Peaches En Randalia #30
Obscure scenes shifting within the camera eyethe editor splices film based upon a notefound quietly sitting in a manufactured bit of candy, post-Chinese cuisine
The fortune cookie fell to the floor, and with it went the slip of paper with my message.
1) Before Phish, and after I left home, I was heavily schooled in the works of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. Despite my mothers best efforts, I jumped the Christian ship and landed in the field of hard rock. This would change slightly when I discovered the respective music of Messrs. Jerry Garcia and Bob Dylan, but I held the timeless LZ songs aloft to the Valhalla Gods for eternal enshrinementand very much still do, despite my present preoccupation with what some would either call free jazz, avant-garde, organized noise, or jamband fringe music.
Dylan came over me like a tornado of muse-drenched chaos. He changed everything.
2) or is it clarity that one seeks and not that moment of artistic silence? Alices rabbit hole, or that room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Gamehendge, or Bonnaroo, or is it mythical Willoughby, a fantastical realm that only resides in ones imagination? Is imagination enough to wrest triumph from defeats grasp?
I dont think Dylan was ever pursuing artistic clarity, which is why his well-written and frank autobiographical tome Chronicles, Volume One, also seemed ill-conceived to me like Chaplin talking, Thompson quitting, or Brando giving away his sordid secrets.
3) I have stayed in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a 45-minute drive from Manchester, for the last three years, while writing for my editor, Dean Budnick on the Bonnaroo Beacon. Murfreesboroalways go on the Chamber of Commerce site of any town/city to find interesting tid-bits a pleasant little middle-ground townneither rich or poor.
Little Feats Bill Payne recently said something interesting. He said that he likes people with a little bit of dust on their travelin shoes, whether its Garcia, Dylan, or you and me. It was a moment of epiphany that reminded me that I once left a comfortable townhouse a block away from the Pacific Ocean, to live in the deep underbelly of poverty in East L.A. What drove that decision to bunker down on Judson Street? How did those 18 months change my worldview of the haves and have nots, and the Footprints of Giants, and, alas, the stories of those whose footprints have always been forgotten by the pages of history?
Found the fortune cookie: We cannot change our external environment without facing what it is that drives our internal motivational triggers. Huha rerun from my past, or I am faced with one very heady little fortune cookie scribe? AhhhJudson Street. VOTE!
_- Randy Ray stores his obscure cinematic hymns at www.rmrcompany.blogspot.com