Alex Masi - Thoughts

january/28/07

...in the beginning for me music was an ecstatic experience of the highest form. i was maybe three or four years old and there were sounds...they were absolutely meaningful in their meaninglessness and that was exactly what i was craving. i could trip out for what seemed like hours on the smallest insignificant details of a melodic or harmonic sequence, although i had no idea of what those things were called...they seemed like hidden clues in a vast game that included everything and i mean EVERYTHING...

some of my most distant memories, all of my memories have a strong element of light in them...degrees of light and how it affects the world...rooms, walls, city streets, trees, the sky, people...

smell was the link to this reality...i once met a woman who lost her sense of smell years before due to a rare form of illness, she was an improbable human being...

through the years my attraction to sounds and music started taking a more defined shape and names started to be associated with sounds...instruments, artists, titles and even styles...my fall from grace...my exit from the garden of eden.

circumstances and various things have contributed to a sort of reconnection to the original idea...that first moment of wonder in the presence of sound.

with time i found that all the extra baggage attached to the primordial experience of being in the presence of sound is not only unnecessary but, most important, counterproductive to the experience itself.

this involves everything from the excessive interest one may develop for technique(s), tools of the trade like instruments and various technologies, archival sense of history and the king of them all, the search for meaning in music.

there is a silly little microcosm one can check out to get a feel for what i'm talking about, the universe of guitar forums on the net...

these are places where thanks to indiscriminate gift of "democracy" guitar fans flock to announce to the four corners of the world their staunch appreciation of fluff and all things irrelevant...

one night charlie parker was given a plastic saxophone for a joke, he played it all night long and played the same notes the same way as when he was playing his "good" saxophone..."the poet points at the moon but the idiot keeps staring at his finger".

up to a point during the renaissance all musicians were anonymous little entities making their presence known only through their music...then came the cult of personality and composers/musicians had to start having their names linked to their work but at least they were still working in an insulated world were a small circle of privileged would pay for their services based exclusively on their taste.

i doubt beethoven had any idea of what his emancipation from the aristocratic circles meant to the future of music...

obviously the masses aren't exactly looking for the highest form of aesthetic experience (to put it mildly) so music, and art in general, has been slowly asphyxiating in the most recent history...

and if you're insane as i am you'll be as bold as to find a connection between the comatose state of art and the general decline of mankind that we are watching nightly on tv....

i'm staring at sound with my mouth open and taking in all of its unadulterated mystery...the rest doesn't concern me anymore.

a sort of "temple of music" where artists play for free, without a formal organizational structure, no tickets sold, nothing sold...

...of all possible universes i'm in this one...as i'm dealing with music and life in general it seems that the optical illusion of time and its related hallucinations are playing a pretty fierce game...when it's time to be a rational asshole i seem to worry as requested by the script but other times when this thing that some people refer to as consciousness (for lack of better terms) jumps over the fence i lose track of my "self" and everything falls back into place...

there really is no reason for me to waste even just a moment thinking about this nonsense but it's late, really late...i've been sitting here for hours trying to figure out what sound to use on this fucking track and i'm still nowhere near where i should be so why not?...let some nonsense flow, i say.

earlier today i was in my car driving in traffic fully immersed in my idiotic role and i was despising each and every jackass who, like me, was trying to get somewhere...

if i had a button that could annihilate all of these motherfuckers on the road i would lick it, make love to it and then, while in a trance, press it..........

they're already doing that somewhere around the planet...how's that going by the way?...not too well i hear.

make time the enemy and live like this is the only game in town. keep believing we're all little separate entities trying to build a little stash while we're alive and then when we're dead some old man called god will take care of us on the basis of our earthly deeds...

apparently i've been living a life that so far had very little regard for things belonging to the realm of expectations normally attached to being here on this planet as humans....i'm not a pioneer or a particularly smart individual, i just don't give a shit...

