Brian Eno / John Cale, “In the Backroom”, from the 1990 album Wrong Way Up:
When Señoritas walk at night,
Habañeros on the move,
It’s music to their ears in the backroom.
If there’s money to be made,
And it’s a hundred in the shade and in the backroom,
She’s sentimental like the last
Of the foreigners running past her to the backroom.
And if things aren’t sweet in Mecca
She’ll be begging for forgiveness in the vacuum.
They’re taking pains with California,
And they’re guaranteeing boredom for the monsoon.
And apart from what was offered
There were mothers buying orphans at the auction
Youre much better off in Twos
If you’re coming to see the carnage in the backroom.
Doubled over on the table
I was concentrating harder in the backroom.
Weaving in and out of consciousness
Hiding out behind the entrance to the backroom.
It took longer than expected:
They had difficulty swallowing capsules.
We had a keener nose for trouble
Than the sniffer-dogs at Heathrow –
You’d be trousers down in no time in the backroom.
Almost nothing in the papers…
Told me it happened when they emptied out the backroom.
A great song of incidents.
Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City. This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.
I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.
He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In The Chatter of the Soul, he elaborates:
As long as I can remember, I have been writing down fetching things people say. My personal hell would be me clutching my pants pockets for eternity and finding no pen or paper, while fascinating folks are saying unforgettable things that all of us are bound to forget, if someone doesn’t write them down, now. In my crowds, that was always me.
…On my own time and dime, I rather like to drink carefully-made beer and wine, and fellowship with friends with amply-stocked minds and souls. When this was a rock and roll road show, we were forever traveling between gigs. The notebooks I kept in those days were known (in the beginning, officially, complete with roman-numeraled dog-latin names) as “gig books.”… And when [these days] I take the time to type up my notes after a night out, I still think of them as gigbook poems.
Gigbook poems are not for everyone. Often I have been told, “I guess you had to be there.” But I think they capture the chatter of the soul. They strike me like little luminescent winks of actual people enacting their lives, in the middle of it and making it all up as they go along.
Yes! There is often gold in the most seemingly trivial of overheard utterances, which have long formed one of the sources of the texts I develop in my work (see #4 on the About the Work page of my site). I think Chris, as a “real” writer and journalist (and judging by his comment above), is probably more reportorial and factual than I am, or, to put it a better way, more inclined toward narrative; I’m usually pulling paragraphs apart and looking for different ways to scramble meaning. My version of his gigbooks are the Snarkbooks, which are not so much “the chatter of the soul”, but just the chatter, period.
There’s a feeling in this kind of activity though, a feeling of being in the zone, of appreciating what’s happening in the moment, that I think we’ve both tuned into in our own ways. John Cage summed this feeling up beautifully in the closing paragraph of his 1957 lecture, “Experimental Music“:
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
Purposeful purposelessness is the best description I’ve ever heard for the function of an artist in society. And I love how Cage repeatedly in his writings throughout his life stressed the (curiosity) value of observing or creating situations and seeing what happens (getting “one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way”), as opposed to trying to impose a structure. I’ve always hated the phrase, “bringing order out of chaos”, as if the “ordered” system was inherently good and the “chaotic” system something to be avoided at all costs. If meaning is synonymous, or at least dependent upon, information, then a chaotic system, which has more potential, more possible outcomes, than an arbitrarily ordered system, must therefore be more “meaning-full“. Allowing an event to take place, to happen, does not mean, however, that it will always be 100% chaotic, and it’s much more interesting when a confluence of dynamic systems produces both chaotic and ordered eddies of information. How the “ordered” and the “chaotic” systems are arranged is, of course, a (by)product of uncertainty, so the beast feeds itself and the cycle continuously renews, like the water in a river you can never step in twice.
Yes, I’ve gone off on a tangent, and by now you’ve likely drowned in this river of metaphor, but isn’t a tangent but a confluence if you’re traveling in the opposite direction? Run the film of the tangent backwards, and you have a confluence.
A nice composite image of John Cage cooking, from the excellent blog of the greatly named J. Henry Chunko:
Mr. Chunko links to this post about a recording of John Cage: Empty Words Part IV (1973-78). But I especially like the Lichtensteiger.de blog that he turned me on to, which has several pages of John Cage material. The recorded Cage readings that strike me in this hearing as unexpected cousins of Kurtz’s monologues in Apocalypse Now, two characters I’ve never connected before.
Bob on Bob, Louis Menand’s review of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, in the September 4, 2006 issue of the New Yorker. A great review of a book that sounds less than great, due to Dylan’s mumbling indifference to most interviewers, at least during the early days of his career. Menand zeroes in on Dylan’s interest in the sound of music, more than lyrics, and how artists, either out of creative exploration or commercial necessity, often explore a greater range of interests than their fans, who want to put their prey into boxes:
…[Dave] Van Ronk was a big spirit, and in his posthumously published memoir, written with Elijah Wald, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”—a wise and very funny book; in some ways a great book—he had this to say:
I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take. I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them.
