ypsilanti's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- this is our music when i get a chance to slow down and look closer at everything around me... that's when jets really start to crash into each other, fireworks go in reverse (backwards through the sky), i figure out the somehow secret importance in every off-hand remark anyone ever made without thinking about what they were saying anytime in the past six years. there's merit and genius in almost everything. i feel really good about being sick right now because it's given me a chance to stay in bed until 7:30 in the afternoon, and move so slow i can see past all these flames and fireballs into the actual moments of heat and true sparks... for example.. a good two or three or maybe even four weeks ago now, it was art fair, and everything around me made me sick. working all day in the hottest days of a pretty syrup-paced and equally sick month. nothing but violence and cruelty in the name of money anywhere you looked. that's no big surprise, but magnify it by a thousand, paint it your least favorite color and put it right outside of every door you open. that's what art fair is like. i found an ornette coleman record called "THIS IS OUR MUSIC". ornette has always been one of my favorite improvisers and jazz players, ever of always. the first jazz record i ever bought and really checked out was "ORNETTE ON TENOR", in part because i was disgusted by the people i knew who told me i would be stoked on miles davis or bill evans. i never even heard it and i thought all that straight-ahead shit sounded like resturaunt music. i guess the covers for miles davis records reminded me too much of the crappy easy-listening records i would pull out of thrift store dumpsters and be annoyed and disappointed by before i tried to sell them or just put them back in the dumpster.. ornette had some strange and simple thing going on with bold text and subdued but powerful colors on his record covers. the aesthetic brought me in and the music just freaked me out. no way i could understand it when i heard it for the first time, much like the scissor girls, jaks, the melvins, breadwinner, naked city and all the other stuff i was listening to by the end of 1994. i couldn't even tell if i liked it, but i knew it was important, so i kept buying records, and kept the music in my coughsyrup head for as long as i kept anything else. it fit like everything else didn't. perfect. seven years and only some advances in understanding later, i'm leaving an ornette coleman record at your house while we drive out into the woods to see secret places and return to the car several hours later to find the window smashed out and the lock fucked with but nothing taken. i wonder if i'll make it to my twenty-fifth. i drop you off and your housemates move or misplace my record, and i all but forget about it, as much as i can ever forget about anything. weeks pass. i made it to twenty five, not before more glass is broken. things start making more and less sense at exactly the same time. i feel beauty and space and understanding at the same time i feel cold and crowded and ignored and disregarded. sometime today you found my record, along with the cd discography of the highwater-wearing 1995 emo freaks i got for my married friend. everyone is happy. i walk home and think out loud, jittering with energy and wobbling with sickness. everything seems to happen in extremes at once, like you can only fly so far across the world before you're right back where you are. finally it's three in the morning, and i'm awake and alive and coughing until my lungs feel like fiberglass. i listened to belle and sebastian and then the dead milkmen and then something else on the headphones, half asleep and then totally feeling like i've never even slept in my life... i watch the end of the blues brothers with my also very sick roomate. it's ridiculous. car crash after bombastic, unfathomably silly car crash. i know i've seen the movie before, but maybe back then i was less sensetive to unrealistic or over-the-top elements. this was really cool. i felt like the twenty minutes i saw of the movie lasted for about an hour. then i'm the only one awake, and i put on my hard-fought ornette coleman record, the first record all day that i actually turn the speakers on for. the right speaker is broken anyway, so it only half-way matters anyway.. inside the sleeve is what seems to be a single page from a magazine. as the music plays, i begin to feel some sort of necessary connection and relationship with sound. not necessarialy understanding or empathy, but without a doubt relation and history.. a place inside myself that has been built on the foundation of this music and the times i've had along side the ideas it helped me understand. the page is from the May 11, 1961 issue of Downbeat, a long-running jazz magazine. the first thing on the page is a review of the record i'm listening to. an awful review. a goddamned awful review. one of a possible five stars. "poor". endless and merciless disection of ornette and cohort's technical ineptitude. the idea that 14 year old ametures would be embarrassed to play this music, let alone these older "professionals". mistakes. embarassment. the dismisal of what some have called genius. "I do not understand the babblings of my two year old daughter. Does this make those sounds profound? Hardly." you gotta listen closer, dude. so amazing that as i listen to something so profound, so glistening and important.. 40 fucking years later... critics never got it right then, just as they miss out now. ridiculous car crash and over-the-top blind date after bombastic wedding and arena-scale rock and roll supertour. all of this smoke in the sky, so many different colors and shapes and meanwhile, life behind the stars continues uneffected and undetected by everyone who makes their living trying to figure it out. beauty is a rare thing, fifteen years before i was born and twenty five after. this is our music. flashpapr plays a show in ann arbor tomorrow night and then leaves the next morning for east coast tour. sooner than later we'll have a new record. it's weird to have two years between each record, but it's perfect, too. sad and uniformed, sad and informed, not sad and not uniformed. fuck. i find myself writing here less and less and less. why is this? thank you for all your help. thank you for listening. ******* listen to: francios hardy, bob dylan, esg, the kinks, otis redding, ornette coleman, belle and sebastian, the zombies, detroit music. 3:55 a.m. - 8.15.01 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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