i actually care about stuff....mainly stuff related to aesthetics...and that's an enormous amount of stuff cause even driving in traffic can have a value in aesthetics...patterns...rhythms...just like art, life, physics, music, the hill behind my house etc...

meanwhile "survival and profit" seem to be capturing the spotlight more so than ever and the hallucination deriving from that is pissing me off...i know, it's pissing off a few other people as well, so what?

all i can say is don't create useless traffic by driving slow and listen to nusrat...

whatever becomes of me is irrelevant because i don't know what "me" is or what to "become" means...

tiny diagonal slits are cut across the veil of perception and suddenly the perception mutates...it was hard edged and menacing just a little while ago and now it has softened and the colours are warmer and the sounds are velvet and the smells...the smells are made of memories and they contain it all.

a view of the other reality...the one kept under lock and key by our fears, fears have also incarnated and live among the good people to preserve and prolong the struggle, this struggle isn't real as one can easily discover but it's projected as real and maya gets another chance at confusing and alienating the good people.

there's an invitation i offer to all...an invitation to disregard the plan at hand even if for a couple of hours and look for a veil to slice and to look through it and let the warmth of the other side speak of life without pain, life without sorrow and life with beauty and overwhelming joy and peace.

i don't really know how many out there like me feel the need to express opinions, fears, hopes, wishes or just plain ideas...i know i do.

one could start to divide and subdivide the whole big mess in many different subjects with relative offshoots but i do not have that kind of scientific attitude...i tend to deal with things in a random fashion even though i'm well aware of the fact that it's not always to my advantage or to the advantage of the point i'm trying to make... but in a way all things seem to be connected to each other even if an apparent remote way.

take the question of the "arts" or even just taste/aesthetics (as in good and bad taste)... the point about the gradually increasing drop in the amount of anything even remotely valid from an aesthetic standpoint has been made many times in numerous venues... what hasn't been explored enough (in my humble opinion) is the connection between lack of taste (or straight bad taste) and the psychotic disorders (even apparently mild ones) derived by lack of actual, relevant information and education and also the almost pathological drive for acquiring wealth...or good ol' plain greed.

we're living in an age of conflicts between civilizations...not interstellar ones, the earthly variety....

we're here in the western hemisphere (both geographically and culturally) clinging desperately to our supposed values of freedom and justice as we're facing an apparent assault from cultures diametrically opposed to what we built all this stuff upon and yet for 99,9% of us out here what still matters the most is the accumulation of material wealth for ourselves and our loved ones...

in many cases it's a question of accumulating beyond what we can actually enjoy and also beyond we can actually afford both financially and psychologically...the image i have in mind is of the dog that keeps eating to the point of exploding.

well, put as simply as i can it means that we have gone mad in our "gold rush" and we have lost sight of things that make human the experience of being human...

for example the "arts" (music, cinema, theater, literature, figurative arts etc) have all been mutilated by this insanity through the ever-expanding maniacal use of commerce...

even if you barely watch tv or read any paper you must have realized by now that the validity of any given "work of art" is measured these days by how well it does on the charts or at the box office...

therefore the assumption is that something that doesn't do that well commercially must suck...

there was a time when for every ten shitty movies that came out there was a "deer hunter" or an "apocalypse now" etc....there was a time when albums like miles davis's "get up with it" or even zappa's "overnight sensation" made it in the top 50...

it's not a matter of "back in my days things were better"...no nostalgia from me...i hate fucking nostalgia...nothing more pathetic than seeing some forty something year olds dressed up in tight jeans and heavy metal t-shirts with fat bellies popping out at a tribute band show...i'm definitely not talking about that.

what i'm saying is that greed has slowly crept up and swallowed every single inch of creativity and replaced it with calculated, statistically proven, shareholders approved shit.

think about reality shows on tv...think about the current quality of movies in the theaters...think about commercial radio...hip-hop / fake angry rock / britney and all the other britneys etc.....

