Lots of talk lately about black kids and hoodies. This is why I hate the liberal media, they only amplify the negative. All this commotion about what Geraldo Rivera said about black youth and hoodies only elevates that stereotype. Stop that! I'm sure somewhere, someplace, someone has something alitte more inspiring and positive and intelligent to say about the whole matter. If you make Geraldo the enemy than you lose sight of the real enemy, the racist mother fucker walking the street who was a racist way before Geraldo ever got on the TV. And now I'm part of the problem because I'm talking about it and then I realize we are all part of the problem. We all contribute to this cess pool of crap that bombards are ears and hearts everyday and all we do is digest. Like George Carlin said, "There are no innocent victims. Your birth certificate is proof of guilt."
Composer's Voice is fresh!
Somehow I found myself with my ear pressed to the lid of a grand piano yesterday afternoon. A woman from the back of the room walked backwards to a stage in front, at the same time she sang something –I’m pretty sure—backwards (!). She then stood facing the audience, with the piano in back of her, and began playing it with her hands behind her back.
She suggested that audience members might come up to the instrument to hug their ear against the cabinet as she sang and the last chords of her piano performance resonated through the wood. How could I resist?
It was like putting one’s ear to the ground to hear what’s coming in the distance or snuggling the side of your head against a pregnant woman’s belly—except in reverse—for the dissipation, not anticipation. The sounds of her voice resonating with the piano’s had the opposite effect in me: to inspire movement forward. I was hearing something new.
Her name is Gelsey Bell, one of nine other women composers and performers at Composer’s Voice, a bi-weekly concert series at Jan Hus Church, 351 E 74th St, NYC. The concerts—free and open to the public—are sponsored by Vox Novus, curated by avant composer/producer Rob Voisey, and dedicated to composers who write and perform the music of today.
What kind of music is that? Well, ironically, on the subway en route to the concert I was reading an article from the current issue of The New Yorker about the Top 40 and how the latest hits by Rhianna are made. Like most all others of the genre: by formula and assembly line. A committee meets for a demo, lays down some beats, throws in the synth tracks, loops, and etc., then Rhianna enters the recording booth, and, as she says, “I just go in there and scream and they fix it.” Precious.
At Composer’s Voice they’ve done the writing themselves. And yes, perhaps, maybe some computer generated electronica or whatnot and/or collaboration, on occasion, but there’s no committee throwing in plug-ins and fixing. It’s live, and you actually have to have the skill to perform what you’ve composed. That takes talent, not artifice (fellow composers/musicians, more than anyone, will know what I mean). And it’s on the edge of what’s happening, not endlessly churning the same-o, same-o. Avant. Mos def not Top 40.
Got an ear for something new? Check it out: next up, “Perspective—Japan,” April 8th. More deets at www.voxnovus.com
The Resurrection of Christ is upon us, what do you wear to something like that?
Easter thoughts from Thomas Fucaloro
Read MoreRAGE FOR DISORDER: Loving The (Not So) Mean Streets of Manhattan
“you don't run from a bear because you're afraid; you're afraid because you run from a bear” The urban experience is an untidy one, full of contradictions. Thrills, dangers, bewilderments and enticements. Brutal confrontation and studied disinterest. Sometimes it hides what it possesses, lazes about boring and blind. Other times it can just explode in your face.
“Like a pig in a burlap sack,” said my North Carolina friend Otis Jernigan, who knew of such matters, on his one and only visit to Manhattan. “You know something's going on inside but you can't quite put your finger on it -- then wham! This town can just rip right through the burlap and tear you up.”
Otis Jernigan was a pretty smart guy and, I suppose, he was going for the ‘gotta have street smarts’ thing. However, nothing bad happened to Otis while he was in New York.
Otis Jernigan went away thinking he now knew something he didn't previously know. I think he just confirmed some predetermined ‘thank God I'm a country boy’ point of view about New York City that he‘d brought along with him.
It goes the other way, too.
Some city people run away from the urban experience -- thinking they're going to find some imaginary Key West where it’s possible to satisfy their blessedly anal ‘rage for order,’ the kind insurance company executive (and poet) Wallace Stevens championed.
I suppose that’s attractive to some. If you can just get all the elements in line and under control, you will have won at the human game. But me, I think there’s a rage for disorder in a lot of us, simmering or rash, that keeps us coming back to the city.
One guy who comes to mind is Peter Orlovsky, who used to preach about vegetarianism on that Cherry Valley farm he and Ginsberg ran upstate. Those in the know will tell you that Orlovsky wasn’t averse to sneaking out on occasion for a midnight hamburger run to NYC.
One way or another, the urban experience can be a two-faced, bi-polar, multifaced animal of major proportions. But it's also “an outrage, a spectacle, an emblem of human ingenuity that seems frankly superhuman,” like Saul Bellows said.
Bellows was also a very smart guy.
So was William James, Henry James' big brother. Returning home in 1907 to his native Manhattan after a lifetime traveling in the highest intellectual circles of America and Europe, he stepped out onto the mean streets of New York City and declared himself gob-smacked with the “courage, the heaven scaling audacity of it all… the great pulses and bounds of progress (which) give a kind of drumming background of life.”
“In the center of the cyclone, I caught the pulse
of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated
with it, and found it simply magnificent.”
William James wasn’t talking smack when he said that. He was a pretty smart guy. He grew up with folks like Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau at the dinner table. He was educated in England, Switzerland, Germany and France. He taught at Harvard for thirty years. He mentored Teddy Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein and WEB DuBois.
Heck, he was the father of American Psychology.
William even told his kid brother Henry -- that's right, the novelist Henry James -- to stop with all the drawing room tedium, and write a book with ‘vigor and decisiveness of plot… and absolute straightness of style.’
Gotta like that kind of talk.
Truth, said old William James, is 'what happens to an idea,' it isn’t ‘an inert static relation.’ Another way of putting that is, truth's the outcome of what you do to things, and what things do to you.
When it comes to love and fear, the truth of any experience -- even New York -- is what happens to you when you’re in the middle of it, not what you predetermine it to be. That’s why you don’t run away from a bear -- or a city -- without a good solid reason for it.
You're not supposed to go in being afraid of it. You don't poke it in the nose, either.
the apocalypse is here and it is the color of spring
They say it's spring but I think the world is just angry. Tired of the day to day turmoil of being walked upon by meer men. The apocalypse is here and it is the color of spring. The green of the leaves is just chlorophyl of the once lived. We shall dine on the corpses of the living in order to get a little color in those trees. Blooming flowers are just blood thirsty zombies destroying everything they see with a sense of flowering beauty and the dead. Oh it is spring and the dead are alive and kicking and ready for the heat of the sun. That blue widening sky is just a reminder of how empty we all are inside, so have a happy spring.