The Dance of Electricity

“The Dance of Electricity,” from Tangerine (1997).

The hounds stopped their howling
Replaced by the wailing of machinery
The calls of the crows and the mockingbirds
Gone silent, subsiding away
The sailors now sailed to foreign places
Leave no traces, no memories behind
The urchins of alleyways
Forever now fleeting, they’re drifting away
The water of wishing wells
The dust of the dreaming that’s disappeared
The shining of sundown
Superseding’s the dance of electricity

The trace of the outline of industry
Has permanent placed itself on the old skyline
The smoke of the twilight horizon
Has, shrouding, descended and seized the day
The feeling of four-letter fingerprints
Impressed itself onto the outside.  It’s crying out,
“Wait!”  Now the whole price has pushed itself
Inside of each and of all of the hollows.
The shelter of solitude
The noise of the numbers of metal days
The brightness of moonlight
In the dark of the dance of electricity

The leaves and the laughing of lily-roses
Who now can suppose who can speak in their way?
The tempo has taken its trampling
To the tears of the hallowed of higher places
The shadows of new-orphaned faces
See the spaces of lifetimes now leaved behind
In the shaking and stealing simplicity
In the trance of the dance of electricity

I went through a period in the summer before I entered grad school where I moved from Claremont back home to San Diego and wrote a number of tunes very quickly, with little editing but with a series of what I think are pretty good melodies.  There are three or four tunes from that period that actually haven’t seen release in any form and, having heard them a few years ago as I was going through my old 4-tracks and remixing them through Pro Tools, aren’t likely to be made available any time soon.  I was working quickly and playing around, and wrote some pretty embarrassing lyrics in the process.

I got better as the summer wore on, and that August (or so) I wrote “For Good Measure,” “I Know and You Know,” and “Have You Seen My Baby?” in that order, all of which still stand up and which are here heard in the 4-track demos I cut that summer, later to be re-cut for the House Carpenters’ In the Choir of Primates in 1995 and Bill & Pete’s Hey Rhumbahead! in 1993.  It was a real streak, that August, and “For Good Measure” at the time and in hindsight really represented a jump forward for me in the way I would feel that something like “I’ve Maintained My Advantage” would later on.

“The Dance of Electricity,” on the other hand, is like all the stuff I wrote in, let’s say, June or July: cut from a different and lesser cloth than those later three.  The lyrics are a mess, if evocatively so.  I’d just read Ulysses and, while I never labored under the conceit that was a writer that sings rather than a musician, or a poet rather than a songwriter (why on earth, I think, would someone who could write songs want to be anything else?), I did like how Joyce was so willing to do unconventional or anti-conventional things with language and form.  It seemed then and in its way still seems to me a good general policy, though for years now I’ve played with form and language in a less outwardly obvious way than I do in this tune.

I became very attached to E.P. Thompson and John Ruskin‘s writing in grad school, and I thought a lot at the time about change in history, and things that are lost.  I don’t think I’m a nostalgist, but I am very skeptical about the idea of progress.  I have always lived in thoroughly modern places, be they suburbs or, as I do now, in a genuine city–and Dakar is, without question, a thoroughly modern city, if of a different side of modernity than one sees in San Francisco.  Dakar would be impossible to imagine before the creation of a global division of labor.  I say this to contextualize the fact that I spend a lot of time daydreaming about living in a quiet, rural environment and walking everywhere.  I don’t know what to make of it, but suffice to say that the imagery, drawn from 19th century reactions to industrialization, are only partially a pose on my part.

What makes the tune worthwhile is the mandolin riff.  I can’t remember precisely, but I’m fairly sure this was the first tune I wrote on the first mandolin I purchased, an Irish-style Flatiron I bought used and which later split in two when a bass drum rolled on top of its soft case on the way home from a gig once.  There’s not much to say about this, except that it proves you can get a lot of mileage from a good riff, even when the other parts of the song, while not totally indefensible, aren’t up to the riff’s quality.

I have made the point elsewhere, but, again, this is a good example of how a great record doesn’t need to be made up of nothing but great tunes.  Rule #1 about choosing tunes for a record is that the tunes must be good to listen to, and therefore they need to be decent tunes.  What makes a decent tune, though, is the big question.  I’d put forward that any tune needs to have something extraordinary about it.  In this case, it’s the mandolin riff.  Actually, in hindsight I would say that everything else about the tune, from the lyrics to the vocal performance, which is likely the oddest one I’ve released, are fair at best.  I have a few tunes that I have no intention of releasing that have both better lyrics and a better performance, with a melody on par with their better lyrics and performance.  “The Dance of Electricity,” however, beats out the objectively better tune, because it has one element that really is special.  It’s got a great riff, and while that doesn’t make for a great tune, it does make it work on what was a great, if unintended, record, Tangerine.

