all he can prepare for dinner for himself and son is fishsticks). Also a great version of “Psychotic Reaction” which was as good as the Urinals doing the “Jetsons” song and [my old band] Keene White doing “Rave On”). A great, stupid, short set.

Then came the guy [John Trubee] who once played bass in the Amazing Shitheads laying down (the first time we ever saw them he was doing that—I think that was his final gig with them, though.) He did this ridiculous poetry—real crude, witty and funny. He rolled around on the floor, dropped to his knees, and waved at and cajoled the crowd with a big rubber penis. He also had one of those mechanical chimps you wind up and they clang little cymbals together: clang clang clang clang like that. His best poem was one about Sonny andCher, elevating their story to the level of a Greek tragedy.

He had been backed by the next band on the bill (though their “backing” was a quite unrehearsed volley of noise and squeaky guitars), who called themselves Vertical Invaders. They had a line-up and sound similar to MX-80 Sound, though much less developed. Good points were a) they didn’t wallow in sloppy-noise-as-art b) their guitars were used in interesting manners c) no rhythm boxes or other trendy devices. Bad points were a) monotonous drumming and b) some of their songs were a little too similar to others, e.g. their climactic number was very similar to “Waiting For My Man”. Promise, though.

A couple oddities: they had a song about General Guderian, and one song they started, screwed up, started again and then having completed it, decided the did it poorly should do it again. I liked that. It was extremely hot in the place, the air conditioning having broken down in the midst of our 100+ degree heat wave.

Finally, of course, was Zoogz Rift, who put on as good a show as I’ve ever seen them do. Zoogz began the show with an acapella rendition of “An American Tune” by Paul Simon, done straight, then he joined his band and tore into some new material, including “Kiss My Bleeding Dork”, an attack on theL.A.music scene, and some song really trashing Frank Zappa. Plenty of old stuff as well, in particular a great version of “Heart Attack”.

We sat with Zoogz and his band, talking, and all in all had a good time. Richie Häss, the drummer, is exceptionally good—plays all kinds of beats, has two bass drums and a high hat, etc. The bass player, Dan Buchanan, is the strangest rock bassist I have ever seen: never mind that he bounds about eland-like, but he plays with a slide on his little finger and runs his fingers up and down the fretboard (sometimes both hands) maniacally, making a really strange sound—his bass at times sounds more like an Elvin Jones drum solo (fast, deceptively erratic) [think I meant Rashied Ali.]. The keyboard player [Jon Sharkey] is really weird, playing a cheap organ and electric piano through fender amps—you can imagine the effect. He also strings his equipment with blinking Christmas lights. Finally Zoogz himself: fat and angry as ever, voice strong and guitar frenzied. Nice guy, too.

These guys are our favoriteL.A.band; I think they are the best band on theL.A.rock circuit, and I can’t even think of any other band that compares.

The next night we went to the Cathay de Grande to see, once again, Zoogz Rift. Opening the show was a strange band calling themselves “Hurtin’ Bros”, playing a kind of intellectually crude R&B: imagine an R&B band on the old Roxy album [the Roxy Live punk comp], heavily influenced by Mirror Man—that is kind of the idea. A bit pretentious, but crude enough to satisfy my punk urges. Three guitars (two lead and a rhythm), bass, drums and sax, and a barefoot singer. FromPasadena and I liked them [one of them was our crazed friend and original Silverlake BBQ Association member Bormann]. They’ll probably gain some notoriety around town—a cultist’s cult band.

Zoogz and His Shitheads were good that night, though it finally dawned on me just how bad the sound system is there—criminal! The worst of all the clubs in town, especially after the real good system they had at the Anti-Club. The crowd sucked, too it’s too bad the crowds are so lame in L.A. anymore—the art crowd has been permeated by this sappy gay funk disco mentality with no real sense of purpose. I suppose all youth movements are prone to this—it’s just sad to see it happen. Zoogz, too, was sick of it, or them, especially of people walking out, so, during “Heart Attack” he lunged off stage and charged after two deserters using his guitar like a lance, then thought better of, turned around and told the band to pack it up. That was it. The Shitheads said he does that sometimes…. Zoogz explained it to us later, and his reasons actually made sense. We talked for quite a while, on the Cathaystairs, about all kinds of stuff; he gave us a copy of his first album (gratis), called Idiots On The Miniature Golf Course, qualifying it like mad: I like it, a lot in fact, though it is nowhere near the quality of the stuff he’s doing now.

Zoogz Rift and His Amazing Shitheads is probably the third band like that both of us have been really behind, and fond of: others are the Sequencers (+ Christian Lunch), and Nervous Gender. I think what we appreciate in them is a) an uncompromising attitude and belief in what they are doing, which borders on ferocity; and b) a healthy dose of personality, that is, interesting exciting people who don’t try to cover up their appearance onstage behind a made up image (they can act weird on stage, but it’s them acting weird, and not some facade; and c) they’re nice guys. If they are jerks, stuck up, or attitude coppers [attitude copper?], she doesn’t like them—nor do I.

So we went home—a bit discouraged that the show went so poorly, but happy that we are getting to know the band so well—they consider us two of their biggest fans.

