The Kryptonite Konspiracy

 

“The cover to a story grandson Malik wrote about me and I could use the confidence! It has been three months since I taught a workshop, so hoping Malik's faith in me will come to fruition as I'm off tomorrow to teach in Little Rock, Arkansas and then three weeks in Brazil—São Paulo, Tatui, Brasilia, Rio” was the caption I put by this photo on Facebook and in retrospect, it felt a bit disingenuous, a touch of false humility. Many of the comments were encouragement from people to bolster my confidence, but in retrospect, my ability to teach a dynamic workshop isn’t the issue. Yes, it does take some work to rev up the old engine, to take out my Superman costume tucked away in the back of the closet and switch from my Clark Kent mode. Hardest of all is to find a phone booth to change in! (Am I just talking to baby boomers here? Young people, do you get the connections?)

 

But I have no doubts whatsoever that workshop mode is home base and where I am most effortlessly myself. What does concern me is that there is a new “me” facing a whirlwind schedule with this ongoing and worsening mysterious dizziness that every moment makes me feel less than myself. It’s as if a piece of kryptonite somehow got lodged in my body (still with me, non-baby-boomers?). I met again with my doctor, who switched tactics and gave me different kind of exercises, so we’ll see if that helps. 

 

It seems like a dubious state to take on this adventure, but my thinking is that continuing on as I have with the things that I’ve been doing— playing piano at senior homes, helping my mentee with the concert he put on last night and so on— doesn’t feel worse than lying around at home and probably helps distract me from this constant introspection “How am I feeling? Am I at a 2 or 5 or 8 on my personal Richter scale?” Life goes on and I might as well keep going on with it while I can. 

 

So on to packing and off to the airport in a few hours. And who knows? Maybe if I keep moving, the kryptonite will dislodge itself. One can only hope. 

Contactless Arrival

Friends, I am not making this up. In every walk of life, we are striving to eliminate human contact and then pay huge sums of money to sit in a room with a professional therapist (or worse yet, engage over Zoom) to discuss why we’re so lonely. 

 

I’ve said this so many times before and a lot recently. We can go to the hotel in a driverless car, order dinner from Grub Hub, sit alone in our room watching TV, scroll through our ‘friend’s’ posts on Facebook, have Chatgpt write an e-mail for us and wonder why we feel disconnected from human companionship. We, of course, are responsible for making those choices and have the power to refuse them. But most people are not built for such resistance and when the whole thrust of a culture is encouraging us, rewarding us, building its structures around machine interaction, it does its dirty work effectively and efficiently. 

 

This rant came from the above note from my hotel, encouraging me to avoid having to talk for a minute with a clerk at the desk. By putting things like this in the context of which way the wind is blowing and the damage it can do to our collective culture and individual soul, I’m hoping to make a little ping of resistance that might help you make a more human choice when you can. Ride the bus or take a cab with a live driver, go to the movies and feel the buzz in the air different from your living room, go to the restaurant and sit and talk with your friends from an hour or two or three as they still do in Spain. Or better yet, cook for them at your house and play some board games after dinner. 

 

And for goodness sake, please refuse the Contactless Arrival and talk to the desk clerk! 

Plain Talk and Poetry

I don’t know who Larson Langston is but was mightily impressed by a piece he shared on Facebook. Since I make no money from these posts and all publicity is good publicity for authors, I hope he will be happy that I’m sharing some of it here or at least forgive me for not going through the tedious task of finding out how to contact him for permission. 

 

It is a beautiful example of the power of language to transform, uplift, bring our common shared experiences into the light and gild them with the chosen words that make them more powerful and meaningful. Indeed, this is a good summary of all artists’ unspoken Mission Statement. The musicians who take the random sounds without and within us and gather them into a beautiful coherence, the dancers who shape our constantly moving bodies into something eloquent and graceful, the artists who draw from the shapes and colors surrounding us and paint them into a visual statement with an edge to the canvas. 

 

For example, yesterday, instead of simply shouting “Aaargh! I hate filling out online forms!” I might have said, “I navigate through the stormy waters of your poorly mapped cyber-chart and am thrown to the deck with the bitter salt of the pounding waves crashing on my tender body." That would have helped me transform mere frustration to a noble failed task. And hopefully would have been more interesting for you to read. 

