Biked home in light rain after work. When I dismounted, I was surprised to see my Moleskine resting on the rack behind my seat; it had apparently worked its way out of my back pocket and landed somehow under one of the pannier's handles, whose gentle pressure sufficed to carry it home. The upper right-hand corner appears to have made repeated contact with the tire (always the brown paper cover, graph paper pages, and flap on the back cover for pressing flowers or occasional (already-dead) dragonflies; current notebook entitled FUNK SIREN; MY DHARMA BOOK; PEACE NOTES; PROGRESSIVE KNOTTINGS INTO; MY PAPER LIGHT SCREEN; PAPER PRACTICES; PROCESS-ONLY WORKBOOK; FREEDOM SKETCHBOOK; DR. RED WARBOOK

My handwriting only works in caps; no flow otherwise. And it's really hard for me to write complete sentences (except imperatives) when not sitting at this machine, stilled, caught in whatever feedback loops of screen light and brain wave, freed from the left-to-right space-time of line (i.e., not free

Attempting to write away from the computer, according to this book (my miracle book): I LIKE IT BETTER OUT HERE NEXT TO HILLY IN THIS PILE OF SEVEN BEAUTIFUL FABRICS; I SAW THE LITTLE BOWL SHEELA MADE ON MY WAY IN (CEREAL (DRY (MY DHARMA BOOK (BEGINS ANYWHERE (SPEND TIME OUT HERE, LEARN TO WRITE ON PAPER, HEAR YOUR VOICE DIFFERENTLY (GET AWAY FROM THE SCREEN (I MIGHT NEED BIGGER PAPER (I ALWAYS IMAGINE THESE FOLIOS THAT REFLECT AN IDEALIZED MIND

† † †
My favorite part of Lord of the Rings (the movie, since I've never read the book): when Frodo is first given the Ring, he drops it into his shirt pocket for safe keeping. No zipper or button secures this artifact of universal significance, just a spirit of trust.

This morning I stopped to investigate the Longfellow Garden (primarily a spot for the consumption of workday lunches out of foam trays; secondarily a poem garden for coffee writing). This is its first springtime after two years of seriously destructive renovations. It is ironic that the destruction was caused by the expansion of the Maine Historical Society, whose library claimed my favorite spaces at the back of the garden, covered recesses or grottoes maximally spiritually remote from the city, yet surrounded in its sounds. I think there was a cedar tree, and also a hidden bench around a corner; I sat there and watched ants carrying little pebbles up out of their home and understood for the first time the construction of anthills. Whatever ant-earth there may have been between flagstones pushed apart by decades of weed life is gone; the bricks are new and tight. The lion fountain is the same as before—his eyes are radically unfocused; there's no conceivable angle from which eye contact is possible (I think this is rare for representations of lions)—but the cistern into which he dribbles looks new (part of the horror is not knowing which elements have been replaced; preserving some of the original somehow ensures that the destruction of memory is total (yet: "The garden as a whole was rehabilitated following preservation standards, and retains the character and replicates many of the plantings found in Lamb’s original sketches"

I can never resist dipping the last page of my notebook in holy waters like those of the lion's cistern (many dippings into the eternal puddle in the parking lot of the Bethesda Lutheran Church on St. Ronan's (the Pool of Bethesda (kneeling to drink from a puddle, the highest form of worship

I suppose it is wrong to judge a garden in April; I hope that in July it is impossible to see end to end, that it is brambly, and that bees will alight again on purple coneflowers (the radiance of genus Echinacea is the highest form of praise

On the sleeve of a sweatshirt worn today on Congress Street:
"ICE STORM 98 SURVIVOR"

may these texts continue to circulate

The broadcast equipment of WUNH was damaged in the ice storm. Welcome to the World, scheduled to play some Saturday or Sunday morning in mid-January, had planned to cancel anyway, for the spirit energy that had sustained strange reincarnations of the band so many fall Friday nights in a row had gone dead. The storm mercifully took the decision out of it.

