The garlic I bought at the supermarket last week had a tag on it that said "Made in China." Let me repeat that: I went to the store in Dortmund, Germany and bought a head of garlic that was imported from China. It's been about 25 years since I was in China, but I have this feeling that it's still far away--somewhere on the other side of the world. I remember it took a long time and cost a lot of money to get back to Europe from China. It cost so much, that I had to spend a long time in Paris before I had enough money for the flight back home to New York. But that's another story. I've been busy lately, but as far as I know, Germany is still part of Europe, as is Italy--(those two countries got along famously a while back)--not to mention Greece, Spain and Portugal, though I do understand the ruffled feathers in those relationships. Wouldn't it make some sense to buy stuff from those countries rather than just give them money? But that's another story too. In any case, if I wanted garlic badly enough, I could practically walk to Italy and pull it out of the ground. Hell, there are parts of Italy where the majority mother tongue is German. So what the hell is that Chinese garlic doing in my local produce rack? How little do those people pulling the garlic out of the ground in Szechuan Province have to get paid for it to be worthwhile for Angela Merkel and Co. to buy their fucking garlic before looking closer to home? So that's the bad news of the month.
The good news is that on the opposite coast of the Mediterranean from where we should be buying garlic, millions are buying into an idea most of us over here have pretty much given up on. From Western Sahara to Bahrain, something unexpected actually started happening. This is probably the first real news since the fall of the Berlin Wall, though I would look even farther back--to the 60s for anything approaching this level of positive surprise and global influence. For the last generation or 2, we've been treading water creatively and politically. Tentativeness--maintaining the status quo--has been the order of the day. The visual arts have languished behind an overarching scrim of decorativeness. Art music has bitten back at atonality and the avante garde in favor of minimalist soundscapes and ultimate tonality. Pop music simpers along with the limp-dick cleverness of the likes of Sufjan Stevens and The Decemberists topping the Billboard Charts. (Are you kidding me?) We've all been coasting along, inured to catastrophe or euphoria; trying to figure out what to do next. I think this thing going on south of the border, down Egypt way, might just shake things up enough to wake us all up. Change the whole creative zeitgeist.
At the end of the month, with my band Botanica, I'll be doing a couple of programs of music, food and scenes from the novels of Haruki Murakami, the great Japanese writer. South of the Border, Down Mexico Way--(West of the Sun)--is on the menu. (We're going for a bit more of the Patsy as opposed to the Frankie…) Murakami is a true post-nuclear age artist. People appear and disappear in his stories. Worlds and levels of perception coexist easily within and without the corporeal frame of body and mind. Though literally surreal, Murakami's stories evince little of the fantastical or fantastically complicated fabrications that so annoy me in so-called magical realism. (Harry Potter for adults). Murakami's tales are informed by the reality of quantum physics and the possibilities of string theory. The basic notion that the place of a thing is based on perception; that things can be in more places that one at the same time--or so it seems; that juggling an existence on more than one plane might be just as natural as eating Chinese garlic in Germany. I don't think Murakami would have been possible without science from Max Planck to Maldacena.
So let's raise our glasses to interdisciplinary, trans-global, cross-generational movement. And don't let anybody tell you it's all about Facebook. Technology's great, but bullshit in and bullshit out--and humans still shovel the shit. Nobody virtually burns.
Maybe the revolutionaries south of the border will somehow help kick the Decemberists off the charts.
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