 

Art does not invent feelings, emotions, ideas, visions that are unique to the audience but reflects what we all feel but don’t have the time, talent or intention to express articulately. When we fail to express them, we are at the mercy of the sorrows, frustrations, disappointments, outrages and likewise often don’t fully experience the joys, beauties and blessings. When we attempt to work with them through words, musical sounds, visual images, movements and such, we engage in a relationship that brings them—and us— more fully to life. 

 

So here’s some wonderful examples from Larson Langston as to how this feels.

 

In English, we say: “I miss you.”

 But in poetry, we say:

“I trace the shape of your absence in the spaces where your laughter used to linger, and let the echoes of you fill the hollow hours.”

 

In English, we say: “I don’t know how to let go.”

 But in poetry, we say:

“I carry you in my chest like a stone—

heavy, unyielding, and carved with the sharp edges of what once was.”

 

In English, we say: “I feel lost.”

But in poetry, we say:

“The compass of my heart spins wildly now,

its needle drawn to places it can no longer call home.”

 

In English, we say: “I wish it were different.”

But in poetry, we say:

“I water the garden of could-have-beens with tears,

waiting for flowers that refuse to bloom.” …

 

In English, we say: “You hurt me.”

But in poetry, we say:

“You planted thorns in my chest with hands I once trusted,

and now every breath feels like an apology I shouldn’t owe.”

 

In English, we say: “I wanted to stay.”

But in poetry, we say:

“I lingered at the edge of your world,

a star burning quietly, unnoticed in your vast, indifferent sky.”

 

In English, we say: “I’m trying to move on.”

But in poetry, we say:

“I untangle your name from my veins each morning,

only to find it woven into my dreams again at night.”

 

In English, we say: “I’ll be okay.”

But in poetry, we say:

“I gather the shattered pieces of myself like broken glass,

knowing someday, even scars can catch the light.”

Direction-Challenged

 

 

If you happened to be walking past my house yesterday and heard screaming, that was me trying to fill out the Hong Kong working visa form for my March workshops coming up. I HATE filling out things like this, especially on-line where the unforgiving Old Testament God of Computers has no tolerance for a single character out of place. And if you need help, why, just go through another ten hoops for online assistance. 

I wrote to my sponsors in Hong Kong pleading for mercy and miraculously, one of them found the single error (one number!) that halted all forward motion. As I got past the guard at the gate and tiptoed to the ending, I arrived at the signature click and that’s when it said, “Sorry. Our system is experiencing problems. Try again later.”

 

I was never the kid who could put together the model airplanes and likewise was bad in Biology Lab. Something about me resisted following the unforgiving step-by-step directions. Likewise, those multiple-choice tests where the test-makers thought they were cleverly setting up one correct answer only, but I could see other answers were possible and I could explain why. No surprise that it led me to a life in Orff Schulwerk and Jazz, where multiple answers were not only possible, but often desirable. When you figure out variations of the melodies and chords and a hundred different ways to teach the same lesson, the understanding is deeper and the result more interesting. 

 

It is maddening that I have to fill out those one-way-only forms to get to teach my many-ways-are-possible lessons. I reluctantly accept that these are simply the coins I have to pay to Caesar before arriving at God’s house. But some day, as it seems to be moving in the direction of more and more unnecessary and maddening hoops on uncaring screens, I may just decide to stay home. 

 

Meanwhile, I did finally sign the form. Perhaps I’ll go to Hong Kong after all.  

The Messiah Complex

Almost time to move on from Bob Dylan, but one more point. In the No Direction Home  movie, there’s a scene where Dylan walks into a music club to check out the act. He’s at the beginning of his fame, someone recognizes him, screams, “It’s Bob Dylan!” and all these people run over to him in full fan adoration. It disrupts everything and of course, Dylan is not pleased. 

 

Contrast this with Muddy Waters playing at a Blues Club and Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones walk into the club. The band keeps playing, the black audience keeps listening, no one pays them particular mind. Later, Muddy invites Mick and Keith Richards on stage to join them and again, the audience is cool with it, but not screaming like star-struck fans. (Here’ the Youtube link, the Stones enter about 2 minutes into the clip.) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Or7huOK7o&pp=ygUsbWljayBKYWdnZXJzIGluIGJsdWVzIGNsdWIgd2l0aCBNdWRkeSB3YXRlcnM%3D

What’s going on here?

