Whole Cowardly Bundle of Art

The telephone interview didn’t go so well. ‘Is that really what people want to know about me?’ I said. ‘Everything you need to know about me has already been written and it rhymes.’ The line was quiet.

I wanted to be Elvis but then he died. Life is like that.

I received an email today from the United Nations. It was in reply to a piece of music I had sent to them which was intended for all of mankind. Their corporate reply concluded with the words thanking me for “taking the initiative of writing to us.” Please do not misunderstand me, I have the utmost respect for the principles of the United Nations and replied to their email saying who I was and would they kindly extend me the courtesy of actually listening to the piece of music I had written for them and get back to me with a genuine reply. A few days later the reply came and said that they would be passing the track on to the appropriate department and thank you for taking the initiative of writing to us. So I shot next door’s cat.

I have all my ideas in secret. They are the salary of the mighty. If I tell you my ideas you will suggest re-writes  leaning towards popularity. This is how popularity perceives the world. It comes in promises and it comes with cages for humanity.

I try not to ask what people think, mostly they are in the dark to the reasons behind their answers. So, as an example, if I ask you, should I have my hair cut? I am asking a question but at the same time provoking a response. Your answers could be many and depending on certain factors including our your mood cycle or your confidence at any given fluctuating moment. It puts into question whether you love or despise me, perhaps you neither care one way or another and answer accordingly, are you jealous, inferior, do I intimidate you, do you actually give a damn or is it you just can’t imagine my hair in a different style as an example. All of these factors may distort your answer. And all of this stuff is going off every time we just ask each other a question. Knowing all that, I don’t ask.

The idea of a question is of more use than the idea of an answer.

Beware of what you didn’t used to need, you can never put it back.

Street

A while back I received a letter from Davide. He was my best friend when I was a child. We were at first school together for a year or more when I was about six years old. I remember his father being something important in a foreign country that I couldn’t imagine. I had forgotten all about Davide until a few days ago when he discovered who I had become. I am easy to find, I have kept my name. I was so delighted to hear from him. He was doing very well working out in the Gulf in A.I. He sent me an old photograph of the two of us at school together. I was shocked. I hadn’t realised he was black.

I love the experience of being alive. Yet so many people appear to be just getting through it and haven’t figured enough time aside to take it in, to play with. To know what it is to be alive, to live. To feel it. Chained to institutionalised poverty, a school system over-run, turning children off, unwanted babies becoming unwanted people. But what of the book he gave you to change your life that you never read? What of the sunset that, had you only asked why, would have re-written your future. What about the peace and a friendship and the space-station and the animals that broaden our horizons and young people who give us all faith in tomorrow? To watch beautiful young men laughing, lifting up somebody’s car and carrying it up the street and parking it someplace else, turned around, just for the sheer exhilarating fun of it. And to watch us resemble love, under the veil dancing and making it better, smiling, singing to themselves, nursing all our infants. People reaching out and bending down to their own kind and free healthcare and all our genders gently falling asleep and waking up for the work that needs to be done and lifting borders and tearing down walls and climbing the Shard without a rope and knowing you would sacrifice your life for one more worthy than you. And difference and forgiveness, silent achievements, change opinion, say sorry, purified water and more laughter and love and kindness and ideas and respect. And adults protecting the young like a wall of steel and being kind and ice shelves and wisdom and taking time to listen and meaning it and squeezing peaches on tactile bodies and powder blue dresses and the gymnasts in crucifixion and hearing it, be part of it, to witness it, and to know inside, that we are the same, that we make it better, that our morals, our blood, our beauty and our passions are unparalleled. And through stuff like that the whole world feels for a moment, we are connected, we are one.

I read recently that a team of doctors had removed a live grenade from the chest of a young soldier…. Everything you are ever going to need know about the reach of us is already there. 

Post Original

When I was young I wanted to leave home. I asked my mother if I could. She said ‘You’re only 13’

So I waited…. 

Meanwhile I learned to play the guitar and grew fascinated with what it was lyrics could do.

Later I ran away, fell in love and I wrote my first song. In geological time I don’t matter, but when writing music I become magic.

I started to sing and play in the city. Got political, ecological and romantic.

Won some awards and the local news, but they weren’t listening to me.

Fell off Main Street. Stood up. Changed my name. Grew a hat. 

The world shouted; life is in discovery.

Kissed her and magic coincided with children, wrote more songs.

In and out of recording studios until I parted with the company.

Took back my music catalogue. Life without intervention

Write, record, perform, produce my music, the way that I hear it.

