Posted on: June 21, 2008
Fender Stratoscaster
Enumerations
I am sitting in a wooden upholstered chair built in the nineteen fifties (I know because the table it came with had the original sales receipt from 1957) at my computer desk listening to Jimi Hendrix performing with the Band of Gypsies on New Years 1970 at the Filmore East almost two years before I was born.
My cat Sibyl is sleeping behind me. She is almost 13. Hard to believe. She looks five and has the most beautiful black/orange tortoise-shell fur I have ever seen. She also has an incredibly sweet and talkative disposition. (I have known many cats and by far she is the most gregarious)
I am 36. Time is spinning a web around my head. I am thinking that the chronometric parsing of our small gasps of life may be the death of us, machinelike, or at least make our oxygen scarcer and sleep consequently less…
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Posted on: April 2, 2008
The songs of both these artists are generally perceived as music to slash your wrists to, and playing either of their records at a party signals its certain death (or yours). To their intensely loyal cult following, in the privacy of their bedrooms, they sing to each alone. And by making their anxieties public, these artists are Saviors to brethren of solitaries. Both are literary types; one is a novelist and poet, while the other as a librarian’s son was steeped in literature since youth. Yet both are not great poets, by the admission of one and despite the protestations of the other. Still, when they wrap their yearning around their words and make them sing, they are achingly lyrical. With a kind of duende (dark creative force) for a muse, both are poets of aloneness and longing, disaffection and death. And both have been away, for several years. One retired…
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Posted on: February 29, 2008
There are days when I curse being a musician. I work long hours for a ridiculously small wage and often under crummy conditions. Think about the loudest, dirtiest, smokiest bar you have visited with your pals in the last 12 months. I have probably performed there, or at least some place exactly like it. In fact the word performed probably needs the qualifier of “tried to” before it, because like the fabled tree falling in the forest, if you are playing for an audience where no one is listening, are you really performing? I have performed during bar fights and public break ups straight out of a Hollywood movie. I have been knocked off stage by drunkards who then snatch up my microphone and start singing themselves. I have performed while patrons surf Internet porn with their computer screens facing all of us on stage. I have sung behind chicken…
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