We went home and turned on Monster From A Prehistoric Planet, Japanese circa ’65. Kind of a cross between Godzilla, Rodan and Gorgo—complete with a brown-faced Japanese kid portraying a little jungle boy who is friends with the Mom and Dad monsters and cries as they are blown to pieces by massed rockets. Real trash—actually drove Fyl off to bed, but I remained, the TV with the sound off, one of those strange KPFK late night-early morning “new Music” shows squeaking and rumbling quietly in the corner, and reading (what, though, I don’t recall). How bohemian….

Sunday we went to Spike’s to issue in the Labor Day. He lives in a sort of “artist’s” colony at the corner of Western and Melrose: great litle vaguely European apartment, but the neighborhood is crazed, being the center for drag queen whores. Just a wonderful neighborhood—the whole time we were there we were accompanied by screams and yells, breaking bottles, squealing tires, loud queen voices, threats in Spanish, sirens, strange and ominous bumps in the night. I couldn’t handle it [we must have been very stoned and I was freaking out, as we’d been hanging in neighborhoods like that on a regular basis....] Spike was once mugged outside the gate of the building [by a gang of six foot plus black drag queens, seriously]; they hit him over the head with a metal bar, and nearly tore his ear off as well. And he was on acid at the time….

We had a good time, though, talking talking talking, drinking beer and smoking pot. Listened to the Slits, Dolls, Hell Comes To Your House, Stooges, UXA and other neet records [that “neet” was a joke, or better have been], watched an animated Flash Gordon (only partly with the sound on—it wasn’t very good); told variations on the “maybe it’s just a stupid bird-lizard” line from Monster From A Prehistoric Planet, and listened to Spike’s great flying saucer, etc., stories. Fun.

On Monday Phyllis, out of the blue, said let’s go to my folk’s house to see my Dad off to Philadelphiathough he’d already left. Went anyway—had fun, great hamburgers, weird jokes (my brother Jon wouldn’t sit on the lawn because it was full of “insect shit”). Had a couple hits of pot and a great trip home—windows open, air beautiful; heard a riot-like Jerry Lee Lewis song (“High School Confidential”, live) and something by Aaron Copeland we liked a lot. Ed O’Brien [aka Celtic Runes of Renfield Brick, then bassist in Zoogz Rift's band and later art director for SST] returned my MC5 albums and “Teenage Head” by the Flamin’ Groovies; he also picked up a copy of that rare old Some Chicken single—great savage ’77 punk; real obscure, too. Oh—I borrowed my sister Suzi’s copy of Sometime In New York City album, which was surprising on two counts: first, that Suzi had it at all (apparently she’s a real John Lennon fanatic), and two in that it’s not that bad, after the reviews I’ve read. The title cut (minus the “Sometime In…” ) is a real killer cut—just hard rock’n'roll. I like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “We’re All Water”, too. That Elephant’s Memory is a hell of a band, too—I’ll keep an eye out for their album.

That was our three day weekend, then—I had lots of fun. It was real refreshing. Wow, I started this Sunday, and am just finishing it now, Thursday 9/9/82, at 10:30 PM.

Musical prose

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(from an email to John Altman, 2006)

Music and language probably evolved together. I think they’re inexorably linked. To use language without music seems a shame. Not words so much, but structures. I think to really write well you have to think beyond straight narrative and use, abuse, and play with the very structure of language. Certainly abandon all restrictive grammars. Although you have to know grammar (else you wind up like that bass clarinetist who could play free but didn’t know “Giant Steps” and was excoriated on stage by Roland Kirk.) What Bird did with harmony is possible in prose.

But fuck it’s hard.

Brick

Hands

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(email, 2010)

The photographer Joe LaRusso took this shot of me today.  Well, he took a bunch but for some reason this was my favorite.  Damn, I got big hands, I never realized that. That’s a 16 oz cofee cup, and that size 15, 6 mm wedding band looks like something from a cracker jacks box. 

An editor brought me and the photographer together to discuss a project (which sadly never got off the ground) that had me writing a couple essays for a collection of  LoRusso’s boxing photos.  We’re talking and talking at this little coffee shop on Santa Monica Blvd. and I look up and LaRusso is taking a pic of me on a little digital camera. Takes a couple more. He shows me a couple, they looked cool, actually. The guy was good. He keeps shooting as I’m talking and I made a crack about giving the finger and then the guy starts taking shots of my hands. Hence this. To be honest it’s my favorite pic of me for some reason.  A lot of muscle in those mits. They are huge. I had never really noticed that before, being that they are part of me. Funny how a writer spends so much time watching his hands dance across a keyboard, but never actually sees them. I stare at my hands but see words.  But I stare at this picture and I see why gloves don’t fit.

 

Music as Heroin

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(book review, West Coast Review of Books, 1981)

 

The Healing Energies of Music by Hal A. Lingerman (Theosophical Publishing House)

“Music as physical, emotional and mental therapy.”  The author, a self-described minister, counselor and teacher, tries to show how one can be a better person by listening to “certain pieces of music, played with timing and good taste,” and by avoiding the music that hurts his plants.  To illustrate this to us he begins with an “incident” from Greek history in which an enraged man, sword in hand, is reduced to lamb-like gentleness with a single chord plucked from a lyre.  If you believe that, then this book might be for you.