sure, it makes some people richer...maybe even you...or me (i hardly doubt that...lol) but the price to pay is a desolate landscape without any emotions, any ideas that aren't corporate approved....

humans have been proven to need a variety of stimuli in order to preserve their mental faculties intact...

just like the hamster running the wheel for hours in its cage will sooner than later develop nervous issues the same way us human beings need more than an existence dedicated to the payment of mortgages, credit cards, car loans and pop music...

the "funny" part of all this is that, when asked, a lot of people seem to enjoy the current state of things...

there's something deeply freudian in all this but that would open a whole other can of worms for which i don't have time right now since it's late and i want to go to bed....

bottomline (if there is one in this mess) is that we as a species are on a weird path...

as it turns out we're the only documented being (so far) in the universe that's able to think and analyze its own nature and question the meaning of the universe itself and yet we're caught in this psychotic tangent where we're almost denying ourselves the gift of thought and the pleasure of aesthetic contemplation in order to satisfy the basest of all animals (almost proto-cellular) instincts....

oh yes, let's not forget about the recent regurgitation of various varieties of religious fervors and their apparent consequences on the world scene (fundamentalisms, bush etc...)

first off, an obvious observation. the rate at which time is speeding by is getting ridiculous...

some say it's an effect that increases in intensity proportional to aging...last year i had instead this bizarre idea of a cosmic conspiracy where time was being manipulated directly or as a consequence of a more mysterious plan to modify or bring to an anticipated end this experiment called "universe".

all physicists seem to agree over the fact that during the first few millionths of a second that followed the big-bang all laws of physics were shaped from a crude form to a more refined one...gravity, electromagnetism etc included.

one could easily (or maybe not so easily) imagine a situation in which the laws of physics at the time of their formation could have been set in a completely different manner...in my ignorance i tend to imagine that the chips fell where they did due to a series of reactions initiated by a "cause" that could have just as easily made them fall in who knows how many trillions of other combinations...maybe the universe would have been carved out of cheese or maybe it would have turned into a medium size bowling alley with visible antimatter and super nova sized balls...

some superior intelligence somewhere out there between bakersfield and alpha centauri might have found the genetic code of time and started messing with its content maybe from the standpoint of a future past or a past present just to screw with our collective brains or for a much higher purpose...

who knows?...nothing surprises me anymore...the fact that people supposedly reelected mr.bush based on moral values is in itself a lot stranger and much worthier of a sci-fi B movie than all the crap i just talked about.

.......musically i seem to have "retreated" even more to what some people may call obscure music. i practically only listen to ethnic music from north africa, middle east and india. a lot of classical stuff, lately especially scriabin, schoenberg and bach. also lots of electronic music...god bless squarepusher, one of the few who are taking the medium somewhere these days. shawn lane, hendrix, jaco, miles, bird,trane, jarret...all angels in my kitchen.

god knows it's a sad day out there musically and probably i should say from a human standpoint as well. commerce has always been part of the game but i doubt it ever reached these levels...

i try to imagine being 14 years old and being bombarded by the absolute putrid shit that's being passed for music or education or information by the mass media...the young ones don't stand a single chance. bought, packaged and sold to the gods of wall street without even realizing what's going on or even being given the tools to realize it.

i don't think it's by accident that the phenomenon of "reality shows" got to be as huge as it turned out to be...the fine trickery of calling REALITY something that is OBVIOUSLY not real can only be interpreted as an attempt at modifying people's process of perception...it's passed as entertainment but it's clearly a lot more than that since people seem to be ready and willing to do anything just to get to audition to one of these monstrosities... humiliation, pain, fear etc... it's the glaring demonstration that the only things being valued currently are fame, celebrity and cash.

here's looking at 2005 with the hope for a growth in human consciousness and freedom from the chains of materiality.

...george harrison died on this day 3 years ago, a thought goes to him, an amazing musician, a beautiful spirit.