Tangerine, again as I’ve written before, consisted of a bunch of tunes I had on 4-track that either I’d never tried with a band or which had never worked with one.  I had a fairly large back catalogue by the time the House Carpenters ceased to be, and 1997, which should have been the worst year of my musical life given the band’s implosion, ended up seeing two good records come out and a new-found confidence and independence on my part.  The Bathroom Mirror, recorded to walkman in a day and released on cassette with photocopied packaging, served to prove myself that I possessed all the tools I needed to make something beautiful.  Tangerine served to show, above all to myself, that I had been doing so for years if only I had been aware of it.  Interestingly, though I would strongly disagree, there are people who think it my best record.

New Tune, “Coyote on Valencia”

“Coyote on Valencia” from Garageband Demos 2009-2010.

Lyrics, in .pdf, with chords.

My velvet blazer and my whiskers waxed
I tip my top-hat as I cross the tracks
Without copper coin or greenbacks
My paws patter on the blacktop
Leave no reflection passing window panes
Nor no impression passing peoples’ brains
I slip between the cars and bike lanes
That litter this, my creation

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone in the Financial District
You’ll have company inside the station at 24th St.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone on the Big Red Bridge
You’ll see long ago footprints in Dolores Park

I catch inarticulate infants’ eyes
I read the forms in that clouded sky
I see the metal buildings gone too high
While crouching down on the pavement
Despite that history hunting on my track
I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re taking the T
You’ll have so much company you won’t know what to do with it.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re cursing the Mayor’s office
You’ll see any number of brown eyes staring back at you

When the paper reads the Mission burned
White Jesus gone, Father Serra spurned
You’ll know that I took my turn
Though it was too long in coming

I feel I take a bit of a pass on writing for 2009, because I recorded Adieu, False Heart, printed it up (such as I did), and dealt with other musical things, like performance and getting my web situation to something that fits my life at this point.  I do have a number of little ideas for tunes built up from last year, but the fact remains that I completed no new tunes in 2009.  I began this one, but only got the first verse and a bit of the second last year, and a start on the second part–”Sneaking through windows and doors,” etc.  The third part, the chorus such as it is (I’m not using these terms scientifically) had been a wisp of a melody I’d had in my head for years but which connected to this tune on the last day of a meditation retreat I attended over winter break.

I read Vine Deloria‘s God is Red a couple years ago, and it had a big impact on how I see things.  Particularly powerful was a lengthy except from a speech Chief Seattle gave in 1854 or 1855, here shortened to the relevant passage:

And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

It will be noted that eminent historians working for the National Archives have questioned the existence of the speech:

The dubious and murky origins of Chief Seattle’s alleged “Unanswered Challenge” renders it useless as supporting evidence.  The historical record suggests that the compliant and passive individual named Seattle is not recognizable in the image of the defiant and angry man whose words reverberate in our time.

I’ll go with Vine Deloria over some white hack working for the Federal Government any day of the week.  The paper is worth a gander, if only to dismiss it more specifically.  What we have here is one of a long series of examples of white academics and intellectuals trying to determine the meaning of, in this case, Indian people’s past.  Among other things, a dead giveaway for Jerry Clark’s intellectual bankruptcy: “angry man.”  Chief Seattle comes across as many things in the speech, but angry is not one of them.  If I had a dime for every time some white person called a non-angry non-white person angry…

Clark, of course, not wanting, as an employee of the Federal Government, the institution most responsible for the destruction of Indian societies in North America, and a beneficiary of that slaughter, to deal with the substance of the words.  They mean something to Deloria for a reason.  Rather than understand that reason, the argument is changed from a political to a technical one.  Clark–in Clark’s own mental world–here has the home-field advantage.  If I don’t know it, he thinks as a National Archivist, it therefore must not exist.  This is absolutely typical of white academia particularly as it examines non-white people.  We are the ones who truly know your history.

I have a pretty simple rule when looking at the past: I try to find out what peoples say about their own history as a starting point, and proceed from there.  Control of the narrative has to remain with the subjects, so to speak, of the story.  This is particularly true in North America, as in any settler colony.

There’s a litmus test to apply to any such debate about history and evidence.  When the white scholar lectures the non-white scholar or person about objectivity (broadly put), you know the white scholar is the villain, and that an attempt to maintain white control over the meaning of the past is in play.  Viz. Philip Curtain:

I note a curious anti-empiricist tone to some of the recent postings concerning the slave trade from Goree.

Where the tune differs with Chief Seattle is that it doesn’t posit the disappearance of native people:

I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

Credit where credit is due: our friend, Nellie, refers to the Golden Gate as “the Big Red Bridge.”  I cribbed the line for this tune.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I don’t read books as quickly as I seem to be writing posts about them.  I work with a couple of students who for various reasons can’t attend regular school, and one in particular is very bright and curious.  At our first meeting I pointed out that for her English credit we could either read from the regular English textbook or choose novels.  She thankfully chose to read a novel.  It turns out she, as a high school freshman, had read both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and had Down and Out in Paris and London on her shelf ready to read.  I’d never read it, so I agreed happily to read it as well.

