12.28.08
“and so this is christmas [or {buddha-, solstace-, x-, christmakwanzakka-}mas or the blessed birth of big baby jesus our a festival of lights (has it always been about oil?) or just about anything else you want it to be] / and what have you done?”
what have you done? what have we done? what has anyone done? how does one go about measuring a year and actions and events contained within such a time-frame? let’s not get into pseudo-meta-physics [the win-fail-entropy-hawkins postulate of 2008 to be explained in a future post.] we can go by the songs . . . that which i danced the year in with and that which i dance out [might that be one full dance dance revolution?]
but the songs weave in and out of years like . . . yeah i promised not to get into pseudo-metaphysics and that includes pseudo complex analysis as well . . .
i learned one thing this year *||preachy lecture alert||
there is a knob on guitar amplifiers called presence. technically, one could call it high high highs. it controls the levels on the highest frequencies (most energetic.) if you roll the presence all the way down – the notes and chords you are strumming are still coming through and may be reproduced in a way that still sounds good, punchy, bangin’, sultry, and supersweet – whatever you may be going for at that moment. but . . . roll that knob up and you’ll have something a little extra going on above . . . push it too much and it’s way too much . . . but in that zone of polite and live presence, what used to be just a clean guitar tone from a fender strat’s bridge pickup put into a twin reverb amp becomes the stale beer and rock and roll smell that fills the air of the dingy club where the girl in the crowd will break your heart eleven times out of ten [reminds me of that airborne toxic event song] it pushes the sg run into the mesa boogie into that in between that might just make you cry. it’s about presence and it has taken me awhile to figure that out.
it’s about presence it’s about being there – existing in the moment – rolling up the presence knob and not just auto-piloting ones way through it all. it’s not filtering out the sometimes offensive and nastily energetic superhigh frequencies. it’s listening to them and adjusting your play and noisemaking accordingly – and we all make so much noise – play less [sometimes turn down - thanks john] and actually feel more. far from enlightened – but inching [or centemetering for our scientist friends] closer. while things should never be scott-free-easy…
the universe has a way of slipping into profoundly and transcendentally clear grooves and the man beneath broadway and 175th street knows exactly one riff on the guitar and his vocal melody is bouncing phyrigian and pentatonic and that combined with the drip and the drip from the stalagmites (or is that tites?) that echo . . . it’s that which makes this a cathedral
and on a downbound a-train you’re already humming and bouncing to the symphony. it’s because you are there and you know that it’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever heard – and you’re finishing nine different versions of the song in your head at once – and you were told of this upward lofting melody from the co-conspirator extraordinarre – but now you know: you know what starts symphonies and you know where that train and new york city night may take you is what completes them.