…You can’t find the road that gets you from “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “This Land Is Your Land” through “Pirate Jenny” to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Musicians don’t follow roads. Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do. Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, “Escaping the Delta,” points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. “If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,” Chuck Berry said, “it would be Nat Cole.”
…Van Ronk thought that Dylan was sloppy, that he wrote his songs too fast. Even in Dylan’s best songs (I know that my life will not be worth much after these words appear in print), there are lines that are truly lame. “And the words that are used/For to get the ship confused/Will not be understood as they’re spoken” is not even lyrical, forget about the sense. “Ballad of a Thin Man” does not profit from the verse about the one-eyed midget shouting the word “NOW.” (“And you say, ‘For what reason?’/And he says, ‘How?’/And you say, ‘What does this mean?’/And he screams back, ‘You’re a cow/Give me some milk/Or else go home.’ ” Maybe it makes some kind of sense as a proto-hip-hop rant.) Dylan’s words—he has said as much—are often placeholders, devices to fit the melody and fill out the line, which is why dutiful efforts to extract a message or a meaning are largely beside the point. If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says in one of his early interviews. “I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing.”
Leo Kottke’s liner notes on the back of his 1979 album, Balance:
We live on the edge of town with a big front yard. I get up in the morning about noon and make my way through the dogshit to the mailbox to get the mail.
I often pause to think at this point, but then, the dog is emblematic of civilization and, without civilization, we could be riding on horses without umbrellas and spending our lives waiting to skewer badgers on sticks.
With civilization we bring actual animals with voices like saxophones right into our homes where they defecate at will. And then we blame the animal for being so dumb.
At Christmastime, trees, as well as living animals, are brought into the house. Little silver balls are hung from the tree. And food. Popcorn, cranberries and candy canes rotting in the forced-air heat.
But what can compare to seeing that first sled under your tree in Oklahoma, where it hasn’t snowed for the last eight years.
Actually, my sled was not under the rotting Christmas tree but, for some odd reason, hidden in the kitchen stove with its rear end protruding from the oven door. “Go in and get it, Leo!” my parents said, delighted with that wide-eyed look their kids always got at Christmastime.
But often times, standing at the mailbox, none of these musings will soothe, and, in a bathrobe at noon, with my right hand deep in a mailbox and left foot buried in turd, I succumb to despair.
Watch out for the smelly pile of despair; most of us seem to have one foot in anyway.
Here’s a great story out of Germany:
HALBERSTADT, Germany — A relative rush of activity broke out this week in the world’s slowest and longest lasting concert as two new notes sounded in a piece of music that is taking a total 639 years to perform in its entirety.
The mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) is entitled “organ2/ASLSP” or “As SLow aS Possible”. The performance began nearly three years ago on September 5, 2001, and is scheduled to last until 2639.
The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord — G-sharp, B and G-sharp — not sounding until February 2, 2003.
But things really got going yesterday as two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded.
The could be the soundtrack for The Long Now Foundation.
Groucho Marx, as Captain Jeffrey Spaulding, in Animal Crackers (1930):
Spalding (speaks): Well I’m certainly grateful for this magnificent washout, eh, turnout, and, eh,
now I’d like to say a few words…
(sings) Hello, I must be going.
I cannot stay, I came to say I must be going.
I’m glad I came, but just the same I must be going.
Mrs. Rittenhous: For my sake you must stay.
If you should go away, you’ll spoil this party I am throwing.
Spalding: I’ll stay a week or two.
I’ll stay the summer through.
But I am telling you that I must be going.
Mrs. Rittenhous: Before you go will you oblige us
and tell us of your deeds so glowing?
Spalding: I’ll do anything you say.
In fact, I’ll even stay!
All: Good!
Spalding: But I must be going.
Read the stories John Cage tells in Indeterminacy. Go on, you’ll enjoy them. And the Smithsonian Folkways recording accompanied by David Tudor is great great great:
The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple and audaciously original. Cage read 90 stories, his speed determined by the story’s length. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, David Tudor, pianist and veteran Cage collaborator, performed miscellaneous selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix. The resulting collaboration is an astounding piece of “music,” and a fine introduction to the innovations of John Cage.
My brother Jack just emailed me this:
A Native American elder was asked to sing the old hunting songs for a documentary. But he doesn’t remember the words and instead sings about not remembering the words and about being filmed.
He says he got it from an LA Times about ten years ago. I couldn’t find any references to this online, but it might be a Laurie Anderson story. Sounds like one.
Anyway, I like it a lot. Seems to capture quite well our media mad culture. And even though I can’t remember the source, I’ll sing about it.