Lingerman’s approach is based around a strange mesh of the bible, astrology, sixties-style mysticism, and what are apparently Theosophical ideas of Sound and Light that are never really explained.  The music is not explained technically at all, but rather in terms of what instruments are good for the physical, mental, spritual and soul “bodies.”  Compositions, too, are categorized this way:  the physical body, for instance, benefits when it hears marches, fanfares, “Oh What A Beautiful Morning,” Liberace, the soundtrack to “Born Free”, and Johnny Cash.

He then drifts into how we can control our moods with music.  To release anger we should beat our rugs to “Ride of the Valkyries;” or calm down to the strains of Bach or Andy Williams.  Lingerman, again, recommends Johnny Cash because “the tremendous outpouring of feeling” on his live prison albums (perhaps the cheers after “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?) are “testimony to the basic longings of mankind, no matter how seemingly distorted, for some ineffable union in the Spirit.”  Lists of music are provided for our various moods.  Interestingly, lust or physical attraction is not one of them.

It gets really hazy after this.  Apparently, we are all either air, water, fire, or earth; maybe a combination thereof, and must carefully select our music accordingly.  He does this for us, with a mixture of religion and pop psychology—all based on the idea that we can know our exact temperment (which can never be changed).  He tells us which composers had which temperments.  Apparently, we are supposed to stick listening-wise to those composers with our own temperments.  If we don’t, who knows what could happen….

The man’s approach is patronizing in the extreme.  We cannot make any decisions for ourselves musically without his guiding light.  He tells us to first take the dust off our stylus.  To say thank you, literally to say “Thank you” to the music for playing for us.  He tells us what to play for our kids (“Scheherazade” and “Tubby the Tuba”), what to play for our fetuses, why we should not play Beethoven and Tchaikovsky after one another (it could upset us), or play much Tchaikovsky at all (it will upset us).  That rock music irregular rhythms (irregular?) will hurt us as well as our plants—except, research shows, that of the Beatles.  That digital recordings are not as therapeutic as regular recordings.  That listening to international music helps make us “planetary citizens”:  the American selection is an album each of Navajo songs, “negro” spirituals, and “American Civil War Songs of the North and South” as sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

I could go on and on.  Though the “light” selections go from “Whistle While You Work” by the above named choir to the Captain and Tenille and Barry Manilow, and that “the ‘Sound of Music’ is one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed,” the classical selections in general are very good, by many and varied composers.  But we are given Stravinsky’s “Firebird” but not “The Rite of Spring;” Liszt’s “preludes” but not the “Mephisto Waltz.”  And there is no jazz listed or even mentioned at all.  Too many rhythms, too many time changes, too much threat.  He gives you music as heroin: clean off your needle, say “Thank you” and float away into the euphoric nothingness of “The Sound of Music.”  This is not therapy.  It is escape.

Mountain Interlude

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 (one of those write a short story in 400 words or less online contests. Late 1990’s.)

 I passed the gorp.  Seeds seemed unappetizing just now.  I wanted meat and potatoes.  She looked up.  “You better eat.”  I grunted yeah.  She handed me the jerky and I tore out bear sized mouthful that made speech impossible.  “Wa’er” I requested.   She handed me the water.  “You’re gonna choke if you keep eating like that” she warned.  The water only made the jerky in my mouth swell in size.  I turned away and removed the chunk with my fingers, and then tore at it with my teeth.  Maybe it was my imagination but I swear I could feel them loosening in their sockets.

 She laid down and sighed.

 The wind rustled the evergreens.  Birds chirped, whistled, shrieked.  The sun made us warm, sleepy.  Wildflowers bloomed crazily all around.

 She sighed again, louder.

 “Hmmm?” I asked, swallowing the last of that jerky.

 “Nothing”. 

 Something.

 I scooted closer to her.  Reached out with a boot and prodded hers.  Once.  Twice. Three times.  She smiled.  She sighed again.  This time it was nothing.  So I laid down beside her, rolling my jacket up into a pillow.  The soft grass would do the rest.

I’m no musician

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(comment posted at International Review of Music, 2011)

Musician? I’m a musician now? Where did that come from? I mean, I played drums for years, yeah, but I was one of those drummers for which the term musician was quite a stretch…. I didn’t even know Don knew about that.

Had fun, though. Girls, drugs, parties. Not to mention tearing down on stage as the next band is trying to set up and my guitarist is backstage somewhere doing something fun or illegal.

Oh, and the violence, bar room brawls, a night in jail, kicked over drum kits, getting dusted and playing with my hands (a lotta blood), taking on a dozen cops (they won), a lot of funerals (none my own), turning down a chance to be a porn star (I love that story), who knows what else. A helluva lotta fun.

But it never once occurred to me to call myself a musician.

Of course, how I became a jazz critic I will never understand either. It wasn’t my idea. Nice perks, tho’. Plus you get all kinds of jazz credibility without having to be a, well, musician.