 

It’s simply a fact that some people have some special charisma or energy or talent or inherited power that stands above the crowd and that it’s natural that people want to huddle around their fire and catch a bit of their ju-ju. Everywhere, every time. On the inherited side, there’s the European Kings and Queens and Chinese Emperors and such. On the religious side, there’s Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and such all the way down to the Indian gurus that caught the attention of spiritually hungry white folks in the 60’s. 

 

It's the same with actors and musicians and other artists, amplified by the power of big screens, recordings, large concert venues with electric instruments. I was going to trace the musical side of this to Frank Sinatra as one of the first to have screaming fans, 95% women, reaching for him in hysteria. Then, of course, there was Elvis and then Beatlemania and on it goes. That was the culture that Dylan came up in. 

 

But it turns out this weird cultural phenomena did not begin with Frank Sinatra! Just as I was thinking about this, someone posted this little piece about the classical composer, pianist Franz Liszt. 

 

The term "Lisztomania" was coined to describe the frenzied adoration he received during his concerts in the 19th century.

 

1.    Frenzied Concerts. When Liszt performed, especially in the 1840s, his concerts often turned into chaotic events. Women would throw flowers, love letters, and even pieces of jewelry onto the stage in an attempt to get his attention. The excitement was so intense that concert halls sometimes had to hire extra security to manage the crowd.

 

2.     The "Liszt Effect". Liszt's charisma and virtuosity had such a profound impact that it created what was known as the "Liszt Effect." This phenomenon referred to the way his performances would leave audiences in a state of ecstasy, with many women fainting or swooning from the sheer thrill of witnessing his talent. It was not uncommon for concertgoers to be so overwhelmed that they needed to be carried out by friends or family.

 

3.     Fan Letters and Gifts. Liszt received countless letters from admirers, some of which were quite elaborate. One fan reportedly sent him an extravagant gift of a piano made from exotic wood, hoping to win his favor. He often responded graciously, but the sheer volume of fan mail became a running joke among his friends, who teased him about his devoted following.

 

Sound familiar? Again, what’s going on here?

Going back to Mick Jagger jamming with Muddy Waters in the blues club, I can’t help but think that this is a particular peculiarity of white culture. This line of thought deserves more time than I have at the moment, but suffice it to say that I have never witnessed this kind of hysteria in the various musical events of black culture, be it the dancing ring in Ghana, the jazz club in New York, Aretha Franklin coming to sing in a local church and so on. There is certainly appreciation and some admiration, but not the over-the-top worship. Why? 

 

Again, more time needed here to elaborate and investigate, but I trace it back to what I call the Messiah Complex. Giving over all your own power, be it spiritual, political or artistic, to someone else and counting on them to “save you,” to “love you”, to accept your unquestioned faith in their omnipotence. By so doing, it excuses the fan/idolator/ worshipper from having to do the work to claim their own spirituality or musicality or what have you. Of course, there’s nothing I see in the report of Jesus’ teaching that suggests that he asked to be simply worshipped and adored. He seemed to be constantly exhorting his followers to lead more exemplary lives as they struggled to learn to love their neighbors and themselves. But some toxic strand in the Western psyche turned the whole thing over to blind worship so people could lead clearly unexemplary lives as long as they went to church on Sunday and proclaimed their faith. (Buddha, by contrast, gave us a meditation practice whereby we might, through our own efforts and discipline, try to experience the same kind of insight and enlightenment that he did under the Bo Tree.)

That toxic strand is so clear in British royalty and runs throughout the TV series like The Crown, the shows about Princess Diana, Prince Harry's autobiography. Indeed, it is the sickness of celebrity obsession that created the paparazzi that ended Diana's life and makes Prince Harry's an ongoing nightmare of no privacy. The combination of a public that feeds off the celebrity gossip at the expense of attending to their own lives and the media that keeps pumping food to that weird obsessive hunger is simply a sickness that is not wholly recognized as such in our Western culture. On one hand, I liked that Taylor Swift got so many young people to register to vote because she said so, but on the other, what is wrong with us and our educational system that we don't help young people that it is their obligation to their own future? 

