Individually Wrapped

Went to the Basquiat exhibit at MOCA yesterday. Free-associating my impressions, single words and concepts come to mind: Primitive, Free, Childlike, Dehumanized. I’d seen the film dramatization of his life as well as the documentary “Downtown 81”, and had checked a book of his work out of the library a couple of years ago, so I was already somewhat familiar with his style. At MOCA, we could have taken the opportunity to walk around with the docent and hear some intellectual blah-blah about his stuff, but I didn’t want anyone else’s ideas polluting my impressions on seeing the work for real for the first time.

What I’m most drawn to is the shear energy of the pieces. Normally I’m attracted to art (of all types) that exhibits a high degree of technical skill. I like seeing work in which it’s obvious that the artist refined their control of the medium over years of practice. From Basquiat I get exactly the opposite feeling. It’s all big gestures that release a free-association and stream of consciousness of images and words. I got the impression that he started with splashing color on the canvas and then took it wherever he felt like going at the moment. Yeah, there are repeated elements (both within a single work and between one or more paintings) - certain text phrases, anatomical parts, teeth, disembodied heads, references to black musicians, the crown icon, products, lists of people from history. But the sense I get is that he made it a point to paint outside the lines. You can see in some paintings that he had already put in certain figures and text, and then he just washed over a segment of it with a seemingly random splash of color. In essence, he was constantly creating, modifying and then defacing his own work.

I find that approach suddenly liberating. In my music I’m always trying to refine the structure. How would it be for me to just cast off the restrictions of making it technically “good”, and just create it and deface it as part of a continuous process until I finally decide that “It’s done”?

As a side note, there’s a pretty cool website on Basquiat that’s being promoted as part of the MOCA show. There are images of many of his paintings, and you can click for a magnified view where you can drag the viewing area around the screen. The ironic thing about the website is that it’s sponsored by JP Morgan Chase - an organization that undoubtedly falls within the category of capitalist corporations that Basquiat criticized in his art.

The title of this post is also the title of a book which I have, alas, not read. (As an aside, the Lawrence Sutin biography of PKD, “Divine Invasions : A Life of Philip K. Dick” has now been re-issued in a spiffy new paperback edition featuring a cool photo of PKD on the cover.) But back to this post:

In last night’s dream, I’m attempting to score a good viewing location at a reading that Philip K. Dick is giving at a bookstore in Berkeley. M is there at the bookstore with me, but she’s content to hole up in a chair in a corner of the store with a book or two she’s pulled from the shelves. I’m unable to get a good view, but I can see PKD is sitting in a wheelchair. I can’t hear him that well, so I wander around the store randomly glancing at books. Eventually I make my way back to the reading. People are leaving, even though PKD is still in the middle of speaking. Apparently the book he’s reading from is too abstruse for the audience. By the time I get there, it’s just PKD sitting in his wheelchair talking to one lone audience member. It turns out that person is an Italian friend of PKD, and PKD is speaking in Italian with him. I can’t understand what they’re saying, so I walk away to find M. As I walk away I wonder what was actually happening in the bookstore because I am well aware that PKD has been dead for over 20 years.

But what’s it all mean?

Went for a run on the Venice boardwalk and bike path on Sunday. I’d been cooped up inside for over two weeks, and I just had to get out of the house. Running along the beach, I suddenly (re)realized that I have a primal hunger for corporeal experience. I need to be out in the world experiencing life directly through my body. (It’s tempting to make some grandiose generalization and say that all experience starts in the body, but ascertaining the truth of such a remark requires a lot of theoretical backup - a place I really just don’t want to go right now. And besides, I have no idea if experience is necessarily body-dependent.) Anyway, I can’t just live my life staring into a glass screen, or reading books, or listening to music - i.e., constantly up in my head. I have to get out and move in the world. Walk, run, breath, see the sky and feel the wind, and be in nature. Yes, nature. I can’t live without it. I don’t care how corny it sounds. Life is movement. I need to move and be in the physical world.

