18 November 2001
5:12 am
Dearest Deborah,
I just saw what was, perhaps, one of the most beautiful things I have ever
experienced. I’m gonna hold off on the specifics for the moment, though, and
let that serve as a frustratingly intriguing comment while I ramble off on
tangents and build back to it. That’s the plan, anyway. It’ll all come
‘round eventually.
I’m so extremely happy that you and Neil are coming down to visit! Yes,
extremely happy. I bounce up and down and tell my friends that the
Lobster People are coming to New York and they look at me strangely.
"They’re not genetically lobsters," I explain. "They just spend a lot
of time with them on boats; you know, catching ‘em." I’m not sure if they
get it. They probably have visions of y’all approaching them at a
maddeningly slow speed, pinchers raised and snapping in slow-motion.
Legend has it (per one of my professors freshman year) that after Jean-Paul
Sartre – or one of those other French existentialists – took acid, he wrote
that he felt perfectly normal, except for the giant lobster that persisted
in following him around Paris. Ah, to be a French existentialist. I haven’t
quite sunk that low yet. In my present standing, I’m still a few levels
above that. I’m pretty sure there are about three or four more stages of
self-loathing depression between geekdom and all-abiding philosophies of
gloom. I’ll let you know, though.
At any rate, this here ramble actually begins (and nearly ends) with the
topic of music geekdom, specifically a couple of precise strains of it. I’m
gonna have to slip into dorky analysis mode for a long moment. In 1965,
there was Bob Dylan. He was it. He was cool. He was the top of the pops,
cream of the crop. Sure, there were the Beatles, but even they were picking
up lessons in Hip from Dylan (who, supposedly, first turned the Fabs onto
pot). Everybody basically followed in his footsteps. They couldn’t help but
be influenced by him.
Beyond his lyrics – which have certainly been commented on enough – there
are two basic elements that make Dylan so amazing to me: his keen sense of
American history (musical and otherwise) and his strange-as-fuck-all notion
of rhythm (which itself probably derives from old forms of American popular
music).
Historically, Dylan is self-consciously aware of where he stands in the
stream of American music. It comes through in his lyrics, which evolved
fluidly out of the traditional material that made up the bulk of his early
songbook. Unconscious, I think, is Dylan’s rough American spirit, the last
remains of a certain brand of populism championed by the New Left in the
’50s – with Woody Guthrie, Bob’s hero, as their model – which would
eventually mutate into full-on hippiedom. Both of these things manifested
themselves in a raw drive that crackled behind so many of Dylan’s great
mid-‘60s songs — Like A Rolling Stone, Maggie’s Farm, Tell Me Mamma,
and tons of others.
To summarize: Dylan’s cool. Many bands took him on as a primary influence,
including The Grateful Dead and The Velvet Underground. Each of these
embodied a completely different aesthetic — yet each was equally born out
of Dylan. The Dead took Dylan’s sloppy rhythms and tightened them up into a
danceable rock groove. The Velvets took the same sloppy rhythms and made
them even sloppier. Each of these approaches, in turn, spawned entire
genres; The Dead birthing jambands, The Velvets birthing punks and, later,
indie rockers.
That’s the way my theory goes, anyway. There are two people in my life that
I would be most likely to spring this kinda diatribe on in conversations.
And, oddly enough, each of them represents one of these aesthetics perfectly
and completely. Tommy, for example, is extremely into indie rock, watching
sunsets, deep drones, Jim Jarmusch, and philosophy. Ray, on the other hand,
is deeply immersed in the jamband world (whether he’ll admit it or not),
social politics, and other fun things you can dance about.
In my four years at school, I felt a deep split between the two worlds, at
least as they revealed themselves in own life. This became more and more
apparent during my senior year. One of them was the Phishhead thing: hunting
down tapes for long pieces of beautiful improvisation, trekking around the
country to see bands in exotic locales, all of that. The other part involved
the pursuit of Beauty with a capital ‘B’: taking Polaroid pictures of deep
blue skies and strip malls, exploring the sonic possibilities of feedback in
my basement… those sorts of things.
There’s a poem by Mike Doughty that always summarized it well for me (even
though my friend Dawn told me that it was basically ripped off from a novel
by Italo Calvino), which I now desperately need to read). It’s short, so
I’ll retype it. Hell, I might’ve even sent this before. It’s one of my
favorite pieces of writing… ***
Bicoastal
Each city is its own dream life.
In each, the other the dream.
He is awake only on airplanes.
He hurdles weeks
through the calendar
in each city,
longing for the other.
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