I love the greenhouse—we went houseplant shopping today, and I spent the longest time staring at cacti in the amazing indoor natural light. I want to live in a plastic barn, among plants. My favorite cactus was the size of a melon, and it had a couple dozen wrinkly faces, each with countless fibonacci-spiraling prickers (spines? jaggers?). The amount and arrangement of information overwhelmed my faculties of cognition; I couldn't see the cactus all at once, and it seemed to be in motion, like those tessellating lizards one sees peripherally in pebbly sand after a sleepless night. It was a living cubist object, thanks to the natural math of optimal form. I really wanted to bring the cactus home but doubted I could take care of it—even my favorite quartz crystal couldn't save Hilary's beloved rat-tail cactus (although that one, dug out of the ground in McNeal, Arizona, was never intended to live a domestic life in northern New England). So instead I picked out three leafy plants that looked friendly and had a quickening effect on my powers of imagination.

This seemed the appropriate time to finally pick up Stevie Wonder's Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. I had seen it in the Soul bin last week at Strange Maine; thankfully it was still there ($6). It is insane that I never listened to this record until now. I mean, I preached from The Secret Life of Plants (the book) in high school, even early college. (After Desmond Morris, Carl Sagan, Fritjof Capra, Terence McKenna, Leary and Alpert, The Celestine Prophecy, and Phish, the science of plant consciousness did not require a great leap in imagination.) I put on Innervisions when I re-pot my plants. I bring up the Wonder/houseplant affinity in any discussion of 70s culture. Maybe the Universe had a reason for hiding this music from me until I was 33. But it's criminal that Journey isn't part of the normative Wonder catalog. You can tell by listening that the music is a soundtrack to something you're supposed to see, but this makes it no less complete (for Wonder, at least, the music is the movie). His genius is fully present, more so because the context is not totally self-defined—you can hear real-time living intelligence more clearly in a commissioned throwaway than in a masterpiece of personal vision. The fact that the music is campily programmatic is a plus; this defeats any ironic New Age angle one might attempt to take up (slapstick jazz can break out anywhere (certain sequences of the movie must be animated (& you know there's lots of time-lapse photography

The tour dreams are starting again. Merriweather Post Pavilion was a stage on the beach, behind a grassy dune. People were sledding on the sand. A boardwalk led to the venue, and no one was jumping the rickety white fence. I was at a concessions stand, trying to figure out what happened to the nachos I had ordered. Suddenly I realized I had missed most of the first set; they had played a bunch of new tunes, Tela, and a cover of Willie the Pimp.

What is Phish?

A first approach to the question: explain why many/most people hate Phish

Startled by a sudden sound (the release of air brakes), I looked up from my bike lock and saw a bus across the street, emblazoned with a giant advertisement: YOU FIRST. THE TECHNOLOGY FOLLOWS.

This slogan is never true; it applies to no technologies. But it's the story each new technology tells about itself, shortly before its deployment creates for us a new set of habits, desires, needs, and myths, destroying some part, large or small, of who we were before. No falsehood is more dangerous to humanity.

Rosenwinkel's note on "Grant," the best (catchiest, most danceable) tune on Enemies: "Grant is an upbeat tour through several different sections. It is a very linear tune compositionally and features everyone well."

An upbeat tour through several different sections. I find this formulation absolutely intoxicating. (It's brilliant as instructions for listening (to anything): imagine you are going on a tour of several different sections.) It almost sounds like a joke Don and Walt would make sitting at the mixing board in a video interview: fake formal language that totally fails to meet the music, a parody of the critic puffing himself up with empty abstractions. But coming from Rosenwinkel the remark is quite full.

In support of a robust reading of several different sections:

During the time we recorded Under It All my room was just covered wall-to-wall with architectural drawings. I didn't know what any of the symbols meant—I couldn't interpret them literally—but to me the specificity of all of the blueprints was inspiring to me, and yet was totally abstract because I didn't know how to interpret them; but I loved the idea of specificity and abstractness.