...so "in the name of mozart" has been out for 2 months now and it appears that so many people have gotten into it already...i've received hundreds of emails from all over the world and keep getting more daily praising the album and expressing their thoughts on my music and music in general...it's so great to read all the thoughts that people want to share with me about artistic issues etc...i answer to each and every single person who writes, sometimes it might take a bit longer due to things i need to do too like eat, sleep, record etc...but eventually i do reply to all who write, thank you to all of you from the bottom of my heart.

......and then there's the "specialized press"...all those who write about musicians' works for a living either in magazines or on webzines....

most of them have shown intelligence and knowledge on the subject of music but some other ones (the minority i should add) are repeating the same clichés ad nauseam...in my personal case (but it extends to other artists as well) i've been "criticized" by some so called METAL press for releasing an album of music composed by mozart that i chose to play on an acoustic guitar....ahhhh, how dare i turn my back to the true metal and how dared my label send my album as a promo to this particularly offended "defender of true metal"? ...that's some funny shit.

now the point i want to make very clear is that i believe, rather, i know that music is an art form. it is free in its expression. it includes so many different styles and periods that it's demented to try and select a couple or one only on which to focus all of our energies...by restricting the range of music we expose ourselves to we do a disservice to ourselves first...it is the current major disease in music...the obsession with CATEGORIES...as if we weren't boxed enough by schools, societies, governments, media etc...it's sickening...the beauty of rock for its first 20 some years was its ability to eliminate barriers between jazz, folk, blues, indian music, classical etc and blend them all together to create some beautiful hybrids from the beatles to led zeppelin to hendrix to deep purple to zappa and lots more...

today we live in small boxes that allow us only to read certain things, listen to certain things, see certain things, do certain things and ultimately BE ONLY certain things...

i'm sorry boys&girls but this is not the way i want to live the rest of my days on this planet. there's so much breathtaking beauty in a recording by glenn gould or a solo by john coltrane...so much power and soul in a solo by hendrix or a drum solo by terry bozzio...it all expands the brain and the spirit and brings us a step closer to the truth whatever that is...should i give that up in order to make some uncreative lost soul feel better about his own existence in a mental box?...no thank you.

i listen to and i play everything, i always will...one day it could be a distorted guitar over a fast double kick and the next day it could be a clean guitar over a set of tabla with a hindustani singer...luckily the majority of you out there will realize how important it is to have a vast and varied "musical diet" but to the few ones who can't seem to shake off the neurotic fear of sticking their narrow little heads out of that industry imposed box all i can say is : try it, it feels bloody good and you might actually begin to truly enjoy music, your soul will thank you...

