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innerspace #7 - Music is the Best (Cities and Bits)
by Carol Wade - caw39@columbia.edu

a) Flyering

Brain bleeding, eyes burning...tweaking. Edges and funny creaky lines on a screen, the vectors uneven, straightening...damn the pen tool.

Mmm...carbon monoxide. Brekky o' champeens. Tearing the sky a new lighthole. Holy stars! on Rogers Street, night so crisp you could seep unhindered to the Bulova Building through the thin coldness. Thirty dollars later, we decide never to take one of THOSE again....

Okay, don't take one. So what. Oh, want one? Okay! Rad! No? No? Okay....

b) Glitter Everywhere

The Exhilaration of the Gleaming Surface pulls me into my bass. O yea, 'tis cheesy, but the road returns me to the oceanic indigo of Ibanez Lucite(TM), and some days, I wear pink feathers, and become "Princess Aquantis...Lady Sovereign of the planet ENSOR!!!".

That night, though, was pure CRAMP, as we careered through the first ever one-hour set. Oooh, one bloody hour...tiny violins! A couple of faces in the crowd, a ways back, too...I sounded furry and the sound guy kept opposing my stage volume. But "Invincibility" reared its head, and tiny prickles of hoo-hah coming-together ensued.

c) Predators of Love

Loni Anderson, Muse of the Eighties, has been beckoning me in my sleep. Don't take this the wrong way...it's just that I've been having these flashbacks. The crosstalk that rings through the streets at night, tinged in a yowl which echos off dim and moistly stinky city corridors...it causes nostalgia, a tingling remembrance in the limbs, if there can be such a thing. Some would say it's existing right here, tight and concurrent with the springing steps and the bursts of wind insisting, "Wait...just you wait."

Twisting open the gates of steel, I feel a rush of childhood come back, even further back, though, to the part of me that can feel the feet of time on my innards, well-magnetically drawn as they are to various rhythms. Reading from a worn copy of "Billboard's Rock Movers and Shakers" (compiled and published in 1991 by a corps of no doubt ruthlessly informed media hacks), I receive the alien chill of gorgeous revelry. The visions arise inside, slowly and viscous, like plumes of emotion and tele-empathic perusal. Little triggers tripping wires, wired as I am sometimes like a TV Age survivor. The live broadcast sends eyes cast backwards, so immediate that all the appropriate impulses take hold...

September 18, 1970...Jimi Hendrix is found dead in his room, after sending out a desparate S.O.S. to a cog in his world, "I need help bad, man..." Two days before, he'd played a show in London, and as I read, and languidly sit, open-mouthed and tremoring, I imagine that last show on the 16th in the late, late summer, a shuddering Hendrix on stage with a funk-thick and wrenchingly throbbing band called War, and Eric Bourden, the helmsman of the Merseyside-via-Detroit outfit, The Animals. Two days later, no more. I think for a second, I feel the chill of time entering me fully, expanding out from my middle, breathing on my ends...

September, 1976... six years later, grit and long shots of carnage oozing through dirty New York streets and filthy seats, Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" is out in the movie theaters, and freaking people out. Outside the darkness, the war zone expands to the thruways and cloverleafs, thinning to a different pall of industrial wasteland, to Akron, Ohio, where a bunch of sinewy, androidal teenagers are trying to assemble their band. They decide to call themselves The De-Evolution Band, due to the collective band belief that their music is "the sound of things falling apart". Soon, though, they shorten their name to simply Devo, and proceed to make fast friends with the likes of David Bowie, and Brian Eno, who went on to produce some of their earlier works. Proto-practically everything the following decade would have to offer, they appear in my mind, orchestration, concept and huge, expansive obliteration of all things previous...

I don't know why these things intrigue me so much; morbidity and a sick flush of mordant curiosity slide over my brain, as I peer through the column inches supporting the ethereal components of the lives of creative, dynamic people, many of whom are as different in creed and direction as diamonds and glass. To me, though, they're as elementary, as inseparable as the sky. My ears, if they are open, will listen, despite the cloying, the cunning that often surrounds the misty activities and machinations of The Creative Ones. I go to sleep and dream in Rock 'n' Roll Cinevision, thin arms flailing over instruments, pale white, fringed brown hands, rings, headbands and lipstick-red stacked plastic, cylindrical ziggurats...the colors a bit faded, in sleep, as dream cleverly records with respect to age. Devo, Jimi...any difference, really...?

