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Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us--simpatico dudes that we are--while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time--while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works--but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns. Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us--as damaged and anti-social as we are--might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions. And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock--like "free" jazz--sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising. ↗
#music #rock-and-roll #society #art
Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have ↗
My father always used to tell one of his dreams, because it somehow seemed of a piece with what was to follow. He believed that it was a consequence of the thing's presence in the next room. My father dreamed of blood. It was the vividness of the dreams that was impressive, their minute detail and horrible reality. The blood came through the keyhole of a locked door which communicated with the next room. I suppose the two rooms had originally been designed en suite. It ran down the door panel with a viscous ripple, like the artificial one created in the conduit of Trumpingdon Street. But it was heavy, and smelled. The slow welling of it sopped the carpet and reached the bed. It was warm and sticky. My father woke up with the impression that it was all over his hands. He was rubbing his first two fingers together, trying to rid them of the greasy adhesion where the fingers joined." ("The Troll") ↗
It's a wonder, given your prowess with these delicious women, that there aren't dozens of little Bonapartes running around. Tell me, how do you account for that? ↗
And I told you that one night wan't enough." Loki leaned down, kissing me deeply and pressing me to him. I didn't even attempt to resist. I wrapped my arms around his neck. It wasn't the we had kissed before, not as hungry or fevered. This was something different, nicer. We were holding onto each other, knowing this might be the last time we could. It felt sweet and hopeful and tragic all at once. When he stopped kissing me he rested his forehead against mine. He breathed as if struggling to catch his breath. i reached up and touched his face, his skin smooth and cool beneath my hand. Loki lifted his head so he could look me in the eyes, and I saw something in them, something I'd never seen before. Something pure and unadulterated, and my heart seemed to grow with the warmth of my love for him. I didn't know how it happened or when it had, but I knew it with complete certainty. I had fallen in love with Loki, more intensely than anything I had felt for anyone before. ↗
After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. “What have you found there?” said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. “Ah, you’re a Trollope man, are you?” “I’m not sure I am, really,” said Nick. “I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his ‘great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters’?” Lord Kessler paid a moment’s wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, “Oh, Trollope’s good. He’s very good on money.” “Oh…yes…” said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. “To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.” “No, this one is pretty good,” Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. ↗
To be sure, rock n' roll is usually a flagrant commercialization of rhythm & blues, but the music in many cases depends on materials that are so alien to the general middle-class, middle-brow American culture as to remain interesting. Many of the same kinds of cheap American dilutions that had disfigured popular swing have tended to disfigure the new music, but the source, the exciting and "vulgar" urban blues of the forties, is still sufficiently removed from the mainstream to be vital. For this reason, rock n' roll has not become as emotionally meaningless as commercial swing. It is sill raw enough to stand the dilution and in some cases, to even be made attractive by the very fact of its commercialization. Even its "alienation" remains conspicuous; it is often used to characterize white adolescents as "youthful offenders." (Rock n' roll also is popular with another "underprivileged" minority, e.g., Puerto Rican youths. There are now even quite popular rock n' roll songs, at least around New York, that have some of the lyrics in Spanish.) Rock n' roll is the blues form of the classes of Americans who lack the "sophistication" to be middle brows, or are too naïve to get in on the mainstream American taste; those who think that somehow Melachrino, Kostelanetz, etc., are too lifeless ↗
I came into the unknown and stayed there unknowing rising beyond all science. I did not know the door but when I found the way, unknowing where I was, I learned enormous things, but what I felt I cannot say, for I remained unknowing, rising beyond all science. It was the perfect realm of holiness and peace. In deepest solitude I found the narrow way: a secret giving such release that I was stunned and stammering, rising beyond all science. I was so far inside, so dazed and far away my senses were released from feelings of my own. My mind had found a surer way: a knowledge of unknowing, rising beyond all science. And he who does arrive collapses as in sleep, for all he knew before now seems a lowly thing, and so his knowledge grows so deep that he remains unknowing, rising beyond all science. The higher he ascends the darker is the wood; it is the shadowy cloud that clarified the night, and so the one who understood remains always unknowing, rising beyond all science. This knowledge by unknowing is such a soaring force that scholars argue long but never leave the ground. Their knowledge always fails the source: to understand unknowing, rising beyond all science. This knowledge is supreme crossing a blazing height; though formal reason tries it crumbles in the dark, but one who would control the night by knowledge of unknowing will rise beyond all science. And if you wish to hear: the highest science leads to an ecstatic feeling of the most holy Being; and from his mercy comes his deed: to let us stay unknowing, rising beyond all science. ↗
