attachments to material things: foodshark

The Foodshark in Marfa Texas; the first place we found a veggie, non-deep fried meal in a week of travel in the Southwest. It makes you realize how immersed you are in the material; who should care if you eat nothing but fried beans for a week? Certainly not achieving an unattached understanding; complete and clear, like water reflecting the moon. The mind in samadhi, like the sky, For ten thousand miles, not a cloud.
Certainly not thinking of salads, beer(s) or a secondhand cross frame to go trailstorming with. Or even a Yamie CL221 bass clarinet to open out some new textures in Riprap. No, nothing like that. Anyway, Marfa is an amazing hallucination that suddenly appears out of the distance after almost 200k of windswept high plains. A small town that grew up as the railhead for the area, it was once the wealthy, bustling world center of merino wool (cue Rapha clobber here). After that, it collapsed in the depression, and the town was left twisting in the wind, miles from anywhere, until Donald Judd, the New York Minimalist artist, arrived to begin buying up the town as cheap studio/exhibition space. What you see is an 'ironic' Prada shopfront in the middle of a very quiet space (200k quiet)

Apart from that, it's suddenly fairly mad times - multiple poetry settings required in two weeks, for a concert in Chelmsford with Grevel Lindop. It needs for one to just keep going to that little calm place. Plus a request for a piano reduction of an aria from 10,000 Things, and a duo that might look at an old sax piece of mine that needs radical re-editing. And, of course, trying to get in some time on the horns, teaching, marking, etc. Also, there's the Britten Sinfonia doing a workshop with Knussen this weekend, and the West Suffolk Wheelers Reliability Ride on Sunday. Not to be missed.

Strangely, the comments section attached below these blogs requests more high, lonely train pictures and such.

So.... my fave cheap motel, with the half-mile long freights with four huge throaty Union Pacific locos dragging it up the grade that rumble through every ten minutes, like a vibrating bed you put a quarter in, only free:



and Maria's, a great place to have scrambled eggs on toast with tons of chili sauce, (which only aids the Mel Brookes moments alluded to above) in a picturesque valley surrounded by mine tailings:



















and the beer garden of the above establishment:




















and of course, the final 'rails-into-the-distance' photo ( for a while), leading out of Marfa, Texas.,






















I think I've milked this holiday about as far as I can, and we haven't even arrived back up North yet.

You all have a safe journey now.

Filling ratholes with cement.

It's that kind of provocative title, isn't it? Almost like the beginning of a bad metaphor in what will turn out to be a cringingly boring sermon as you slump, hungover, further into the pew. ( "...of course, we should try and understand that we've all had to fill ratholes with cement; each and every one of us. We cannot stand in judgement. But this should always bring to mind the parable of Jesus among the money changers in the temple... [ I had just typed 'Monet changers', which looked far more interesting... that proximital slip of the T and Y being adjacent each other on the keyboard creates a whole different tangent that is tempting to follow..anyway...])

So as I laid in bed at 3 am listening to an ongoing rodent Summer of Love in the walls, it brought to mind Gary Snyder's concept of 'porosity' from The Practice of the Wild, the idea of allowing our surroundings to move freely through our lives, a kind of practice of interpenetration and embrace of Rattus norvegicus. After all, they are sentient beings. .... Right. All that went out the window yesterday, when it was discovered that the furry bodhisattvas had started chewing on Jane's green, un-fired pots, as she had been using coconut in the clay body to open the texure of the surface during the bisque firing. Madam was not pleased. So it's a Friday evening, and I'm gripping a beer (sadly not a PBR , as suggested elsewhere) and filling ratholes with cement.; not off to interesting gigs, fashionable parties, or an evening filed with scintillating, Wildean repartee.

Anyway, sorry for the digression - the header photo: more holiday snaps. Lordsburg, New Mexico; a bypassed godforsaken railway town that was once a major hub of activity. It was the place that the 'Ringo Kid', John Wayne, had to get to in his early film Stagecoach, by John Ford. Standing in the middle of the high plains on the border of Arizona at over 4,000 feet, you can now stand on the main street at rush hour, all six lanes of it and take photos at your leisure. The early sun shows gold off the rail tracks that every 10 minutes a what seems miles-long freight labors over the imperceptible incline, four locos in front, two in the back, laden with containers of white-goods soma from China.


This vast space seems haunted, and indeed it was; we had spent the day driving up from the Mexican border through a long, high valley that was all pasturage, about four miles wide flanked by 1,000-2,000 foot ridges hemming in each side. This, compared to the landscape before and after, had seemed relatively lush in a high-plains-kind-of-way. We stopped for about a half an hour, alone, just outside a place called Apache, and listened to the impersonal, autonomous wind that had blown forever, irregardless of our presence, and would always continue to do so. The sense it gave was one of something lost, you kept scanning the ridges for some sign of the reasons why. The effect was entirely otherworldly, though you knew you were on a road, in the USA, in a car, participating in the shiny, almost-new Third Millennium.