d) Music is the Best

I get in a car, and the engine hums, no radio. A cab ride, perhaps. The road makes noise, as does the sound of my teeth clicking together. The train, oh...travel, exquisite composition. Machines, elegantly crafting their own scores, I feel odd sometimes for noticing. But why not? The Futurists did a dance on the surface of forms, in the tailwinds of new roadsters, some alpine road race...the taste of life in their mouths, tight and fuel-bitter. The letters in the lines, as they stood roadside, dreaming of the exploded museum, sketching hastily at the words that fell from the arcs of new metal flight. But, in seconds, gone, no longer God or savior, this gathered grant of motion is not the end though it gets us there faster, and information is not knowledge.

Sometimes I try to cram things all into my head, make them fit, like tomorrow's trash, building up and up and up, filling the sky...I recall more ziggutats. I recall Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", again, a tap on the shoulder from a dark, smiling friend from youth. What looks like mounds of illuminated garbage reaches into a sky so thick with funk that the ominous towers threaten to pierce it, revealing an ironic underlayer of concealed optimism. Swimming in the crackly sci-fi viscosity of what's to come, I think corporations, and wonder how in the world they can think they know just how things are supposed to work, rewriting nature with a gloppy pen, and too-thin paper. Knowledge is not wisdom.

One minute, the universe on the head of a pin. The head of the pin on the tip of a thread, the thread a million-billionth in a fine web of contradiction, which holds the whole thing together. A kiss, one minute, embracing all one thought was possible in the world, the next, a feeble gesture with unlaughing mouths, too serious, thinking, like the next guy, that they've written the book on What It's All About. Waiting for the train, to ride that thing again, to feel that damnable feeling, and boy, does it never show up. You think some things, and think you're sure, and have got the in-door. Wisdom is not truth.

Getting closer now, she's looking out the window. Across the wet concrete, black-grey and porous, she sees where it is it's all going to come down. Leaping, she feels a rush of wind, increasing, and then somewhere, someone has a memory of a greying two hours in the dark; a film, bleak, concrete greying, one painted, black-lashed eye, a cane with danger stashed straight within, another celluloid march across screen within screen, hilarious...Beethoven's "Ode To Joy". Eyes open now, the uncertainty of the clock quietly grinning...is it AM or PM? Which way is waiting for the time when things will get done? Truth is not beauty.

Beauty is not love. Love is scary and scatalogical and useless, but ironically all the things at the same time that we, with words, are negating it. Our strident gaits and vigilance do not illustrate what draws us in like a thick twig of charcoal. A dance, a dance...Chagall painting, with colors tumbling, dreams drifting like smoke, and as always, somewhere beneath the paint, the tiniest whisper of an accordion, a hurdy gurdy, cold and brilliant gaslit streets, Soviet cold. Getting so much closer now. All things love tinged on the bottomside with a greasy layer of conflict...slippery and, for the ground (who possesses with gravity), gripping....

In my head, this dance again...flames leaping from the songs, always. Always over in ten seconds, twenty, and always. Negation. Corps of souls and vessels gathering. Travel arrangements made, the road, beckoning with its symphonies. Love is not music. Once again, love is what music is when it is played through the sieve, and not into the air, unless, of course, you're playing the sieve (whole other story). Several decades have lied to us about this. Love was the love song. The song is the love song, love is something else. Love was the poetry, but love is also hate. Hate is not wise, but sometimes necessary, unavoidable, alchemical...one thing dissolves it, in it's varicolored laser insistence...

Music is THE BEST. Frank Zappa said it the best, using the voice of an epic album's unsung heroine, Mary the Slut from the tour bus in "Joe's Garage, Parts I, II and III":

                  "Information is not knowledge
                   Knowledge is not wisdom
                   Wisdom is not truth
                   Truth is not beauty
                   Beauty is not love
                   Love is not music...
                   Music is the BEST."

Nothing is known without music, without rhythm, some aural logic; like a structure, it is built from itself, its motivation as much mortar as the mortar, it's desire as firm as the bricks, the itching, waiting ear, the sweating brain, the urge to create...Zappa said we'd all swallow ourselves whole with our thirst for nostalgia, but he spent the good last quarter of his life in a windowless hole, getting it all down on tape, for the record. Irony could be the best, if you put it to a rip of electrified string crank of an unbelieveable wattage. But it would still turn out to be something like the sound of anything, coalescing into the song of days.