...it's been a long time since the last installation in the "thoughts" section of this site but i can assure it's not due to lack of thoughts...i've just been working a lot on all these different projects. i can still remember laying in bed in a mexico city hotel at 4am after a great show with MCM and thinking "...i gotta work on some music as soon as i get back to the US.." that's how the "in the name of mozart" was conceived...the "bach album" was a pretty good success and a lot of people were asking me if i was going to do more "classical" records and i had some ideas of doing some wild stuff like some wagner or schoenberg to really throw people for a loop (and of course i love those composers) but then i thought that it would make more sense structurally to move up chronologically from where bach left off...of course between bach and mozart there are lots of amazing and worthy musicians like c.p.e. bach (johann's kid) and that giant often referred to by wolfgang amadeus himself as "papa"...i'm talking about franz josef haydn whom many consider superior in more than one way to mozart himself and who taught many stars of the time from wolfie to beethoven etc...but mozart crystallizes the essence of the post bach era with all of its immediacy and lack of interest for counterpoint and other things dear to bach...
my album of mozart's music includes some of his "big hits" as well as some less familiar pieces like a movement from his c minor piano concert...
almost immediately after i finished the mozart album shawn lane died...it was a heavy blow...it still is...shawn was the climax of electric guitar playing, i talked extensively about shawn here and i'm sure i will again...he was/is an abstract connection to a pure dimension of perfection...now, a few months later after the sadness of his passing a more peaceful emotion has taken over...there's this feeling of his presence in all the moments of clarity i happen to stumble upon whether playing or listening to music or when time seems to lose meaning as the late afternoon sun is creating eerie shadows on the hill behind my house...
friends came and went last year, sounds like a cliche but when it really happens it feels pretty strange...almost like you never really knew them...i send them all my love and wish them all the best in whatever they're doing and hopefully we'll meet again.
...and then there was the MCM album...lots of fun recording that one, randy and john did a great job in new york with their tracks and when i heard them my brain was going in all directions thinking of all the possibilities...i tried to make my parts as cohesive as possible but i still managed to record ideas that range from indian music to rock to funk/jazz...it's a wild record...i cannot wait to take it on the road even if the task of even partially duplicate it on stage with only three musicians will be quite a challenge.
now i'm working on the "in the name of beethoven" album and i took a brief break to record a couple of numbers for the shawn lane tribute album on lion music.
so far the beethoven album is a deeply intense experience, i'm almost done recording the first movement of the fifth symphony as it was transcribed for piano by franz liszt...this is music that has superhuman qualities...i always like to say that the holy trinity of music is bach, mozart, beethoven...bach is "god"...mozart "the holy spirit" and beethoven is " the son of god"...ludwig is the human _expression of the spirit while bach always remained on a purely mystical level and mozart flew like an angel in between the two realms.
by the end of this year i expect to have released three albums of which i'm highly proud and to have toured quite a few places from which a lot of friends have written through the years...in the meantime i hope you're all doing well even through these times of uncertainties and remember that art and music are timeless and universal.
love.......

...it's been awhile...been busy living, recording various things for various situations...doing some jamming...i'm really looking forward to this project (MCM) with randy coven and the madman himself john macaluso...i can feel the album will be one of the highlights of my career so far...i have so many new ideas to pour into it and i know those two will unleash pure hell as well...
those upcoming gigs and clinics in mexico will be good too, the first time we'll actually play in front of an audience and in a totally removed environment from the sometime jaded LA or new york crowds...i'll make sure to post pictures and reports of the "campaign" as soon as i get back from the mission...the masi/macaluso project is "on ice" for now until the MCM album is out etc...we don't want to create confusion by having 2 similar records coming out simultaneously, but it will be released in the not distant future because it too is a pretty great album...........
in the last 2 or 3 years i've become increasingly more and more fascinated by asian music, it started when my childhood friend beppe asaro from venice who also moved to LA in the 80s showed me the documentary he had completed about NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN ( www.avoicefromheaven.com ) ...it has been a gradual immersion ever since...nusrat and his party did things that defy the concept of music...he was channeling a spiritual force through his voice...then in 2001 i got to jam with rahat, his nephew who became the heir to nusrat's crown after his death...an amazing experience it was, i have the video of that private gig and maybe sometime i'll release it in some form or another...since then i got to understand (even if "understand" is not a very effective verb when talking about this music) more the eastern approach. african/middle eastern/eastern music (from algeria to indonesia) is quite at the opposite end of the spectrum from western/european tradition. in the west we developed through the centuries a very "vertical" approach with a progressively refined
understanding of harmony. polyphony is europe's greatest gift to music...when i recorded my bach album i realized fully how spectacular european contribution has been to music...i'm afraid to admit that sometime one must really read and play some of that music to really be able to visualize the depth of that vast tradition....
and then there's this music from the "other side of the planet"...at first many westerners (europeans and americans) can be a bit turned off when hearing those sounds...there isn't really any harmonic development in most of african/asian music, long, dragged out drones are common and the use of microtonality (multiple notes "in between half tones") can sound rather sour to ears used to major and minor triads and chord progressions....but that's exactly the transcendental beauty of it...western music is all about progress, development, the linear concept of time whereas this "other" music has a static approach...but static not as in unmovable or even stiff...for example in western music we have a tendency to rely a lot on the strong parts of the "beat"..."one" is vital for us...in indian music the percussionists are masters at moving the accents all over the place while retaining the full power of the "groove"...same goes for the various melodic soloists, they can take a melody and play with the grouping of notes so that over a certain beat you'll have an ever changing grouping of numbers...4 can become 5 then 7 then 9 up to whatever thay can manage to fit in and vice versa a high number can get stripped down to the lowest possible one...the use of diminution and augmentation much like the one known in baroque music is also common. but besides all the possible technical descriptions there is the music itself...one needs to "undress him/herself" of preconceived notions
and with humility let the music envelope their being...it's stuff that goes beyond the mere aesthetic experience...i felt the same moving power many times in some dark and damp church in venice when some organist would practice some lesser known bach fugue or when a choral piece by some obscure renaissance composer was being rehearsed by the local choir...that's exactly why at the end of the day all great music does the same thing...it puts us in touch with some mystery that we can't quite name or point out...how we get there doesn't really matter as long as we get there...

