Late Thoughts on Assorted Esoterica

Notes from Bizarroland 6: Belatedly, Dad's Obit

2011-03-08T01:39:00.000-05:00

[Published in the Sunday Dec. 19, 2010 edition of the New York Times]

SOMOROFF--Marc, died quietly on November 23, 2010, after a courageous struggle with lung cancer. He was a devoted husband and father, accomplished scholar, a gifted writer, musician, visual artist and raconteur. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from NYU and earned the M.Ph. in political science from Columbia University. Marc won significant academic awards for early achievements in his field and enjoyed college teaching. As an insurance broker, his sincerity and professionalism garnered respect from his colleagues and clients. Marc will be best remembered for his personal integrity, incisive humor and intelligence; he knew how to connect with people. He will be dearly missed by his wife Alice; son Matthew; siblings Michael, Anne, Erik and David; stepmother Janet; aunt Geri; daughter-in-law Beth; and many cousins, nephews and nieces.

Bizarroland Interlude: Normaler and Normaler

2011-01-09T13:05:00.000-05:00

8 January 2011, ca. 12:45pm

Four people confirmed dead. On the other side of town, the phone keeps ringing, my mother’s ear glued to the receiver. Meanwhile, the wife and I sit in front of the television with our MacBooks. Equipped with layers of audiovisual devices, we try to make sense out of non-sense.

I keep thinking about Dad, about what his reaction would have been. I can hear his apocalyptic declarations.

“It’s like we live in Israel now. This kind of shit happens in the Middle East.”

“This country is completely fucked up.”

“This state is a political disaster.”

“There’s gonna be a riot in this city.”

“This is what you get in a gun-crazy state.”

And he’s right. I’m so convinced that I know him well enough to imagine his reaction that I feel like it is him speaking through me. And I suppose I’m glad for him that he isn’t around to witness this, because I know it would disappoint him. Upset him. Possibly break his heart.

The paranoia abounds now. The theories pile up. Mom, Beth and I bounce bits of information off each other – Jesse Kelly’s M-16 rally of this past fall, Palin’s “Take Back the 20” campaign that held Giffords in the crosshairs. The paranoia. Assurances to family and friends that we will stay inside today. Half-hearted thoughts of attending a peace rally, a pacifist vigil of some sort – these impulses checked by doubt, by a self-preservation instinct that wells up like a bilious lump of stomach putty.

The press gives conflicting reports. Giffords has been assassinated. Giffords remains alive and in surgery at Tucson Medical Center. More paranoia at the Tucson homestead: perhaps the media is covering up her death. Perhaps at this very moment, Giffords lies dead among the others killed, while the news gives placating reports of her continued existence in surgery, while the Tucson PD, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the National Guard prepare for bedlam.

ca. 7:20pm

Now Tucson is in the throes of a paranoia attack. The TPD is investigating a “suspicious package” near Giffords’ headquarters. A vigil for Giffords was being held near her office. The bomb squad is apparently “rendering the package inert,” KOLD news tells us. A reporter talks about hearing explosions and smelling acrid odors of bomb chemicals. I wonder if the city has itself exploded into mass fear – a latter-day version of the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” What will the coming days bring in Tucson? In Arizona? In the United States? Will the histrionics and suspicion of the days following the 9/11 attacks return full force? Will we have another wave of what Art Spiegelman termed the “new normal”? Is now the time for the dawn of a Newer Normal in the Southwest?

When traumatic events go public, when they become part of mass consciousness, infinitely mediatized until people begin to absorb them and incorporate them into a new normality, do we become more normal? Is each “new” normal also an increase in normalcy? In a sick inversion of supposed logic, is it the case that the more we see, the more jaded we become, the more normal we become?

“Every day and in every way, we are getting normaler and normaler.” Maybe this is what all the news coverage is secretly telling us. As a growing chorus of voices chants that “We are horrified by these tragic events” and that “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families,” I begin to wonder if they are trying to convince not only us watching out there, but if they are trying to convince themselves, if in convincing us they might then reabsorb the normalcy themselves. Or maybe the mantra should go another way: “Every hour and in every way, we are seeing how demented Jared Loughner is and we are getting normaler and normaler.”

9 January 2011, ca. 10:50am

And what will become of Jared Loughner in the near future? Besides whatever judicial punishment may or may not lie ahead, will he become a new cultural scapegoat? I watch an expert on CNN emphasize that Loughner is not a “lone gunman,” that he is a visible iteration of a systemic cultural disease (though the expert didn’t quite use those words), but I wonder what other contortions the US media will put the cultural figure of Loughner through…

Notes from Bizarroland 5: Nearing One Month

2010-12-21T13:12:00.003-05:00

Ma and I descended upon the homeland yesterday. Homeland in two senses: the house and the neighborhood. The house in which I grew up, in which the vast majority of my parents’ life together played out. The neighborhood is a humdrum borderland that we always called Forest Hills but that is apparently within the bounds of Rego Park. It may have been considered part of Forest Hills decades ago. The problem is that the house in which I grew up, which before it was my parents’ belonged to my maternal grandparents – a Slavic immigrant couple who met in New York during the depression – resides right near the boundary separating Rego Park and Forest Hills, these neighborhood designations in Queens that may or may not have significance now but that linger on as reminders of the collection of towns that made up western Long Island before the consolidation of the five boroughs. So I spent the earlier part of my youth saying I was from Forest Hills, and then sometime during my adolescent years I acquiesced and admitted I grew up in Rego Park – a name that for those in the know carries considerably less cachet.

In any case, the “homeland” – this neighborhood that contains buildings I’ve looked at since infancy, this place I still call “home” in spite of increasing feelings of alienation I feel at the changes in the local landscape. Where there is now a mall containing Sears, Marshall’s, and other stores there used to be a monolithic branch of the old NYC department store Alexander’s. Before there was a discount dollar store of some sort on Queens Blvd. there was a Nobody Beats the Wiz. Before the Wiz there was…I can’t remember now… Ben’s Best Delicatessen is still there, serving classic New York Jewish deli fare.

Within the neighborhood there are streets I walked hundreds of times with both grandmothers, my mother, my father. Over the past few years, each time I’ve visited my parents’ house I recognized fewer and fewer of the neighbors on the block – a block like many others in Queens, made up of red-brick connected row houses, these a bit larger and admittedly nicer than similar blocks elsewhere in Rego Park, Astoria or Sunnyside. Last year the next-door neighbor Helen died at a ripe old age of…hmm, don’t know…shortly after my grandmother Jean did. Her daughter still owns the house next to ours, and I guess that makes her and my mom the longest-term current residents on that block.

Something about Rego Park – my section of it, started to annoy the shit out of me since I moved out in 2005. The increasingly chintzy storefronts, the motley folks bumbling around, the disappearance of restaurants and stores that should have remained, if only for my sense of continuity. Yet as much as the damn place annoys me, I can’t loathe it. It’s too much about me, so when I look at it and feel disdain for it I’d be feeling disdain for myself too.

The house itself is now a large brick-and-mortar ellipsis for me, the gradual process of my parents’ move out of it and fully into their new house in Tucson having been interrupted by the revelation of Dad’s terminal cancer. Of course walking through it yesterday there were memories. Of course. While my mom sorted through mail, I found myself looking for artifacts proving Dad’s existence. I knew where to find his notebooks from about ten years ago – artist journals, I guess you’d call them, into which he pored out all kinds of mental activity, some insightful and beautiful, some morose and tiresome. The red-and-black ink drawings still strike me as brilliant: garish caricatures of people both real and imagined. I slowly read through some of his writings, laboriously deciphering his horribly messy hand. It occurred to me that I might be eavesdropping, invading his privacy by reading these jottings, but somehow I didn’t feel any guilt of trespass.

I won’t lie; a lot of the writing conveys a keen feeling of depression, of anxiety about how to go through life. Not only did Dad mull over his own tribulations, he wrote out his sympathy, sometimes pity, for family and friends – a piece describing his observations on the neglect of his half-sister by other relatives, an entry pondering the bullshit of the W. Bush regime via worrying about my oldest friend’s being called to duty for the Iraq invasion of 2003. My friend, and my dad sat there scribbling out his worry for him. Well, sure, why not. I mean he treated the guy like a fucking nephew since sometime in high school, and the guy came out to see the old man, full well knowing it might be to say goodbye before Dad kicked it.

Then there were the photographs. I just started to look around through the many MANY photos my mom took over the years, knowing I was looking for images of Dad. I found a good deal – photos from the late 80s and early 90s, photos of trips to Vermont, Florida, pictures of my dad’s 50th-birthday celebration in 1992 with some of our Czech relatives with us in Queens. Photos of both of my grandmothers, Anna (my mom’s mother) already suffering the symptoms of Alzheimers’ in 1990, though you can’t see it in the images. Anna, looking healthy (as she physically was) at age 78; Jean with a head of almost all-brown hair at age 74. Photos of Dad looking spry at 45, 48, 50. Photos of Dad and me – he a slim man in early middle age, thick dark hair on his head; me an incredibly dorky 10-year-old, with baggy pants and a baseball cap the diameter of which fit my head but still looks outsized on me. I had read some stuff in his journals from 1999, stuff about how he realized he needed to let me live my own life, about how at age 19 I was grown up (I’m sure he later realized that I was anything but grown up, even if I thought I was), about how he still wanted to help prevent me from making the mistakes he had made. Quintessential concerns of a father, perennial hopes for the good fortune of his son.

So I spent a couple hours being an archaeologist of my own past, of my father’s life and past, of my family’s past, of the house, the neighborhood. Whatever.

The thing is, with all the feelings of futility and fatigue brought on by this archaeology, this recollection, there is so much I want to tell you…

There’s so much I could tell all of you out there about the crazy and hilarious interactions Dad had with the neighborhood freaks and goons: Chester, the homeless guy who gradually went more crazy over the course of a few years, who started to bend the windshield wipers on peoples’ cars, whom our neighbor Abe wanted to pulverize with the help of my dad; “FBI,” the fucking maniac who walked the streets of Rego Park screaming out “I’m FBI, don’t mess with me!” or things like that, and who then actually got shot by a Central-Asian Mafioso (they started to pop up with the influx of Bukharian Jews into Rego Park during the 1990s) for yelling his bullshit, a mobster paranoiac who actually thought “FBI” was yelling it at him, warning him that he was in trouble; the bizarre conversations Dad had with The Late-night Streetwalker, a neighbor on the block who will remain nameless, who spewed vitriol about his family and about the revenge he would exact upon anyone who dared block his driveway. These people all existed.

There’s so much I could tell you, so much I want to tell you, about how I remember all those games of catch, how I too remember the time you played basketball with me and my teenage friends, when I made that one basket that won the game – that game you scribbled about years after it happened; about how much I enjoyed watching those Marx Bros. movies for the first time with you, how it opened up whole worlds of laughs and ideas when you showed me the Marx Bros., the Pink Panther movies, W.C. Fields, how even though you annoyed the shit out of me at times in Tucson this past year I still wanted to laugh with you at the Marx Bros. and Louis C.K.; about how I remember that you taught me how to understand baseball and basketball, these rituals of fathersonhood, these rituals of Americana, those hours we looked up all kinds of shit in the huge baseball encyclopedia you bought in probably 1993, the year the Mets sucked more ass than we thought possible, the year the Knicks were great but not great enough, the year the Phillies caused you agony when Mitch Williams completely blew it, “CHOKED” as you talked about at length, fucked it all up and gave up the Series to the Blue Jays…

Now, and for the past four weeks, I have so much to tell people about, so much to tell you…so much to tell…

And I wonder who it is I’m telling, and, for that matter, who’s really doing the telling.

Notes from Bizarroland 4a: Music Is the Healing Force

2010-12-04T22:22:00.003-05:00

As I sit and begin to write this latest installment of literary effluvium, the unbridled soul and humanity of Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack, vol. 1 vibrate around me. Since Dad’s expiration, even minutes after we all returned home from his deathbed at the hospital, I sought something from music. I sought comfort, consolation, escape, indulgence. Music has been a fix, a drug. “I’ll take a shot of James Booker followed by a chaser of Howlin’ Wolf.” Or, “Can’t do that right now, I’m about to sit down and gorge myself on Schubert’s most misery-soaked slow movements – a few of them back to back should do the trick.”

On the Tuesday of his death, I wanted to hear music of celebration, music that Dad loved. During the last six months of his life, he whittled down his listening habits to the music that most sustained him during his sixty-eight years on the planet – the blues. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker – the aces of the Chess catalogue, these were Marc’s aural bread and butter. His admiration for James Booker also peaked during the summer and autumn of 2010. I am glad to say that I played a part in this: during my stay in April, I purchased Booker’s The Lost Paramount Tapes, a sickeningly good collection of “previously-unreleased” recordings the Bayou Maharajah made in the early ‘70s. Seeing how much my dad enjoyed it, I left it in AZ while I returned to New York so we could pack up the Eastern homestead and head West.

Anyhow, on Tuesday afternoon and into Tuesday night, I blasted Muddy, Booker, Dr. John, Wolf, Clapton’s all-blues album From the Cradle. Somehow the good vibes flowed, probably aided by the bottles of Black Bush Irish whiskey and wine my uncle had brought home as sweet spirited salve. My uncle and I had a joke that we were going to honor Dad by making up for all those years (26 of them) that he didn’t drink – he put the bottle down in 1984 and never picked it up again. Well, we didn’t quite reach the goal that night.

Dipping into the wellspring of the black music of the Delta was my attempt to somehow keep my father’s spirit going. Since the vibrations of energy that make up “life” had escaped from his body, I guess I tried to conjure them up using my parents’ stereo – and all our ears – as surrogate flesh. I had brought in a small kitchen stereo and played him some blues, Miles, and Bach Cello Suites during his last days in the hospital. I’m pretty sure now and then he heard it and possibly enjoyed. I know that on the afternoon of 21 November it thankfully calmed him and even lulled him into a brief nap. I put on some blues and New Orleans R&B in the few hours on Tuesday before he unexpectedly checked out at 1:25pm.

