HISTORY OF MYSELF*

My new sounds:

My new sounds:

My new sounds:

My new sounds:

Rocked by Bessie and Ruined By The Masses….including myself. I tried to make some cheap contemporary lyric changes, but the old songs don’t budge….you can’t re-phrase something that’s re-phrase proof….

Friends

Ain’t it grand2 by eternaleditor

What’d would be the essence of what I’d want to say if I had a Facebook account?  

No, not the show (along with Sex + The City) that deluged NYC with whimsical wannabe’s from all over the map, but real friends. I’ve got them and I forget about them a lot when I’m bogged down with feeling sorry for myself. But real friends(and my family). Over the past few weeks I’ve been down about so many things- real and not. Throughout it, I was able to have the support of my wife and parents and friends. Thank you very much, and I hope this is an insurance policy for when I forget next time how atheistically blessed I am to have each and everyone of you. *

*And the reason why I don’t have a FB account is because I know that sending something like that to you, over there, would have never happened…….

WIN: 

\

WORLD SERIES LOSS:

A Desperate Little Man

Snake Dances by eternaleditor

Felt like walking through a field overflowing with landmines, that’s the way it is sometimes with me and my guitar. One fret( of which I forgot how all of them sounded) off and notes explode like a bad bad mistake.  

Extinct: 

The landmine goes back pretty far, used as early( and cited in texts) the 15th century in China and a staple of Dynastic warfare thereafter. The word itself has been used to also decorate psycho-speak of our time: his thoughts are like landmines, etc……

Hearing myself plugged in, vulnerable and shaky, is completely disarming me from my embarrassment. There is mistake after mistake, but I don’t know if I hear the one that makes it a heap. When is that magic moment when each grain of sand comes together to make a pile? 

John Hardy, desperate little man. Mother Maybelle and Sarah singing…….

A West Virginia miner who killed a man during a dice game…… converted before hanging day.. The Carter Family version is great, but AP often went into the hills to collect songs, and thanks to the work of folks like Mike Seeger, Alan Lomax, we have a lot of versions and interpretations of the tune: 

Lacking In Depth

Maple Leaf Swag by eternaleditor

Scott Joplin consummate stroker of keys, Father of Ragtime — would he have worried about the violence of video games?

For one, he would have, like many of the folks we’ve seen travail in those great tomes to our culture, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure(s), had suffered from the blinding immersion of the foreign, incomprehensible, exposure to technologies and images that his brain wasn’t capable of visually processing.

This phenomenon is often referred to as “blanking out.” Visual integration of “the new” isn’t as sophisticated as we believe: ( see here, there, and also here.) It is a maybe-myth that the Taino Indians were unable to see the boats that Columbus sailed towards shore in, struggling most likely to place this new(floating) construct into their mental lexicon.

Meanwhile, Columbus’ ex said he was lacking in depth. Somewhere off in the Americas, he would be— showing her the true HERO, saying something like, darling your head’s not right.

 The perception that Columbus had towards the Natives he came across was much different, but there are no claims in his often-cited journal that leads us to believe he suffered from any visual cognitive lapse in seeing the Tainos. Which, was unfortunate for them…….

 Joplin also was victim of other’s perception, their blind spots, though prolific(47 original pieces based on music that didn’t sound like anything else, meaning he had to create it, void of reference, framework, acknowledgement) Joplin’s “fame” was not only posthumous, but late roughly 50 years after his death due to the fatalistic nature of the Jim Crow South’s Caste system and the immoral qualities tagged onto songsters from the black clergy and its flock. That’s slow, even in posthumous time. Even Posthumously, Religion Still Does Poison Everything

Joplin died syphilitic and mad in NYC….. feeling much less sorry for himself(maybe he didn’t realize how much Missouri sucked), I’m guessing, than other syphilis sufferers like Nietzsche( What the Thus?) who would simultaneously take young thinkers under his wing only toexplain to them that they didn’t understand what a brilliant mind they were in the presence of……they were lacking in depth.