The reason became clear at the next crossroads (to glorify one house by a dirt track by that name) - there was a stone cairn which, after seeing nothing for the last 60 miles, we stopped at. It was composed of spooky recovered stone quorns the women had used for grinding corn and local rock, with a small bronze plaque that announced this was the place that Geronimo and the exhausted Apaches had finally surrendered to the horse soldiers. Geronimo and 35 warriors had held off 5,000 cavalry for almost a year, (who they knew would only ever increase in number) and had finally been split up and ethnically-cleansed to reservations hundreds of miles away in Florida, while others had been sent to the extremely unpromising scrub land tracts that white guys decided they couldn't use for anything else. I found later it was called Skeleton Canyon; it had been their valley.


The thing that occurred to me was that all the valleys had been someone's long before they were driven from them.

Back in the saddle again...

Cue the Sons of the Pioneers here, as we just got back from a week driving the back roads of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. However, this breathless update of our adventures in the wild Southwest, NYC art galleries and New Hampshire blizzards had to wait a few days as I arrived home to find mice had chewed through many of the cables strewn around my desk for the computer, necessitating a few days of soldering, cable purchasing and re-wiring.

This particularly iconic (yeah, I know, I hate the word too) motel sign, beckoning us all to our own personal Calvary of rusting bathroom fittings, static- fuzzy televisions and 'lite' American beers (unless you subscribe to some of the perhaps heretical views of the Ark of the Covenant actually lying under the true site at the Mount of Olives; thus making it your own personal martini buoy) was what drew us to the Motel Motel (it had no other name, so we'll just call it MM for the moment) in Fort Hancock, Texas, after a day of trickling down side roads along the Rio Grande. (I know, I put my hand up; I lied on the Facebook page by saying this was from Globe, but I uploaded the wrong one and couldn't be assed to change it... let's face it, Facebook sucks as far as extended, cogent discussion goes - although compared to Twitter, it's Adorno's Aesthetic Theory; and who doesn't love that book?

None the less, the actual motel at Globe, Arizona is here sub; and you can see, if you zoom the photo a bit, not only is it refrigerated, but there are room phones and a large, unexplained picture of Geronimo gracing the entrance. Add that to being surrounded, as I mentioned elsewhere, by green-tinted, worked-out stepped ziggurats of the abandoned copper mines which overshadow the town.

Needless to say, it was a real find. The whole town sat above five thousand feet in the mountains 100 miles roughly northeast of Phoenix, hard against the barren, high-altitude scrub-infested reservation the Apache had been forcibly ethnically-cleansed to at the end of the 19th century, after Geronimo's final unsuccessful uprising.

More on other things from this holiday as time goes on, but I must get to work on some settings for a gig in Chelmsford next month, where Riprap accompanies the poet Grevel Lindop. This should be interesting, as we have no idea yet as to what we're doing. Malcolm promises some suitable material soon...



El Rancho: it's refrigerated and very reasonably priced, and it's waiting there just for you and that special someone... you know you deserve it.

White Christmas

Just a quick note to say that I will soon be back amongst the lumpy New Hampshire landscape for a couple of weeks, and, as you can see here from last year's expedition with Jane in the Notch, it's somewhat different to Suffolk. But not much; there's always that 100 meter rise out of Clare to deal with.

So it's the White Mountains and, on the coast by my Mom's house, Lupo's Bar and Grill, which of course doesn't have anything so jejune as a website, (hence no link) and has non-stop ice hockey on the tv above the bar. It tends to score fairly low (if at all) on foodie indices. Imagine, in a place far away, a small place right on the ocean that's boarded over the windows with a sea view, with plastic lobsters in fishnets over the bar, and choppsy 60-year-old waitresses your mom is on first name terms with when they bring her that first scotch on the rocks, along with slightly left-too-long-in-the-fryer clam rolls.


heaven

ho ho ho


k

another get-off....recovery drinks needed

Sunday... a freezing cold morning here at the Lazy K; got up, made coffee, looked out at the amazing lightly hoar-frosted landscape showing gold as the sun rose. Too much excitement for attempts at satori - so the wonderdog and I went out and slid around on the ice for 15 minutes up the path by the stream amongst all the fresh deer tracks, while the lazy sun came up and showed through our steamy breaths. Stood like a tree while the dog emptied, then back inside, tea brought up to she-who-toys-with-my-heart, nuke oatmeal, then light up the wood stove. We're leaving for the States at the end of the week, so I had to spend some time getting in firewood for the folks who will be house & dog-sitting while we're gone. Skating (literally) across the still-unsalted road with the dog, I was torn between wanting to get out on the fixee all day in the blinding winter sunshine with the chain gang, and knowing that we'd all be sorry as soon as we hit the first corner that the sun hadn't reached. I've been there before... A & E... stitches...picking gravel out of my head for the next few months...