We all knew that music would continue to sound in the house over the coming days. I knew because it had to, for my own sanity. I gradually began searching for music that would help me realize my own grief; these I would listen to privately, with headphones. I sought recordings that could provide me with a sonic mirror, reflecting back to me the feelings of melancholy, pain, loneliness and plain stupefaction I was experiencing. Reflect those back, and in the process help define the situation, help me trace out the landscape of myriad and at times conflicting emotions that had been continually forming itself in my mind. I knew that Bill Evans would provide a sure shot of melancholy, and his recordings did not disappoint. Especially effective were the albums Since We Met (1974) and You Must Believe in Spring (recorded in 1977 but not released until after Evans’ death in 1980). I have held the former in special admiration since I bought it in college…some ten years ago. It’s not one of Evans’ widely-lauded recordings, but there just seems to be a spark in his playing, a sonic twinge that speaks to me of the cold, hard streets of lower Manhattan in January, when Since We Met was recorded. I have no idea of what the lyrics of the title song of You Must Believe in Spring are, but listening to that tune, and hearing the aggregate mood of the whole album, I imagine the lyric going something like, “You must believe in spring, because the winter of this world sucks.”

So at night I would wrap myself in Bill Evans’ melancholy. I would imbibe of it. I would glut myself on the sweet stinging pain of his piano. Isn’t there at times an exhilarating edge to an oncoming wave of misery? As good as I was doing with Bill, defining my own sorrow, erecting an imaginary monument to my pain, my feeling of loss (me me me), I knew there was someone else I was forgetting. I would shuffle through my CD collection at random times of day and night, trying to remember who else’s music I should be listening to the way a person searches for the proper word which has of course escaped her at just the wrong moment in discourse. Who…? Not Tchaikovsky, well not quite – too many fast movements interfering with the slow agonized pathos I need. Not Chet Baker, too pathetic himself…Not Schumann, too thick, too German, too…something…Some of Kenny Wheeler’s recordings worked very well, but there was still an unexplored territory in my mind’s ear.

Then two nights ago it dawned on me. Chopin. Like a starving dog shown scraps of meat, I greedily pulled out CDs containing Chopin’s Mazurkas and Nocturnes, for me the most wistful and stately of his music – the furthest from the exuberant, virtuosic mode. Yes, the Nocturnes especially fed my ears and soul well. Yes, soak in the misery of these sounds, the regret. The excruciating nostalgia of some of the middle sections that is then crushed, ground into dust by the return to the opening material…I’m really thinking specifically of the C-minor Nocturne, op. 48/1. Years ago during my Master’s program, I performed a Schenkerian analysis of this piece. I spent hours studying the music note by note – hours consuming the wealth of feeling, which was never depleted by my scrutiny. So I know the piece well. The loose, little narrative about the piece I’d constructed for myself years ago fit the current situation magnificently. The “A” section, with its stately march-like texture and minor mode, is funereal. In the “B” section, Chopin switches to the major mode. From C major, the Nocturne moves into brighter the brighter keys of D and then E major. The music grows increasingly fervent; pounding octave figures become manic, hallucinatory – a hallucination of a beloved past, of a lost love, of a dead father, whatever. It was always clear to me what the return of the opening material in the A¹ section did to this hallucination-reminiscence-whathaveyou: it smashed it. It brought the nostalgic reverie to a crunching halt, and brutally reminded the subject (= Chopin? Me? You?) of the current reality.

It then occurred to me that by hanging out in the aural headspace of Chopin and Bill Evans, I was getting in touch with my Slavic soul. (Half of Evans’ ancestry was Rusyn. I am of all Eastern-European stock, at least half of it Slavic.) And I started to think, What I really need is for the Chopin interpreters and Evans to take it to the next level. More. More sorrow. More pianistic pain.

I imagined a recording of the C-minor Nocturne wherein the pianist doesn’t just play those B-section octave figures in a robust forte, but hammers them out. I imagined an überpianist with hands of titanium attached to arms of granite pulverizing the piano keys, SMASHING them in that B section. In my mind’s ear I heard a recording of almost farcical pathos – an overdubbing of bombs exploding to coincide with the punctuations of the octaves. As the bionic pianist-hulk smashes the piano keys, eventually pulverizing the wood, metal, and ivory, the piano simultaneously crumbles under his weight, explodes, and then, like a video-game character flickers back into view as a “new life” is used. Huge crashing of bombs, dynamite – no, bigger – nuclear blasts – accompany the decimation of the piano – One can listen to the overlapping sounds of wood splintering, metal strings cracking and bending, and massive explosions of air molecules caused by gargantuan bombs.

I imagined an analogously grotesque Bill Evans recording, one in which the listener can hear Evans’ keel over from the suffering and misery of his own music - No, better yet, make a video of it – A DVD that shows him in the studio performing the achingly beautiful tune “The Peacocks” and imploding at the end of the take – shriveling up on the piano bench – and to the shock of Eddie Gomez and Eliot Zigmund, crumpling like a deflated balloon on the studio floor.

If we’re gonna do grief, let’s do it right - Let’s REALLY get into it – On one side, I want Chopin’s music making pianos explode – I want the piano to be the detonator for a collection of hydrogen bombs – setting off a chain of pulverizing impacts that feed back into the musical groundswell of the Nocturne – On the other side, I want Bill Evans to play himself and all of us into a musical-metaphysical blackhole – his sound creating a central vacuum that sucks us all into ourselves and out of existence.

MORE POUNDING OCTAVES – MORE NULLIFYING CHORDS.

To me it’s only the flip side of an aesthetic of excess that has been so brilliantly cultivated in African-American music for decades. James Baldwin, Fred Moten, Amiri Baraka, and others have celebrated this aesthetic of excess. It’s in the music my father and I love so much – the good-times thump of Muddy Waters and Hooker, the screeching excess of James Brown, the all-out musical, sartorial, and performative excess of James Booker – a willingness to let it all hang out, a celebration of the rough edges of life. Of course an aesthetic of excess isn’t only the province of African Americans. Among many other folks, cultivated excess is no stranger to my father's side of the family. (If you had spent a few hours listening to the cackling and absurdly raucous humor that took place when my father, my uncle and I got together, you’d know.) Excess – more is more. More, in some cases, is better. Listen to the music louder. Pound those drums harder. Make those guitar slides wilder.

Dad was a practitioner of excess. If one ibuprofen pill helps that headache, maybe six will help it a lot more, and faster. He did stuff like that. I don’t know if he truly believed on an intellectual level that more ibuprofen would work that much better, but it was his practice.

Notes from Bizarroland 3: Letter from the HVAC Monster

2010-11-30T15:15:00.003-05:00

During the week Dad spent in the hospital, I noticed an occasional buzzing sound coming from the ceiling intake vent just outside the bedroom my wife and I have been using since moving to Tucson. It first became audible one morning as an intermittent buzz…buzz…buzz when the thermostat prompted the system to give off warm air.

For a couple of days before and after Dad’s passing I lost track of the buzzing sound, being of course preoccupied with other matters. Yesterday evening the intake vent let out more than just that intermittent buzzing. From the grill covering the vent fell a clean white envelope containing neatly-folded letter-size sheets of paper, upon which was typed a letter. Paranoia seized me from the intestines up. Upon touching the crisp white sheets of paper I instantly had the premonition that a hideous creature, some malformed, shrunken, troll-like being had been living in the ducts of the HVAC system in my parents’ house. This goblin, this monster, had powers of clairvoyance that would boggle and frighten the human mind, and it had composed a private letter to me. The parcel looked like something that might be issued from a law office, so clean were the folds, so crisp the black ink. It is written in a stilted and somewhat pompous diction…

To the First- and Only-Born Son,

Perhaps now you see that you are a fool. Perhaps now, after witnessing the emotional work of months and weeks, the preemptive mentations you erected to shield yourself against the eventual onslaught of the inevitable, hammered and quickly felled by the vicissitudes of an unknowing Cosmos, perhaps now you can truly perceive how foolish was your hubris, how ill-founded your sense of poise.

There are so many things I could tell you about yourself, young one. Yes, young, as you well see now, despite the recent occurrence of your thirtieth birthday, in contradiction to the feelings of weariness this milestone incited in you, you are still young.

I can still see you standing in the hospital room after the abrupt utterance of a nurse new both to your family and your ailing father, “He’s gone.” And this said almost in haste, nearly blurted out, as if this nurse somehow knew the events of the past days and held the same expectation of at least a day or two in the relative comfort of hospice care that you had held. You notice the redness and gleaming of her eyes, creases of incomprehension upon her forehead as she tells all of you the news she ascertained not two fifths of a second before the speaking of it, “He’s gone.” I can see your mind digesting her words, then this same mind realizing that it had fallen behind just a bit, that your stomach had actually digested moments before her motions with the stethoscope over his body, the beginnings of worry in the skin and muscles of her face. And yet, in the next moment, as you relay the fact to your mother, who has already begun to weep because of the sadness of his being toted off to a hospice to perish and not because she has just seen the perishing itself, you cannot yourself understand it. And so as your mother immediately embraces the full thundering pulverizing truth in a forward swoon and instant wracking sobs, you offer the most pedestrian suggestion - “Come here, Ma” – and clumsily catch/lift her in your arms lest she fall face first onto the linoleum floor from an apparently pure grief that you cannot yet know.

Yes, I can still see at this very moment into the cavern that looms beyond the opaque, obsidian lacquer painted by your words of a few minutes later, “I don’t understand.” I can see behind and beneath those sounds to what even they in their awkward inarticulation hide: raw fear. You feared not only the jarring closure, not only the grief and anguish to come, but you feared the dead body. You feared a foreign object in the room, a mass of protein, minerals, and water that stood in as a perverse doppelganger for what had moments before been your father. The seizure of your body and mind by fear was analogously sudden to the switch of animated being into dead matter – and, yes, I know and knew at that moment that your bloated, overanalytical mind was already spinning out myriad explications; I detected even from my lair back home the concoctions of a suffocating psyche gasping desperately for some whiff of knowing or being rather than gagging on its own production of putrid thought and theory. You feared the great mystery of this instant transformation of your father into notfather, as many others have. Your own ignorance confronted you from without – ignorance of how easily you slipped into the awe and dread about death that you knew had plagued human hearts for millennia, but which seemed to have been resurrected afresh for your own private torment. Not “death” as an abstract concept to be discussed round a table amidst vague friends and hearty drink, but death as the plain cessation of breathing, death as the sudden metaphysical flattening-out of a person with spirit and mind into a body with only volume and mass.

I can look ahead, too, to see your bafflement at how the work of eight months seems to be erased in the passage of a day. I can peer into your embryonic questioning of Causality, Effort, Time, Memory. I can already hear the tiresome discussions you will hold about the meaning of a life, whether your father was reconciled to his death even as he perceived its coming, the stunning infinity suggested by the finality of his departure from a physical and apparently objectively-verifiable reality. I can feel my stomach turn when I listen to the pre-echoes of your pontifications about “anima” and “breath” and how “expiration” is a fitting word for death since it refers to the final irrevocable release of breath.

I have chuckled quietly to myself over the past few days as I have listened to you repeatedly observe the habitual nature of Mind, surprised that you keep expecting to find him sitting in his usual armchair when you enter the house or to see a missed-call alert from his number on your mobile phone. And I know, perhaps more than anyone else, that each one of your verbal utterances to this effect hides countless more silent reminders whispered to yourself, that you will never see him AGAIN…

Notes from Bizarroland 2

2010-11-27T00:45:00.004-05:00

My mom and I went to the funeral home yesterday morning to "make arrangements" for my dad's cremation. That was what my mom said the funeral director told her the appointment was for: "to make arrangements." I had wondered what it meant. Ma already told him over the phone that we wanted a basic cremation, no service, no urn. (At some point we'll decide where to scatter the ashes.) Besides paying, what "arrangements" needed to be made?

There was a bit more, but not much. A few forms to verify and sign; some minor details to confirm. Then the funeral director asked if we had any more questions. Ma and I looked at each other, she shrugged, she asked, "I don't know, Matthew, is there anything you wanted to ask?"

I paused and began to simultaneously shrug and shake my head "no." But a number of questions demonstrating an idle curiosity about the mortician's craft had shot through my mind.

"When you got the body from the hospital, where were they keeping it? Was it a morgue? What does the morgue look like?"

"Do you keep the body refrigerated at the funeral home until the time of cremation? Or since it's going to be burned anyhow, do you not bother? Let it begin to decompose?"

"What about all the smoke? Is there any environmental regulations?"

"If we wanted to, could we see the body now? Not that I do want to, but...if I wanted to...?"

I decided it was better to just leave than to ask these questions.

Dad and I had once had a conversation about a sleazy funeral director somewhere in New York that tried to guilt-trip him...I think it wasn't pertaining to a relative of his, but a friend and work associate - but I really can't be sure now. I think it was something about how the undertaker tried to convince my dad and the other person he was with that the deceased deserved better than a pine box, how the deceased should be honored with something more noble or elegant or dignified - and definitely a shitload more expensive - than an unadorned wooden box. My dad had related the story so that we could share a feeling of contempt about the inappropriate behavior of the undertaker, and so we could share a meditation on the grotesque humor of a hard sell taking place in an awkward moment where stale grief met tedious bureaucracy.

I was glad that my mother and I were not subject to any hard-sell techniques, even if we inevitably had to spend a few absurd moments acquiescing to a compulsory bureaucracy.

Notes from Bizarroland 1

2010-11-25T21:42:00.001-05:00

I’d like to tell Dad that a cool spell came to Tucson in the past couple days, the kind of brisk weather he’d had been eagerly awaiting.