the whole deal with art and creativity...everybody i know claims, wants, enjoys, uses, attempts to have some kind of relationship with some form of creative expression or another.

sometimes i can't help feeling a huge rush of sarcasm, almost a cynical take about the whole deal of human condition and its dealings with art forms... although it's important and essential when trying to understand something about creativity i'm nonetheless quite disenchanted with the historical perspective, the critical view, analytical huff and puff... my greatest "recent" accomplishment is being able to jump from a strict 15th century fugue to a piece off miles' nefertiti or from a van halen tune to a 3 hour plus indian raga without having to switch mental modes... i'm slowly losing my "form filter".

same goes with technique or lack of it...i'm beginning to hear only purity of intent or simple finger wiggling routines... "pinocchio" from miles, coltrane's "naima"...sufi music, some blues from some destitute alcoholic in early 900s missisippi etc all have the same inner gemlike quality of intent that can be felt in any of bach's masses or schoemberg's pierrot lunaire. the same old saying about that idiot that keeps staring at the poet's finger who's instead pointing at the moon... old/new, fast/slow, complex/elementary, eastern/western...simple coatings, important ones, great to look at and understand and learn to use and appreciate but the human element that sparks the whole process, the internal combustion is too often overlooked. that's what somehow fascinates me...the fact that this mean of expression so direct so pure can be diluted and be made a simple vehicle for entertainment...the exorcism of art. it's way too easy to go off on how brutally stupid the "business of music" has rendered most of the world's audiences...on purpose? maybe...that's worth a whole bloody book or at least a good yell match at the local pub, but....

...hold on, the leaf blowers "people" are outside on my street right now, another good topic waiting to happen...the history of self inflicted torture...how it reflects on our nerve stimuli and our perception/rejection of certain pitches and rhythmical sequences...comeon, no one can really believe that chasing some leaves from one end of the street to another using some horribly loud and atrocious sounding device could only be a practical matter...the psychological correlations are too tempting...what other subtler "noises" are we trying to drown?...

anyway, back to the original line of thought, a shell? that's all is left of music? glenn gould's record of the 2 part inventions is playing right now (the leaf blowers have left god bless them...), i hear glenn's use of bach's own vehicle to carry some pretty universal messages to the rest of...the universe (after all glenn's goldbergs are still traveling well outside the solar system as we speak courtesy of NASA).it moves me, it's an oversimplistic statement i know, but it's a very archaic one and very human one as well...us, humans, the species blessed/cursed with enough intelligence to realize we're of the universe but not enough intelligence to realize why and how, we, humans have this "skill" to evoke a sense of the mysteries that surround us by practicing this craft we call art. art is the only link we have with the unknown, religions are too knee deep in neurotic moral dilemmas to even begin to compete with art...and yet, mankind's relationship with the arts is very superficial at best even if all of us, including the accountant that just spent 8 hours doing somebody's books, have "those moments" those fleeting instants where we perceive a different way of looking at all things...we see the "poetry" of things as opposed to its "prose" counterpart and THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT ART DOES in its many forms, shapes, appearances, styles, periods...we are just as "improbable" as art is therefore i personally welcome that and extend the invitation to all of you to try and come to terms with its disarming message of surrender to beauty, beauty equal to the mystery that contains us/it all...

one thing that drives me absolutely insane is the ever expanding obsession with what's new...