A friend sent me a link to a possible world very close to our own: Under It All, Kurt Rosenwinkel's lost Impulse! debut from the late 1990s. In some extra-artistic corporate happening, Rosenwinkel was shuffled to Verve, and the album was shelved; one of his new bosses said no. No way. We cannot sell this as the major label debut of "the best new jazz guitar player since Metheny and Scofield"; no one's even going to know which sound is the guitar. This is not jazz; this is the private fantasy of a crazy man. It's not that he's not communicating with his audience, he's communicating way too much, which is the definition of "uncool." It is frightening to hear musical intelligence this radically unbounded by conventions of genre. Instead, Verve released Enemies of Energy, a self-financed recording Rosenwinkel had made in 1996, which, though still sort of weird, manages to toe the line as mainstream jazz. It's still oddly lacking in guitar content adequate to the legend of Rosenwinkel—Verve had Metheny and Scofield write blurbs for the liner notes, as if to compensate for the absence of wizardry. Enemies privileges the song, even when the song is sort of bland; Kurt doesn't really shred until his second Verve release, The Next Step, and then it's mind-crushing laser beams, enemies made of energy, the anti-humanism at the end of modernism's rainbow—the awesome, hero-destroying jazz guitar we were hoping for the first time round. But not until Heartcore (Verve 3) is Rosenwinkel allowed to approach the friendly-alien weirdness and compulsive musical artmaking of Under It All.

If these files are in the right order, "Brooklyn Sometimes" is the opener. How I wish these sounds (friends of energy) were the mainstream jazz world's introduction to Kurt Rosenwinkel! This music says: sometimes Brooklyn is like this. Sometimes you walk down a tree-enfolded lane of rowhouses in Brooklyn Heights to this beat. Sometimes a Casio keyboard comes to life and flies you over Prospect Park on a cloud of code. Sometimes you fall asleep on a bench and dream you are under that avenue of palm trees from the cover of Native Dancer, singing like Nascimento in the space café, writing in cursive in that smoggy tropical sky. Sometimes a cartoon insect whose proboscis is a horn walks up the steps from an underground apartment and plays music at you; because his body is an instrument, singing and playing are the same for him. I practiced a lot and figured out how to speak in colors. Now let's hover outside this window and see if anyone notices us.

One of Lennon's powers is to communicate to you across time. I mean this in a very robust and spooky way. Lennon, standing in front of the microphone in 1966 or 67, cupping his headphones, is addressing you, sending you a message that is extremely direct, despite the pitch control and ADT and echo and compression and distortion and the 40+ years and the fact that Lennon is not merely dead but essentially dead, dead by definition (unlike George, who, though he often sounds as if he is reanimated or singing to you from beyond (Hilary's lyrics to "Love You To": I'll be with you babe/if you'll get in my grave), only happens to be dead). Lennon knows your language and is singing directly into your mind. He intends to do this. When he sings Can you hear me? he means Don't you fucking get the way my mind is totally present to you?

Yet lately I am more surprised by the immediacy of certain Paul vocals, sudden clear syllable-melodies alive with consciousness. Tonight one word in particular gave me chills: hourglass

Bought another White Album today ($3 "as is" at Strange Maine; turns out it had been Skot's copy until he got a better one (my fantasy is that he once performed with it (we need to do a Beatles night at the store! The jacket is spotted (gray) and fringed with scotch tape (several yellows). I've only listened to sides 1 and 2 so far (thank God it's not one of those double albums that are pressed 1&4, 2&3 for automatic changers (like Songs in the Key of Life (mismatch of title and technology (only the songs are in the key of life), kind of a shame to have the order broken up for a machine that no longer exists (I bet that even at the time most people just flipped manually (if you were going to devote several pages of your 33 1/3 on SitKoL to the cover, and if the whole structuring conceit of your book were Birth-Innocence- Experience-Death-Transcendence, mightn't it occur to you that the warbly concentric rings picture your trip down the birth canal toward a world in which Stevie Wonder, the very medium in which the 70s were conducted, is waiting to greet you, a blazing white soap impression of Stevie, morning light reflected in his sunglasses, apparently topless, with a Kurt Rosenwinkel moustache and goatee (KR: The key of life is really all I practice now; this guitar is tuned in the key of life; yes I am serious about the songs part of it): houseplant world, macrame world, living synthesizer world, mom world

As-is Beatles record=Beatles TARDIS: accidental lock-groove time-loops, additional odd meters, new chord changes, jump cuts to crucial Schenkerian nodes, all this the sound of the physical history of the record's use, the playback of encryptions in dirt and dust (Nolan's Revolver: covered in his aunt's candle drips (Hilary's Sgt. Pepper: melted in half under skylight sun (drooped over shelf), remelted and flattened, sounded good

"...made her look a little like a military man"

And then, through the comb and toilet paper kazoos, as though they had to disguise it, you can hear them sing his name.