Even though my cello chops are pretty rusty, I’ve managed to get a gig playing in a cello dectet. The “concert” is on a river or a canal. The nine other cellists and I are arranged on a wooden raft frame that is just large enough to accomodate our backward bowling pin seating arrangement (four rows of 4, 3, 2, 1). I’m stationed in the leftmost seat of the 4-row, and I’m facing the rear of the raft while everyone else is looking forward. The movement of the raft on the canal is somehow “powered” by our bowstrokes. We’re approaching the climactic ending of an atonal piece, and everyone is sawing frantically away. The wind is brisk over the choppy water, and misty sprays blow across our cellos and black suits. Our bows dig into the strings on the final repeated rhythmic unison quarter note dissonant chords. I’ve stopped counting where I am in the music because my folding metal chair is slipping off the two-by-four frame of the raft, and I’m afraid I’m about to tumble into the water. The piece ends, and I play one repetition too many of the chord. A couple of the other players snicker, and one of them jabs an accusing bow in my direction, laughing and saying “Bobson played the extra chord.” I give him a whack on his shoulder with my bow. The raft is cruising down the canal at a good clip, still under the momentum of the strength of those last chords. A bend in the canal causes the steering cellist to overcompensate, and the raft spins out and collides with the canal bank. The entire dectet is thrown off the raft helter skelter onto the sidewalk along the canal. At that moment I’m glad my cello is just a 15 dollar job I found at a yard sale, rather than the thousands-of-dollars instruments all the other players have. We pick ourselves and our instruments up. The other players are worrying about scratches and cracks in their cellos. We go into our hotel by the canal, and one of the women starts to make a phone call for a taxi to come get her. I tell her there’s no need for that; I can fit her and her cello in my 1984 Subaru station wagon that’s in the hotel parking structure.

But, what’s it all mean? Interpretations?

Judy just called with a Bobtek support request: How to print a Quark 6 document (Mac OS 10) to an Epson 1520 Color Stylus printer. Problem is, there is no 1520 Epson driver for OS 10 and Epson no longer even supports the 1520 in OS 9. Yeah, there’s the gimp-print solution, but what I read about it on the web suggests that it’s a bit of a pain to get it working right, and the time factor precludes trying to install it now. Would be nice if we could save the Quark document down to version 4 so she could print it from her older system 9 Mac. But Noooo. Quark 6 is only backward compatible to version 5. And unfortunately the low-tech print to PDF workaround was just coming up with too many glitchy bugs. Maybe I can convince Judy to try the gimp-print installation later. Otherwise it’s off to the printer graveyard for the 1520.

Today is the eleventh anniversary of Frank Zappa’s death. Let me just say this right now: Zappa is an influence on me. A BIG INFLUENCE. This morning I stopped by the zappa.com website where today there’s no access to the usual pages. Instead there’s a clip of a burning candle, and a high-quality stream of “Watermelon In Easter Hay” is playing. This is the penultimate piece from the Joe’s Garage “opera”, and it’s one of the most beautiful guitar pieces ever written/played. Alternating bars of 4 and 5 in a falling and rising keyboard line provide the backdrop for haunting guitar melodies and improvs. Listen to it through headphones sometime so you can hear the exquisite tones, articulations and phrasing in all their glory.

The Whole World Is Watching! The Whole World Is Watching! The Whole World Is Watching! …

US - making asses of ourselves.

Election Night. 2:30 am. M is in Europe. I’ve been sitting around watching Rather, Brokaw and Jennings’ beards grow on national television as they “report” the election returns. At this hour, the gravity of the situation is interspersed with commercials for Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits (including the “monumental” ‘You Decorated My Life’ [i.e., that Kenny’s lover has the same status as a strand of tinsel on last year’s Christmas tree]), and Scooter World - makers of fine scooting products to mobilize the immobile. Back to the “news”. There sure is a lot of RED on that map. It appears that we have to suffer through another four of the lying, cheating, corrupt Weasel and his hideous henchmen (and henchwomen). The middle and south of these here U-Nited States carry the day. But what are they voting for?