"have you heard the new by such and such?"... "did you see the latest movie by such and such?"...

the west of consumption and commerce is all about "the new, the latest"... i know people, some of them close (well not that much anymore thank god...) that will denigrate anything in music that's a couple of years old or at the very least they'll patronize you for having the audacity of listening to music that's not "current".

sometimes i caught myself defending my choices of music in the car or at home from the ironic remarks of people who just couldn't see why i would listen to stuff that's 10, 20 or sometimes (god forgive me) 40 years old...

imagine that i still have a pretty vast collection of cassette tapes (some of them are quite old) and i still relish each and every level of hiss coming from them and their ever increasing loss of dynamics.

it feels like listening to music through the lens of time, the tape hiss adds a degree of "historical quality" that a cd cannot deliver with its pristine and sometime sterile sound, it's psychological obviously but a quality nonetheless...

but i do love good sound, i'm not a moron... hearing glenn gould humming clearly behind the goldberg variations is vital, the buzz coming from hendrix's marshall in the studio is quite musical in its own unintended way.

and i do love a lot of great new music and great new art...the problem is finding it unfortunately because not only the emphasis is on the "new" factor but also on the "popularity" and mass acceptance of the product...

i'm a guy who loves obscure, unpopular music recorded badly 30 or more years ago and reproduced on less than "state of the art" equipment...

i know they must be working on a new law somewhere to outlaw such deviant practices... without getting in a long and tedious dissertation on what art really is and why we should all be conscious of what we're "consuming" at any given time (fast food or gourmet cuisine) let's just say that new for new sake is evil and plain dumb.

if you're so determined to be a good, faithful soldier for the industries that sell you all your precious "new this and new that" at least be aware of your status of pawn in the game of commerce (i know people that enjoy that role immensely partly because of their past of privations...)

it's also good practice, i noticed, to let some time pass from the moment something is "new"...allowing some distance from the "novelty factor" increases the chances of objectivity and lets you see whatever qualities might be contained in the work without being distracted by the relationship it might have with the calendar.

i realize it's hard to ask people to stop trying to fit in with the "now crowd", it's a way of feeling alive and to justify one's existence when not much else is there to help them do that...congenital ignorance, acquired immunity from commerce deficiency syndrome or just plain lack of a sense of originality.

an artist's crowning achievement is his death... the stamp of approval of history, instant access to the olympus of greats... the world is too busy with more important things to deal with than to spend time and energies nurturing and appreciating men who are still breathing... it's a lot more "romantic" to read about them after they died lonely and broke...

who would want to put up with somebody like van gogh in everyday life without the benefit of knowing that those weird canvases in his bedroom will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a few decades later? only then it all becomes acceptable and "artistic", the insanity becomes tempered by the knowledge that the man was a "genius", a certified genius, the books, documentaries and money generated posthumously say so (a movie doesn't hurt either)... creativity is best served cold in the great buffet of history.

after bach's death his widow had to pretty much beg to try and get a pension to end her days in dignity since her late husband had died in relative obscurity writing music that nobody wanted to hear let alone play. mendelssohn took it upon himself to "resurrect" the master a century later and even then it took another hundred or so years before the idea of bach as a universal genius started trickling down to the "general public".

what's my bloody point? i have no idea... i just watched a movie on jackson pollock and the story is the same, artists like little boys, lost, scared, "screaming" their pain from being so hyper sensitive... dysfunctional bunch... much better to learn to live like the rest of real adjusted people with their shit together, their real jobs, their bills all paid in time, no need to deviate from a safe path... creative arts are a symptom of a disease and as such should be discouraged from an early age. but there will always be those sick individuals who still succumb to the urges of "creativity" and will "litter" the sidelines of this otherwise proudly "normal" society of ours...

oh well, we'll still watch the movies and feel good afterwards when we can "safely" call them "geniuses"...

