I’m listening to My Favorite Things right now. It’s a John Coltrane album.
More and more I find myself listening to jazz. It’s the improvisation, I think, and the way that the best jazz musicians sit comfortably in dissonance. “Wrong” notes are opportunities. A long run of wrong notes is a statement.
An album of wrong notes is Bitches Brew, by Miles Davis. (One of my favorites.)
It’s something I love about Gary Clark Jr., as well (though he principally plays blues, not jazz): the willingness to grab onto a note and work with it, sit with it, bend it and shape it and force it as far out of true as possible, regardless of what the rest of the band is doing. Regardless of how ugly it gets.
It’s almost like listening to a man screaming in a crowd all humming quietly in a major key.
Abrose Akinmusire is a musician who understands that scream. Miles Davis is another. Kaoru Abe is one of my favorites; his saxophone is the gibbering of the mad.
Coltrane, though, is cool. There’s a vibe to a Coltrane record that’s utterly unique. It’s a sazerac vibe, a sunglasses on in a smoky room vibe, a Half a Joint and Nowhere to Be But Right Where I Am Right Now Baby sort of thing. Cool is what I need right now.
I’m at the library. I’m meant to be working on a collection of poems that will, I hope, end up being my first collection. Seemed the easiest way to start the New Year, and a good way to get at an uneasy pressure that’s been building in my head for the past year or so: a sort of cystic response to the day-to-day grating whine of an America stuck between gears, grinding its way along the gutter. I’ve found myself retreating inward this past year or so, recoiling from too many stimuli, too much information, perspectives shrinking, ideas hardening into dogmas, my empathy flinging the Fuckword much more freely than it had in the more reasonable past.
Too much social network, not enough society.
Karl came over this morning. We’re trying to get as far ahead as possible on episodes of Measuring Flicks, in order to free up time for film and music projects we’ve been talking about for ages, and so decided to try and record three episodes back to back. Something like six hours. Why not? It’s only movies.
I lost my mind somewhere in the first half of the third episode, talking with Karl about A League of Their Own.
It was ugly. The conversation rattled desperately along progressively tenuous tracks as I dove off into long, rambling, vitriolic political rants. I climbed to the apex of my shaky little soapbox and flung myself bodily at all comers, lamenting and lashing idiots and ideologies and every bad idea and backwards-thinking bundle of fucks that happened to fall through my head as on and on I plunged, a nihilistic dervish of intellect and ego and hate.
It felt bad. It felt awful, and when the bile and self-righteousness and hunger for blood had drained from the smoking hole in my face where once my mouth had been, I found myself less than the thinking being I’ve claimed to be all my life. I was become one of them. I was the ringing in America’s ears. I was the internet. I’d joined them, for awhile, down in the shit and the outrage and the indignation that will hopefully cut the angriest of us down with cancer and heart attacks before the shrieking maw of recreational outrage can suck what little trust and hope and wonder are left on the leached bones of this country.
And then it was done, and I stopped the recorder, and sat back, and felt like shit. I asked Karl if we could scrap the episode and try again at our next recording session. There was a fug in the air, discomfiting and pale. Karl said yes (of course), we could record the episode again, and do Penny Marshall justice.
And then he left, and I was left to sit in my stink and my holey robe, my brain left retching in my soldered skull with nowhere to go.
I took a shower and got dressed. I put a pasty in the oven, sat down on the edge of my bed, waited for it to cook, and wondered when I’d gotten so angry.
If all your friends sat screaming at each other in a burning house, would you scream with them until the lot—house and friends and screams—were only ash and echo and memory?
No?
See, you say that, but I’m not far enough away from Facebook to have forgotten. You don’t even have to go to Twitter anymore to hear the whinging of people who have it better than you: just turn on CNN, or Fox News, or MSNBC. The great wail of this wilting nation leads at six, 280 characters at a time hashtags and @-signs aplenty.
Why am I so angry?
A sixteen-year-old told me the other day that she’s on anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants, and a special diet to help manage her recovery from two different eating disorders. But also that I shouldn’t worry, because all of her friends are, too.
She knows fewer people who don’t take Adderall than do.
Most of the kids these days, she tells me, have two Instagram accounts: one all smiling happy people and good times, recording the perfect lives we lie out to the faceless masses whose opinions seem suddenly to matter so much to all of us. The other—anonymous, under a false name, with no faces—records a litany of days spent crying in stalls between classes and grasping frantically for reasons not to open their arms in the bath, or to wash down all the overprescriptions in the house with a glass of celery juice; a record of days when fifteen, fourteen, thirteen-year-old children couldn’t get out of bed, or sobbed for so hard and so long that they vomited their latest cleanse back up and out and didn’t feel any better for it.
Why am I so fucking angry?
Coltrane is done. My Favorite Things is great. If you’re new to jazz, it’s a good place to start, and, hell, it’s a New Year, after all. Maybe it’s time to give jazz another go.
I’m listening to Miles, now. Kind of Blue. It’s perfect—it really is. A perfect jazz album, a perfect expression of potential reined in to mastery, distilled and honed to a shining point that cannot help but find your heart. I love this album always, but especially when the world has kicked my balls up into my guts.
A cup of water for a man in hell.
Or...at least for a man in a house on fire, surrounded by people shouting each other down and shrieking their moral superiority into little handheld mirrors mass-manufactured to reflect back the bilious canker of our particular zeitgeist.
I don’t know that it has to be this way. Let’s see. What do you say? Let’s see if we can’t save some of our house. We live here, all of us, in this vast national unconscious of ours. Let’s help each other out of this droning, Sartre-esque room we’ve made, and back out into the air, and the sun.
It’s a New Year, after all.
Let’s get some water on these walls.