The specific circumstances of his death were the kind of thing he and I would have discussed at some length. We would have hashed it out, talked about how odd it was that he died at the very moment he was about to be put on a stretcher to be driven from the hospital to the in-patient facility at TMC Hospice. Just as he had told me a bit over a year before that he kept wanting to call his mother and tell her the news – that she had died – I instantly had the feeling that once we left the hospital and drove back home I had to let Dad know that he had expired, and that it was bizarre.

My uncle and I had a laugh about the fact that within a few moments of Dad’s passing, I had the inexorable urge to take a dump. The lavatory in Dad’s hospital room had run out of toilet paper sometime recently – possibly that morning, possibly the night before, during the many hours that we all spent in the room with Dad, occasionally pissing and shitting as one must do. Uncle Michael ran out to the nurses’ desk to procure a roll while I sat down to begin my business with the toilet. He handed it to me through the slightly ajar door.

At home the following day I realized that the need to defecate must be my personal manifestation of grief. Following a wave of anguish and a welling-up of tears I once again got a heavy feeling in my gut. That was yesterday.

Today is the second full day in this reality without my father.

My Hearing Belongs to ME

2010-10-22T01:52:00.002-04:00

I recently read a description of Miles Davis' album In a Silent Way (IASW) that gave me a start:

It was the sound of Miles Davis and Teo Macero feeling their way down an unlit hall at three in the morning. It was the soundtrack to all the whispered conversations every creative artist has, all the time, with that doubting, taunting voice that lives in the back of your head, the one asking all the unanswerable questions.

This is from Phil Freeman's book about Miles' electric period, Running the voodoo down: the electric music of Miles Davis. I haven't really looked at much more of the book, and it hasn't been a book that has held much interest for me otherwise. I ran across the excerpt above in the Wikipedia entry on IASW; I was curious to see what Wiki had to say about the album after giving it a serious listen for the first time in over a year. I realize it's not entirely fair of me to write off Freeman's book without reading some more of it - but that's not what concerns me here and now.

As I said, Freeman's description gave me a start. These musings about Miles and his producer Teo Macero wandering through an unlit hall, about secret interior dialogues in the heads of artists...these comments, though juxtaposed with some historical information and contextual analysis, are certainly evaluative, definitely subjective, and don't even try to be critical or historical. One might say they're also poorly-written. Freeman switches perspective in the second sentence, beginning by describing "every creative artist" in the third person, and then switching to the second person, talking about "that doubting, taunting voice that lives in the back of your head" - "your head." And isn't "creative artist" a redundant construction? Doesn't the second word, "artist," already imply the adjective "creative"? Yet the interpretive thrust of Freeman's gloss gnawed at me - maybe the way he imagines the voice in Miles' head, or any creative artist's head, gnawing at him. There was something about Freeman's notion of IASW as the sound of being lost, of contemplating the infinite, that struck a chord within me.

I was going to continue here, to recount my personal history with IASW, probably get a bit mushy at times, etc. (See below for previously unreleased excerpts of this reminiscence.) Well, what was happening was that for a few days it felt like Freeman had stolen my hearing of IASW. Yes, stolen, taken the way I hear the album, the way I feel about it, think about it, know it away from me. But then a few days elapsed, and Freeman's slick yet for me nevertheless uncanny gloss on IASW lost it sway over me, and I started to regain my own hearing of the album. I became able to reconcile Freeman's "unlit hall" with my own dimly-lit space created by IASW.

And then I remembered that Freeman's book belongs to the greasy, fetid, and even depraved industry of Miles Davis publications - a entire subcategory within music books - and I said to myself

"FUCK PHIL FREEMAN

AND FUCK HIS UNLIT HALL."

The still-growing number of vapid monographs on Miles Davis - or some period of his life, or one of his albums - is another topic altogether, one which I intend to address in my very next post.

Unreleased Reminiscence Outtakes
[This is an album I've known well since the age of 16, 38 minutes of music which I've listened more than 200 times, possibly more than 500. Miles' trumpet sound immediately struck me as incredibly beautiful - as full and cushiony as on Kind of Blue, and yet with a new timbral variation, especially in the high register. It was also the album from which I really got to know Wayne Shorter's sound on soprano - still one of my favorite sounds among the recorded jazz I know. There are so many moments on IASW I could tell you about, so many aspects of the recording that have fascinated in different ways at different times. I could really talk someone into oblivion about it....

....I never really thought of IASW as "being about" being lost, if that's even what Freeman is getting at in his words. For me, IASW has often been about something unknowable, both something unknowable about life, the universe, the human condition, and its own unknowability - the music's own inscrutability. There was something evocative about Freeman's thoughts, about the idea of the album being a soundtrack to an internal dialogue of metaphysical questioning. So reading the excerpt, I had an experience of the uncanny. Freeman touched on a feeling I too had gotten from the album - a feeling of contemplating the infinite through music....

...In my late teens the things Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea were doing on the Fender Rhodes keyboards, and the things Joe Zawinul did on the electric organ, held infinite fascination for me. I imagined that as I continued to learn about music, I would someday be able to explain what made the web of keyboard sound on the album so intriguing; I'd be able to analyze it - break it down into its component parts and understand the how and why of the keyboard soundweb. When I started to really delve into music theory in college, I would sometimes return to IASW, maybe play a few phrases on my trumpet along with the record, and think to myself that I was getting closer to being able to analyze that thick, inscrutable fog of keyboards....]

Louis Szekely (a.k.a. Louis C.K.)

2010-10-14T01:40:00.000-04:00

I've been seriously digging on the comic Louis C.K. for the past few weeks. (Thanks to my oldest friend on this earth for introducing me to him, by the way.)

His comedy strikes me as wide-ranging. He can do a lot of very funny observational things; it's social satire with insights as brilliant as the language is plain. His current show on FX combines this observational/satire stuff with some real quirky plots and great moments of absurd and/or surreal humor. I highly recommend.

What I really appreciate about him is that he's a white comedian who is not afraid to deal with race and white privilege. Now it's not like I keep tabs on all the comedians out there, but it seems to me that C.K. has few white colleagues who are willing to venture into those kinds of comedic waters. I want to share a brief but very pithy bit he did about the "N-word" a couple of years ago:

Suggested viewing/reading of related interest:

http://theloop21.com/society/why-louis-ck-matters

http://theloop21.com/society/louis-ck-hits-black-girl-race-sex-and-unwanted-male-attention

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjCK2QkucL4

"Things Are Crazy"

2010-10-04T14:34:00.002-04:00

[WARNING: Ranting ahead]

I'd like to propose an indefinite moratorium on the following phrase, and all synonymous variations:

"Things are crazy."

Last week a beloved friend inadvertently woke a sleeping giant when he included this phrase in an email to me. Said friend, who is an adept writer and talker, inspired me to finally compile and present my thoughts on the matter of the above phrase.
Initially I want to address the ambiguity of the phrase "things are crazy." It is a simple enough grammatical structure, a three-word sentence in the indicative mood; the speaker is saying that it is a current reality that things are crazy. But already things (not the "things" of the phrase, though) are becoming vague. Is this an observation of a general condition of existence? Are things always crazy? To remedy this ambiguity, people often modify the core phrase as follows:

"Things are crazy right now."

"Things are crazy these days."

"Things have been crazy this week."

Here we already are considering some of the synonymic variations I refer to above. So it could be an observation about how these "things are" at a specific point in time, or during a specific period.

But what of these things? What is their nature, beside an apparently volatile mental condition? To alleviate my annoyance at hearing the phrase, I often amuse myself by imagining the "things" in question. When someone tells me that "things are crazy," I pciture his or her living space filled with small creatures, of reptilian or perhaps amphibian type, who are causing havoc. These small things might resemble gremlins or imps, running around the house, knocking things over, spilling liquids, and generally causing a ruckus. Perhaps they have behavioral problems. Possibly they experience hallucinations and hold deluded views of reality.

You see, not only do I lack knowledge about the nature of the "things," I also don't know in what way they are "crazy." Do they suffer from recognized mental conditions such as sociopathy or schizophrenia? Or are they just plain old fuck-ups and hence projecting their fucked-upness onto the poor human's life?

More likely than not, the speaker of the phrase "things are crazy" does not intend it to be a statement about monstrous creatures who have intruded into their lives and torment them. He or she probably doesn't even mean to be making a statement about the way of the world, or the human condition. The actual scope of the statement - what the person is really talking about - is usually much more limited.

"Things are crazy for me."

And I'll give folks the credit they're due - I often do hear or read this particular variation. Though unfortunately the observation far too often remains unqualified by any pronoun. It is often qualified by reference to a location, or a specific situation.

The family of phrases I'm grouping under the general archetype of "things are crazy" is a favorite utterance of academics: "It's a crazy time of the semester" which leads to common variations like "It's a busy time of semester," "It's a rough time of the semester" - all of which I have heard employed during the first week of classes, right after midterms, or during finals week - basically any time of semester can be a crazy time and can cause those things to get all hot and bothered.

So let's take stock of the taxonomy we have so far. There's the ur-phrase:

"Things are crazy."

There are the time-specific variations:

"Things are crazy right now."

"Things are crazy today."

"Things have been crazy this week."

"Things have been crazy for months."

Then there are substitutions and variables on "crazy":

"Things are hectic."

"Things have been all over the place."

"Things are busy this week."

Sometimes folks even remove the "things":

"This week has been nuts."

When most people utter the phrase, I hear a strange echo, a kind of veiled sonic afterglow. It usually goes something like this:

"Things have been just crazy the past week." [pause of a few seconds...] I've got a lot going on in my life....

That's the secret message there in italics. When a person tells me "things are crazy" this person is usually also indicating how busy s/he is, how rich his/her life is, how many endeavors/projects/tasks/ongoing-something-or-others s/he has got his/her hand in. (This is an observation that go-getter types, into which category most academics fit, really like to make about themselves.)

But I'd really like to acknowledge that the phrase-type "things are crazy" belongs to the rhetorical category of bullshit - that is, a statement without truth value, one which can be proven neither true nor false. The usefulness of the phrase-type "things are crazy" lies not in its observatory power. No, the power of the phrase lies in its application, and in how it communicates what it does. When we say "things are crazy" (and yes, of course I have used it too...unfortunately), we are exculpating ourselves. A more truthful transformation of the phrase would go something like this:

"I know I was supposed to do [insert task here]. I'm sorry I haven't done it; I just did not get around to it. I have no excuse, but I'm asking your understanding, since we have all been in this position at some point."

But when we say "things are crazy" we displace our own inability to do the things we should be doing outward and turn our own temporary lack of organization or irresponsibility into an external and general condition of reality.

So once again I propose an indefinite moratorium on the phrase-type "things are crazy." For my part, I will make a concerted effort to admit openly when I have not been able to look at someone's email/call someone back/get something done when I said I would. I will not talk about those pesky apparitions we call "things." Because let's be honest,

when aren't things crazy?

Extreme Anthropology

2009-10-21T12:19:00.005-04:00

To fully understand the phenomenological experience of a killer, you have to start killing. Overcoming my repulsion at the idea of taking another human life didn't just involve a recalibration of my personal ethics or a suspension of disbelief during the ethnographic project. At its crux it involved absorbing a new habitus - one that included an embodied knowledge of the instruments of death just as much as an intellectualized urge to use them. When the butt of the gun began to squeeze back, holding my hand like an eager lover, I knew I was really getting to know the life of the gang thug. When I became aware of the place where the knife's blade ended, the same way you know where your index finger ends and the air begins, I was finally gaining a glimpse not just of the practices of hitmen, but the feeling of being a hitman.

Colleagues told me the project was too risky, the fieldwork would be disastrous - at best I would become a felon, at worst I would go too deep and abandon academe for a career in clean-up jobs. But they underestimated me. While I did spend over a year soaking in the milieu of the killer (and helping at least 10 victims pour out their blood), I was able, not without some mental acrobatics, to remove myself from the hitman worldview and relearn the pacificist ethics I had espoused for all of my pre-hit life, the very ethics that lead me to the project in the first place.

Some say that anthropology in dangerous places (or of dangerous activities) is more about the crisis of the ethnographer than any contribution to social science. People look at Bourgois, who spent years hanging out with crack addicts in East Harlem and then upped the ante on himself by spending 12 years hanging with and studying homeless junkies , and praise his courage and dedication to social critique. People say similar things about Wacquant's willingness not just to study boxing in a Chicago ghetto, but to place himself right in the ring, becoming one boxer among others, occasionally getting his brains beaten out. Harvard apparently thought Wacquant went off the deep end, told him he couldn't stay out in Chi-town turning into a meathead, called him back to the fold.

But I say they didn't go far enough. Did Bourgois smoke crack with his informants? According to him, no. Wacquant danced in the ring and rolled with the punches, but he forgot the other half of the equation, the part where he gives up his economic, educational, and cultural capitals and really lives in the ghetto, becoming one of the forgotten, the passed-over.

Me...? I Didn't half-ass it. Not only did I "take up the gun" (as my informants like to say), but to fully immerse myself in the everyday practices of the petty hired gun, I forfeited all university funding, left my wife and kids, and moved into a neighborhood where I'd be living with gang members 24 hours a day. I cut off all communication with my family, friends, and everyone in the university. I only spoke to my "associates." And I studied the ways of the gun, learned to smell fear on the bodies of soon-to-be victims, meditated on the unique feeling that comes just before a kill - a cool satisfaction somehow tethered to a deeper surge of manic hilarity - to understand why these men kill, and then kill again.

* * *

Why the ludicrous and even cartoonish satire of anthropology that studies the fringes of society? Why the possibly vitriolic attack on clearly accomplished and apparently sincere ethnographers? It's not because I think their work is crap. Bourgois' In Search of Respect is a book that I found compelling, challenging, and to this day inspiring. I recommend it to people, refer to it sometimes in casual conversation, and value the insights it's given me. Having read only bits of Wacquant's work (including snippets of Body and Soul), I look forward to reading the whole book, for I anticipate it being a similarly rewarding experience.

