I should have made it to the chapel today. There was still time before I left. But I got distracted. Excuses excuses. I don’t know if one trip will be enough, given the uncertainty of my use of the place as my private recording studio.
Listening to some particularly cranky Joe Frank last night at the Bakeway reminds me why we keep our heroes at a distance. He complains about how much better Ira Glass does compared to him, and how much funding he gets while he (Joe Frank) gets a single conspicuously paltry salary. Glass is heard on hundreds of NPR affiliates, Joe Frank on one single station.
In the past he has intruded on the flow of things with asides about how much it costs him, personally, to pay the telephone interview subjects (it was $200 when he mentioned it). Of late I see him waxing somewhere between embittered and needlessly interactive on Facebook, sowing hatred for DJT when really, there seems no need to cultivate that emotion. Whoever is there already is there and not going back.
So I keep Joe Frank where I’ve known him best, and that is at his best on KCRW.
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I did not sleep on the 2nd full night after the 2nd full day without booze, but somehow I feel fine. I read some online forums filled with people like me. People who drink and swing back and forth between drinking for a few weeks and then not at all, this potentially liver-ruining seesaw possible thanks to the likes of Lorazepam and its ilk.
I’ve seen people complain about the sleep thing. I’ve complained about it myself. People say that they don’t miss the bars, the money being spent, the hangovers… all they miss is the sleep. I’m starting to think this is something of a crutch, or even an excuse to return to booze. It seems to be a crutch for me, or at least I start to think so after waking today on probably less than 6 full hours of very fitful sleep in which impossible dreams lingered like gassy film from an oil spill on the surface of tranquil waters. Who needs 8+ hours of sleep? Who really needs the 11+ hour I was getting 2 or 3 nights in a row last week?
Sleep is akin to food, I think. The less of it you get the longer you live. That is a theory about food and longevity: If you eat less you live longer. I tend to believe it, but have not read up on the literature about this matter for a long time.
I looked into this newish stuff called Soylent. It’s for people who don’t like food but need to stay alive. I am not 100% in that camp but I have days and weeks where I consider the bureaucracy of food to be a bother.
Soylent is made to sound like something new but I encountered stuff just like it a few years ago, during my Colon Cleanse phase. I was cranking out 13 and 14 inch logs 2 or 3 times a day. It was really great. In researching the evacuation of my bowels I encountered its opposite, which was filling those bowels with maximum efficiency. Stuff like Ensure and Endure Plus, and other “meal replacements” which I never tried. It seems they would be like eating mud, or some kind of orphanage gruel. I suspect that Soylent is simply a well-marketed hipster fascination with a DIY twist. Otherwise it’s not so different from its predecessors.
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On the BBC 4 last night I heard talk of LP records coming back to Jamaica. There has not been an LP record press there for many years, but interest in vinyl recordings of Bob Marley and the reggae sound has returned, now among those who recognize that you just don’t hear that rich and humming bass sound on MP3. I could have told you that years ago, decades even, when these twangy 192kb MP3 files were being passed around as CD replacements. We lose so much with a lot of digitized content, and much of what is lost might never be recoverable.
I thought along these lines while scanning some potentially interesting scores from those old “Etude” music magazines. I found a couple works by, of all people, Theodore Presser. They looked reasonably pianistic at a glance, and I’m sure they play well enough under the hands. But are they credible music? It does not appear they were published anywhere except in that magazine. Theodore Presser, of course, published “The Etude,” so an occasional salute from the big guy would seem to be in order. He only published 2 pieces in that magazine, neither of them apparently based on original themes.
Also present in the pages of that magazine are several works by another editor there, James Francis Cooke. They seem not so interesting.
Most notable on balance are the works of the women composers, whom “The Etude” was never shy about promoting or giving opportunity. As any honest critic will concede, a majority of that stuff simply is not very good. I’ve been drawn to the works of Theodora Dutton and Evangeline Lehman, and to a singular beautiful ditty by one Lois Wentworth.
