Experimental work

All creative work is Experimental Work.  I used to be wedded to “experimental theater” but this meant weird, “difficult to understand” theater, because I was a snob I suppose, trying to differentiate myself from the local community theater folks putting on Oklahoma for the 100th time.  Sigh…Youth.

— I am posting a different kind of thing.  Instead of my usual blog voice here, I am posting a piece I wrote awhile back:

Jim Campilongo   Listening to Jim Campilongo.   And his trio too,  Chris on bass, and Josh on drums …  Jack London, Yoshi’s…hipster city, with beautiful people, I mean, we’re talkin’ beautiful people… like Jim too…eye candy…  men so well coifed and fit,  graying here and there, and the women

Oh oh oh the women…

Is it true that this is my fate?  To wear clothes that never go out of fashion, baggy, subtle toned clothes from a “CP Shades” designer of sorts?  Scarves, and flowing pants,  hair neatly coifed and earring purchased either at the museum gift shop or the whole earth festivals around the whole earth?   White people,  Asian people, some black people,  all Oakland and SF in this current year of 2017,  as I try to look at the base player and figure out “is this THE LOOK these days?  Will we be able to spot the year of decade in clothes?    With his printed lightly plaid patterned pants,  snug  cotton button-down shirt with short sleeves rolled up on the biceps… will we know this is from roughly 2017 when we see those pictures down the road sometime?   Or is that the 2000s?  or perhaps even the 90s?

Oh oh oh the fashions blur when you are destined to wear your cotton CP Shades look, and even though you might LOVE new clothes, and LOVE shopping like you always have,   you no longer pay as much attention to magazines or celebrities,  and the length and line of the dresses no longer stays fixed in your mind, because you know

It will all shift again in a few months anyway, and you know

This is blink of time

And so you look for your new clothes, and love shopping,  and seek out those subtle tones and cotton styles that flow and wrap and make you look graceful and strong and smart and grounded….  This is the look for the educated middle aged woman,  with a splash of jewelry,  always with room for a splash of earrings or necklace…maybe even an inch or two on those comfortable shoes…no, not two, as that would thrust the whole look into another age…the age of catching a man perhaps,  or woman,  or the one who is supposed to be lured in by the heels and the fantasy of sex in the dark with bright pink heels,  spikes perhaps, digging into the back of the man who is busy in the deep throes of pleasure and pleasuring..   no, those days are over perhaps…at least in terms of the luring in with the pink heels?  So you wear olive green, black,  indigo,  purples and layers and layers of white and ivory and tan…

This is not what I came here to say

And “say”  aye, there’s the rub

Musical notes – climbing inside the music, living there, letting the sounds, the consonants and vowels if you will, take you, carry you,  as you live inside of them, crawl inside the notes, like we crawl inside a pea pod of some kind, we crack it open, we crawl inside of it, we are enveloped by it,  we are part of it, perhaps,  but we are inside the notes, the composition, the moment, it takes us away,  and we cannot use words

No words

No narrative

No logic

Or story

Or rising action

Or subtle symbolism

Or character detail

Blah

Blah blah blah

Words, NO…not words, not the things we attach so MUCH MEANING ON…we attach it, we are linguists, narrators, descriptors of reality with words,

But with music

Can we lose the words? That’s  the question.  That’s my question, when can lose all the words and just taste the apple

Taste the cream, or candy or wicked licks of guitar strings, when can I abandon it all,

So that I can bathe, bathe in sound, in pain, in joy, in vibration, the strings on the guitar, the bass, the beat of the drum, the wild combination of notes, sometimes familiar, sometimes not,  moving in and out of my ability to use words, to recognize and name

To name something

To re cog nize it, categorize it, and so claim it…fixed, for the moment, a fixed moment of meaning perhaps but no, not with the stream of music, that does not connect itself to words

What about it

What about this

What about it, this act of other …this act this moment of pure abstraction?  We cannot attach narrative to the jazz licks, though we try, we try baby, oh how we try, it is our salvation, this language this ability and drive to

Name things

Make cave paintings

To reflect

Do you see, do you see, can you hear me baby, can you hear me?  It is only

Sound perhaps

Dancing in and out view, how does sound dance in and out of view? The editor cries, the grammarian, the logician, the one who EDITS, the one who EDITS,  and this is the one who is banished

You are banish  shed !

and perhaps never, never never gone even after this is ,this line this mark, this dance of sound on the page, no this is perhaps never gone, because that’s how we hold things

We hold on to things

With language, we hold on, we grasp, we grasp and grasp and grasp

As we name the colors and the sounds of animals and the concepts

The constructions the concepts the ability to build to build to build baby, that what we do, we build things

We name things

And we call things

Civilization at its root, yes yes yes,  but there is a difference between naming and describing and making it afresh? And this act of practicing

Scales,  practice your scales, play them over and over so that they are there, inside of you, and then you can wail

You can wail on your “ax” your sax, your sex,  your own ears and bloodstream making love to the air in the room for no other apparent REASON than it feels right somehow, it just feels right, and this is enough to have that affair, to give someone part of your intimate life where words are invited

To disappear under the sheets of no language, save the language of vibration, is this noe t, is this not the same thing as wailing

Wailing on the guitar or bass or drums, in an effort to dance between the sheets of entanglement and confusion confusion, beautiful confusion between things, between words and sensations and accepting and rejecting and in and out and in and out we make love to our own narratives, we want it, baby we want those words to grasp, to hold on to, but we banish the words, we breathe them into nothingness, we live inside the notes the sounds the rhythms of the moment the plucking and plinking of the fingers, the fingers and the hair and the movement back and forth

We should all be arrested, in civilized society

For making love in public.

And yet this is precisely how we do it, we do it, we do with and for and with and for ourselves and others all in the same glance at the time, we are lifted away from the clock, the time, the rigid construction of nature, of the day, we are lifted away from our own needs to grasp, to understand to narrate, no, we are free

For a moment

But the words

The words

Whisper until they

Cannot

be heard

are no longer

audible

maybe

not

existing

 

except in vibr ation of

the inside

in…

 

Inside. Outside.  Reflections._