Amazing Lace

Amazing lace by eternaleditor

Different thoughts I have, each one pitching towards the next……here in no specific order: 

Is The Goonies a brilliant foreshadowing of the Economic Meltdown 22 years in advance? Or is it just a movie for kids? Are kids connected someway that we aren’t to our collective past? The artifacts used in The Goonies draw in the imagination more than would artifices. I sound like a dick…..

More importantly, what does it mean to really stare at a picture( moving and not).

Are we looking into our own personal past’s? I feel that way when I watch The Goonies, something deep inside got me feeling bad for those little kids. It wasn’t so much age identification, than something that I would not know how to articulate until years later. I saw something in that story, beyond the myth of One-Eyed-Willie, that seemed unjust/injust(I don’t feel like searching grammar points no more). Is Troy now an evil corner office guy at Goldman SLacks(the epitome of what the American Future and Great Success looks like through the eyes of the blind). The idol of our great but tired  trash-dick-un-bocks? Are The Goonies our great Heros? Where are they when we really need them?  

(We can say something here about the subconscious((perhaps)) of the Spielberg /Columbus decision of naming the love conflict of the film Troy. His counterpart is reduced to the name of a mortal, Brand(consumer of), while the guy we are meant to despise is designated with a name that alludes to the choirs of False Gods and Great Cities)

 While the world continues to rot away —filled with few Troys but millions of wannabe-Troys— where are the folks who will go on the hunt for an innovative way to reclaim what is rightfully theirs? It is a strange question when you look at it through that lens, but stranger things have happened: like Josh Brolin becoming a star while Corey Feldman sank into the dark wormhole of The 80’s. 

Something About Amazing Grace: 

Some of the things politics, corporatism  in the American Democracy has ruined, or hijacked, are parts of our past that were attached to the art of America. While common folks like me from yesteryear all the way up through the generations until today were aslumber with the hope of prosperity and exhausted by hard work, the Dark Powers slowly took all of the republic-related art off the walls and the songs out of the folk that sung them. As we spoke about our dreams, the word patriotism, the icon of the flag(and that poor unknowing fucking Eagle) were being used as apparatus’ in order to hurt and harm anyone on this green and blue ball that stood in the way. 

They marched forward using these images and sounds as so many swords used to slay a dragon, on repeat. So now, we don’t want to see them or say them or use them. They’ve been successfully co-opted by people we wouldn’t want to live in the same town as. Amazing Grace is a great example of this, this, kidnapping. (In the same very terrifying sense) Written by a clergy member of the Anglican Church, the song soon found itself popular among African-Americans in America.(get it) At some point, maybe because they saw it’s opiate-like effects among its listeners, the song was soon taken out of churches and heard across battlefields and quoted in backroom deals.

But it’s too strong, too dense to lose it’s true beauty and sentiment devoid of faith or nation or state, to that triad. So here is something of a version of it here and there somewhere in today’s recording.  Also, Doug Martsch is great: 

 (What I Was Thinking: A Little Amazing Grace, Some Doug Martsch “Dream”, was thinking about Dinosaur Jr. and Beach House and Tommy Jarrell’s version of “Poor Reuben”, often referred to as Rueben’s Train at some point…… Have to work on tempo and transitioning from them….. )

at 12/18/11 on 6-ish

On Some Snowy Sunday(12/18/11) by eternaleditor

The intro to this thing is typical me— stone sober and stumbling—foolishly self-believing my own mis-beliefs as I freeze in front of the microphone, or microwave. 

I don’t know in what I believe that makes me so separate from the rest of the human race. While I know we share the same organs, the same air, why do I think we don’t mess up. There are plenty of examples of perfection in myths, but those are for boys and boys should grow up. We mess up all the time, for me I feel my most vulnerable in front of a microphone, with a microphone in front of me and me way in the future. 

Who will listen to my music is always the predominant thought going through my head. That is how far we’ve come from maybe what the tradition, maybe pre-etymological defitintion, of what music is. That is, in it’s most undesirable term but true sense is: your spirit or a look back to long ago. Something there saying, yes I was once part of something that isn’t like, like, the way it is now. But we move on and join civilizations and form allegiances and find gods to help us make sense of what this all, all this animalness that we have is….. we try hard to hold it down and suppress who it is we are.