It's not that I doubt the validity of their arguments or the brilliance of their work. It's just that, along with all that validity and brilliance I can't help but sense a bit of machismo. And it may be that the machismo isn't even a mindful or intentional posture on the part of the individual ethnographer - the machismo may be a kind of habitus all its own, a by-product of being such an apt student of ethnography, taking its assumptions and goals so seriously, that the fieldworker begins to one-up himself and his colleagues.

The radicalism of work like Bourgois' and Wacquant's, a radicalism not only of leftist ideals, but of the research method itself, has at times revealed an underbelly to me. It is the same underbelly that an esteemed ethnographer identified in all "radicalism." This other ethnographer, who will remain anonymous, observed that for him the word "radical" always carries macho connotations. To position oneself as a radical scholar is to engage in masculinist one-upmanship. I paraphrase his words: "Positioning yourself as 'radical' usually means you're saying, 'Here, let me explain to you how things really are.' And in that explaining, you're claiming a position of intellectual power over others...There's also a tradition in the academy of 'radical' scholars being men who compete over who can articulate the most radical, the most far-out, perspectives on things."

I would agree that in the tradition of leftist scholarship, there is sometimes a pissing contest at work. Picture Foucault, Bourdieu, Althusser, and maybe even Marx in a room together. They begin to argue about who has most incisively perceived the mystification of social reality and the fictive nature of the autonomous subject. In their intellectual sparring about who can elucidate the domination political economy exerts over us all, they try to dominate one another. In place of wielding male prowess on a physical and/or sexual level, they wield it on an intellectual level: "My theory of systems of power and control is bigger and thicker than yours."

"My fieldwork was more dangerous than yours."

"My ethnographic site was more dreary than yours."

"My informants were scarier than yours."

"I crap bigger'n you." (So said Jack Palance, playing a send-up of the cowboy as "real man," to Billy Crystal in City Slickers).

I think in certain ways there may be tacit posturing when ethnographers assure readers that they didn't cut any corners in their fieldwork, that they really lived with and hung out with the dregs of society. The insights ethnographers like Bourgois have for us are compounded by the awe we feel at the courage their fieldwork necessitated. Or maybe it's just the awe I feel as a "soft" ethnographer - one whose fieldwork is anything but extreme. I sometimes wonder what scholars who've done fieldwork in ghettos, prisons, conflict-stricken Third World nations would say about my fieldwork, in which I hang out with jazz fans, shooting the shit and listening to music. Would they say my work is soft, safe, peripheral? Yet isn't the intended endpoint of most ethnographic roads very similar? An office in a university-owned building, a comfortable salary, perhaps some of the finer things in life. Even if Bourgois, Wacquant, and others took tremendous risks, the implicit idea was that at the end of the road, they could walk back into their prior social reality - barring any unforeseen complications encountered in the field.

Gringos Accessorize Existence? (Gentrification in medias res, addendum)

2009-10-17T12:46:00.004-04:00

So, recently this restaurant near me changed it's name from "Talay" to "Pancho Gringo." Certain sources indicate that before it was "Talay" it might have been "Alma." But the dream of Thai Latin culinary fusion is now stardust, and in its wake lies a good old upscale "bistro" (as Panco Gringo calls itself) serving any mildly affluent diner a neat and tidy simulacrum of Mexican gastronomic authenticity.

Apparently some concerned citizens are crestfallen about the change:

http://ny.eater.com/archives/2009/09/curious_revamps_talay_is_now_pancho_gringo.php

http://greasyguide.com/2009/09/20/harlems-talay-restaurant-is-dead-pancho-gringo-rises/

We will revisit these misgivings over the fall of Talay below, but first I want to ruminate on the name Panco Gringo, because I think it deserves further attention than just tossing off an "Oh, that's an unfortunate name." Let's begin with the first half of the appellation, "Pancho." It is a Spanish word that, according to a very quick and dirty internet search, could refer to any of the following (in no particular order):

1. a nickname form of "Francisco"

2. a the first name of Mexican revolutionary and associate of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa

3. a different sidekick, here accompanying "the Cisco Kid," a character created by O. Henry and later finding his way into various media

4. the name of a chain of Mexican restaurants based in Texas

5. part of the title of the song, "Pancho and Lefty," performed by many, but perhaps most famously by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard

6. the name of a Mexican restaurant in the Los Angeles metro area

So to what does the "Pancho" in Pancho Gringo refer? If it is a signifier, what does it signify? Well, I can't be sure. But from the above list, two trends do emerge: 1. Pancho seems to be a preferred name for sidekicks, perhaps the name even works as an icon of sidekickery; and 2. Pancho seems to be something white Americans like to call Mexican restaurants.

Maybe now we're getting somewhere. The "Pancho" in Pancho Gringo might have something to do with sidekickery, or with US citizens loving to have good, "authentic" Mexican food (almost any Mexican restaurant I've ever patronized claims to be selling the real McCoy). It might even have something to do with Mexico being (after numerous conflicts about which I think most US citizens, myself certainly included, know almost nothing) the trusty, browner and more zesty sidekick of the US. It might even have something to do with Mexican food being a sidekick to the Caucasian US belly. Just let it percolate in your mind a bit. Imagine the unruly web of connotations that "Pancho" conjures as a bowl of salsa that needs to sit so that the garlic, cilantro, and onions can suffuse the whole with their pungent flavors.

While that's happening, let's turn our attention to the word "Gringo." Most readers will probably be at least somewhat familiar with this word. It is a Spanish-language word used mainly in Latin America to refer to foreigners, especially those from the US. It is usually considered derogatory. However, as with most slang, its wide range of uses, meanings, and implications cannot be simplified - sometimes it isn't even deployed with the intention of insulting the named. For evidence of this, see the Wikipedia article on the word.

Whether or not "gringo" is uttered as insult, it does seem safe to say that the implied speaker is of Latino or Spanish ethnic affiliation, while the referent is someone who does not speak Spanish and is often white or "Anglo" in ethnicity. Thus "gringo" might be defined as a way for a Latino to mark another person as an outsider, or non-Latino. When considering this eatery, Pancho Gringo, I am compelled to ask, who is speaking? I can't be sure that the owners of the business and the building which it occupies are white, but I think that's a reasonable assumption. But that's a sloppy way to go about making my argument. So I'll ask who frequents the joint. Participant observation (I often go to an Italian "trattoria" nextdoor) informs me that there are more "gringos" (as in non-Spanish speakers) than non-gringos at Pancho Gringo.

Is the restaurant's management sticking it to their gentrified clientele, by calling them all a bunch of gringos? Is the deep structure of "Pancho Gringo" equal or close to, "We, your trusty sidekick Mexican restaurant, will serve you, the foolish gringos, overpriced food"? Or what if the management is a white man (or woman)? Is it then the case that the restaurant owner is sticking it to him or herself with the establishment's name? Or what if nothing is meant by the name, what if the owner just came up with two words that signified Mexicanness and didn't give it any further thought? Is it even possible for something to mean nothing?

Since I've gotten myself into very murky waters now, I'll retreat and revisit the question of why Talay's demise is lamented by some. The writer for GreasyGuide frustrated that the "sexy and posh spot that [Talay] once was" has been replaced by something that looks more like a "cheesy Mexican spot." The writer then expresses a wish that PG will be up to snuff, "as the service quality in Harlem has gone down as of late." The dream of consuming affluence, sophistication, and cosmopolitanism deferred - regardless of the class or ethnicity of this writer/consumer. Amanda of "NY Eater" notes that Pancho Gringo is an unfortunate name, but I am left wondering why she thinks so.

To complicate matters further, consider the circumstances around why restaurants have sprung up on 12th Ave and 135th St in the first place, which I referred to in previous posts (the keen observer might even catch a bit of Talay's "oriental" lion statues - still intact during the era of Pancho Gringo). Sometimes gentrification doesn't proceed the way we wish it would. Sometimes it takes a slightly different path. It may slow down for a bit. Or, in a fit of excitement and bravado, it may charge ahead, clearing everything in its path. While gentrification is busy doing its thing, we may need to find a different Thai-Latin restaurant to go with that new craving for exotic fusion cuisine - you know, the one we got the great deal on at the department store of our minds last week?

When the Masquerade Ends

2009-10-03T20:32:00.011-04:00

[NB: If this post seems like a departure from my usual subject matter, it is. It's from an email I received from a friend whose name also begins with "M" - such an odd communication that I couldn't resist sharing it with you here.]

I want to tell you about a letter I received yesterday. It’s from a friend with whom I hadn't spoken in years. It feels like another lifetime back when our lives coincided in some meaningful way; though we had been close friends during high school, we later drifted in vastly different directions. So when I looked at the sender name in my email inbox, it felt like finding an article of clothing that I thought I'd thrown out years ago. P___ had gone on to a life in images, by which I mean he had become a visual artist. His preferred medium was pencil. Soon after graduating from high school, he had carved out a stylistic niche for himself with a series of drawings which showed at several art museums in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest - some are museums you might have heard of, others are obscure repositories of the merely-talented majority which, in the world of fine art, rarely enjoys the privilege of prolonged attention from the critics. But it was the time his work spent in the first type of museum - the significant one which, when mentioned to an acquaintance would cause eyebrows to raise - that had remained a source of comfort and even a kind of fuel for living. At least that's the way I must look at it now. When we last spoke and when he might have sensed the faintest signs of the approaching twilight of his repute and meager acclaim within the art world, I only had a small suspicion that the limelight was so important to P___.

For obvious reasons of privacy and security, I will not divulge the identity of P___ here. But I must share with you at least a cursory account (both in its length and in my own limited comprehension of recent aesthetic debates in the visual arts) of the artistic work that put him on the map, for it will figure importantly later in the story. The series of drawings in question could be described as neo-realistic. They are of fairly standard size - about ten by fourteen inches - and they are all landscapes. The pencil strokes are generally fine, controlled, precise; the depiction of objects is vivid, nuanced, almost photo-realistic despite its own monochrome. P___ was quickly recognized as a consummate draftsman with a keen eye for detail. It was also noted by more than one critic that his landscape drawings were unusual for the very breadth of visual field which they recreated. These were landscapes with an overabundance of land: what appeared to be an accomplished if unremarkable scene with a mountain silhouette as its focus would, if the viewer placed himself closer to the paper, reveal itself to be an image containing the sky above and behind, the mountains themselves, below that creeks running through foothills, and finally a small town. The sheer amount of lifelike, representational visual information that he managed to fit onto a 10 x 14 sheet of paper was impressive.

It was said that when looking at such a drawing from close range, the eye did not know where to go. The drawings almost stood in opposition to themselves; the details of said town competing with the chiseled contours of the mountainscape for the viewer's attention. There seemed to be many points of focus, or none at all. The term "hyperlandscape" was coined by a prominent critic in Portland to encapsulate the technique and its effect upon the eye of the beholder.

Yet this alone would not have garnered P___ even fleeting success. The crucial element in the alchemy that caused his moment of fame was that his landscapes were of virtually unknown locations. Each time a viewer was struck by the skill of the pencil work, the feelings of curiosity and fascination aroused in the viewer would be compounded upon realizing that he had never even heard of the locale depicted. My friend, it was said, had a knack for finding an unknown town, a forgotten valley, and bringing it to vibrant life. His brilliance lay in his ability to see what others had not even bothered to know about. So it was said.

As his work began to makes its rounds through the galleries, and then the museums, of the Southwest and Pacific Northwest, a small movement developed. People became inspired by P___'s drawings to visit the locations he had portrayed. He stood by the dual claims that he always drew actual places that existed in the world, and that his pieces were completely accurate representations, both in content and scale, of the locations at the time of drawing. When people became fascinated with these meagerly-sized yet opulently detailed landscapes, they knew the next step had to be a pilgrimage to see for themselves.

As I mentioned, I inferred from our last conversation that P___ might have suspected the waning of his success in the art world. This sentiment was outlined rather than directly communicated through a story he told me about a conversation he had with an art critic who had been an early champion of P___'s work. The critic had ventured to one of the "secret" locations portrayed in one of P___'s drawings which he, the critic, most admired. He reported to P___ what a disappointing trip it had turned out to be. The critic found none of the charm and wonder of the drawing to be reflected in the tangible reality of the village visited. Though he supported my friend's claims to representational veracity, at least on a physical level, the critic found that the same houses in reality struck him as less vibrant, less crisp, than their miniature reproductions in my friend's drawing. The critic explained that the whole experience function for him as a temporally and geographically protracted inversion of trompe l'oeil.

P___ related this to me with a note of distress in his voice, almost as though he were telling me that he had been involved in a money-laundering scheme and was scared of being found out. He lingered on the critic's insistence that though there was nothing inaccurate or exaggerated about the drawing - that he still agreed that my friend's proportions, lines, and shadings were correct - he nevertheless felt the actual town was somehow less "present" than the drawing had led him to believe (and P___ quoted the critic as using the word "present"). He was distressed by the implications behind the critic's impressions: that his renderings were somehow fundamentally disingenuous, that his work was contrived not in the sense that all artistic creation is artifice but rather in the sense that P___ was somehow unable to fully connect with reality, that though he portrayed the physical shapes of reality perfectly an apparently metaphysical - and crucial - aspect of this reality was completely lost on him.

If you are still reading, I offer my thanks and my apologies. I thank you for indulging me this extended preamble and I apologize that it was so extended. But it was necessary to properly introduce P___'s letter itself, for it makes mention of events in the past without knowledge of which the letter might strike you as irrelevant. I reproduce the letter now and assure you that though I have abridged it, I have left in everything relevant to our story:

Dear M,

How in the world have you been?! I know it's been YEARS since we spoke, wrote, or even emailed. I wanted to call you and catch up properly – hear everything that’s going on with you – but I could only find your email address, and so I want to share a story with you while it’s fresh in my mind. In the past few months I've witnessed a series of events which made me think deeply about our last conversation - you remember, the one where I told you about that critic who took that disappointing trip to S_____ A_______? You might have been wondering what happened to me after that phone call. Well, it's enough to say that I went into a sort of downward spiral soon after that. A couple of exhibits I had in small, regional museums got very bad local press. I never did that well in galleries, but after those crumby reviews, most gallery-owners suddenly had openings booked through the following year or wouldn't return phone calls, or had a million other things to do as soon as I walked in their front door.