But these are, I hate to say, trifles. If we must rank composers according to their gender then Amy Beach rules the roost from the early 20th Century, Cecile Chaminade a worthy second.
That “Etude” project on which I embarked maybe 5 years ago is one of many things I’ve started that could easily have become something great, if I’d only had either someone to back me up, or some ability to better plan for efficiencies. I am, without question, more capable than most at finding efficiencies in all things, although sometime I think that saying so is little more than a glorified way of saying I am lazy.
Who remembers the famous and (to me) profound quote attributed to Bill Gates, but probably apocryphally so: “I would hire a lazy person to do a difficult job because they would find the easiest way to get it done.” It is a true sentiment, as true as I’ve ever heard, and as a congenitally lazy yet highly productive person I can vouch for it.
I don’t remember now if it came from my training as a pianist but I remember telling other students that one should never have to work too hard to play the piano. One should never have to work too hard to do anything, really. I even thought of this yesterday, at the thrift shop, while making the critical decision to by the puppet of a monkey in a barrel. I was in the basement of the thrift shop, where two men were moving a large armoire (or something like it) up the stairs. There is no elevator at this place, which actually seems like an ADA lawsuit waiting to happen but no mind, I shan’t sue. So they are moving the heavy item up the stairs and I am thinking that even with my limited muscular resources I would, with the help of another (of course) have no trouble moving this. It’s all about finding the point of gravity and moving it only as far in the air as necessary before placing it on the next step of the staircase or alternatingly passing the weight back and forth between yourself and the other mover. I could do that because I am schooled in the arts of laziness. Productive laziness.
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So what is an order of agenda for the chapel trip? Hmm.
- The esoteric union of funerary workers who deal only with tombstones and memorials for people who never existed. They do their work mostly in the dark of night, in ghostly passageways of high walls topped with cornices and skylights. Sometimes they succeed, other times their work is caught by cemetery security and summarily removed. Some cemeteries have a cordial relationship with the crew, passing it off as an innocuous statement of art. Until, that is, relatives of the deceased upon whose unmarked grave the markers were placed appear. Then all hell breaks loose. Once-sleepy community board meetings become unlikely debating grounds for the rights of the dead, with cemetery owners saying they would allow the fake stones to be placed as long as the descendants of the people actually buried there had paid their Perpetual Care monies. In this way the Union comes to work with the cemeteries, and their work continues unmolested. When a descendant of one whose unmarked grave finds the surprising presence of a marker for one Donald Franklin, who allegedly lived from 1952-1988 and died in nearby West Maspeth, all that had to happen was the stone be moved to the unmarked site of another unsuspecting family’s forebears. But this was done only after the Perpetual Care payments resumed. In this way the Union not only gets to continue its work in filling the cemeteries with memories of those who never lived, but they work out a deal with the cemetery where they get a percentage of the Perpetual Care payments, perpetually. This is how the Union survived for generations now, and how their work should so secretively endure for centuries. Yeah, I will polish that off.
- The years pass like strangers to me now. But I will never grow nostalgic. I will grow old, and lonely, and I will drown. – Will look that up from earlier on here. In fact, I should just go re-read some so I don’t needlessly retype.
- Thrift stores and second hand are but treadmills for the derelict possessions of the dead. Most of the windfalls that come pouring in are from estates of those who left no other instructions, if any, save to dump their shit at the thrift shop. A beautiful set of china, probably unused for decades, looks different when it is imagined in its more comfortable context of a dining room, or perhaps just in a cabinet. The sips of tea and whispers of conversation conducted over these empty cups will never return, but one can imagine that buying such an item primes it for that type of conversation, for an interaction that would take time to cultivate from a newly-bought set of tea cups.Or is that conversation actually spoiled? Will it soon be seen as inevitable that the conversation of the dead will have no choice but to rise again from these teacups, invading the present without imbuing it with a fabled sense of grace that conventional wisdom seems unwilling to define as anything but nostalgia, that bitterest of sentiments?