Originality is that which you learn, but can never teach.

My life in 172 words and 172 songs!

Short Order Catastrophe (Covid-19)

Welcome to the days that changed the world.

This virus crossed all borders, entered our homes and broke into our bodies from the corners of our eyes without indifference. And when it came, it came fast and hard and dragged us from our lives. COVID-19 screamed through the streets of the world until we could witness its effects at the level of human consciousness. And with it came the knowledge that total annihilation was possible, and for a brief moment in human history, we felt it.

But governments stood tall and did the right thing. People belonged to each other again, they broke free from the lives they were cast in, self-importance stood down for the sake of the many, birds continued to sing and the nurses and doctors, those that were the best of us behind the masks, put in a call to all of our hearts, making us smile from the edge of our tears…..

COVID-19 is the greatest step forward in the survival of mankind.

 

 

11th Commandment

And still we continue to be tormented by our ancient themes, war, greed and the production of unwanted children. But these, our basic characteristics were formed in the primitive wiring of our ancient brains, back in a time when our necessity to survive was the absolute and justifiable need of the beast. Yet we can still see why all these human traits, as frightening and damaging as they have been thoughout the the Human Epoch, were so necessary for the survival of our kind in establishing ourselves on Earth, where we were to become creative and enlightened.

In the modern era, we ravaged the planet not out of a primitive need for survival but instead to maintain a certain path of comfort and influence that in its relentless requirement forsakes all life on Earth.

And now, for the first time in human history it is the turn of the young to lead us into tomorrow; holding aloft and protecting this beautiful planet with all the magnificent privileges life has to offer. And as the young take on the parenthood of the planet, they will be endowed with nature’s ultimate evolutionary exception, the capacity to love something before itself. This is how we earn our destiny. This is what we have to offer. This is what we call love.

From the album 11th Commandment

Just Is

Trees grow in Paris from perfume, and beneath one of these trees many years ago two young people met; a meeting that would change the lives and kisses of everybody in Paris. Olivia met Pigal as they pressed their backs against the tree to shelter from the torrential rain that summer Parisian afternoon. When the storm eventually passed, Olivia and Pigal giggled, they had become friends and they held hands. They left together and nothing would ever be the same. What they did not know at the time was that their love for each other was so infectious, when they held hands so did other people. When Pigal leaned in to kiss Olivia people around them kissed. For a love as pure as theirs shall become contagious to those found on the verge of passion. As yawning breeds yawning, kissing breeds kissing. And as time passed Olivia and Pigal began to notice these strange little kissing coincidences happening about them, and this brought even more love to their hearts.

One day after word had gotten out about this they were invited the French President’s rooms for supper. The President and his wife had been secretly unhappy for many years. And so Olivia and Pigal spent the early summer evening walking with them in their lovely garden and wandering through the sumptuous palace. Yet their love it appeared had no effect on the President and his wife. They kissed and the President and his wife moved closer to each other but no kiss became of it. Even when they sat around the table holding hands as if to summon a séance of dead love, Olivia and Pigal could not help the unhappy premier family. The President was furious and embarrassed and threw himself into a rage calling them charlatans and liars, vowing to punish them as they had taken him to be such a fool. The next day a deep fog engulfed the city of Paris and the President ordered that the tree Olivia and Pigal had once upon a time stood beneath in that powerful storm was to be cut down and burned. The park filled with the heavy smoke of their beautiful tree and as the burning touched the faces of the people around them they began to cry. Olivia cried and Pigal hung down his head until tears bounced on his poor leather shoes. The man maintaining the gas lamps cried, a child stopped running, stood still and began to shake with tears from his little shoulders, lovers sobbed and parted, Grandmothers wept into their empty twisted hands, the gardener leaned heavily against his spade and cried unashamedly and dogs howled long into the longest and saddest Parisian night. The sound of low weeping it is said could be heard all across Paris that particular day. It was a wave of sorrow affecting whoever heard it like the sad and mournful song of heavenly sirens. The day would be known as ‘The Tears of Montmartre’.

Next morning the sun shone brightly again and Olivia and Pigal walked to buy croissant and coffee for breakfast at the market. The lovers once again happy that yesterday was over, they kissed before they ate. And the Gendarme forgave the woman whose dog had peed against his boot; she smiled and kissed his cheek. The mime artist blew a kiss to la boulanger femme who gave him patisserie, the artist received a kiss from the critic, the acrobat came down from his wire and kissed the lady in the front row, the glassblower put down his tube and handed the young lady in his studio a goblet made of crystal, the banker forgave the penniless man and the flower seller kissed his wife and threw his bouquet flowers into the air. 

