Thursday, February 06, 2003

Okey Dokey I'll get right to the point. We've got a little problem here and it's not going to go away if we just turn our backs for a few minutes. And the truth is, friend, it's not actually a little problem; it's a big fucking problem, is what it is. Now the way I see it you can do two things here that might give that bolt in your ass a couple turns on the loose side: you can go straight down to Riverside Memorial, take the elevator to the seventh floor, walk down to room 715, and get down on your hands and knees and beg Edson Sandall to take pity on your sorry ass while he's still got a handful of breaths left rattling in his lungs. Or: you can pick up the phone and call Lou Martin and ask her to drive you down to Redondo Beach --tell her to bring a video camera and an attorney-- and you can empty out the contents of that YMCA locker and turn over its contents to Ms. Martin, with the attorney and the video camera as witnesses. And then you can buy a one-way bus ticket back to Sioux City, and when you get there you better put down some serious fucking roots and get involved in a church and pray very hard that we never see your face west of the Rockies again. How do you like those apples, Tiger? Either of those options sound like a plan you can live with? 4:25:56 PM

The Day I Discovered Another Planet For me Sun Ra is now almost officially a lifetime project that I can never hope to get either through or to the bottom of. I can't even think how long he's been dead, but there's no getting around the fact that his music literally changed me and, as foolish as it sounds to say it, changed the direction of my life. Or, perhaps more importantly, it showed me that I wanted to be changed, wanted to spend my life exploring and cultivating difference. My discovery of his music was one of those happy accidents that works like a chain reaction and sets off additional fortuitous collisions far into the future. I honestly don't know anymore what I think of Sun Ra's actual music, or at least how to articulate what I think about it and what it makes me think. It's so wrapped up at this point with my life and what I've made of it (whatever that might be), and all the different interesting side roads it's helped to steer me down. It's also always been almost exclusively a private pleasure; I haven't met many other people who have much stomach or patience for either the records or the schtick (and in a strange way I completely understand that reaction), but his music still makes its way to my stereo on a regular basis, and more than just about anything I can think of has become the ongoing soundtrack to my nights. I was really just a kid looking for exotica when I bought my first Sun Ra record. The Osco Drug store at the little mall in my hometown had bins of cutout records, and there was a period during my early adolescence when I used to go out there and rifle through the cheap stuff looking for things that seemed merely foreign to everything else that I saw and heard around me at the time. I found a lot of great stuff in those bins, records I bought with absolutely no prior knowledge of what the music sounded like or who the people were who made it. It's weird how clearly I can remember those 99-cent and $1.99 records: the Byrds' "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," Dr. John's "Gumbo," a Freddie King record, and a batch of Sun Ra's Saturn albums reissued by ABC/Impulse in the 70s. The first time I saw a photo of Sun Ra on an album cover I somehow knew that music was for me, or at least that it was strange and alarming enough to frighten my mother even more than a Black Sabbath record. Ra was probably already over 50 by then, fiercely obscure and stubbornly original, a convincing eccentric, at least to a kid from a white little Midwest slaughterhouse town. I can remember the first time I put one of those records on my cheap Radio Shack stereo. It was brutal, impossible at the time; I don't think I made it all the way through the record. I have no idea why, but I kept putting those albums on the stereo, kept trying to listen to them; you had to listen a long time to find your way into the stuff, to discover the composition beneath and beyond the racket. My ears had to slowly evolve to the music, but now it all just sounds like part of my life, and only when someone else reacts to it with obvious displeasure do I realize how foreign it once sounded to me, and what a huge role it played in driving my ears into places they would have otherwise never gone. Either I gradually learned to hear the world the way Sun Ra heard it, or he was hearing it the way I do, but I love the way his best music clanks and stumbles along, the weird and realistic way it meanders between grace and gracelessness; the way it mimicked the stutter-stepping, bursts of noise and silence, and general caterwauling of my consciousness. It was herky-jerky, and threw off bright sparks and colors. I thought it was funny and beautiful and aggravating and mysterious, and for years I knew absolutely nothing about Sun Ra, other than the information I could glean from the generally sketchy liner notes. When I saw him with the Arkestra for the first time I was stunned, validated, and hugely entertained. I was also hugely grateful to him, and still am; he was the first strange flyer I ever took, the first punch on my ticket out of town. 4:03:51 PM

Some Notes On the Practice Of Sneezing ...the rabbins, who have a story for everything, say, that before Jacob men never sneezed but once, and then immediately died: they assure us that the patriarch was the first who died by natural disease; before him all men died by sneezing. An amusing account of the ceremonies which attend the sneezing of a king of Monomotapa, shows what a national concern may be the sneeze of despotism --Those who are near his person, when this happens, salute him in so loud a tone, that persons in the ante-chamber hear it, and join in the acclamation; in the adjoining apartments they do the same, till the noise reaches the street, and becomes propagated throughout the city; so that, at each sneeze of his majesty, results a most horrid cry from the salutations of many thousands of his vassals.           --from Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature, volume one, 1881 edition. London. Frederick Warne and Co.   A Story Regarding The Rabbins Detestation of Titus, Their Conqueror They tell us that on sea Titus tauntingly observed, in a great storm, that the God of the Jews was only powerful on water, and that, therefore, he had succeeded in drowning Pharaoh and Sisera. 'Had he been strong, he would have waged war with me in Jerusalem.' On uttering this blasphemy a voice from heaven said, 'Wicked man! I have a little creature which shall wage war with thee!' When Titus landed, a gnat entered his nostrils, and for seven years together made holes in his brains. When his skull was opened, the gnat was found to be as large as a pigeon: the mouth of the gnat was of copper, and the claws of iron.           --Ibid 2:26:38 PM

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