Tag Archives: music

The Rock Opera (a dream fiction)

The Rock Opera
(Staring at the Sun from Underwater 1.1.6)

Since Benny Zane couldn’t practice, Flip (I mean Fred) and I took mushrooms or acid with his birdlike classmate Helene Windrose and tripped around the Heavenside street festival, horrified that we might become flattened into the marshmallow morass of smiling oblivious Victorian yuppies. So we skedaddled back to Helene’s place to watch a pot of water boil. Since Helene is a religious studies major, Flip wanted to disprove the veracity of the old wive’s tale, which took forever, staring at each bubble as it rose to the surface while Helene ate a head of lettuce with her bony violinist fingers, not giving a fuck about our water.

While wandering around Heavenside, Flip had come up with the idea of writing a rock opera, about a 300-pound graffiti-artist drag queen named Tink, on her quest to stop hordes of robotic lumberjacks from marshmallowizing the world, turning everything into that bourgeoisie Flatland we’d barely escaped getting stuck in earlier. So after we reached a rolling boil we rushed back to my apartment to write it, Flip on drums and I on a distortion and reverb laden guitar, Tink’s leitmotif beginning in a delicate adagio—a fat man in a tutu dancing in a summer rainstorm—boiling upward through echoed notes, until, wait for it, here come the lumberjacks!

I kicked on the distortion and slew them all, in sharp downward arpeggios that multiplied at our feet, spilling out from the five lines and 4/4, the staff notation suddenly just another arbitrary order barely able to contain the coda, notes not faster now but with more space in between them, hemidemisemiquavers cut open so we could fit whole arias in the interval. The beauty of music is, as Beethoven said, in the rests between notes, but the magic is in the total onslaught, the boiling over of emotions.

Except, up against the rows of grey robots who control our lives, the things we have to offer sometimes seem so frail. As Fred kept grinning, “This is an opera, we have to sing, you know, words.” But our words were too fragile and insecure to tell this story. The bubbles popped.

And then suddenly Phoebe Zeitgeber showed up with a new amplifier she’d gone down to Dead City to purchase, followed by, oh gods, her mother, who had driven her back up and came in to say hello. Though we were tripping and horrified to talk to an adult while on acid, Phoebe’s mom insisted that we jam, breaking out her violin until Flip grew so paranoid that he couldn’t play another snare roll and ran out the door.

In the Moment (a dream fiction)

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In the Moment
(Staring at the Sun from Underwater 1.1.5)

I was so paranoid that I couldn’t leave my house for days. A cop car was waiting across the street from my apartment every morning, and when I finally had to leave to bike to work, I was followed all the way there. At work, that crazy cat Benny Zane showed me the cover of the Post-Gazette, which featured a picture of me in dark glasses and bearded jaw looking like the Terminator under a banner that read, Death to Capitalism, even though that wasn’t the message of our May Day parade. When I got home I immediately shaved off my beard, but even still it took that ruffian Flip Rogers to rescue me, barging into my apartment while I was asleep so that I leapt for the nearest weapon—the leg of a mannequin—which I brandished until he convinced me he was not the informer.

It turned out that while being processed, the May Day detainees were interrogated by actual FBI agents who were looking for our leaders by name: Flip and Emma in particular. Flip didn’t think they’d heard of me yet. He grinned when I asked what he was going to do. Just ignore them; my name’s fake and I can just change it again, maybe to Fred, like my childhood hero Mr. Rogers. Flip went off on some story about finding a secret passage into the puppeteer’s studio, as if the Neighborhood of Make-believe lies behind every store-front’s false back wall. I couldn’t believe he was taking a warrant so lightly. You gotta understand, god, he grinned and lit a stoagie, your fear gives the archons their power. We each have a cop in the head like a malignant jack-in-the-box or alien super-ego, and the more you listen to the mores the less you can live in the moment.

