::NOISE::

Last night I journeyed to what is arguably my new favorite space in Jacksonville, the CoRK Arts District,

and found myself in the middle of several different walls of noise.

Literally. Noise.

I had seen an event invite on Facebook and, recognizing none of the bands, decided I had to fill what was an already full weekend to the brim by heading down to Riverside on a Sunday night, bringing some friends along with me.

This would turn out to be an interesting idea. In the dark of the waiting studio there were bodies moving, wearing giant masks, focused on wheatpasting their art onto cardboard boxes, while a lone figure sat with them hunched over synthesizers and pedals flashing with light. A low reverbed hum throbbed around the room. 

Last night I had my brain shaken.

I was enthralled watching the artists work together, fluidly pasting the glue and paper prints in one seamless motion, and listening to what is called “noisebient” music. I absorbed the multicolored flashing lights into my bloodstream and felt my cells vibrate. Though I was admittedly skeptical of the “music” being played, this music with no immediately obvious rhyme or reason or melody, yet still handcrafted - I was also intrigued.

This feeling only magnified over the next two acts for which we stayed, the second immediately dividing our group’s sensibilities. While the aesthetic of the first noisebient offering was musically unintelligible, there had still been a somewhat pleasant atmosphere compared to this new act before us. There were no artists working, no lights, just two men inside of a wood frame structure, and a wall of sound. Sound like the distorted transmission of a message through the dark nethers of space.

Sound like what you might hear roaring the through the empty stretches of a silent tunnel at night.

I found myself lit up somehow by what I heard because it was a puzzle from every angle, something unique to be looked at and studied from all sides. It was not anything that would immediately be considered music to any outsider listening in, yet it was being presented as music. It was not anything that I could see myself listening to in any other scenario like at work or in the car, but it turned my brain inside out. I was simultaneously put off by the extended waves of discordance but also intrigued, and my thoughts raced to try to make sense of what I heard. I tried to make sense of the people around me and how they interpreted what we were hearing. The fact that we as a group were there together indulging the whims of these two musicians, the fact that these two people had come together and intentionally, deliberately, placed note upon note to form this soundscape.

I sat on the floor and closed my eyes, ignoring the text from my sister pleading, “can we go soon?”

No. I didn’t want to go yet. I wanted to wrap myself around this sound that was warping its way over me, making no sense. Trying to make sense. Objectively observing my visceral reactions to everything happening, thinking about the definition of music and if this could fit inside that definition, if music needs defining at all. If the questions “is this music” or “is this any good” were relevant at all.

We didn’t stay much longer as some in my group were growing restless, and on the way home it was clear that we, the six of us at the show together, were all over the place in regard to how we felt about what we had just seen. It was actually a pretty even split – two of us were really excited by what we had seen, perhaps irrationally so, two of us were on the fence or maybe didn’t even know what to think, and the remaining two were adamant about how terrible the “music” was and how absolutely unenthralled they had been… again, perhaps irrationally so.

And so we talked. I tried in vain to explain what excited me about what we had witnessed, about how I did in fact believe that it was irrelevant if the audience members thought it was music, or if anyone thought it was any good at all. The sole fact that we as an audience chose to stay and take part in something that made no inherent sense made this more of a psychological experiment than a concert. I’ll admit to being more open-minded when it comes to situations like this. Even if something is terribly unpleasant and discordant I am more than willing to give it a chance and try to derive some meaning, any meaning.

Out a lifetime spent surrounded by and studying all types of music, I’ve observed a large element of predictability in most musical types. A majority of songs will end one of a few ways, will have one of a few cadences, will have one of a few chord progressions. It’s why I find it easy to sing along to a song I’ve never heard before. But… there was nothing to be predicted about the music presented that night. There were none of the usual landmarks of a song, be it lyrics or a hook or a bass line dropping. None of it. It was a completely new listening experience for me, and it turned my brain on in a way I haven’t felt in a while. I felt buzzed, like I had closed my fingers around an electric fence, finding myself accidentally trapped. 

I felt, and I feel this now, the call of pure creation crying out for me. If two people my age can stand before a crowd and hurl dark frequencies around in the pitch black studio at a probably obscene decibel level…. then what in the hell is stopping me from pursuing any of my creative interests? If they can do it then I sure as hell can. Who cares if what I create is any good? Who cares if anything is ever any good?

