ON AND OFF THE ROAD #15

An estranged son of Osama Bin Laden is quoted as stating that his father hated the enemy more than he loved his family. This strikes me as about as perfect a definition of war as one can devise. Hating your enemy more than you love your…fill in the blank. 

I played a solo show in Krakow last week. My time in the Polish city coincided with the 21st annual Festival of Jewish Culture. On my afternoon off, I attended a lecture by lapsed American academic  Daniel Pipes. As the talk was held in an active synagogue, all the men were requested to cover their heads and Pipes' careless positioning of his kipa yanked a clump of uncooperative hair away from the rest of his coif, producing the disconcerting appearance of a crow's beak agape and silently squaking for help from the back of his scalp. Unfortunately, this was the most uplifting feature of the event. Pipes spent his hour making the case for why Europe will soon become "Eurabia," ruled by sharia, with a mosque on every corner and schoolchildren genuflecting towards Mecca. His prescription for dealing with this imminent threat was expulsion and violence. After an hour of enumerating the many ways that Islam is fundamentally at odds with the humanism of Christian tradition, Pipes, responding to a question from the audience, expressed the fear that Christians might have to leave Europe to avoid persecution, if they were not in fact driven out. It strikes me that a temple, in a city once home to 250,000 Jews and currently, (in large part thanks to the ignoble exploitation of "Christian" values),  coddling a precious 192, might not be the ideal venue for expressing such fears. Pipes continued the question and answer session with the observation that the Front National in France exists because of the large Muslim presence in the country. While ignorant of both French history and the history of the FN, it would seem unnecessary to point out that this is tantamount to saying the Nazis existed because of the Jews. In any case, by this point I'd had enough. My own attempts at questioning the lunatic at the podium resulted in more of the same, (albeit with loud applause from a good part of the audience and thanks from the the ushers). I left the synagogue for sound-check, stopping on the way to change into my Djellaba and Moroccan slippers. Just playing my part in the inexorable advance of Islamic influence. Although my son says the pointed hood makes me look like I belong to the KKK. (They didn't take that baby away..!)

I remember, before the Berlin Wall came down, going to the Polish embassy in Vienna to get my visa. Growing up in a college town in Massachusetts, with stints in New York and Switzerland, antisemitism was something I heard about but didn't experience personally. (The big music festival where my parents weren't invited because "the director hates Jews" was one refrain.) I was completely unprepared for the look from the middle-aged, Polish clerk at the embassy counter in Vienna, whose blue eyes, perfectly framed by her stiff blonde flip, focused her disdain on the wondering Jew aiming perhaps to--what?--re-populate her decimated, but at least Jew-less homeland? This look, which has stayed with me for decades, I know because I possess it myself. It's the same annihilating stare I  fire at Hassidim on the streets of New York. If only looks could kill!  In Vienna, where I played a few days before Krakow, I had a similar experience with another blond, disdainful head. This time male and much more recent. The desk clerk at my hotel when I asked how to get to the holocaust memorial. 

And yet, Krakow and Vienna are two of my favorite cities. Places where I've had magnificent moments of revelry and music. Where the majesty and elegance of humanity are abundantly evident. And where people laugh freely--or so it seems when I'm heading east from the sad plains of Germany. This isn't a put-down of Germany. In fact, I'm coming to believe that the Germans are so sad out of a certain inchoate sense of the "perfection" of their society and the attendant emotional void. It's sad that there's nothing to be sad about here. Problems? What problems!? 

In the garden of the Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund a few days ago, I performed live music to the videos of Pat Arnao. (Again, dressed for the stage in Djellaba and babouches.) My palette of samples and loops included Mahalia Jackson's Trouble of the World at one eighth original speed. I'm guessing a more wailing lament hasn't been heard in these parts for some time. The accompanying video is from a series "I Wasn't Laughing Then." The artist refers to them as "moving paintings." 

Since the rawness of emotion is expressed without any imposition of morality, it is free of sentiment. As a provocation to the viewer to interpret any meaning subjectively and internally, it creates a personal, spiritual experience that, at this late stage of human development, I would have hoped would have replaced religion. 2010 Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson, in a recent comment on God, post-Creation and contemplating a purer time, observes that "…God remembers his long-abandoned artistry--morality has come to occupy his time now…" 

Some sort of moral system is necessary for us to survive with one another. But with morals come absolutes. And purpose. And the perceived lack of same in our opposites--from another country, another clique, another church--all too often leads us to hate them more than to love our own. Which is really where it all starts. Not with purpose or morals, but with creation. Not god's, but our own. As Dostoyevsky wrote, "beauty will save the world."