To counter the internal police, Flip decided we had to start a band (since, as he said, tunes work better than tinfoil). So we rolled down to his place to cook Food Not Bombs, and when the younger activists drove downtown to feed the homeless, we stayed behind to plan our new anarchist super-group, a cross between American hardcore and bop-era jazz, with some funk and show tunes thrown in for amusement, music that could save the world our at least stave off our paranoid nightmares. If only we could find a drummer.

Suddenly we discovered we were not alone. There was a strange tapping noise from the kitchen we thought was another tapped phone. But it turned out only to be Benny Zane tapping his long fingers on the sink, who turned out to be an exceptional drummer—he’d dropped out of high school to pursue a jazz drumming career, and offered to join the band. If only we had a name. It’s obvious, Flip grinned even bigger than normal, we’re in The Moment.

Against All Archons (a dream fiction)

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Against All Archons
(Staring at the Sun from Underwater 1.0.4)

There was a war on, a rebellion against all the powers that be, the mechanisms of control, mundanity, and everyday life. On our side were the young, the activists and artists and dreamers, fighting with art and song and dancing in the streets. At least that’s what the rebel leader Molly Goldbloom was hollering at the first meeting of our new anarch collective. I’d met Molly while wandering along the cliff edges under the Bloomfield Bridge, where she was digging a playground for the neighborhood children. While working, we talked about the Battle of Seattle last fall and decided to start a collective to try and save the world, now that Jr has declared that running the country would be easier if this was an empire, as long as he was the emperor.

I wasn’t planning to fight or perform any aggressive action. Back in high school I’d gone to the White House to protest Jr’s father’s sanctions against Iraq, and was arrested for just sitting on the sidewalk—a bureaucratically absurd waste of time and money. I was still wanted by the government, and I hadn’t even incited violence. Like I’d told Molly, the only interesting thing about the experience was seeing this one crazy cat with a contagious grin and pants made entirely out of zippers, which made her grin conspiratorially. Instead of direct action I offered to decipher a code or transcribe a map. To protect their tactics, the rest of the anarchs told me I had to go up to a small stone house above the rest of the fort, with walls so close together I could barely move. Out the window I could see an ancient stone city rearing out of a great forested swamp—only the hulks of steel mills abandoned and overgrown with kudzu—but I longed to go out there to have an adventure, like Nim and I used to go on when we were kids, back before everything had become so fixed and real, before we knew the world was going to end.

Except then I realized I was late for dinner. I had to go meet Phoebe, so I rushed down the stairs out of the fort. The crumbling stone steps wound through the city and ran parallel to a great two story tall apartment building, stopping at an opening halfway up the wall then turning and jutting out into the room, partitioning off a section. This was the apartment Phoebe and I had just moved into, and since the walls made all the rooms too small we were still trying to decide on which side we should put our bed and couch.

I’d just finished shoveling the cold pasta into my mouth when there was a knock on the door. It was my coworker Quick Crash with his band, made up of about fifty people it seemed like, all the punks from the meeting I’d jut left. I’d invited them over so Phoebe and I could find a drummer for our band, even though Phoebe just wanted to sleep. We joined the circle, everyone standing or sitting, passing around the melodies with lots of cigarettes and weed. Since there were already six guitars I broke out my viola until the weed ran out and the sun began to rise, feeling like our music could shake the world to its foundations, if we only had the right beat. It turned out though that every drummer in town was already playing in at least two bands at once. Except for this one crazy cat, Quick said. Flip Rogers doesn’t obey any fixed law or tempo. That’s all we need, Phoebe groaned, though she likes to write songs in strange time signatures. As everyone vanished slowly up the stairs, Quick last, he said, we’ll be back, then he too was gone before Phoebe could give him the evil eye.

The Perfect Note, the Pivotal Word

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Earlier today I was jamming around on the guitar and managed to get the levels of overdrive and reverb just right so that a long pulled off note created that microtonal beating that can send shivers down the spine. Sonic wave interference seriously must be one of life’s hidden treasures.