Let me repeat that, for emphasis, for my own future reference: Who cares if what I create is any good?

It seems so simple in this moment of clarity. It is not the creation that matters so much as the act of creation. I know that I am not alone in my open desire to see what other people are creating in all of the wild and varied ways that thought manifests into tangible reality. I know it. I know that there are people who want to see what I am up to as much as I want to see what others are doing, and the only thing stopping me from reaching these people is a lily-livered lack of courage.

A waning lack of courage, might I add.

That is what touched me more than anything else that night sitting in the darkness with ambient static sound surrounding me – the implied courage it takes to stand before a crowd of people and play something completely unconventional. The balls to plug in your amps and guitars and say here goes nothing (everything). Here, this, is what I have been working on.

Christ, I’m so thankful for people with guts.

Verse Versus

 

Thank you, to whomever it is

that anonymous thanks belong,

for making the scratching of pen on paper

sound productive by default

so I can look like I am working when I am really

indulging last night’s thoughts and leftover bits of song;

of elbow patches on worn professor jackets

made of woolen tweed.

Lecherous, indeed.

Thanks to you for useless business meetings

that would be a waste of time except for

this sacred stolen opportunity

to withdraw, to leave my body here

and scratch my way back to lasers dancing

on layers of oak branches and their leaves.

Now back, I am relieved.

Thank you for the Mason-Dixon line that separates

the frosty numbness of my unprotected spine

from the golden-hazed warmth of the fire on my legs,

and thank you for the bodies sitting close

and leaning in,

for the words said under breath

to light my ears and incite sin.

Thanks for the ability to lay back

my head in solemn ecstasy,

my every breath a prayer wrapped in grins

and soaked in guitar necks next to me-

thanks for what this might begin.

I will not thank you, however,

for another entry into the annals of the bittersweet,

as if I needed more disdain for desks.

I already knew that elsewhere there are wooden decks

that lead to marshy water streets -

you didn’t need to rub it in.

You really didn’t need to remind me

of art farms and babies sleeping wrapped up in our poetry

with lumbering canines drinking sips of stolen wine

choosing my feet to slumber under – mine.

But thanks nonetheless for name-dropping peers

and multi-colored mason jars hued by Belgian beer.

Thank you for a row of twenty-somethings children

dangling drunken feet from docks

too skinny for things like mortality

or ticking hands on time bomb clocks.

Wordless Wednesday: A Sea of Me

Sitting for a watercolor portrait workshop

Macabre

3-4

Acrid smoke sneaks through the vents into my lungs,
vapor leaking out from under the hood.
You said you'd fix it but I got that feeling you never would.

And the barriers shatter silently in anticlimax,
I doff my hats at invisible lines marred by soft soled shoes.

I knew it'd be me. I called it, me not you.
Words from the macabre, a tryst or two-
I knew it'd be me. Not you.

Figures

 

written 2-1

I can see the pages lined up before me,
blank except that on closer inspection I can see
the faintest lines of sketched charcoal begin to emerge.

The word “emerge” begs the question -
have these lines been etched into my skin already? Have they always been here?
I am trying to train my eyes, taking care to note the details of each and every thing I see...
including these lines, hand drawn by Clotho herself.

The word “emerge” begs the question -
have I simply been submerged? Perhaps the lush valleys and stretched out mountain ranges,
supported by my calcium deposits and fault lines,
have owned this shape forever and I am just now touring the countryside.

This is how I feel today.
I feel like a walking composition of thick and thin strokes,
contoured and imperfect but art nonetheless.
I am content with this smudged canvas full of hand drawn shapes
marked by experienced distortion, proportions ever so slightly skewed.

I am content because I know that this pen is not held by only my hands
but by the collective of schooled hands that have written these same words,
sketched these lines, fingered these melodies.

Hands that are smooth, gnarled, hairy, dainty.
Such different but unified hands that work with the strength of laughter and impulsion,
the obsessive desire to connect through creation.

Large hands that hold old guitars just so,
roughly belying a grace that explains the glow
rising like steam off of golden-haired fingers -
small hands that lovingly press reality into amorphous blobs
of compacted dirt, singing the female form electric and
imprinting heartbeats into static clay.

Hands that hold my face and brush back my hair,
hands that speak louder than any voice I have ever heard.
Hands that sketch through touch, creating a portrait of my landscapes.
I will wear these fingerprints for all to see.