The pain of this was terrible, and the bottle soon became the only thing that made it go away - at least for a night, until the next morning when it would come back accompanied by nausea and headaches! I had been riding a wave of positive energy and when things started to not go my way it really felt like the end of the world. I kept thinking to myself, "This is not the way it's supposed to be going; I want a redo!" Rather than even try to get my work into new spaces, other galleries, I just started to shut down. Luckily I had some money saved from the good times, because when no one wanted my stuff on their walls, I wasn’t about to go out and get a day job.

A few months passed by, and then I met a guy who written a collection of children’s stories. He knew my work, and liked it, and he needed an illustrator. Turns out he actually had a contract for this collection, so if I supplied the drawings I’d definitely get compensated. I took the job but my ego took a big hit. I secretly felt it was beneath me. After all, I was a “fine artist” – my stuff had shown in museums. So now I had work for a while, but I still had that bottle in my cupboard as well as that knot in my stomach.

The knot only started to go away once I met another artist, this painter named Grossinger. He was living in B______, not far from me, and we started to run into each other in galleries around the area. It didn’t take long for me to realize Grossinger was a coke-head. Constant trips to the bathroom, the energy, the mood swings, the itchy nose. When he was down, he’d just stand there looking at pieces on the walls. When he was high, he’d talk. A lot. About what he’d done, where his work had been in the past, who he fucked, whose career he helped. He’d also badmouth all the artists whose work we’d look at in galleries. This one didn’t know the fundamental nature of the medium she was using; that one was a mindless colorist with no real soul in his pieces.

Like me, Grossinger had become a darling of the art press because of a specific series – he did these oil paintings which were portraits of celebrities. They were caricatures, really. They would be all one color and he used different surface textures to actually depict features, faces, bodies. So picture a monochrome rectangle of red, which, if you tilted your head a bit, would show a cartoony likeness of, say, Nicole Richie. It was conceptual art, he explained: it was a self-conscious parody of itself, a commentary on how vapid and materialist American culture is in the form of a vapid, simplistic painting. The critics loved it, Grossinger explained. They called it “post-aesthetic” and “post-postmodern.”

And Grossinger would talk about how fickle the critics, museum curators, and gallery owners were. How they thought he was brilliant one year, and a tired hack the next. He talked about his fight against eternity, his battle with history. “You’ve gotta understand, P___,” he’d lecture to me, “history is like this big fucking tank coming at you. And if you just wait and let it roll over you, that’s what’ll happen. It’ll flatten you. You’ve gotta fight against the force of history, try to step outside history to become something lasting. That’s what I’m trying to do now, you see.” He’d speak about this crap in jittery, staccato sentences fueled by cocaine. Sometimes he sounded like a bad impersonation of Edward G. Robinson in a gangster role; I actually had to keep from laughing at times!

One part of me wanted to avoid Grossinger – he was like that guest at a party that just backs you into a corner and doesn’t let go. But another part of me was fascinated by his bitterness, the seemingly epic fall he had taken or was in the process of taking. It was like watching an execution replayed over and over again; it felt like being around him was helping me to see what I didn’t want to become. I guess yet another part of me just plain felt bad for the guy.

And I realized that the problem Grossinger was having was the same problem I had had: he had lost sight of why he started drawing, or painting (or whatever it is one does) in the first place. While I had hit the bottle, he was hitting the blow. The same way he got swept up in how popular his paintings were in galleries, I had gotten sucked into all that talk of critics who said that my drawings were gimmicky, a mere passing fad on the scene. But I started to believe all that bullshit, started to really think that when I drew those landscapes it was only because I wanted fame and money, started to forget that I really loved those places and so I drew them. Maybe Grossinger had been calculating about his art, had just done what he figured the critics would love. I forgot that it hadn’t started that way with me. It became all about how “hot” I was, how popular and sexy my work was considered. I somehow forgot all about all those other artists who have one, two or even three great years but then twenty lousy ones. Grossinger, strung out on cocaine, would walk into galleries during openings and scream at the patrons, pick up bottles of wine and toss them across the room, yelling, “I’m not gonna sink into anonymity, you pricks! I will beat history, you fucking leeches!” I'd seen him go into this routine more than a few times. It usually ended with him clearing out the opening and the gallery owner clearing him (and me) out. He was almost ruthless in his willingness to self-destruct. It was like he wanted to make a public spectacle of his misery, his anger, his pain.

The pain can be terrible, sure. And if you let it, it'll eat you alive - I could show you dozens upon of bottles to prove that. But there is a way out. For me, the key was understanding that Grossinger's fight against history is a mistake altogether, and also understanding that it had been my fight too, though in a much more private way. And the thing I want to tell Grossinger, the thing he actually helped me realize though he doesn’t know he did, is that you can’t beat history. You can take a shot at it, you can think and feel like you’re beating it, but that only lasts for a while. It’s a masquerade, that feeling, and when the masquerade ends you’ve got to come up with another way to feel like you’re worth something. You’ve got to realize that everyone else can like your stuff, but that all doesn’t matter unless you like it too. You’ve got to see that just because you’re not at the top of the heap doesn’t mean you’re drowning at the bottom of the gutter. And it certainly doesn’t mean you can go and harass strangers, screaming crazy shit at them just because you think they’re not giving you enough attention...

After this, P___'s email quickly segues into a recounting of the more mundane facets of his recent life, a topic which does not concern us here.

AUM Fidelity Showcase: Oct. 15

2009-10-01T21:22:00.007-04:00

On the night of October 15, you will be able to listen to live performances by David S. Ware, William Parker, and Darius Jones. Have I got your attention now? Hopefully. Yes, I'm plugging another live jazz event. Yes, again it's of my own accord.

The AUM Fidelity recording label (like Clean Feed, an absolute stalwart among independent jazz labels) will present a one-night showcase featuring a triple bill. Click here for more info.

SUPPORT LIVE MUSIC

SUPPORT EXPERIMENTAL ART

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT RECORD LABELS

Come to this concert.

Coming Soon to NYC: Clean Feed Festival!

2009-09-01T13:30:00.007-04:00

For my money, Clean Feed Records is one of the very best jazz labels in existence today (and, believe it or not, there are A LOT of jazz labels out there). When you buy a CD from them, you get the total package: great music from great musicians (be they veterans of a jazz scene in the US, Europe or Japan, or "up-and-comers" who might be getting a first chance at making a record, Clean Feed seems to have a sixth sense about picking out the music most deserving of documentation), beautifully-recorded sound, AND beautiful cover art & packaging (for a devotee of the album like myself, this last part matters too). The Clean Feed catalogue is large (especially considering that this independent jazz label began in 2001) and extremely diverse stylistically.

Of my own accord, I want to plug the label's upcoming showcase in New York City. You can find all the info here:

http://www.cleanfeed-records.com/festivalpdf/

Folks who live in the NYC area and care about jazz: you WILL NOT be disappointed if you attend this. (I stand by this guarantee.)

Living with Noise

2009-08-30T22:06:00.005-04:00

I sometimes sit at our desk and look out the unusually large window that provides views of Broadway, a large playground tucked next to the base of an even larger apartment development, 135th Street, the 1 Train tracks emerging from the ground. Sounds of machinery and traffic from the street are constant: the wrenching, guttural growl of motorcycles with mufflers removed, the raucous clatter as potholes throttle the chassis and contents of cargo trucks, the hard clangs of metal smashing against metal as subway cars roll over the 1-Train elevated tracks.

Hearing these sounds I often feel the iron, steel, concrete, asphalt; there can be an almost brutal physicality to the sound. The clang of the subway tracks buzzes against my teeth. I sometimes have morbid daydreams in which I imagine the trucks that barrel (seemingly all too fast) down Broadway losing control, smashing into other vehicles, people, street lamps, steel wrenching against bone. Horrid visions, I know. I experience the street sounds as a demented sonic reincarnation of the modernist conception of the city as an entity of machinery, metal, constant motion.

There are other ambient sounds too. My wife and I sometimes hear the yells and whoops of Friday- and Saturday-night revelers. Then there are the vibrations which emanate from our floor on random late mornings or early afternoons - bass vibrations of reggaeton, merengue, salsa. As in any apartment building, I might hear an occasional bit of yelling in the hallway, a snatches of families arguing may reach me through the bathroom vent or the other side of a wall.

Considered cumulatively, these sounds can sometimes grate on me. I grew up in a residential and relatively quiet sections of Queens. The major instance of "noise pollution" was the intermittent airplane passing overhead (my parents' house is underneath a flight route for LaGuardia Airport). There might be an oil or delivery truck now and then - but no subways, very few motorcycles, no bus brakes hissing and squealing. The few years I spent in North Carolina may have weakened my ambient sound tolerance. Friends and relatives asked me if the quiet was unsettling or disturbing to me, as a city boy. I had to admit that it was a noticeable change at first, but a pleasant one, similar to the aural "breathing room" you might suddenly feel when a refrigerator that has been cooling its contents suddenly shuts off and you are left with a palpable moment of quiet.

Most of the sounds, I realized soon after moving into our current apartment, are simply out of my control. Am I going to call up the MTA and tell them that their buses make too much noise? Will I campaign for prohibiting commercial vehicles on Broadway? No. And I don't begrudge the weekend debauchees their good times (I've been known to seek those out myself now and then). I wouldn't think of complaining to neighbors or the super about loud music - it's played during waking hours, and, given my predilection to occasionally blast free jazz, soul, or even a nice loud Mahler symphony, I'd probably be throwing stones from my glass house.

A visit from the building superintendent last week informed us that, perhaps without realizing it, my wife and I are throwing a few stones. Tenants in the building have been complaining about the noise our dog makes when we walk him through the lobby. Apparently some have also been uncomfortable with the often feisty (and, admittedly, sometimes annoying) manner of our small terrier/chihuahua mix. He may weigh 15 lbs., but his bark weighs at least 50.

For a couple days after the visit from the super, I stewed with insult and indignation. Scenarios of confrontations with the super and other tenants played perpetually in my mind. "Hey Gerry [our super], I know our dog barks but I can't exactly sit him down and tell him he needs to stop. But neighbors who stuff the garbage chute with poorly-tied trashbags until it's overflowing and the hallway stinks CAN help it - why don't you get on their case?" "Oh, my dog can walk. Why am I carrying him through the lobby? Because some people in this building think he's a ferocious beast."

In an effort to calm myself down, I became philosophical about the whole thing. My retaliatory feelings reminded me of Ralph Ellison's classic essay "Living With Music." In this essay, Ellison describes a battle of sounds in his apartment: when noise from the street and especially the sounds of a singer practicing got to be too much for Ellison to bear, he decided to fight back with a little sound of his own, blasting music on his stereo system in response to loud vocal exercises from the singer in his building. Reading over Ellison's essay helped my state of mind a bit.

Then I got to thinking about what kinds of noises and sounds are permissible in an apartment building. Now I have to tell you that we are the only pet owners in our building (as the super reminded us). This we found out only after we moved in. It immediately caused us some anxiety. We had been concerned about what tensions might arise from our being the first pet owners in the building, and now it seemed our concern was warranted. The body language and manner of more than a few of our neighbors has told me that they are unnerved, annoyed, perhaps scared, perhaps even disgusted by our dog. Then there are those tenants who see the pooch and do not become alarmed, who let him gingerly approach, his ears folded back, and sniff their legs, perhaps even give him a quick pat on the head, and find that his barking has ceased.

Perhaps the question becomes more broad - which kinds of tenant practices are tolerated, and which are censured? Were I to take a combative stance about the situation, I might begin to call out neighbors whose children are screaming in the stairway (which often causes my dog to bark). I might complain about tenants consistently littering the hallways and stairways with bits of food, containers, wrappers. It could me my own version of what Ellison called "fighting noise with noise."

But for now, my wife and I carry our dog through the lobby. It not only prevents any possibility of him tugging at the leash, trying to approach a neighbor to disable them with a ferocious sniff or lick. It also keeps him quiet - I think he might feel a bit emasculated by being carried. He certainly cannot convince himself that he's leading the walk if he's in our arms. So, at least for a while, maybe the noise that will best sound my indignation at having my dog preemptively criminalized is the deafening clamor of no barks at all.

Crowds (Gentrification in medias res V)

2009-08-27T21:51:00.012-04:00

In case you thought I'd forgotten about the photo essay...

Incident at 135th Street & Broadway
Early morning, 26 July 2009

Motorcycle Gang Based in Harlem
(corner of 125th Street & Broadway)

p.s. I never did find out what occurred at the corner of 135th St & Broadway on the night of July 25th/morning of July 26th; one possible explanation, though I have a hard time believing it caused all the police vehicles, is this:

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07262009/news/regionalnews/off_again__inn_again_181461.htm

Some Thoughts on Lateness

2009-08-26T01:53:00.015-04:00

In the natural cycle of plant life, the middle of summer could be considered the moment of fulfillingness, the zenith of an arc that begins its ascent with the buds of early spring. In New York City, this zenith comes at about the middle of August. The days are not as long as they were in July, and they seem overripe. On a recent afternoon, the August sunlight made the red bricks of buildings especially deep. The green of leaves on trees, now no longer the sprightly, lush green of late May, looked more burnished. The sun, humidity, and lack of wind conspired to produce a stillness of atmosphere. Owing to concerns which had produced in me a certain mood, it only took a slight shift in my perception, a minute adjustment of my interpretation of the information conveyed through my senses, to feel in this August afternoon not the muggy but pleasant laze of summer in full swing, but a certain fatigue in the atmosphere. It was as if the balminess of mid-summer was revealed to be a facade with a depth of torpor lying underneath.

* * *

The news of Rashied Ali's passing on August 12th hit me with eerie force. Death had already been on my mind, as at that point I had been attempting to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for my grandmother's passing. The news of Ali's death felt like metaphysical print-through, a pre-echo of another death that my family knew was imminent.

