Ruby's RoadhouseThe Lake, The Unexpected, and Steven Seagal. What more could you want?
I’d never been to Old Mandeville before, but then that is nothing new for these trips—I prefer to go someplace I’ve never been in hopes of bringing back reports of something new, something that had heretofore been unspoken in my circles. In dealing with the uncertain, though, one has to prepare for contingencies and maintain a positive outlook, both cobblestones on the path of discovery.
The lakefront area of Old Mandeville, bordered by Hwy 190, the Causeway, the lake, and Fontainebleau State Park, is completely charming. As I tooled around the narrow streets on a lazy Sunday, I spied plenty of little homespun restaurants and boutique shops. I was early and spent some time on the walking path snaking the shoreline of the shockingly vast Lake Ponchatrain. I passed a gaggle of ladies all in purple congregated at the steps of the venerated Rip’s restaurant, their chatter a counterpoint to the click of pool balls at Don’s a couple of doors down, all underscored by the languid swish of the lake. It was both laid-back and active, the closest approximation to a California beach town as I’ve seen in Louisiana.
John Cage has been coming up in conversation a lot lately, three times in as many days
The country musician with which I toasted my birthday surprisingly mentioned him when we were talking about songwriting, saying there are people like John Cage that have really good ideas that need to be put out there so that someone else can come along and make something better out of them. I tend to agree, I have been a fan of his ideas for a long time, though I admit having a hard time enjoying his music.
This sentiment was echoed by another friend in defense, who said she enjoyed his more "musical" pieces, which we both thought was funny. I interviewed John Cage on Valentine's Day in 1992, when he was a guest composer at the LSU School of music. I took off from work to go to his lecture where he talked about how eventually the economy would get so bad that it would cease to exist, and we would then be forced to do the work that we were called to do, so why not start doing that work now in preparation, and that, more than any of his musical theories has stuck with me ever since. I had him sign an album or a book, I can't remember, and asked if he would be interested in being interviewed on the radio, and his handler butted in, "John we have that reception, and you are going to be tired." He brushed her off and asked if I would come pick him up at 8. He was exceedingly polite, lauding praise on a friend of mine who had a piece performed at one of the concerts that took place that week. he patiently answered our questions, largely some of the same ones he'd been answering for decades and told a story about walking through a park with Morton Feldman and seeing a firetruck drive very slowly through the neighborhood with its lights flashing but no siren. They followed it for a coupel of blocks until it turned off its lights and sped off. "It was a quiet fire engine."
Cage's notorious silent piece 4' 33" is the iTunes Discovery Download (link will open in iTunes). Here is one of the many performances of it on YouTube
A couple of people have asked about what I had to say about Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians in my book proposal for the 33 1/3 series. Two is a couple, right?
In the interest of transparency, matching that of the folks at 33 1/3, I started a separate blog to document the whole process from open call to what I hoped would be glowing press releases of respected music scholars hailing my genius. As it happened, it ends with the very polite rejection letter.
Colossal Yes - Charlemagne's Big Thaw (listen) I love this very much, even more the second time. Colossal Yes - Acapulco Roughs (listen) This earlier record is a little lighter in its step, but still feels revelatory. They are impossibly Squeeze, The Band, Paul McCartney, Ben Folds, I dunno, Style Council, maybe? They have a dash of everything from every pop band I love with the things I don't love neatly excised from the mix. Here is a live video for "The Honeymooner Creeps"
Funkadelic - America Eats its Young Were I asked to score a movie in which the opening montage involved a family busily getting up, getting dressed, getting off to school, to work, to life, leaping into the intricate clockwork of life, I would have "You Hit The Nail on the Head" as the soundtrack
The opening instrumental minutes are shockingly busy and fully composed moments, it is as tight as Philip Glass's ass building up a torrent of activity, interweaving, melody struggling to be heard against the grind and then suddenly, at around the 3 minute mark, it plateaus with a harmonica-centered lopey strut - everyone is off to school, work, to their own peculiar grind.
Funkadelic has a way of capturing an Appolonian picture of life tightly contained in a seemingly Dionysian orgy of sloppy excess. The disco chant that comprises most of the lyrics:
Just because you win the fight Don't make you right Just because you give Don't make you good
puts the whole notion of Socratic truth and Christian salvation under the spotlight (or maybe flashlight) . Doing it all correctly, following the plan, running with the groove doesn't intrinsicly mean anything. Social systems are ways to get along, not ways to thrive, but you first need to get a long to truly thrive, or perhaps by thriving we get along because our uniqiue thriving feeds back into the system, turning the soil. I am tempted say I am projecting all this into something as purposely stupid as Funkadelic can be, but isn't that part of the game? Is George Clintion the Falstaff of the Shaespearian tragedy of the 70s? Is he laughing at my hair and glasses?
Now I'm wishing I'd worked up a 33 1/3 proposal about this album, but then not even the more salable Maggot Brain proposal made the final cut. So it goes.
My wife and I were talking about a documentary about the Jesse Lee Childrens Home, an orphanage in Alaska where her father grew up, and how in the documentary one resident regales life there as : well, we put in a garden and grew cabbage and had dogs and chickens but the dogs ate the chickens and the garden was about half-a-acre but we planted more stuff and then it was a full acre and... its the kind of story that makes you pull your hair out, GET ON WITH IT! and yet, this detail is this guys life, not only his but a generation of people, the actual survival.
I can talk for 20 minutes about my iPhone or my philosophy 101 ruminations on Funkadelic, or about having these ruminations while listening to Funkadelic on my iPhone, but 5 minutes of the actual details of survival seems excruciating until it is put into a higher context to make it interesting. I want to build a cathedral of understanding while missing the real story in the bricks. Thankfully Funkadelic is around to call bullshit on all that once in a while.
My JazzFest picks, which are hopefully current given that the article was submitted a month and a half ago.