I remembered and smiled.

Makers of Music blog

Makers of music 

Libya was nervous and breathless. The warm up act if you can call it that, had come and gone and I remained dizzy. The curtain rose to a polished black grand piano on a dark satin stage with only a silver candelabra front and centre as visual assistance. It was hard to know from where we sat, if the candles flickered from the air circulating around the audience or whether they had an open door behind the stage to prove the authenticity of the flames. Either way the candle point of control in the dark was mesmerising. Then, enter stage right, the pianist to applause. There are so many things about this world that I do not fully appreciate but the quality of music I understand. The pianist sat with a back poised and ready to play. In the pause before music, you can feel profoundly the magnified anticipation of others. There was a cough behind me, someone creaked in leather, a state of nervous expectation gripped the entire theatre. The performer motionless, like a conductor controlling the moment, holding, holding… Nervous ripples gently washed backwards from the front rows. You could feel the people willing the pianist to begin. But the artist undaunted sat poised, clear in mind and music, the hands now outstretched on thighs, maybe to cleave the last moisture from skin. Distraction at this point would be disaster. A woman cleared her snooty throat by the exit and the man beside me stroked the grain of his close beard. The pianist’s mind fully engaged with the interpretation of notes and nuance. A little tentatively some adjusted their gaze from the stage only to return to the pianist, eyes blinked and reset; as we hint for the first time that perhaps the artist is in difficulty. The code of the unknown arrives and we combat it with small, sweet excusable ‘your audience is here’ noises. Perhaps the performer was frozen with stage anxiety. We patiently wait, but can we detect the artist with inner chaos? A murmur of nervous ambience tried to lift the performer, willing the release of those priceless pianist fingers on keys. Time was elongated in our agony. The audience now readjusted itself; turning up gently their response from sympathy to irritation. A watch slowly ticked, a nose sniffy. We were all caught in the headlights of what appeared to be nothing. For some, being subjected to waiting is a rudeness. A word or two was whispered into the ear of those they sat beside. But surely silence must prevail out of respect for the length of the artist’s legendary preparation? Feet shift about me in a cacophony of awkward physical energy, punctuating the dark weight of silence. A belly turned over and gurgled aloud. Maybe something behind the scenes in error, maybe a violinist with a three-string meltdown or the mezzo-soprano in all sorts of tears; still the pianist remained stable and trained for the accompaniment. A woman’s purse opened, she popped her glasses from their case and looked upon the stage in detail. The emotions in the room intensified. A calling word “Hello?” entered the arena from the stalls. A head tilts and neck cracks, he re-crosses his legs and sighs and the back of my chair is leaned upon. A man gets up and moves through a row as everybody in turn stands allowing him to shuffle from the auditorium through the closing of insensitive doors. The pianist was unmoved. A cigarette lighter clicked a hole in the dark. Three, four, five spaced handclaps, and again somewhere else in reply. And as moody clapping broke the tension, a flood of audience hiss and annoyance shout their disapproval into the air. Then suddenly all noise abruptly stopped as the pianist rose, sliding back the piano stool on the stage floor, turning without acknowledging the audience and left the stage.

The curtain fell.

But we’re infinite Monkey’s right!

Music for an Unknown Revolution

So this is the skinny, it goes like this…. Early mankind worshipped the Sun because it was obvious to a species with a large brain that the Sun sustained life. It dictated light and human cycles and crops and even intervened in our moods. Next we decided that we were greater than the Sun, mostly because we had evolved a bit and now we could cook stuff and communicate so we made up God. God was superior to us, and he lived in the clouds, it was he who had actually created us, not the Sun! God was our father so we could continue to act like children and then ask for forgiveness. So we all started following Gods and writing down and modifying their words to fight the words of other Gods wherever they may be. And this continued to define us for a few millennia. Next came intelligent design, which would eventually require neither God nor Sun… and sometime soon, nor us. And through all this time the whales swam in peace and harmony. We are not the chosen.

Politics for this songwriter is an ugly mouthful of a word. It has no poetry, no beauty, no connotation other than that which it is. To use the word politics in song is to usher in hate and fix the song to it. Politics inspires not love but mistrust. We have been sold to it, not convinced by it.

Having said that, I would like to recommend a couple of albums for you to listen to, but I have found this mostly only works with musicians. You cannot make people be what they are not. That is the job of work.