 

There’s a recording of someone named Lou Bell Johnson singing in a gospel church that is every bit as powerful as Mahalia Jackson or Mavis Staples or Aretha Franklin, yet none of us know about her. The black “stars” were people who through a combination of luck and circumstance and commitment, turned their musicality into a life’s work. But because everyone in Ghana drums, sings and dances, the whole congregation sings so soulfully in the American Gospel church, the whole New Orleans culture has all sorts of folks out on the streets in their brass bands, these “stars” are appreciated, but ultimately, just one of the folks who anybody would be comfortable singing, playing or dancing with.

 

In short, the less cultural energy given to our own exquisite spirituality, our own dynamic musicality, our own power to make intelligent decisions about political issues, the more we are vulnerable to turning it over to others in a disproportionate way that turns into the cult of celebrity or the Messiah complex— save me! I have great respect and gratitude for all the artists or film stars that have enriched my life and indeed, been fortunate to meet some of them personally. But instead of falling at their feet, I often just ask them if they’d like to visit my school and meet the kids. And many of them have!

 

Like I said, a big issue and worthy of an entire book or two but let me close with this thought. In the political realm, our inherited Messiah complex has us waiting for the “Second Coming,” for someone to appear to save us. We found promise in John and Robert Kennedy, in Martin Luther King and Malcolm X-  and looked what happened to them. In a weird way, maybe their assassinations were a way to announce that we can’t wait for the next Messiah but have to do the work ourselves. Each and every one of us. Every effort we make, no matter how big or small, to own our own genius, to realize our own spiritual promise, to claim our own artistic sensibility, is a vital step toward our collective healing. It’s a step away from giving power to despots, to obsessing about our Twitter and Facebook likes, our identifying as Trumpists or Swifties and claiming our own multi-faceted selves. Nobody is going to come along and save us. Not Bob Dylan, not Taylor Swift and certainly not you-know-who. It is us. 

 

Attend to this excerpt from this Hopi Elder’s prophecy and let’s get to work:

 

It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.

 

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

If You Have to Ask…

 

                        “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”

-       Louis Armstrong

 

I get that the human brain likes to label and sort, to name and identify. It’s a stop on the road to understanding, a way to position yourself in the vast sea of knowledge. But the most important things to understand and experience defy easy explanation. Truth is nuanced, filled with alluring and unexpected curves and turns and hidden places. To ex-plain means to lay it out flat like a Kansas plain and in the process, lose its true meaning. Truth and beauty can be pointed to with words using images, metaphors, stories, can be felt in the body through musical vibration, exuberant or graceful dance, attention to breath. But it can’t be packaged, mass-marketed and sold on the Costco shelf. 

 

The two Bob Dylan films I recently watched are still echoing (the mark of a good film as opposed to a merely entertaining movie) and one thing that struck me in the latter part of the Scorsese film were all the failed attempts to interview Dylan and his resistance to the barrage of misguided questions. Misguided because they were all about him trying to pigeonhole his place in the ecology of artists and explain his “message.” If I was his advisor, I’d suggest he simply answer, “Listen to my songs.” And then ask the interviewer, “What do you think they mean?” In fact, one interviewer confessed he had never heard Dylan sing and when Dylan asked why he thought he had the right to ask him a question, the man replied, “It’s my job.” He was a newspaper reporter trying to capture Dylan in a sound-byte for a mass market not prepared for or capable of understanding what his songs had to offer. 

 

I’m so pleased that Dylan was the first songwriter to receive a Nobel prize for literature. More than well-earned, as re-listening to his songs (of course, especially his earlier ones), I was transfixed by his ability to find the perfect rhyme and image and phrasing in melodies that neither swallowed the meaning nor interfered with the words but drove them all yet deeper and lifted them yet higher. And equally impressed that he could sing these complex lyrics in long songs (a marked complex to the over-repeated little soundbyte-phrases of so much pop music) without ever faltering or needing a prompter. 

 

Without resorting to Google, here is a short list of some of his poignant images and wise words, all of which apply to our lives now as much as they did then and as much as they will tomorrow. All praises to the poet!

 

• You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

 

• You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is., do you, Mr. Jones.

 

• The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

 

• You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’.

 

• He never thinks straight about the shape he is in, but it ain’t him to blame. He’s only a pawn in their game.

 

• He not busy being born is busy dying. 

 

• But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

 

• To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.

 

I could go on. What are your favorites?