Never mind that W is dismantling nukular treaties and moving forward with development of new nukes
Never mind lying about WMDs in Iraq and systematic lying in general
Never mind the biggest wealth transfer up in US history and the corollary of out-of-control national debt
Never mind the ENVIRONMENT - wasn’t that just all going to die anyway?
Never mind his profound anti-science stance - a policy in which the CDC can’t even mention on its website that condoms help prevent the spread of AIDS
Never mind the thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and the growing number of US armed forces fatalities and severe injuries
Never mind the net loss of jobs
Never mind the use of torture in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib
Never mind Dubya’s inability and unwillingness to develop meaningful international cooperation on ANY issue
Never mind the erosion of civil liberties

… etc…

What matters is that he’s a “CHRISTIAN”! He’s against abortion and gay marriage! He’s got “our” values!

Half the country seems to be too fogged in to get the import of the wider context. But this is the election in which No Idiot Is Left Behind. Those with the narrowest metacontext win. Bush pulls the idiots into his phoney christian evangelical orbit, and they ascend to victory.

It appears that Dub got the popular vote. V for W. A tremendous loss for the rest of the world. It’s going to take a monumental Activist Effort to break this downward spiral.

I’m in a car with Tom Ivers (a drummer I used to play in a band with). We’re stopped at an intersection. In front of us two men cross the street. The second man has a gun pointed at the head of the first. As they pass in front of the car, I make a gesture with my arms to shield myself from the man with the gun. He sees this, gets angry, and immediately shoots at us, but keeps walking. The bullet hits the car, but both Tom and I are so freaked out, we don’t even know if we’ve been shot. After they’ve passed we give ourselves the once over and are amazed we weren’t hit.

Sunday evening went to LACMA to see The Circle of Bliss, an exhibit of buddhist sculpture and art. I thought it might be boring, but it was actually cool. The various metal sculptures of the buddha are pretty amazing. And about half of the mandalas were pictures of the various symbolic spiritual beings fucking - you know, spiritual fucking in which the male and female dimensions of each participant merge to cancel out all duality. Did I mention - the emphasis was on the tantric practices of buddhism? Anyway, each painting had a little plaque thingy next to it on the wall explaining the various beings depicted, the place or beliefs of the sect portrayed, the time period it was painted, etc. But not a single one mentioned anything to the effect of: “Here we see Lord Blahblah and his Consort Rumpumpum fucking” (or making love, or in divine union - or whatever terminology would be appropriate). No, the mention of that fact of the painting was left out entirely. I guess when you see Lord Blahblah’s balls pressed firmly up against the crack of Consort Rumpumpum’s ass, seen from the perspective of the consort’s backside facing you as she embraces Lord Blahblah, it would be “trivializing” to actually mention what the physical act is. And then there was the wrathful metal sculpture in which the being depicted had an ornate head of a bull, sword, shield and, oh yeah - a mighty erection pointin’ right at you - all of which was lovingly described on the plaque, minus the erection part - the one part you can’t help but notice first…

M and I had dinner at MB’s tonight. She has recently begun meditation practices through the Siddha Yoga Foundation. So we talked some about meditation and Muktananda. I’m somewhat familiar with Muktananda because a bass player I used to play with became a disciple of his in the early 80’s. But before that, I was playing with the California version of a band called School for Buffoons. We had a rehearsal space in the garage of the house we rented in East Oakland. The previous tenants had left behind a couple of boxes of books with some journals and papers in them. In one of the boxes we found an ad for a Muktananda retreat. It showed a picture of him sitting on the beach, wearing sunglasses and a ski cap, his hand up in the “howdy” mudra, and a big goofy grin on his face. The caption read: “Be with Baba in Miami Beach”. We couldn’t get over how silly the whole thing looked, and we had that picture tacked up for months on one of the exposed two by fours of the garage wall. Which really is just the proof that I wasn’t equipped at the time to understand anything about what Muktananda really was.