Spoken Word

1-24

The first wobbly step outside of my comfort zone has been taken - not just reading my words in front of a group of people that I know, but reading in front of one of my adopted mentors in writing...

It always takes me off guard when my physical reactions are completely out of sync with my emotional status - take, for instance, the heart of mine that began to pound against the walls of my chest in excitement and panic and no small element of “what the fuck are you doing on stage in a fur coat right now?!”

But, like I know would be,
I was proud as shit of myself, and inspired.

my one picture from that night

 

 

 

Me mid-sentence: taken by GM Palmer

my friend Alex: taken by GM Palmer

Banjo and Sharpies

Some nights are for coloring notebooks and shoes with sharpies in a tapas bar at the beach. 
For driving in the drizzly rain, looking at the hat (that I made!) warming my little sister's head, 
singing loudly to Frank Ocean.

Some nights are for fingers flashing wildly, on strings made of steel on stretched drum, on strings made of nature and knots. For music and the hum of vibrations, pleasant to my ear and my life.

Chocolate Phillies

8-27

These words are meant for typing, no pen and paper today.

There is a meaning to all of this, a swirl of beauty for me to collect together and make sense of.
It will happen, I’m sure of it.

This one is a dark one, a beautiful one and a strange one.
Intelligent and unschooled, untamed.
He is the most Lost of them all, I think, and one who sunk in without intention on anybody’s part.
An accidental friend, a side effect that turned into a function all his own.

I’m writing to commemorate, I think, as I’m scared that this beauty is about to be altered by institution.

Burro

8-29: Intoxication at Burro

And, well, this is a strange mixture.

And I don’t know that I ever anticipated that the soft guitar would lift me this way, would send me off. The change in genre was a swift one, switching from packs of young men screaming and punching their way into musical oblivion...to the sweet delicate girl with her fingers perched in practiced positions on dusty silver strings.

I am spending the next few seconds embracing the puff of air that rushed over me as you slipped past, leaving perfumed wind in your wake. The sudden coolness spreads like frozen wildfires in a flash over the whole of me, and I am dumbstruck, helpless to move or breathe until that instant spell of yours is broken.

What a feeling it is
to see men where once
there were boys

What a feeling it is
to feel the beauty
in all of this noise

Jewel Case

In another room a man has a stack of jewel cases in his hand, clacking as they shift. He stands, as stone might, before hastily crafted wooden shelves. With a pattern of colors chosen randomly and shifting from visit to visit, the CDs lay at rest in their shiny and encrusted homes.

Stacks of clacking jewel encrusted tomes
Aural manuals, audible missives of tones
Collected into groups of chords and arrays of voicings
An auditorium of musical expression.

In another room, he carefully peruses the vast selection before him.

Astounded that this grand display of a collective thousands of hours spent in recording studios, tour buses, and lonely 3 am writing sessions is still only a miserably scant selection compared to the entirety of rehearsal spaces, thrift store instruments and boardroom meetings that make up all of the cds in the world.

Dreaming mature thoughts

 

8-16

I am not afraid of my mind.

If anything, I am eager to plunder the hidden depths for epiphanies and...

Well, and whatever else is hanging out, silent, taking up residence in the folds of my lobes.

Fruit of my loins
Folds of my lobes


I have no brain for mundanity today. How can I focus on paperwork when there is uncharted territory in my possession begging for me to explore?

“Let’s get a little deeper, friend.
You have no idea where I can take you -
and I want to show it all.”

I have a tinge of that uneasy feeling, 
the feeling of squashed down compression with a hint of nausea - primarily because I keep forgetting to breathe.
The lines between dreams and reality have been blurred, perhaps even irrevocably.

Vestige

Written in the spring of 2006

Your excitement lights me up like a pinball machine
the vibrance in my eyes reflecting the colors of your shirt
Your chapped lips dance and your tongue screams for freedom
the ideas that spew hit my reflexes like a man entitled MD

Your apathetic intelligence rings so familiar and warm
makes my mouth mimic yours and makes me want
to let your smoke drift from my softer lips

so that my smoke
and your words

can play along the ceiling of your truck

Every now and then I revisit old words that I have written, and I am always struck by what I create. Not that it they are anything of exceeding beauty or depth or originality...but that they are mine.