* * *

The common link I could find between the deaths of Rashied Ali and Jean Somoroff was that each inspired in me feelings of regret. As Ali had been a close friend of one of my research informants (whom I consider a friend), I immediately thought of the encounters and conversations that might have been. I would never get a chance to tell him, in as composed and graceful a way as I could muster, that Interstellar Space, his album of duets with John Coltrane, was a reference point in my life, an example of what I love about and why I can believe in "free" jazz. I would only be telling half the truth if I didn't admit that I also thought about how it wouldn't be possible now for him to add his own memories, knowledge, and wisdom to my dissertation research - a selfish kind of regret.

Some of my first thoughts after learning of my grandmother's death could be seen as regrets about my selfishness. Jean Somoroff had a life-long (as far as I knew) love of dogs. Since my wife and I got our dog in early 2007, she had heard about him. Once she moved into a nursing home in March of 2007, I began promising her that we would bring Bobo with us during one of our visits. I told her we would bring him when the weather was warm, so that she could sit with him outside the home for a while. Since we were living in North Carolina, there admittedly were not many chances for us to bring Bobo along for a nursing home visit, as we usually left him in NC when traveling north to see family. When I moved back to New York City in late 2008, I assured her that now, when the weather was a bit better, we'd bring Bobo so she could finally see him. But I never got around to it.

* * *

Jean Somoroff was, in general, not a woman who felt a need to sugarcoat her views. When my parents brought her down to North Carolina to celebrate her ninetieth birthday in the fall of 2006, she said with a smile, "Now I'm old, too old." It was the first time she had seen my apartment (before it became the home I shared with my then-girlfriend/now-wife). The number "90" brought home the idea that my grandmother was born in a different world, and I teased her about that, knowing she could take it. I seem to remember her admitting that she didn't quite understand the world any longer, that it had more or less passed her by. Perhaps this is only an apocryphal memory.

Whether or not she voiced the opinion, I'm pretty sure she did feel a bit like a stranger in the early 21st century. She remained, until her last two years in the nursing home, a fairly avid follower of current events. She never took much to technology, and I think I might have briefly tried to explain the Internet to her. I wouldn't have asked or expected her to understand what I was doing in graduate school (it only makes sense to me half the time), though coming of age as a Jewish American in South Philadelphia (back when South Philly was an Italian and Jewish ghetto) during the Great Depression, she had an inherent respect for higher education for its own sake.

I realize how different our worlds were when I think about how baffled she would be had she ever listened to Interstellar Space. Even if she would have been able to hear or understand my words during her last week, it would have meant very little to my grandmother to know that a great jazz musician from her neck of the woods who was some eighteen years her junior had passed away.

* * *

On days I spent with my grandmother during the summer, we would often walk over to 108th Street, the commercial thoroughfare that was one long block from her apartment building. From the age of about five to nine or ten, these walks would combine a number of activities: she would run errands at the supermarket, the cleaners'; we would stop off for me to get lunch at a pizzeria; sometimes we might stop in the toy store where she would spoil me and buy me a Matchbox car or action figure of my choosing.

Looking back, I feel fortunate to have grown up near two pizzerias that both served great New York pizza. I associated Joe's, the one on 108th Street, so strongly with my grandmother that the few times during my childhood when I might stop in for a slice with my father the whole situation felt a bit odd - not bad or disconcerting, but just notably different than usual. During one of my visits with my grandmother, when I was perhaps six years old, she told me, "You're getting old enough to order the pizza and pay for it yourself. Go ahead, you can do it! You know what to say." And, sure enough, I did. I asked for "one slice to stay, please" and handed $1.10 across the counter to the cook whose face I knew so well. It was my first monetary transaction.

* * *

If I reach very far into the recesses of my mind, I can touch one of my earliest memories of being with my grandmother. I must handle it carefully, lest it flit away like a frightened bird. I cannot force it to the surface of my consciousness, but if I reach slowly and gently and then wait patiently, the memory fades in. Typical of early-life memories, it is not so much of an event as it is merely an image. But this is a memory-image whose visual contours are invested with other sensory information and with the weight of emotion, which itself seems outside the boundaries of sense. I'm lying on her bed with a bag of ice held up to my lip. I see the dresser in her bedroom, the quilt on the bed, the plain white of the walls. I'd been running around in the playground just across the street from her building and had fallen on my face, bruising my lip. I was perhaps three years old at the time - the tears came freely, and my fall seemed like a catastrophe, the injury to my lip a major setback. The context, the story, is bolstered by only the faintest of images. It is the image of myself on her bed that remains more vivid. The pink of her bed and the blond wood of her dresser feel safe in my mind's eye. I cannot recall her words of comfort that afternoon, but their feeling, their resonance, is somehow contained in these colors in a kind of mnemonic synesthesia.

* * *

It's been eight days since my grandmother passed. It was two days after her death before I could really cry for her. I cried for the minuscule geography to which her life was limited at its end, confined first to a building, then to one floor, and finally to one small room; I cried for the loss of verbal ability in a woman who knew nothing if not how to talk; I cried because the woman who had an almost never-ending supply of food and snacks whenever family visited her (and this well into her eighties) lived with barely any appetite during her last two years. It was two days after her death. Earlier the same day I had noticed the exhaustion at the edges of a mid-summer afternoon.

Rashied Ali, requiescat in pace

2009-08-16T21:12:00.003-04:00

"Venus" - duet with John Coltrane (1967)

Interview with Rashied Ali one week before his passing

New York Times obituary

On the Waterfront (Gentrification in medias res IV)

2009-08-02T16:03:00.009-04:00

Views from the West Harlem Piers

The "Waterpod Project" is docked
at West Harlem Piers July 23 - August 3

Background info/Suggested Reading

http://urbanomnibus.net/2009/06/mts-casts-shadow-on-west-harlem-piers-park/

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/park_of_the_month/2009_05/index.html

http://www.thewaterpod.org/

http://www.harlemonestop.com/event.php?id=7592

Lunchtime Recess at I.S. 195 (Gentrification in medias res III)

2009-07-30T12:17:00.007-04:00

IS 195 is a public school occupying the ground floor of 3333 Broadway (see "Gentrification in medias res I").

Riverside Dr and 12th Ave (Gentrification in medias res II)

2009-07-28T10:43:00.010-04:00

I took the following pictures this morning while walking my dog.

136th St & Riverside Drive

142nd St betw Riverside & Bway

12th Ave near the 138th St underpass

12th Ave near 138th St

Corner of 12th Ave & 135th St

Eyes in the sky, 134th Pl & 12th Ave

Links & Background info

The New York Urban League

Wikipedia article on Hamilton Heights

New York magazine guide to Hamilton Heights - for the young & ambitious

On 133rd Street (Gentrification in medias res I)

2009-07-25T21:15:00.010-04:00

Recently, certain visuals - objects, views, juxtapositions - around my neighborhood have struck me as vividly portraying the complex process known as "gentrification." Taken collectively, they might serve as a report on my impressions of the gentrification taking place in West Harlem - its indicators and its ramifications. I'll be using my next few posts for (what I'm pompously deeming) a photo essay about the gentrification of the Manhattanville and Hamilton Heights neighborhoods in New York.

The building bearing the "3333" sign was taken off Mitchell-Lama status in 2005. Read more here.

View of 133rd St & 12th Avenue

Some Background information:

Columbia University Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification

NY Times article on CU's expansion

Column on new restaurants in the Manhattanville neighborhood

Lt. Columbo, LAPD Ethnography Division

2009-05-29T16:23:00.004-04:00

Anyone who has had a conversation with me in the past few months knows that I have been avidly (compulsively) watching the original run of Columbo on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature. Initially, the show was an escape from the doldrums of beginning fieldwork. I would come home during the wee small hours, after having sat in one or more jazz venues, silently looking around at folks, constantly telling myself to walk up and “make contact” (“Make contact, dammit!”), yet too self-conscious to make a move. What could be more therapeutic than sitting down with a cold beer to watch Columbo oafishly poke around until he gradually deciphers the murderer’s motive and method? It was at once a complete escape from my own troubles, and yet an oblique affirmation of my endeavor: here was someone who’s work depended on his roaming around and gathering information from people whom he barely knew.

More and more, I have come to view Lt. Columbo as my model ethnographer. Anthropologist John Jackson discusses his ethnographic alter-ego, “Anthroman” in his nuanced, writerly, and often richly humorous book Real Black. “Anthroman” was a persona Jackson could channel when the field-going got tough; becoming Anthroman was an elaborate self psyche-out he could use to feel less like himself and thus more courageous about doing his fieldwork. Jackson also mentions that he often asked himself the question: WWZNHD (“What would Zora Neale Hurston do?”) to help guide him when he felt at a loss in the field. I can claim with complete seriousness that I have often asked myself WWLCD (“What would Lt. Columbo do?”). Now I’m not saying that I walk around wearing a rumpled raincoat and chewing on a cheap cigar, imitating Peter Falk’s euphonious New York accent. But, when I manage to be courageous enough, when I can achieve the right combination of self-effacing politeness, persistence, and calculated ignorance, the “Columbo effect” sometimes works quite well.

(I am compelled to digress here for a moment to discuss this supposedly well-known “Columbo effect;” the popular notion of Columbo, I feel, does not do complete justice to the character as he existed on 1970s television. The Wikipedia article on the show rehearses these misconceptions:

Police Lieutenant Columbo is a shabbily-dressed, seemingly slow-witted police detective whose fumbling, overly polite manner makes him an unlikely choice to solve any crime, let alone a complex murder. However, his demeanor is revealed to be a complex put-on, designed to lull suspects into a false sense of security…

To me, there is nothing seemingly “slow-witted” about Columbo’s act. He can appear distracted, folksy, and excessively self-deprecating, but in most episodes the murderer has realized at least by the halfway mark that Columbo is no chump; often this realization comes much sooner. Egotistical murderers (always marked as upper-class – I’m sure someone has written about the class politics of the show) often get annoyed at just how pesky that little goofy detective can be, but they don’t quite seem to assume any incompetence on his part. To me the brilliance of Columbo’s approach lies in its winning combination of persistence and sincere courtesy. If you are really polite to people, they will often put up with more questioning and pestering than they would otherwise.

The lead-up to Columbo’s hallmark “Just one more thing…” device is also, I’ve realized, a paradigm of ethnographic inquiry. (For Columbo non-initiates, the detective will often conclude a seemingly meandering interview with a suspect or witness by suddenly remembering “one more question” he wanted to ask, which turns out to be a far more pointed, topical query than any he’s posed during the interview proper.) I’ve found that I have more relaxed and informative conversations, and ultimately get more interesting evidence if I don’t come out and ask the kinds of questions running through my head (e.g., “What do you listen for in this jazz recording you say you love so much?” or “How would you describe why this album means so much to you?”), but instead let the conversation/interview go where it will, often include my own opinions on things (non-jazz related too), and keep the interviewee guessing as to the themes/agenda of my questioning (I like to think of this last aspect as another performative fiction in action, since I myself often haven’t formed an idea about the “theme” of, or what I wish to find out during, said interview; so I just pretend I know what I’m getting at…)

So, am I putting on my informants, and thus engaging in ethical questionable behavior? Well, I guess my honest answer is “Yes and no.” First of all, as one informant and I agreed, “Everybody has a motive.” So why should an ethnographer be any different? Most of our interactions with other humans happen because someone wants something: your boss wants your labor-time, you domestic partner wants your attention, you want his/hers, you want a bus ride, the waiter wants your money, etc. Second of all, I again invoke Columbo. He manages to catch murderers without ever using abusive or coercive tactics (sure, he may sometimes play a trick that ensnares the murderer, but this trick usually relies upon the murderer’s own duplicitous behavior). He is consistently respectful, and dare I say, in his unassuming and clumsy demeanor, achieves a kind of rare dignity and even grace.

But I must define how Columbo serves as a model with greater precision, since I really do not try to trick people into sharing cultural knowledge with me; my hope is that this sharing is voluntary. Yet, even when I try to be as respectful, unassuming, and mild-mannered as possible, I often feel that there’s something confrontational about asking informants direct questions – it just makes me feel nervous and slimy at times. And it’s here that Columbo’s manner comes in handy, because I think it provides an example of how to minimize the confrontation implicit in any kind of questioning (even the ostensibly amicable interactions between the ethnographer and his/her informant). At his best, Columbo’s technique is about what remains unsaid, how he manages to get information and answers to his questions without ever uttering interrogative formations; if, as many have argued, ethnography is an art, then I contend that, had he existed in the “real” world and been an anthropologist, Lt. Columbo would have been one of its great virtuosos.

When Griff Was Great

2009-05-12T22:05:00.006-04:00

I received Johnny Griffin's first Blue Note album, Introducing Johnny Griffin, in the mail today. It was recorded way back in 1956, with a great rhythm section: Wynton Kelly, Curly Russell, and Max Roach. Listening to this album has washed out a sonic bad taste that has been lingering for going on two years now. I heard Griffin live at Duke University in the fall of 2007, as part of Duke's "Following Monk" series dedicated to Thelonious Monk. Griffin was featured as a soloist with the Duke University Jazz Ensemble, and the program was heavy on Monk tunes.

Though I knew Griffin was 79 at the time, I did not know what to expect from him. His articulation was sloppy, he was dragging way behind the beat (which was never his style), his lines were short, his musical vocabulary limited. I withheld judgment, thinking that perhaps what I was hearing actually evidenced a reconception of style: a distillation, a paring-down that often occurs with elder jazz musicians. But after a few tunes, I had to admit it to myself: the Little Giant sounded finished. To be sure, on a slow blues (I think it may have been "Misterioso", but I can't be sure) he pulled out a few burly, bluesy lines befitting his beginnings in R&B - perhaps the soul was willing, but the body just not able. The audience at large reacted vociferously to these few, precious, beautiful lines of saxophone: large roars filled the hall. With them the crowd seemed to be saying, "Yes - we knew you still had it in you! That's Johnny Griffin! We remember you."