Sooo.... fire up the chainsaw without guilt, knowing I'd have a ride to somewhere exotic like a 50 mile jaunt to Bures after the ice melted. Cut up the poplar I collected in the spring and split it. The day stretched before me - chainsaw stuff, cycle to Bures through damp, ancient sunken lanes and have a coffee, work on the Guzzi, do some composing. Soak in a bath, aided by grape nerve medicine - Perfect.
Come 10:30, togged up in roadie mode, complete with sunglasses, (sad) soaked the fixie down with WD40 and hit the road. Hmmm.... ice everywhere on the verges. Blew through Clare feeling good, cold sunshine on my face and climbed (gently, only about a 100 meters up) into Essex. Legs limbering up and cadence rising - what's that white in the shade of the hedge on the other side of the road? Into a corner for the junction at Belchamp which I notice is also shaded; I also notice the looming solid white road, slow down to have a look; but the rear wheel kicks out down the camber, I'm facing at 90 degrees to my direction of travel and still (momentarily) upright. This isn't supposed to happen on a fixed. One more time.

Limp 5 miles home.

So to the Guzzi, best to end the day on a high - all I needed to do was fill the crankcase with oil, screw in a pair of plugs,drag it out of the barn and hit the start button. Various pops and bangs scare the dog back into the house, and a sheet of flame blows out the open, silencer-free pipes; phooarh...I've got a spark, anyway. I'll see about getting it to actually run when I get back. It just so looks better now, and, as we all know, that's half the battle. Back to that wiring diagram.

The afternoon was spent trying to capture a sound in my head, an initial gesture to start an aria for the Neal Cassady thing. I kinda managed to find a start, and it's going to be low... cellos, basses, bass clarinets, that sort of thing. And woodblocks....lots of them. Neal is going to have to be a tenor, I think. I can hear the voice counterbalanced against the orchestra's low register unison lines. Who's the baritone, should it be Kerouac? I seem to hear him even higher, for no good reason. Countertenor? That would just be just plain silly. But he really doesn't come across as a baritone for me.

The strange thing is that lately, more and more, I am struggling against how my head keeps getting invaded by the musak tracks I can remember being piped into all the environs of my childhood. 2-feel perky electric bass played with a felt pick, banjos, unison male choirs a la Mitch Miller and the Gang, shimmering strings - that kind of thing. Spooky. Since the mice ate my mp3 player's earphones about a month ago (another story sometime soon) I have been struggling with this rising tide of banal dross running in my head. It's a bit like zombies taking over the malls.

So, today was good, apart from a red and blue rash along my right side. Time for a recovery drink, mmmm...probably a Slipstream Cream Ale would hit the spot and aid tissue repair.

So, with the sound of Mitch and the Gang echoing in our ears, sweet dreams.

k

enso on..

This is just a quick note to say that I've put up a download of Malcolm doing his poem "My Poetry is Jamming Your Machine" on the website for your listening pleasure and edification. I'll get a few more clips converted and uploaded as well in the next few days.

I've spent the last few days re-doing Newset for Piano and Violin, as Mifune and Paul are playing it again on December 12th. I was never happy with the last section, it seemed a bit abrupt; and so it was, as I merely stopped the piece, like Wile E. Coyote stopped in mid-air after running off a cliff, because I had exceeded the specified time limit for the gig. So I went back and re-wrote much of the last section, prying bars apart and adding great gobs of stuff, trying to work out the material in more leisurely transitions. It was kind of fun, and you realize that you always throw away too many ideas without really developing them. To come back to something even just 6 -8 months later makes you look at it very differently, as you've now completely forgotten what you were thinking at the time.

Dalhaus points out that after the triumph of technology here in the future, (the land of food pills and aluminum-foil disposable clothing) we now view works of art as an on-going process (like Steve Reich would say) rather than a finished, free-standing autonomous objects, and as such, always open to technological innovation. The temptation for me, rather than doing new stuff, is to keep trawling over old pieces, thinking I can somehow rescue them. And somehow, it's also much easier than trying to start something new, facing that terrifying blank sheet of paper on the piano. But it's more like having to accept it when the Vet says that there's no way your pet is going to get any better, and needs to be put down. The thing might just be crap.

The next big thing is to start on a piece for Peter Britton's orchestra; I'm thinking it could be a test bed for a chamber opera I've been planning with Malcolm about Neal Cassady. Something about the leap from the hot-wired cars of On the Road, the Magic Bus of Ken Kesey, to the last manic walk down the railway tracks on a freezing night after a week-long bender in Mexico. One fast move and I'm gone...

