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. 

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.

 

 

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.

The Heroin View

Modern music is boring! I am scared by its banality, by its reason to exist. The media have stolen its honesty and made it superficial, made it irrelevant and left us hungry and short changed. Music has been rendered a slogan, an empty gesture, a sound bite indeed; it is dressed up without substance, it is superficially bang tidy. Today music is being engineered without passion; it treads a bland monotonous path as if all that paved the way to this moment has been no more than a wasted passage of time. Yet the musical collective of this world is enormous, varied, vibrant, exciting, intelligent, life inducing and wild; and so filled with love and humanity that it burns with the self same light that once filled our greatest musical journeys.

So if music is still alive out there, grinding with youthful, inventive, uncontrollable verve, why is it so dull? Switch on your radio and receive a snapshot of today’s musical poverty, fit only for mainstream turned down minds. They are promoting what will sell, regardless of its worth. The multi-million sellers today have stood on the shoulders of greatness and passed it off as their own and we continue to be fooled that sales is a sign of worth. But it is not! It is like judging the happiness of a family by the price of the house in which they live. It is all a farce; as is the positions of the charts or the best sellers list, they are just slots paid for by the record and publishing companies, to make you believe what it is you are buying is approved.

Music doesn’t care what you look like, even if you care what it looks like, music, it is no better for rich mans ears than for the poor. The more perfect the voice, the less it usually has to say! If you listen to music through bad headphones, you never get to know how beautiful it really sounds. At the same time if you only listen to what they want you to buy you will never learn of music’s utter sublimity, you will remain deaf to how rich this thing can really be. Modern music has become a manufactured commodity; pop stars are just the peddlers of snake oil.

But defiant change is coming. Where our creativity is not blighted by the record corporation. I hear it now. Music is alive and inventive in cafes and clubs, on street corners and rooftops, online, deep in your hearts; in your head, on your lips, in the harmony and disharmony of lives and loves. Our musical presence is alive; it lives for us on the curves of her rhythm and the gravel of her voice. Let it be invented in bedrooms, in prison yards, with attitude and reason, released by those in love with music not money, make it without time signatures, dream it, live it, bend it and break it, offend god, don’t apologize, turn it up, record the cry of freedom and love, screw the control of commercialism, bang stuff, scream, sing, damn your soul and condemn your body to let your music be! Music really can set you free!

Make music, make new music, don’t allow the shallow marketers to robe you of your musical heritage or more importantly our musical future. Lose the label. Find the rebel. Lose the genre. Be free, not instructed nor frustrated. Let your prejudice go. Learn how to hear it again, listen to it all and throw the whole world at it.

Life is boring which is why we have art!

FOR FUCK SAKE, PUT THE WAR AWAY BOYS!

It is always hard for me to believe that we go to war. It is even harder to believe that we accept it so readily, that we are convinced so easily of the mandate of war. Are we informed, do we care? Do we stand on the right side? Who do you choose to believe? Do we know the circumstance, the timeline, the pipeline, the truth behind the fact? The price of life. The meaning behind the headlines, the stink behind the bullshit. Do we remember the Resolution that damned both sides to war? Religion, money or prejudice; which suited your mind? Is it an act of humanity or terror? Did we hear their side in reason and think accordingly? Did you see the movie or the documentary? Do you believe Mr President, the anchorman, the prime minister, the soldier, the doctor, the industry or do you trust a politician? But we do remember those “Weapons of Mass Destruction” don’t we? And behold, war harnesses the power of advertising.

The greedy generation wears “What Can I Do?” sprayed across hipster tight t-shirts. Where is their fight, the stomping, the graffiti; where is their primal urge to rebel? But their acceptance has been sold to them on every device, on every campaign of sale, on every pitch upon this new cathartic life. Social media has controlled us to conform within its polite, political parameters. We can speak to the world now, but only in courteous, accepted tones. LOL. Music, once the gauge of youth rebellion, the temperature of the soul is now lost. It has disappeared from campuses, is non-existent on itunes, empty from the music papers. It is becoming more and more Eurovision and less the temperament of defiance. Music companies, too concerned by sales in a changing market to rock the boat, too polite to sign up a reaction. Music has become a commodity and is no longer a revolution. I spit blood to this! Music has become bland, more sterile than I ever dared believe. The charts are a sham, they tell you what they want you to buy. It has been rounded, perfumed and cauterized of all expression. But this is not the order of the world changing; this is not evolution, this is not the free spirit of young people. This is control.

But it isn’t our involvement with war that frightens me most, it is in our simple act of acceptance. Shall we honestly not care that we kill our own kind? Today we accept the killing of innocent people and make those that carry out such crimes heroes; I shudder at the advertising connotations of this. Look out, we are being sold a war and we believe it. Governments know this.

I say bring on the hackers, the bloggers, the terrorists of convention, a class of redemption, the musician, the artist, writers, the iconoclasts and allow them to give us back our voice. Turn off the television people; it will have you dull and programmed. We have more power collectively, than sedative control allows you to believe! An easy life is a cowards life, and it shall reap its rewards in pointless, cowardly ways.

 

 

ESSAY IN SILENCE

In the last one hundred and fifty years of our magnificent intelligence, we have been responsible for the most unbelievable leaps foreward for our kind in recorded history. The computer, medicine, philosophy, science, arts, design, communication, aeronautics, stratospheric’s; people are more enlightened, dreams are now even possible; the canon of our worth is now almost unimaginable. And as much as the false leaders all want to take the credit for these creations, it is has nothing to do with a single one of them; but they can make speeches on it.