— Yikes, this sounds more like Ashbery than JF, haha
- I come to the chapel to eat. There are no signs or indications ordering me not to. If I can come here to eat the body of Christ, dipped in a chalice of His blood, then why can I not eat a sandwich? If it gets me any Indulgences I could sprinkle some holy water or blessed salts on it and you’ve got a divine concoction. Here, have a bite.The silence of the chapel returns the act of eating into my head. Earlier today I was eating a sandwich sitting here alone on this pew. I felt chewing noises in my mouth and skull. Incidental collisions between top and bottom teeth felt like stones smashed with hammers, the shattered parts pounded and scrubbed together like chalk board erasers. The occasional scratching of teeth was like being shoved down onto a waterslide lined with razors. The chewing caused a mucous-like feeling to fill my head, which was wringed of its juices, or kneaded as a masseuse would rub and pound upon my back. This was having lunch with God, whose gift of this vessel of bones and water has brought me back to Him in this way. The chapel is built by human hands, but owned by God. I am not the owner of this body. Only its usufructuary. I can hear every trickling of liquid proceed through its rooms and hallways, every instant of high blood pressure punishing me for my abuses, every malconstructed thought yet to rise from the sewer of my mental bowels. That is how quiet it gets at the chapel. It is like sitting in a sea of shit, except for those who can get God to come through to them.
- I never used to, but since accidentally discovering one I have spent a lot of time at the community mausoleums in certain of the New York City cemeteries — St. Michael’s in particular, but others as well. For years I did not enter these structures. I did not know what they were, but I assumed they housed some sort of administrative offices, or even monasteries or convents. My feelings upon browsing these structures is often conflicted. They are, …. OK, don’t need to copy and paste all that from earlier stories, which seems close enough for jazz that I could work with it.Going to add this anyway: Browsing the niches feels like I am shopping for lives, or browsing the shelves of a supermarket for humans. They are building another structure across the parking lot. Maybe I will consider that for my final arrangements, not that I’m in a hurry to execute them. Calvary would make more sense, given my bottomless fascination with and countless hours spent there. But the mausoleum there is at 3rd Calvary, which I never liked. I think they are building a new mausoleum at 4th Calvary, if the foundations I saw a few weeks ago are any indication. I would also like to be near the puzzling pair of 54th Avenues, so that all who make the pilgrimage to my vaunted niche will stop to contemplate its mysteries. If it is in fact a new mausoleum then it would also be near the bathroom. Very convenient for anyone who finds that my memory makes them nauseous, or if my memory makes them so ill that nausea is skipped and they move straight ahead to projectile vomiting. I suppose that I could request, in lieu of one of those dildo-shaped containers for flowers, the cemetery could leave a supply of barf bags at my site.
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Eureka: My burial or interment site as a comedy, the culmination of all my writings and ramblings about death, or a place to come and remember my morose ramblings and laugh about them. With actual barf bags!
Well, I think those paragraphs are more than enough to work with tomorrow. Rain is expected but I’m OK with that. Have to make sure the gear is revivable. I don’t have the $300 Sony wants to fix my field recorder but I might pimp some to come up with the $ Or just not drink for… 3 weeks? That’s about how long it takes to spend $300 on booze, averaged between at home and at bars. Actually that’s not so bad…
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Had another idea for a story but it has eluded me now.
It used to be that a love of the world was equivalent to a hatred of God. I never quite knew that, at least not to the point of learning the word avaritia, which is actually the “immoderate” love of the world. Defined initially as “intoxication” it refers not necessarily to alcohol or intoxicating substances but an immersion in the pleasures of life to the exclusion of God. That must still be considered a no-no in some parishes.
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After all that optimism about Flaneur.NYC I find I just don’t like the theme I was so excited about. It looked better in the demo. In practice it is clunky and awkward. Glad I took a cooling off time to let that settle in.
Sammich time. I’ve been here on this spot for almost 2 hours. Writing like this works the mightiest muscle I have, and it is exhausting, but I’m OK with that.