And that night, and the next day, I thought about what happens when musicians get old, when they lose their stuff. And how often this happens in the jazz world, and often fans get to hear it. Should one wish, one could put on the recordings Lester Young made in the last year of his life: the sound of a man barely able to blow enough air through the saxophone to produce a tone. One could also hear a strung-out, withered Chet Baker in the last years of his tumultous life, blowing ragged, weak trumpet. And such events become embedded in jazz lore in an unfortunately perverse way. The frailty of players and the diminution of their abilities are regarded sometimes with deluded romanticism, sometimes with morbid fascination, but rarely with the understanding that decrepitude can take hold, that these unsightly endings to the lives of such "legends" neither negate the pinnacles of what they've accomplished nor amplify whatever greatness they may possess. It also occurred to me that I have never read, at least within jazz scholarship, a serious discussion of the cultural dynamics around the passing and mourning of musicians.

I had this bad taste, as I call it, from that Johnny Griffin concert. While I'm glad that Introducing has helped wash out the taste, it wasn't that I wanted to forget the concert. It's just that I want to remember the Little Giant all over the changes, hyperactively edging ahead of the beat. Like others in Duke's Baldwin Auditorium, I applauded those few great blues lines Griffin mustered up to pay tribute, to tell him, "I know who you are, what you have accomplished." It was a very poignant moment, and one that made me glad I had attended the concert. Though not an especially satisfying moment musically, it was an eminently human one. For musical and aesthetic satisfaction, and to hear Griffin joyously ripping into a tune, I heartily recommend Introducing Johnny Griffin.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

2009-05-05T15:09:00.004-04:00

The sophomoric nod to Raymond Carver aside, I do want to revisit this question with some degree of seriousness. It is a matter of not just academic interest for me (although that too), and it is one of the main questions behind my current fieldwork. I’ve recently read two pieces that raise the issue of listening to music and talking about that listening in complementary ways (Steven Feld’s near-classic essay “Communication, Music, and Speech About Music” and a long essay/short book by Peter Szendy titled Listen: A History of Our Ears).

Feld’s approach is very much that of an ethnomusicologist/linguistic anthropologist: he’s thinking about the social factors at play when a person listens to music, and then what's at play when this same person talks about that listening. Rather than seeing a primary meaning as being located within the sound/text of a musical work, he argues, we should understand meaning-making as a process that takes place in the mind of the listener. He discusses what’s happening when, for instance, US citizens listen to a remake of the “Star Spangled Banner” in minor, as opposed to the usual major: “A range of social and personal backgrounds, some shared, some complementary, of stratified knowledge and experience, and of attitudes (about anthems, songs in general, parodies in particular, politics in all cases) enters into the social construction of meaningful listening through interpretive moves, establishing a sense of what the sound object or event is and what one feels, grasps, or knows about it” (Feld, 89). So when people talk to each other about music, Feld claims, even when they stumble for words in these exchanges, they are making their listening experiences social.

Szendy, a philosopher and professor of aesthetics at Universite de Paris X, meditates on the idea of “sharing one’s listening.” For him, a major example of how listeners have made their listenings shareable, or even legible in the first place, is to document them in arrangements of pre-existing musical works. Now, though Szendy’s meditation focuses on the canon of Western art music (unapologetically so, I would say), I find his insights more broadly applicable. He writes about wanting to share his listening with others, because he feels that in the act of sharing his listenings really become his own: “…it is more simply as a listener that I want to sign my listening: I would like to point out, to identify, and to share such-and-such sonorous event that no one besides me, I am certain of it, has ever heard as I have” (Szendy, 3 [italics in orig.]). Please indulge me as I submit one more extended quote, since Szendy’s own prose is more poetic and efficient than any gloss I could attempt:

The listener I am is nothing, does not exist so long as you are not there. There or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter, so long as my listening is addressed to you. The listener I am [que je suis] can happen only when I follow you [je te suis], when I pursue you. I could not listen without you, without this desire to listen to you listening to me, not being able, since I am unable to listen to me listening… (Szendy,142)

Again, the sociality of listening, the desire to externalize interior thoughts and feelings – or is interior/exterior too simple-minded and dichotomous way to think about these things?

These passages from Feld and Szendy (among others in these two pieces) may well become rallying cries for me as I look and listen for evidence of why people listen to jazz and of what they listen for when they do listen. And as I then think about why they might (and often do) want to tell others what they heard, what they thought and felt about what they heard. And as I try to teach myself to hear the interplay of content (what they say) and form (how they say it) in their talk about listening, and how this talk communicates something of the stuff of their listening experiences. These passages have been swirling around in my mind, often bumping up against a concept that two of my informants have invoked, and about which they have had something to say: “the privacy of listening” or “listening as a private experience.” They both believe that deep, intense listening – the kind where you feel excited, moved, transported, stunned, the kind you remember for years afterward because you made sure to construct a narrative form of the experience that enables you to tell it to yourself (and maybe others) – is something that happens between oneself and musical sound, often sound issuing from a recording. They both mention how they’ve had these really amazing, overpowering moments of listening when they have been able to sit alone with themselves and give their attention to a recording by Cecil Taylor/Albert Ayler/Sun Ra/whoever and receive something in return, when they were able to commune if not with the minds/souls/bodies/beings who created the sounds (such a conviction implies a simplistic mysticism that would misrepresent their more complex spiritualistic and humanistic thinking) then at least with the materiality of the parts of these sounds that have been captured and preserved.

And so they’ve both told me that they think there is something deeply private, deeply interior about listening – but they’ve told me about that experience. I guess I want to place my informants’ thoughts and comments next to those of Feld and Szendy. I can’t figure out yet if my informants agree with, argue against, move in parallel or oblique motion to, or do something else to/with the ideas of Feld and Szendy. In telling me that they have had these private listening experiences, are they undermining their own statements? Are they making a claim about the sociality of privacy (e.g., “I want to see if you’ve had these same kind of feelings when listening intensely; I want to see if this ‘private’ feeling is something we all share”)? Are they merely spouting rhetorical manifestations of what amounts to a form of aesthetic false consciousness? [I’m thinking here of Jonathan Sterne’s convincing discussion of how ideas of hearing as a sense allowing for “pure interiority” have their roots in Christian theology (Sterne 2002, 14-19).] Yet how can my informants’ experiences be false? What right have I to discount, denigrate, or moreover deny these experiences? Perhaps they mean to parse the difference between the incommunicability of the experience itself and the communicable statement that “We have all had similar incommunicable listenings.” While they seem to say, “You cannot know my listening, you can never touch it and feel it the way I have,” they also seem to say, “You can touch and feel the knowing that you and I have both had these private experiences of our own.”

So, to reformulate the question implied by the title of this post, “What do we talk about when we talk about the privacy, and possibly the profound unspeakability, of deep listening?”

Getting Back On(Off) the Wagon

2009-05-04T14:03:00.004-04:00

Okay, okay. I know, if I'm going to maintain a blog of any respectability, I need to post with some regularity...more than once a year, anyhow. In the interest of achieving that goal, and also as a way to get me to begin to formulate some of my thoughts about my dissertation project, I'm going to begin to share some thoughts about my research (we'll see how long this lasts - hopefully at least 4 weeks).

I've been going to hear jazz performances quite often here in NYC since the middle of January. More and more, I find myself going to performances of - call it what you will - "free jazz" "avant garde jazz" "out jazz" "creative music" "experimental jazz". This has been a large part of my ethnographic fieldwork so far. (If you're thinking, "Wow...what difficult work" with a wry grin on your face, you are not alone.) My most regular hangout has been the Local 269 - a bar on E Houston St, a bit west of Avenue B. They're hosting a weekly Monday-night session organized by RUCMA (Rise Up Creative Music and Arts) that often features stalwart NYC free players (check out the schedule here: http://rucma.org/ ). I'm finding some ethnographic "gold" here - a group of regular audience members (including musicians) who convene here, and who know one another.

I've also been trying to figure, as I go along, what the hell fieldwork is. I try to take notes (in my not-so-slick little maroon-covered notepad, with part of its price sticker still left on, due to my laziness and unwillingness to completely scrub the sticker off), but I constantly wonder if what I'm writing down will help me write up good fieldnotes, and if those fieldnotes will be at all usable when I start trying to write dissertation chapters. I'm also constantly plagued by feelings of self-consciousness about the presence of the notepad itself ("Are people looking at what I'm writing? Did I offend that guy sitting near me by glossing him as 'mid-age, white male - nodding head vigorously'? Are those even worthwhile observations for me, the researcher?" Thankfully, the following book tells me I'm not alone in these feelings: http://www.amazon.com/Improvising-Theory-Temporality-Ethnographic-Fieldwork/dp/0226100316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241461345&sr=1-1
This is a kind of "chicken soup for the ethnographer's soul." It presents an email correspondence between a grad student "in the field" and one of her committee members back at the university. They talk about things like: feeling awkward when talking to informants, doubting that you're actually finding anything out, feeling stupid when you realize that your original questions and research plans are turning out to be beside the point, etc. I recommend it (as my advisor did for me) to anyone who's about to set out on ethnographic fieldwork.

And we wonder why academics have a bad rep....

2008-06-30T11:42:00.011-04:00

I begin, as usual, with a link:

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=CmsDGXwDwYbYBrFjwsbxqRCFdDBC4zqx

This, from today's Chronicle of Higher Education. The present post will not easily fit into my proposed format for this blog; it does not address an aspect of popular culture, or a certain musical performance that I find invigorating and rewarding, or anything of the like. Instead I find myself dragged right into the muck which Mr. Reeson inhabits: self-reflexive meta-commentary by academics on academia. (I usually save the putrid stew of bitching, self-evaluation, armchair-professoring and plain old ranting that all fit under the rubric of this "meta-commentary" for in-person, voiced conversations--i.e., shooting the shit with friends who are also in grad school.)

It is not the first time that something published in the Chronicle has raised my ire, or inspired me to fits of condemnatory logorrhea (--case in point), though again, those usually manifest in the spoken, rather than written, word. However, Mr. Reeson's comments compel me to use a blog post to weigh in on his editorial. My initial reaction was to believe that his piece was a ruse of some sort, a practical joke meant as a send-up of the self-importance many professors feel. But I must remind myself that the views and opinions expressed in the Chronicle under cover of pseudonymity often border on the surreal and absurd. Reeson is in all likelihood sincere in his musings.

Although Reeson seems to be at pains to alert the reader that he does not condone selfish, anti-social, and childish behavior on the part of humanities faculty members, his essay as a whole serves as a sheepish apologia for the kind of antics experienced by most people who serve on or are in contact with such faculties. If it were simply a matter of a room full of PhDs trying to stir up the dull waters of their professional lives by creating a bit of office drama, Reeson might have at least half a point. Yet he reveals his cloistered perspective in his failure to mention how faculty dysfunction negatively affects non-faculty members of an academic department (...yes, them...remember?). When brilliant professors get cranky--either because of spats with other profs, or for whatever reason--administrative coordinators, program administrators, assistants to the chair, in short staff, are often the ones who must weather the storm. Even when conflict is not brewing, staff may have to put up with random tantrums, sudden requests (orders) to stop what they were doing and assist a faculty member with a dire task like showing him or her how to make double-sided copies. (Needless to say, the occasional graduate student can also get caught in the crossfire of departmental politics). So, issue #1: Reeson is a classist. Academic departments would not exist were it not for the staff. So to lament that faculty "only hurt ourselves" by being mean and selfish is to discredit the labor and humanity of our colleagues in the main office.

I also find Reeson's version of structuralist analysis of faculty infighting as a form of ritualized sociality to be unpalatable in its false logic. This paragraph in particular is a gem:

"Now I'm not trying to normalize or sanction conflict. What I am trying to suggest is that conflict must have a certain practical value for us. We professors are a relatively intelligent bunch. But by refusing to be nice to one another, we poison our work environment, effectively peeing in our own pool. Why would intelligent people do that unless it served some purpose? Couldn't it be the case that academic conflict — even as it creates certain problems — might also solve certain problems, problems that are particularly acute for academics?"

Normalizing conflict is precisely what Reeson tries to do in this piece. It is insulting on multiple levels. Firstly, since when has intelligence ever precluded aggressive or unethical behavior? Secondly, why does intelligence necessarily lead to "rational" or "practical" actions? Did intelligence prevent "great minds" like Dostoyevsky or Charlie Parker from doing something impractical like hitting the bottle or needle? Thirdly, and perhaps most distressingly, Reeson suggests a quantitative approach to interpreting and analyzing faculty behavior where a regularly occurring action must serve some positive, beneficial, or productive function. The more something happens, the more likely it is that there's a good reason for it to happen. Extending this logic further suggests so many harrowing examples of how it could be (and has been) employed that I need not even cite specific instances.

I must also take exception to Reeson's thoughts on the special problems that academics face: tragedies of the moderately-affluent intelligentsia such as boredom, ennui, wanderlust. The agony of teaching courses in a field you consciously chose, year after year, earning a comfortable salary. I respect boredom: it is a powerful human emotion which can lead to or coincide with others such as depression and anger. But I will not place the charge of boredom on the profession; instead, I place it on the person. (If Reeson wants to experience boredom, he could work the night shift as an office building security guard night after night. If he wants to know repetitious labor, he should try working in an automobile assembly line for 35 years.)