The world is a fundamentally different place than it was before the Great War; you remember the one that millions of innocent people got shot in. Today sees just another leader, another effigy, another fool on the hill; but we’ve seen it all before, it’s all the same, new logo: same design. Don’t let them hold us back, don’t let politics or religion stifle or take the credit for our unrivaled prowess! Mankind stood on the moon, not a nation, not a religion not a political party.

Today’s governments are at the forefound of nothing, preaching to an old world on out-moded media; on televisions, in radio friendly, bible belt words, spelled out in yesterdays Times, with pseudo-leaked reports, in the sound bites of bullshit. But the Internet generation shall succeed politics and religion. It follows a different command; its very design is of the order of progress. It is very difficult for the email generation to believe in holy water, as it is difficult for the YouTube generation to believe in party political broadcasts. Today the computer age owns the world. The young are in control, and if you don’t believe me, you just try and ignore them!

So how are the dinosaurs that control us doing today? We grow enough food to feed the world but half of its people are starving. We march for peace but the world is at war. They shore up flood and famine until such time as we can excuse ourselves of blame. The people have faught to take back a freedom that had been promised for so long that we no longer know what it is, instead we now settle on a new form of freedom; today freedom is adjusted by the amount you get paid. The markets have spread poverty and ignorance further and further and shared the wealth and influence with itself. Gods political wing is not uniting the people but ironically pushing mankind further and further apart. All over the world women are still fighting to take back the rights they deserve. In a post-racial world why is racism rising? Human rights, poverty, welfare, justice, hatred, torture, land mines, the death penalty and the thirsty refugees. Just because you believe what you are being told, don’t make it right!

But humankind is a believer, a follower en masse, a pack animal; seldom an individual. We want to believe in God even if we don’t. We belong to politics but who really trusts them? Religions eventually become mythology and politics are eventually overcome by revolution. But what frightens me most, is what it is we are willing to believe.

From the earth came Mankind. From his inability to control himself came God, from the love of his own design came Kings and Emperors and from our social indifference came politics. It appears that each significant form of control takes less and less time to fall. Stand up!

MAN ON HIS OWN

Just let me be. Leave me alone to write my music: to write my blog and to be in love. Leave me to intervene with my own bucktoothed philosophy: to be inventive and foolish and to find expression in the low bow of trees and in the reluctant corners of eyes. I had begun to use the words that nobody spoke of; the ideas that nobody came with. Those that knew me disowned me and crossed the street, and those not of my acquaintance hung down their heads and let me in. As time passed I told the truth as I saw it and eventually nobody but my love came to my door. So now I hide in the cleft of music that resonates beneath words. To find that which should not be said, and say it first. There is of course considerable juicy pleasure in scratching your ass, but very few would like it recommended at table. We are all born stupid. Written on the wall of my studio it states ‘In this room I am free’. People have commented poorly on this but it is true. Freedom is that which you do alone, it is individual at its source. Do not confuse loneliness with being alone; they are not the same thing. Being in love and being alone; now, this feeds the artist where they are their hungriest. So I drift into the opportunities that guitars have to offer, the voices obtainable from my piano and the words in my head that stitch these things together. And she brings me rice noodles and fish when I become famished. This is the view from my room and it is universal.

There is one unifying factor that binds nation to nation and people to people. You can hear the answer in the street, on the voices that spill from downtown kitchens; you can feel it in the yearning for individuality in every crowd that surges together; it is in the distance, and it is also inside your heart. What is it we all crave but can never receive enough? You can feel it profoundly in the ugly, you can see it if you examine your own image, in bikinis and in suits, in porno, the baby, the lover, the lonely; it sprouts from the teenagers loudly willing to be heard, to the voices of nightlife saying come and get me; it rises from cigarettes and coffee like quality French girls; it is in prohibition, in censorship, in the elevator chatter on the fourteenth floor, to the subterranean rumbling behind locked toilet doors, from pimps to pushers to pullers; from all of hospitality to philosophy, in music, in violence, in lipstick, in humor, in the denouncement of god. And no it is not sex! This thing we crave shines for a light when we already have one, it’s in the taxis, the paperboy, and in our dreams, it rises in the hush of longing, from the edge of the tightrope, at the lip of the cliff, in funny and in tattoos, in the lost and in the found, in painting and at temple. It can be transmitted through our five senses, through sight, sound and touch, and increasingly provocatively through scent and taste. The flow of our world is identified upon the self same thing. Everything we do we do for attention. Read it again.

But our need for attention in the modern era has gone berserk. The superficial has never been so seriously taken. Our children’s desire for fame is to be recognized not for what they can do but out of a desperate need to be loved, loved not for what they are but what they want to be. Fame has superseded the product it peddles. Will we ever match the attention we crave? How much do we need, how much will it cost and what are you prepared to pay for it with? How much is too much? Are we all just setting out our meds readied for disappointment and depression? But what is the cause of our junky obsession with attention? Is it our parents, is it femininity, masculinity, is it money to buy a boat and a sack of cocaine to bring on better quality attention, is it in your subscribers, your re-tweets, is it the fear of loneliness, is it the longing of acceptance, is it to be idolized, fantasized, recognized, close your eyes and smile that you made it all the way to notoriety? Is it the shallow mark of modern validation? Is it only a publicity tool that the marketing strategists exploit? Or is it real? But only those of justified attention shall know what it really means. Your life is yours for the giving away!

Love is her who makes silence for my noise.