ON AND OFF THE ROAD #14

I sat down a couple days ago to write about a heckler at the last Small Beast, and Cory Arcangel too. And maybe something about Odd Future thrown in. My late uncle Sergiu figured in there somewhere as well--(never late, but he's dead now). And then I heard the Drake track "Dreams Money Can Buy" with the dopest sample ever: don't fuck with me. Over and over again; a flow so smooth; intimacy, in that most mercenary and unrevealing sub genre of modern pop that hip-hop has become. I thought, well, this is so beautiful and fundamentally, this column is all about beauty and this is what I have to write about. Then this afternoon I came across  Josa Peit and everything small and large became at least momentarily clear. I  know that the moment--what has come before, what comes just after--has everything to do with how it all hits you. But it's hours later--(almost a generation in today's attention span)--and I've got the headphones on as I type. "Simmerdown" is playing. Josa is singing. I can imagine the woman in the video I first saw and the woman with her hair up,  in the acoustic version. Or every woman that has made my heart skip for the last decade or three. Or I can also just hear the sound of this voice etch a river from ear to ear with a wake down to my soul. 

The last couple weeks I finally had some time to myself to listen to some music. This is kind of how it works with me. I say I don't listen to music because I'm always playing it, but that's not really true. What I really mean is that I'm listening to the same soundtrack I've always had, which means in a way I'm just listening to myself--and the things that people are always giving me--which are often quite wonderful, (even when they're not), but it's still somehow more of the same. Inbreeding. Then every once in a while--maybe not often enough--I try to listen to as much as I can. It drives me crazy and the mouse is often on fast-forward, 'because I'm thinking: "Damn! What a waste of time--I could be doing something myself instead of listening to all this shit dropping all around me." So it's a very concentrated experience. After a week or two, if I've done things right, the mash-up-mixing-kitchen-aid music machine in my brain is filled to overflowing and I'm ready to press play. Or is it called work?

Nicholas Carr, a man who thinks a lot about how people think, just wrote a book called "The Shallows." Acknowledging that reading on a screen--multiple windows, links, visuals, audibles and all the hell else--facilitate our ability to multitask, but arguing that the difficulty in actually reading through the distractions, compromises the contemplation born of total and solitary concentration. Carr likens the experience of today's computer reading to the time, mere centuries ago, when words on  page--or parchment--weren't separated by punctuation or even spaces; running together as an extreme scroll of thought. Solitary, silent reading was unheard of, writing only being meant for reading aloud. It was too physically taxing to decipher the mess on one's own.  Riding one train of thought at a time, Carr argues, allows connections to be made; builds memory. Advances the species. 

Tyler the Creator is the creative force behind Odd Future. He's 21, but raps with the rasp and tonal depth of a man 3 times his age. The video, (which he directed), to his latest single, Yonkers, features a hook illustrated by his body convulsing to the beat as he regurgitates the liquified giant cockroach he's just swallowed. This too is so beautiful. How can something so dirty be so clean? And when you look at Josa Peit you think: How can something so clean be so dirty? I get the feeling that Josa's beauty comes from never being bored. From not entertaining the possibility of being bored. And I think that Tyler finds the strands of beauty in the frantic, 24/7 efforts at evading boredom. Josa reads books while Tyler's got that screen lighting up his face. I'm more Josa than Tyler. Looking for the multi after the task. 

I think it's one fuck of a great time to look around and listen. I can't remember when I've simply opened my ears--or turned on my computer--and heard so many great sounds.  My uncle, a Romanian-Jewish gypsy who achieved quite a measure of international fame and fortune in the classical music world of the last century, told me when I was barely into double digits in this world, that if he didn't make it to the absolute top, it would be because of his lack of education. I'm sure he meant this as advice, (I didn't take), to finish school, but I took it more as his regret at not having been more universally curious at a time when he could still afford the time. Before life got in the way. Now everything's moving so fast. I heard Mos Def--(he had to make it in here somehow)!--casually refer to two generations as "ten years." Two generations!

Besides the hook, my favorite part of "Dreams Money Can Buy," is when Drake all of a sudden grabs his lead pipe of a lyric and with superhuman strength bends it back and down with an effortless twist. You have to hear him do it; hear what happens to the phrase, but I can tell you it's about a fat ass in the middle of summer. A hard road down leads to a high moment of beauty and laughter. And of course: "Don't Fuck With Me." 

That  sample from the Drake jam, came off Jai Paul's BTSTU where it doesn't have nearly the same impact. I'm thinking--how can I fuck this up further?