So, to conclude I return to the thoughts of Mr. Reeson's non-academic friend, who reiterated the proverbial wisdom that though professors learned many things, how to interact with other humans was not one of them. While it is a simplistic and prejudicial statement that cannot serve as a general theory of academic social conflict, I do believe that it lies somewhere near an accurate explanation of this conflict. I think that those academics who do not get along with their co-workers are not so much socially inept as unwilling. The job of university professor does not emphasize social skills; the highest premium is placed on "brilliance." Even the non-superstars in Reeson's own department were once starry-eyed graduate students who worked hard to get into their graduate program, then worked hard while in it, and were sure that their dissertation would shake the world. The job training most academics received was in how to write well, how to develop critical thinking skills, how to develop and market a research project. Nobody told them that once their dissertation (or article, or book, or job talk) got them a seat at the faculty meeting table, they would have to interact with their co-workers. I suspect that those faculty members who interact with peers in a disrespectful manner view those interactions as a distraction from the "real" work at hand. To them, faculty meetings and collegiality are just not a part of their jobs, even though they are.

Free jazz blog!

2008-06-29T18:11:00.013-04:00

I submit for your approval a blog I just discovered, but which, as far as I can see, has been around for at least 2 years (don't I feel like Rip Van Winkle...):

http://destination-out.com/

It's a wonderful resource for those interested in getting into or keeping up with music containing a high degree of flexibility and improvisation, variously known as "free jazz," "free improvisation," "creative music," "the avant garde," and back in the 1960s, "the New Thing." I especially admire the page entitled "Beginner's Guide to Free Jazz" which not only offers some ground rules about this much maligned (and even more often misunderstood) group of musical idioms, but also gives the reader a diverse list of mp3s to get their sonic feet wet.

Regarding Sean Bell

2008-04-26T23:22:00.009-04:00

I haven't really formed my thoughts on the disgrace of Sean Bell into a coherent interpretation, but the following two blog posts speak pretty well to the issue, and I submit them for your consideration:

http://sherealcool.blogspot.com/2008/04/another-acquittal-is-our-living-in-vain.html

http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2008/04/kevin-powell-on-sean-bell-verdict.html

There's a phrase spoken by Jimmy Breslin at the beginning and end of Spike Lee's Summer of Sam: "New York--the city I love and hate equally." This always struck me as a completely comprehensible statement, especially in its self-centered logic. I'm willing to grant the stereotype a degree of veracity: New Yorkers can be a self-absorbed lot. But NYC comes by its "center-of-the-universe" status honestly; New York is the place where a lot of the shit (good and bad) goes down. "Love/hate" for Breslin, and usually for me too, but right now it's more "shame/disappointment."

Post scriptum:
The title of my April 8th blog post now carries a bitterly ironic ring, doesn't it?

NY Ain't So Bad, Is It?

2008-04-08T21:16:00.009-04:00

So I recently got this CD reissue of a 1975 Rashied Ali album entitled N.Y. Ain't So Bad in which Ali & co. play the blues. Yes, free-jazz stalwart and once-drummer for John Coltrane Rashied Ali, playing the blues. The straight-up, down-home blues. Kind of.

What is so arresting about this album is the way avant-garde cracks give texture to the mostly smooth, polished surface of this set of blues. This really is a blues album--heavy on groove, finely-burnished melodic and harmonic turns of phrase (i.e. great stock licks), and that elusive but crucial ingredient--"feeling." Nestled between and tucked behind singer Royal Blue's straight-ahead (and soulful) shouts, "free" elements turn up erratically: one of the saxophonists (Jimmy Vass on alto and Marvin Blackman on tenor) might play a background phrase whose harmony intersects perpendicularly with the harmony articulated by Charles Eubanks on piano and Benny Wilson on bass; Ali might expose his free-jazz roots, playing a fill that is a bit too busy, clattery, and all-out rowdy to belong in a Chicago-style blues band.

[I'm sorry I can't provide sound files here, but you check out the album on iTunes. Listen to "Everyday," the band's cover of the B.B. King standard. Towards the end of the 30-second sample you'll hear Ali taking things "out" on the drums. Also check out Ali's hip polyrhythms on "Moontipping."]

Listening to N.Y. Ain't So Bad reminded me that the album was recorded around the end of a period in US jazz when African American musicians from the "progressive" end of the (jazz) musical spectrum articulated a strong sense of a black music continuum--both in their words and their music. This pan-African musical sensibility of course arose along with (I don't really think it's accurate to say "out of") the Black Nationalist and Black Arts movements. Musicians such as Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and Albert Ayler, who had pushed very hard against musical-aesthetic boundaries during the mid-60s to create high-energy music that confronted the listener with extremes of timbre, pitch, and rhythmic density, began to change direction by the late-60s and into the early 1970s. I wouldn't characterize this change (evidenced by albums such as Ayler's New Grass, Sanders' Thembi and Shepp's Attica Blues) as a "reigning in" of musical vanguardism so much as a spreading-out of its impetus. As in numerous prior moments in jazz, these musicians sought ways to connect what they were doing to a deeply-felt experience of an inclusive black musical tradition: one linking gospel, blues, R&B, soul, funk, jazz, etc.

While I've often thought of the notion of a "black music continuum" as a distinctly post-Civil rights African-American construct that casts an essentialist light on the musical practices of African Americans, the music created by Ayler, Shepp, Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Frank Lowe, Clifford Thornton, Rashied Ali, et al. was nothing if not eclectic. These musicians used elements of jazz (from various sub-styles and periods in that idiom), blues, funk, West African, and Caribbean music, freely borrowing and mixing together bits and pieces as they saw fit (Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp strike me as especially voracious in their eclecticism). If they were guided by essentialist notions of blackness, then it was an essentialism that seems to have undermined itself, allowing for a diversity of musical expressions that challenges the very notion of a common, underlying essence. If essentialist understandings of black expressive culture usually reduce the multi-faceted, myriad forms, styles, and aims of African-American art to a monolithic body of work with a single, driving force of "blackness," the essentialism of Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and, on the basis of N.Y. Ain't So Bad, Rashied Ali, was perhaps something of an oxymoron: a reductionism that resulted in variety, a narrow-minded investment in race as the basis of culture and consciousness that allowed for an expansive musical vision.

I venture to guess that it was Rashied Ali's investment in such a notion of a black music continuum that allowed him to record N.Y. Ain't So Bad without any qualms. His other recorded work from the mid-70s belongs more clearly to the post-Coltrane avant garde bag. Arguably, it took courage for Ali to record a relatively straight-ahead blues album (vis a vis his standing in the avant garde community). I would say it also took musical courage for his band to inject these blues with piquant touches of free music--and to let the two musical poles, down-home blues and heady free jazz, coexist in a delicate tension in sonic space without attempting to reconcile them with one another.

Classical Music with Soul?

2008-03-10T23:21:00.006-04:00

Submitted for your approval:

http://www2.deutschegrammophon.com/home

Look toward the right-hand side of the page, a bit of the way down. See the "Surprise"? Witness the thumbnail photo included--small, but large enough for one to perceive what appears to be an afro worn by this woman. Notice the caption: " Measha Brueggergosman’s debut DG recording makes classical music feel like soul!"

Let's keep going. Click on "Read more", that'll take us here:

http://www2.deutschegrammophon.com/html/freepages/BRUME/surprise/index.html

Surprise! It's an (at least part-) black woman! It was an afro, then. Let's follow the next link to her actual album website. As we begin to explore this page, observe Gramophone's seeming approval of Ms. Brueggergosman's "big hair" and her "rich, dark" voice which is "an instrument of endless fascination." (Let us pause to note some of the choice verbiage: endless fascination, rich, dark...)

Moving along, then, let's click on the "Insights" tab at the left-hand side of the page. We learn more about this young singer:

"What's in a name? In the case of Measha Brueggergosman, plenty. Should you be wondering (and you will be), it's an amalgam of her married and family names."

Should we be wondering more about Measha (and we are), let's go to her own website:

http://en.measha.com/index.php

Scroll down a bit (you can skip all the typical artist hype) and find the link that will tell you "how to pronounce Measha's name." So now we know how to pronounce that curious first name. We also have two ways--one Anglicized, the other properly Germanic--of how to pronounce that unnerving last name. We also now know the nationality of Measha's husband--Swiss.

Now that we've compiled our evidence, let's let it percolate in our minds a while.

big hair...afros...soul...rich, dark voices...rich dark chocolate...endless fascination...fascinatin' rhythm...jungle rhythms...heart of darkness...

See where I'm going with this exercise in free association? In pithy bits of racially-encoded language, the Deutsche Grammophon website reassures the consumer that there is nothing to fear. What, besides the fact that some portion of her ancestry could be traced back to somewhere in Africa, makes Measha' performances of songs from the classical repertory sound like soul? To my ears, nothing else--the mere fact of her phenotypical blackness apparently will suffice to guarantee that a certain quantity of soul will come through when she sings the (ostensibly) soul-less songs on the Surprise album.

While DG assures us of Measha's blackness, her own website seems to grapple with the identity gauntlet thrown down by her name/phenotype combination using a different strategy. Here the defense focuses on explicating her names. The pronunciation guides might be taken as a way of legitimating her names, as if to say, "Yes, these words do exist. The existence of a viable way to pronounce them also proves their reality." Her husband's ancestry seems to serve as a kind of apologia: the impossible reality of her surname is accounted for by his Swiss heritage.

I would not blame Ms. Brueggergosman for the way that DG has decided to market her to an (overwhelmingly) white and wealthy classical-music consumer base. Nor would I blame her for the way she (or her management) markets herself on her website. "Blame" isn't the right word; moreover, I think that whether or not Measha possessed any agency in the matter is beside the point. A strain of race ideology seems to be driving DG's strategy: injecting soul into classical music, inciting fascination in the listener by means of her dark voice (and skin) and her obscure heritage.

Brueggergosman is of course not the first black classical singer to come to prominence by a long shot: Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle immediately come to mind (one notices that Measha is conveniently likened to Ms. Norman in a number of the press reviews quoted by DG). The insensitivities of DG are of course not the first committed by the classical music industry against black musicians: Price and Bumbry were part of a generation of African American singers who fought to make their way into the classical scene during the 1950s and '60s (in 1953 Price broke the "opera" color line at the Met to be the first black singer in the company's employment); in 1994, Norman filed a lawsuit against the magazine Classic CD for racial stereotyping (see: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-17755908.html). Yet all of these women could be called "unequivocally black": all were born in or near the American South, in locations historically inhabited by African Americans (Price in Mississippi, Bumbry in St. Louis, Norman in Augusta, GA, and Battle in Ohio); their Anglo-Saxon surnames would dissuade one from questioning their African American heritage (i.e., the presence of slavery in their families' pasts). Brueggergosman's name, however, offers no such assurances. Nor does her Canadian citizenship (yes...black Canadians do exist).

I will allow for the possibility that Brueggergosman is proud of her mixed ancestry (she has no reason not to be--no one has any reason not to be!). Perhaps she feels there is nothing to hide about her ethnic make-up; or perhaps she would rather be up front about it than have critics, fans, etc. constantly and incessantly wondering, "What's Up with Measha's Name?" But the sharing of this information seems eerily like a confession. And why did Measha (or someone in her employ) think it so necessary to disclose both her and her husband's nationalities? Could it be that deeply-situated notions and anxieties about race dictated that Measha and her management must "speak the truth about herself," as if she had been "incited to discourse," to use Foucault's formulations? We are being given all these answers, and the question that DG and Brueggergosman seem to have anticipated is that classic inquiry about ethnic identity: "What are you?" (As in, "Somoroff, what is that? Russian?" [It's Ukrainian...I think])

On DG's website, Edward Seckerson writes: "What's in a name? In the case of Measha Brueggergosman, plenty." What's in the explanation of a name? Even more.

I Heard It Through the Rock

2008-02-26T10:13:00.006-05:00

My initial posting will be appropriately modest in scope. Here goes:

So last night the wife and I made our occasional excursion down to the local shopping mall, at the southern end of town.

This place has been giving me the creeps for the past 2.6 years. I'm not going to rehash the usual lefty, anti-capitalistic schtick about what horrible places malls are...well, I kind of am, but with a slight twist. The mall has an indoor part (which looks much like any large, over-engineered, too-bright-and-shiny mall across the US), and an outdoor part. My real beef is with the latter. It has been skillfully (?) constructed to resemble an urban space--a small commercial district of an anonymous city, a bit too perfectly-arranged and ultra-clean to ever resemble an actual commercial district, though.

Now I'll probably reveal my age, my parochial worldview, and my snobbery: before moving down to D-ham from the Big City, I'd never experienced this type of faux-urban outdoor section of a mall. I had been in plenty of large, posh indoor malls, as well as the older, venerable form of outdoor strip-malls, but never a city-ulacrum like this one. The first time I'd encountered "the Streets" (the mall's name), the street-signs mocked me; the aura of "town square" taunted me. But it was the music that was most chilling, and still is.

Walking around the "streets" that first time, I heard music in the air. I looked up to find the speakers hanging from walls or storefronts...but I couldn't see any. Then I realized that the music in the air was not coming from just above my head, but rather from below--around my ankles, actually. The rocks play music; the fake rocks placed in strategically-located chunks of nature (trees, fountains, sometimes maybe just small rectangular patches of dirt?) pump out music. What kind of music? Usually black music, in my experience. I'm talking about soul, funk, R&B.

Last night, it finally dawned on me: how appropriate! Black music, the *idea* of "black music," has been a prized and fraught entity in US history. To state the oft-repeated and now-obvious: black music is one of this country's most valued commodities and biggest exports. If the shopping mall has become the most "real" space in the increasingly unreal landscape of the US precisely because of its unreality, we could say (a la Baudrillard) that the mall is now the postmodern American locale par-excellence. If shopping is the most American activity, and the one that most Americans are best at (I probably need to include myself in that last charge), then black music *would* make the best soundtrack for our shopping experience. What would the average wedding reception (another great American consumer experience) be without Motown, James Brown, Kool & the Gang, and some Philly Soul (and maybe a bit of Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald thrown in for the "classy" moments)? If black music looms large in the US historical and racial imagination, both articulating and forming phantasmal desires and expressing a vague feeling of realness, then why shouldn't it form the sonic "wallpaper" (that's from Adam Krims for all you fellow nerds out there) for our shopping experience? Most US citizens desire black music; most desire things at the mall; most desire desire--why not bring them all together?