Recently when I play I’ve been thinking about how the finesse of one note can create these kind of deep physical and psychological effects. Years ago when I was playing in bands, what was important to me was the song – crafting repeated structures, the tension and resolve of key changes between parts – but after taking a couple years off and returning to the instrument I’ve been approaching music at a more fine grained level, a precision and subtlety of effect – how to vibrato only the third note in a chord, when to pull off at the end of a measure to create an arpeggiated triplet with only one strum, &c.

A lot of why I’m focusing on this kind of technique is that, not being in a band currently, I’m far less concerned with producing finished songs. Interestingly, I’ve also been exploring my creative writing on these finer grained levels. Though I’m still interested in the construction of tension and resolve across a story and the use of volta or turn-of-consciousness in a scene, I’m also working a lot more at the level of language. On the one hand exploring the juxtaposition of different modes of discourse within one text (action, memories, quotes, stories, ideation, &c); but I’m also giving a lot of attention to the pacing of sentences, how to hold off saying the key word so that it falls on the most rhythmically powerful place in the phrase. Or there is the juxtaposition of specific words, and even the shape of words themselves as symbols, the visual and sonic repetitions of specific letters.

Once again, though I am still finishing stories to submit for publication, I suspect this comes from a greater turn in my understanding of myself as an artist: that is, the product is really ceasing to be the important thing for me, and the process, the craft, the precision is becoming pivotal. How do you say the one right word that changes everything? Part of this, at least for the writing, comes from being in school for creative writing, and finding that no one really teaches craft at this level. Both classes and writing manuals focus on plot, dialogue, characters, idea generation, &c. and even though poetry classes can get closer to concerns of word choice and sound, there is still a hesitancy to examine how these fine-grained choices produce certain effects. There is almost a mystique or magic to the way language actually works on us.

Perhaps these kinds of techniques can’t really be taught, perhaps this is where the real art comes in, having to delve so deep into one’s craft that you come out the other side with a mastery of specific moments you wouldn’t even have known existed if you remained a casual creator. Perhaps it is once again about being less concerned for product and end results. Much of the frustration I have with the arts in the contemporary world is they are all about the market – getting an album out or a book published – which only encourages artists to rush, to not apprentice themselves for years and years before thinking they are actually capable of creating something good.

I think of writers like Roberto Bolaño, whose works show a clear mastery because he didn’t even start writing prose he felt was solid enough to publish until he was older than I am now. I think of all the shitty indie rock bands churning out albums each year that get super hyped up, but no one will remember before the end of the decade.

I also think about the fact that playing the one perfect note that can send shivers down your spine is an end in itself, whether or not it’s ever recorded, the small crafted moments that can make you shiver and smile.

A Magnet for Possibilities (news)

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APA Philosophy Referee Hand Sginals (above)
Rumors that first Dark Matter Particle has been discovered
US finally to settle Native American Trust Lawsuit
What Philosophers Believe
How the iPhone could Reboot Education (which I’ve already seen with my own eyes at Pitt)
Tom Waits may be up for a role in the Hobbit
David Bowie and the Occult
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
The Milky Way at different Wavelengths
Don’t Believe in God? Can’t Hold Office in NC
MIT’s Mind Machine Project takes AI research to 2.0
Dave Eggers publishes a newspaper
Casual Sex found to not be psychologically dangerous for young people
Henry Miller’s Watercolors
Should Earth Scientists take a Hippocratic Oath? (I say yes)
The Mystery of the Magically Braided Horse Manes
Music for Water Bears
100 Best last lines of novels, the first of which and my favorite is from Beckett’s The Unnameable:

“…. …you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The Way of What is to Come

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Monday, listening to M.Pyres, dancing up and down over my copy of Jung’s “Red Book” [on his theories of interpretation] finally arriving, though won’t have time to dive into it for a couple weeks due to the increasing school work load. But soon.

For the time being here’s some links that have been building up in my reader:

Images
From Kris Kuksi’s Beast Anthology (above).
Dust Echoes: animated stories from the Australian dreamtime.
The dawn of a new post postmodern era in art.