And things move forward here as well, if slowly - I had a couple of good couple of days - lots of compositional sketching, and, finally, I got the electrics of the Guzzi wired up and functioning: turning it over on the battery, a spark appeared at the plugs, lights work, there were no huge arcs of light with accompanying funny smells. The only thing that prevented me from starting it today was the fact I had no oil in the crankcase; otherwise it only would have run for a very short time. So a good weekend, adding that to a daily run on the fixed through the winter showers - I think the word for it is "bracing."

However, it's always two steps forward and one back - the bread I was making on Sunday collapsed, the Wonderdog has a more-or-less permanent limp, and Ruth Padel couldn't do February. But probably Grevel Lindorp is going to do the gig in Chelmsford... more as I find out.

Two more weeks to home in the States for Christmas; fingers crossed that the Arts touring grant comes through for the Riprap project.

k

external vs internal....

Just like the conjunction 'too much' and 'garlic' really doesn't exist, in most people's minds, music cannot be too 'expressive'. Ask any punter why they think a particular piece of music is good, and 9 times out of 10 they will say something about how expressive the singer was, and generally discuss the lyrics. But, in a sense, this tends to emphasize the external manifestations of emotion, just like there are external styles in the martial arts, which seem quite flashy and active, if slightly hysterical. In most martial arts, the ones they began teaching to young fighters are always the external ones, with lots of movement and power. This is opposed to an internal style, which looks mildly boring and it would appear you could run up while giggling and kick them quite hard without much trouble. Likewise, the logical extension of this in a performance would be writhing on the ground while screaming and rending your garments, preferably blaming everything on your unhappy childhood. And of course, as we all had one, so we'd all understand. Sharing catharsis as art? The word is also used to refer to a purging of the bowels.... more on this in a moment.

Anyway, these observations come after the recent round of very successful gigs we did with Riprap, featuring, for the first time, Malcolm Guite's poems. The gig at Anglia Ruskin went extremely well, after a personal pre-gig panic (which did nothing to leave me in good place) about PA and recording problems - the tech-guy had left, and there seemed to be no way of hooking up a mike for the reading because the fact that all the pre-amps for mikes in the studio were down, and allowed only the most obscure of work-arounds to capture any of the gig, and that not in the most satisfactory manner. A very deep and heartfelt ojigi to Roger from Kite Studios for recovering anything at all from the evening. I will post some of the clips on the website later today, once I do a bit of editing.

The group gelled around Malcolm's reading, and put to rest any hesitation I might of had about mixing the two disciplines, and becoming even more obscure and pretentious( later note: and I think I am succeeding). We all came away on a high, looking forward to further collaborations with more poets. The next step is to collectively hunt up a few more gigs, and start the tiresome-but-necessary process of getting some funding to offset the costs of performing at smaller venues.

This mention of external and internal, maybe we can discuss in it more Western terms of Apollonian versus Dionysian (although not really the same thing at all; perhaps objective vs. subjective? ...and that's different again) , was precipitated by the second gig the following week. We were preceded by various younger guys (and that includes just about everyone around me these days) doing personal takes on free - improvs in the Micheal House space in Cambridge. There was a very good, extreme-minimal violinist in a Feldman-esque kind of way, and a flute player exploring timbral variations in a quiet fashion. However, there was one party who decided that they had to "get something going" and inject some of his emotive energy into the proceedings, even though this generally had little to do with the other improvisers' contributions to the textures; and I say this without judgment, we've all been there (say, in my case, around 1976 in extremely obscure peripheries of the Soho loft scene, inspired by people like Braxton and Sam Rivers - avoiding eye contact with angry uptown guys a lot older than me, and trying to make up for in energy what I lacked in technique) . There's always been an on-going debate about this kind of thing in improv circles, with no clear outcome but lots of polarization, like in left-ist politics of the possible. People with no hope in Hell of ever affecting change spend enormous amounts of energy splintering into ever-smaller cliques.

The problem was that Dave had spent about an hour sorting out the piano and doing a bit of repair tuning and minor 'preparations'. That was put paid to by a short sharp sessions with drumsticks inside the new grand piano just prior to us starting. Bent damper felt rods, stuff in the action, and back to (even more) out-of-tune-ness. Ted Gioia, in discussing how jazz might still fall within the immature arts, with it's emphasis on expression as opposed to structure, anticipates this young Free improv player smashing my bourgeois preconceptions . I saw then and there that I had dispose of the usual 'plutocrat' outfit I use for gigs, with shiny top hat, cut-aways and spats, and realized it was time to don some very tight black jeans and "Chuckie T's". Apollo, with his light and symmetry, gives way to frenzy and intoxication.

Back to being sullen, thin and bearded -

k