Making the Scene

 

Back in the day, my wife and I used to bake our own bread, make our own granola, sprout our own alfalfa sprouts and make our own yogurt. The yogurt required some kind of starter and that was called a yogurt culture. Curious that this is the same word that means “a system of learned and shared beliefs, language, norms, values, and symbols that groups use to identify themselves and provide a framework within which to live and work.” When we gather with like-minded people who share those values and beliefs, it acts like a starter sending us to our own particular individual genius. 

 

Thinking about this having just seen the film about Bob Dylan Like a Complete Unknown and then inspired to check out an earlier documentary by Martin Scorsese No Direction Home.  (The first is in the movie theaters— remember them?— and the second on PBS and both highly recommended!) Few would argue that Dylan was amongst the most unique and individual of musical artists, characterized by a relentless restlessness looking for the next sound or song and following his Muse rather than his followers or producers or trends. Much like Miles Davis in that respect. It appears as if he sprung from the head of Zeus, channeling some divine inspiration far out of reach of other fine artists, never mind us lowly mortals. And there is a certain truth to that mysterious innate genius we all are born with being particularly gifted from the gods beyond any reasonable explanation. 

 

What we tend to overlook in our star-worshipping naivety is what kind of work and circumstance is needed to bring that genius into its full blossoming. Miles Davis once quipped something to the effect of: “People come up to me and say ‘amazing!’ as if the notes just poured through me. But man, I had to study!” Michaelangelo said, “If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” 

 

So there’s that. In the documentary film, they tell the story of Dylan robbing his friend of some of his rare record collection featuring a wide variety of artists. Dylan listened to them all and then continued his project going into record stores and taking advantage of their listening rooms (anyone remember those?). His musical mind was both hungry and ripe to absorb them, gathering a wide, wide range of musical style and feeling and guitar techniques and lyrics and transmuting them into his rapidly emerging individual voice. He often “borrowed” existing melodies from various sources, amongst a long list Masters of War from Nottamun Town, Girl from the North Country from Scarborough Fair, Song to Woody from 1913 Massacre, It’s a Hard Rain Gonna Fall from Lord Randall.

 

Most importantly, when he went to New York he became part of a folk music scene that was alive and vibrant, performing just about every night in whatever coffee shop venue was available alongside a long list of other folk musicians from various backgrounds and styles, from the Mississippi Blues to the Irish songsters to Appalachian singers and beyond. He was part of a folk music culture where everyone influenced everyone else, borrowing, begging and stealing guitar techniques, repertoire, performance styles. In short, his genius didn’t flower in isolation but in the living, breathing community of like-minded folks, in the culture that started him on the road to his own voice like the yogurt culture that starts the batch. 

 

And this makes me think of all the other cultural explosions that happened in the same way. Even something crafted in solitude like painting and writing needed other painters and writers to gather as they did in Paris in the 20’s and 30’s, in New York at the Algonquin Round Table. So many "scenes" in so many places that got art moving and growing and changing. In New York, there was the theaters on Broadway in the 30's and 40's and beyond, 52^nd Street in the 50’s jazz community, Greenwich Village in the 60’s folk scene. San Francisco birthed the 50’s beat poetry scene, the late 60’s rock scene, the 70’s modern dance scene, the 80’s comedy scene and more. And so it went in many more places at many more times. Small, vibrant, intimate little cultures where people gathered and shared their work and discussed their ideas. They talked and argued and drank and smoked (cigarettes and otherwise). Alongside the comradery was, of course, envy, theft, love affairs, jealousy, hostility, betrayals, the whole human catastrophe. But also the love and the moving forward of artistic culture. 

 

I love that all of this took place outside of University Classrooms and still aim for and yearn for that kind of artistic community. The Orff world has some qualities of all of that, for sure, particularly when we gather for National Conferences and summer courses. But I worry that the new generation is content with a Zoom gathering or two and online lesson plans. The resulting yogurt is bland, missing the needed start of culture. 

And in general, the thrust of mainstream thinking is to keep isolating us, encouraging us to sit at home, order from Amazon and neglect the local Mom and Pop stores, get our food delivered, choose the TV streaming over actually going out to a movie theater, choose Spotify background music over live performance and bring our computers to the cafes without ever talking to anyone else there. 

 

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you do, get out and join the scene! If there isn’t one, create one! The next Bob Dylan or Miles Davis is not going to sprout sitting alone at home checking in on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!