I haven’t read much Orwell, and as an adult had only read “Shooting an Elephant,” which I taught for a few years.  I read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in school, but that was long enough ago that I can’t think that I have anything intelligent to say about them.  “Shooting an Elephant” impressed, though I know well that its perspective is limited and that regardless of Orwell’s intent it is, even if polemically anti-imperialist, ontologically imperialist.  One imagines, or hopes at least, that Orwell would own up to that.  Regardless, it impressed, and not just for its prose style.  Orwell was a proper socialist, fundamentally humane, and himself aware of his coming-to-awareness of the absolute awfulness of capitalism, in this case in its colonialist manifestation.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a semi-autobiography or autobiographical novel, for lack of a better term.  More important is that the writing has a palpable authenticity to it.  Orwell did indeed know poverty, the analytical subject of the text, first-hand.  He comments here and there, a few times at length, that those who don’t know poverty or poor people directly are more or less inevitably prone to misunderstand the matter.  It’s very true.

The book jibed very well with the Marx we’re currently engaged with in my reading group.  In particular–and I have this sense that this is more applicable to London than Paris, and possibly more to the United States than England–one sees how poverty and therefore class is, regardless of all the rhetoric about social mobility, a closed system.  There is nothing in a capitalist economy that exists to faciliate social mobility upward, only down.  One sees this again and again in Orwell, in concrete situations.

I came to the realization a while ago that while I get a lot out of reading history, and while therefore I’ve read a lot of it, I do well to balance historical or theoretical writings with novels.  One gets a feel for things with novels that one does not get with any work of history or theory.  This isn’t an original observation, but I’ve re-learned that it’s true in the last six months, when I’ve spent a lot of time with novels.

Last: I don’t need to say too much about the anti-semitism and homophobia that pop into the book every now and again.  It’s a problem.

Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

I’ve kept this blog for writings about my own tunes thus far, but I’ve thought for a few weeks now, having finished or nearly finishing a number of books I’ve been working on, to create a blog on which I respond to the things I read.  Among other things, I’ve realized over the years that I am in a process of forgetting the things I’d read in my twenties.  I don’t want to do that, and as I donated my library to the Riverside Public Library when we moved to Senegal, I can’t just go to my shelves to remind myself.  I began a separate blog, but realized as writing that I would do as well to keep all my writing in one spot.  In any event, the tunes I write have everything to do with the things I read and have read.

Last thing I finished was Mumbo Jumbo, which I’d been told made Ishmael Reed‘s reputation.  I finished it a week ago Saturday, I’d read a piece he’d written for Counterpunch on “Precious,” obliterating the film in what is in hindsight an obvious way but which I’ll say I didn’t piece together myself. In any event, it put it in my head that I needed to read one of his books as I hadn’t yet.

The short and long of it was that it was a fantastic book, and I’m more satisfied with it than I think any novel I’ve read in a long while.  Reed’s approach to text is idiosyncratic, but totally controlled.  I’ve always liked writers who tweak the language, and it’s probably that which made me go through my Joyce phase right after college.  I like Amos Tutuola as well, even though he got unfairly promoted as the stereotype of a primitive, unschooled writer, which is totally beside the point and which takes an imperialist approach to pidgins.

Reed is more of a tinkerer with syntax along the lines of Joyce than Tutuola, which is to say his control is totally obvious where Tutuola’s is hidden to the imperialist eye.  The sentences in the book have an almost clunky rhythm to them, but absolutely consistent throughout and sort of reminiscent of the way dialogue would run in Stanley Kubrick‘s later films.  I gather that Kubrick would run an absurd number of takes with actors and their dialogue would gradually become less natural, producing a type of stilted interaction that gave the impression that the characters were simultaneously in monologue and dialogue, a dissociation from the other.  Kubrick used this to produce a sense of alienation, where on the other hand Reed produces a sense of absurdity–while dealing with absolutely serious questions–which is not unlike Gogol in effect if not intent.

Stylistic questions aside, for the last 10 years or so I’ve read more and more in what my wife calls the Subaltern Canon, beginning I think with C.L.R. James–The Black Jacobins, of course–and then to people like Vine Deloria, etc.  My wife, too, has studied Vodun and thought deeply about it.  Combining this, it was really a treat to find that Vodun and Haiti were so central to the text.  I suppose I felt that I’d made some progress over the last 20 years or so.  I had a pretty typical Western Civ. type of education, excepting my courses with Allen Greenberger at Pitzer.  If I’d been assigned this in college, not only would I not have gotten any of the references, but I wouldn’t have been likely even in a position to have them explained to me.  At 40, things fit together like pieces in an easy jigsaw puzzle.  I know what loas are.  It made for a great read.

Of additional interest: the book has numerous images, but–and I have to say this reminded me a bit of what I myself did when I would make those little booklets with my records and put them in ziploc bags, back in the old days–they were rarely directly related to the accompanying text.  The result is to dislodge the reader from what is immediately present in the writing and expand the potential meanings of the novel.  It engages a reader: because the images are generally not directly explained, one must engage one’s own creative mind to produce meaning.