...these moments of quite and desolated contemplation are the cardinal points, sorts of silent milestones along one's erratic life. they all seem connected together or better yet they seem to connect brief moments of an existence... on one hand you have this unavoidable presence made of everyday stuff put in a convoluted succession of small and for the most part irrelevant events that when piled upon one another make the "matter of a lifetime"... the prose of living...

poetry on the other hand belongs to these other moments i'm talking about, it descends upon everybody but not everybody surrenders to it, maybe because it hardly is of any use, it's rather annoying at times. i've lived outside the realm of expectations despite the prose of life being far more present than the poetry or maybe it's a matter of value of their currency... for a thousand some days of daily uneventful carrying-ons there are a couple of minutes of complete abandon to the shattering presence of... that. art must overwhelm, we must approach it with respect and almost fear, it is divine stuff and if you don't feel it you are dead. dead in the sense of non existing outside the animal parameters of survival...

sure, i know, we're animals as well and what we have is a few "degrees more" of rationality and processing capabilities (which accidentally are enough to separate us from the closest primate but not enough to spare us the torture of missing to grasp the "full picture" by a couple of inches...) so it might very well be that art does just that, it processes through symbols dug up from the collective subconscious the quiet and not so quiet desperation of being at the mercy of "god only knows what" and making it an aesthetic event... but then again... art is dead... long live arthur...

...glenn gould (the "eccentric" god of the piano of the 20th century) was obsessed with solitude, he saw self removal from the social aspects of making music or art as the only way to achieve objectivity and eventually ecstasy...

as the years go by i find myself more and more attracted if not forced in that direction... i still enjoy "feeling the pulse" of the performer/improviser/composer doing his "thing" in front of me (sounds dirty doesn't it?) but the level of uncomfortable closeness to "others" who might interfere with my experience of the artist has been steadily rising...

there is a definite difference of experience in listening to music in the car, at home or at a concert... personally i favor the car by far... in my car i clearly "go back" to a prenatal phase, it's a womb, it's me in a shell away from the world while in the world and while moving through the world and the designated area for acoustical impulses in my neurological cosmos is more receptive than ever. if i'm in the car listening to music at night things get even better, besides the lack of traffic at 3 am which saves me from distracting thoughts of mounting a grenade launcher on the hood (please, don't drive under 40mph in front of me around town...) the whole experience becomes almost sublime at times...

darkness favors the reception of pitches (why do you think harmony is way more developed in areas of the world where the sun doesn't shine much while in tropical places physicality and rhythm are the centerpiece?)... i can appreciate all the voicings of a fugue by bach in semi or total darkness while if i'm sitting by the ocean at noon in july all i want is a bright colored drink watching some girl shaking "it" to anything with a pumping beat...

also, i recently started developing a weird personal response to playing in front of people... on a couple of recent occasions while jamming with friends at parties or at some musical event i felt discomfort in projecting my perception of what i was doing onto the listeners... something like "these people don't want to go down that road i'm heading towards"... i remember allan holdsworth saying once " i like it when nobody comes to listen to me, that's when i really play well, people always expect so many things of me and the thought of having to deliver blocks me"... expectations, spectacle, entertainment, approval/disapproval, applause, the crowd response... i really have no "entertaining desires" to fulfill; ideally people would share my view on listening to music and would "participate" in a very detached way allowing me to explore the places i want to go to and hopefully things would click... unfortunately i'm fantasizing and the "circus/gladiator/entertainer" mentality will never go away and so my appreciation for glenn gould's vision of solitude in experiencing art can only grow stronger... (kiss, madonna and britney spears fans are still advised to attend their concerts though...)