On Noting the Dog In the Background……

Oh, how I cringe at the title, the ridiculousness of it. I again go— afraid of the worlds perception of me whilst neglecting to take care of my own self.

This is the part of the project, that hidden something deep inside, that has me imagining friends in front of a computer screen laughing at all of this….. saying, look, we knew he was dumb…slower than the rest, but he’s really proved it this time. At one time artists were honored and seen as a vital part of society. Today, because of the difficulty, the risk-taking that has become a recessive gene within the way society has looked at artists in the last two centuries(maybe less) artists have had to work as outsiders. But this has been to the detriment and brutality that the artist has had to pull his ego through- if you make it hard for me to get inside the castle, I shall make it double hard to come into my moat. 

Along the way, we have separated ourselves from the Artists, and they have separated themselves from us. It is with them that they have taken their skills and prizes, once communally owned by the folk and now a fine and foreign outsider’s game. It has gone so far out of whack, the physics of it all, that Outsiders or Art are those who comes from the Inside of our predominant society. The benefit of having the Artists disembark from us is that the level of quality as increased so that all the gunk and ill remains has been shaved and given to the communal dog. The risk takers stay, but not without slyly crafting only the finest of their goods. 

I am not a fine-crafted song or person. I come from the Inside and have sat there for ages, scribbling and editing, trying to forget the great ghosts that overcome me at any moment, holding fragments of sound and words and colors. For too long I played the game of the Self-Sabotaging-Artist. I think most of us have. As I moved more towards that divine energy, I shook and looked at myself in the mirror and said to go on with it—- shape up or ship out—- don’t think too much or you think too little. The bipolarity attached to living in a choke hold from the thing I wanted most: to create something. 

A Word on Something

You deserve a story: I had long believed I would be a writer one day. As time passed, I acquainted myself with the right people who shared that dream. And soon after, my dream died. It wasn’t me so much as it was my peers that killed it. For they too had seen the magic of it—- the tragic magic signing up to never fulfill the thing it is you spend your days thinking of. The idea of being with company in that self-induced isolatory illusion creeped me out. 

It was at this time in my life I found myself looking for unrealistic fallback for my dream that I worked in a woodshop. There are people placed in your life at different times to help you get to the next point. (Addendum: I am not a new age type, so please void previous sentence’s sentiment) As sanded chair legs and splintered my fingers handing wood to the folks who’d actually work with it, I became friends with one of these people. A knowledgeable and kind person, willing to talk about everything— even when he knew I didn’t know what I was talking about— taught me that guitar could Be Other Things. Be other things than the power chords, the hook heavy, the spotted chops of bluesgrass strums: could be another thing than all of the thing I knew it was. 

It had changed and it changed when that friend told me about Reverend Gary Davis. I didn’t know to later, when I heard someone relay to me that Davis( and a lot of those other players) saw the guitar as a piano: that your left hand played the melody and the right played the base. A Portable Piano. And then I forgot about it…….. until I heard Bukka White.

There is a few bars of “Poor Boy Long Way From Home” in this episode. From John Fahey’s version, but the song itself has an interesting and long past. I don’t know if at some point two songs became named the same or if the one song evolved in multiple simultaneous versions. It is a true American tune, the kind that was made for your neighbors or friends— I wonder if those folks shook and rattled like I do when I think of playing in front of folk—. Either way, for this first post, for the duration of this experiment I am trying to erase the immediate history of our artistic selves. That songs and the like, the whole golden bag, is meant to be made by people in their living rooms and on their porches, without the ego, the hopes for the future, the anxiety of themselves. They were playing to forget all of those demons that lurked in the hallways of the other parts of their lives. Song and art and writing were their sanctuaries, not their confessionals nor meant to make them feel insecure.

There something in me that remembers that part of our collective consciousness, that needs it in my own life now. Just enough to write these pages and record those pieces without editing myself. I am starting to see the internal editor has not been an eternal editor.