Celebrate

I just want to celebrate
Another day of living

Vocabulary of touch

Pleasure principle sensuous femme fatale guide

Mutual satisfaction
Release tender tension

You stash your bags in a simple bamboo room
cut through a distorted distracted disrupted deserted
zone of empty rattan chairs to the beach
It stretches from Sin City to expensive southern resorts
M/F teams rake mourning sand

Grains complement musical melodic waves
breaking the shore day after day
Enjoy a slow walking meditation on a long empty beach

Breathe in - out
Water music laps ankles
Yellow dawn streaks sky
You salute the sun

Celebrate another day of living

Three green islands float long ago and far away on an event horizon
Bright red, blue and yellow tourist boats plant anchors
Engines hum fuel songs

Day unfolds. A lotus grows from mud.

Angkor Wat

Kandinsky

Fishtail Mountain, Annapurna Range, Nepal

Wassily Kandinsky, the painter, had the ability to see sound and hear color.

In 1911 he founded "The Blue Rider" school in Munich, taking abstract painting to another level. Magic.

Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1908-1922.

..."Synesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by "a studious blind man" claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet."

..."If Kandinsky had a favourite colour, it must have been blue: "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white."

..."Despite his theories that the universe was in thrall to supernatural vibrations, auras and "thought-forms", many of which came from arcane, quasi-religious movements such as theosophy, Kandinsky's belief in the emotional potential of art is still convincing today. Our response to his work should mirror our appreciation of music and should come from within, not from its likenesses to the visible world: "Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings."

Ice Man

Blues Music

Kids banging on piss pots, chair spokes and life support systems gave the harp player a backbeat. They had lyrics down.

“Blues are a healer.”

“The blues ain’t nothing but a good woman feeling bad.”

“Let’s invent the future,” said one. “The day after tomorrow belongs to me. Know any Little Walter? I love Juke.”

“Sure do,” said the player. “Let’s have a look see at our repertoire. How about some Sonny Boy? His real name was Chester Burnett, born in Mississippi, down in the Delta. Have you heard Help Me? It’s a classic. He sang, ‘If you don’t help me I’m going to have find me somebody else.’ He had the blues with a feeling. Speaking of healers, my mom does vision quests. Helps people see their way through personal dark slime and muck. She makes womb lodges. People go in there. Can you imagine, going back into the womb? Dark and spooky floating in wet stuff. You can’t see a thing. It’s scary and cool. She says it allows people to process old grief and memories. She calls it regressing. It takes a lot out of her.”

“It’s like entering a cave,” said Tran. “I heard about amazing Paleolithic paintings in Benaojan, Spain near Ronda. They are really old stone stories of 26,000-year old bison, archers, deer, fish traps and sex stuff. I met a wandering ghostwriter named Omar in Morocco after 9/11 and…”

“Probably metaphorical,” said an abstract kid. “They used their imagination and daily struggle to survive. They created internal and external dream images and stories. It’s all about survival, meaning and metaphor. A cave. A womb. Birth. Life. Death. Transformation.”

“Yeah, they painted their experiences. They weren’t dreams silly. They were real. They were hunters-gathers like us. They shared visions and story-truth with family, clan and tribe. They created honest magical creation stories. They expanded the known and unknown in their universe.”

“Oh yeah?” said a skeptic. “I mean where’s the scientific proof? Scientists will never reconcile the two abstract theories into a unified field theory of the universe, matter, anti-matter and evolutionary hypothesis with Time & Being & Nothingness.”

“I heard scientists dated them.”

“When you get that old no one will date you.”

Blues harp music echoed through the ward. “Who wrote that?” said one.

“Willie Dixon. He wrote some great music. Everybody recorded his tunes. Stones, Muddy Waters, you name it. The guys at Chess Records jerked him around big time. Talk about paying your dues.”

“If you want to play you have to pay.”

“Did he mate at Chess or was he a figure of speech like a metaphor?” said a linguistic kid. “Sound check.”

“He was a lyricist,” said the blues player, “and he also played the bass.”

“I know the words but forgot the music.”

“Music is the fuel,” said harp dude.

ART

Juke

My Cadiz, Spain experience sang of Juke, an African word meaning wicked or disorderly in one language.

It also meant a building without walls in the Congo. For American Blacks it took on sexual connotations and a type of dance.

It may have also described jute - a rough fiber made from the stems of a tropical Old World plant used for making twine, rope, or woven into matting - fields and jute workers visiting makeshift bars. Juke joints were bars with dance floors and back rooms for gambling and brothels. Shake your moneymaker.

Your Mask Eats Your Face

To juke was to lead a wandering life, have intercourse. To go in, jam and poke. Whorehouses. From the 1930’s on Delta blues players played juke joints, passing the music from generation to generation. Juke boxes were invented in 1927.

Nothin’ but the blues, everybody’s talking ‘cause talk is cheap.

Hard field work prisons, slavery, life, death, love, loss, leaving and living the blues with a feeling.

It was nothing but the blues talking.

While living, singing, and playing harp blues in the key of C, I trimmed long fingernails down to the quick brown fox jumped over the fence. WYSIWYG. Small slivers of enamel snow spiraled into air floating to cobblestones.

It was a clear truth after three days in the Sierras on narrow Roman passages, chopping and climbing in ancient forests removed from civilization’s discontent.

People moved fast and furious in Cadiz. I sensed their malcontent maladjusted wild crazy freedom from being closeted, closed in, no sky, no air, stoned frustrations manipulating mainstream desires down ways and means with cause and effect in the big city.

It was all a relative reality in the absolute reality and most of my relatives were dead.

Their grounded headstones decorated with names, ages, epitaphs collected dust living with memory.

Weaving A Life (V2)

Blues Music

One day I wrote Blues Music Story on a broken green Fujian, China university board with flakey chalk.

I discussed the African Diaspora, history, suffering and slavery on farms for small money and how they gathered to make music after long hard days in the sunshine of their love.

How the blues manifested as men and women left rural villages on economic migrations for city jobs like China now. Floating people in a floating world.

How the blues expressed feelings of loss and separation from family and friends. It’s an emotional, deep in your spirit soul music.

I pulled out my blues harp and they said, “Oh it’s a cochin.”

“Want to hear some blues?” 

“Yes!”

I blew sweet slow stuff picking up the tempo blasting rifts wailing train whistles. Giving them a real sense of loss forever.

“This is called, ‘Spoonful' by Howling Wolf.”

“When you’re a wandering minstrel or a Griot - a West African performer who perpetuates the oral traditions of a family or village by singing histories and tales, considered by musicologists to be a link with the acoustic blues - or a Seanachai - a traditional Irish storyteller of myths and legends - or a magician, seer and Adept this is natural. I am merely a conduit for music. It comes through me.”

After the blues lesson we practiced making a sandwich. Assemble ingredients: bread, tomatoes, mayo, relish, turkey slices, mustard, onions and lettuce. How do you eat a sand wish with chopsticks?

Let’s eat. Asian mantra.

New music echoed. Everyone ran to a window. 

Across the street an Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three story building.

It towered above a gated Jakarta community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees, displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yo-yo’s and orphans sleeping on broken bamboo bed springs or swimming to Utopia through flooded dreams. 

In his left hand he held a shining silver chisel. In his right, a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between the Stone Algae and the Iron Algae.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. His chorale was an old tribal creation song remembering family and soft rice paddies. Wind carried his life song.

A slave girl offstage in life’s dramatic interlude using a brothel broom of thinned tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm. She created her symphony of sadness and neglect waiting to be abandoned like a vignette.

The Language Company