Balcony jumper at Phish tour closer

Old news, but still on my mind. There are many reports from people who watched the guy get a running start and dive over the railing, and many from those whose section he crashed into, 25 feet below, but mostly I imagine it from his perspective.

From a thread at Phantasy Tour; by all accounts, "fuck it" is verbatim:

I really don't think this dude was trying to kill himself, he was probably on a head full of acid and went through a bad thought process and at the end he came to the conclusion that jumping would solve something, so he said fuck it and went.

Sunday night at the Apohadion

KURT WEISMAN Even this late in human history, a bluesman can apparently still make a deal with the devil. The narrator of "Rainbow Blues" has sold his soul in exchange for extraordinary powers of vision (this blues' turnarounds are little holographic movies that seem to step outside the song's time, rainbows whose arcs unfold kind of perpendicularly to the staff paper (though this blues rolls forwards not left-to-right but like a country road going under you (the melody is sweet, but the singer's questions are kind of chilling for anyone who's been tempted to ask of their imagination more than God gives freely, or who wonders whose voice, exactly, is speaking through them

ROBERT STILLMAN'S "HORSES" Kind of hard for me to separate the music from the pathos of the had-a-bright-future-in-an-advanced-kind-of-jazz-but-walked-away narrative, especially since I like getting my socks knocked off by advanced kinds of jazz (like An Introduction to Kalifactors, for example). In my favorite music, many players' lines seem to be coordinated as if in a living intelligence, but when the many lines really are coordinated by a single musical being, the unity loses its appeal; the magic is all in the as if. (I managed to suspend this prejudice when I closed my eyes, but it's hard not to watch a one-man band—the real-time production of Horses is pretty unique, as human actions go—and being a spectacle does seem to be part of the point: Horses refers to an era, real or imagined, of fly-by-night novelty entertainers (though why Horses' music is so somber is beyond me; I can't imagine it would have lasted long in the bygone marketplaces it posits (interesting that Stillman will play-act the Royal Nonesuch in this icy fashion, but refuse to flaunt his talent in a way that would actually have the vulgar appeal of an itinerant showman

MICAH BLUE SMALDONE Though I've known Micah for a while, I'd somehow never heard him play. Living in Portland, one gets used to responding politely to one's friends' performances, but on this night I needed neither tact nor artifice, for, as it turns out, Micah is one of the real guys and requires none of our nepotism. Hilary once told me, "People say that Micah has the voice of an angel." I now understand her to mean that Micah is a righteous, destroying angel who scares the shit out of his audience. You feel like he's watching you burn in hell, and he's wicked angry. His 12-string sounds like a machine, some tank from the Great War, a combine rolling through the grain, capable of mangling the body of a careless farmhand. It would be a mistake to say that Micah has "peeped into the heart of man" or something, for the evil in these songs is not buried in the breast, but embodied in things people do (like when the murderer raises his dagger, the evil's pretty much right there). I am still spooked by the way Micah's face looked for a second.

Piano Jazz

They replayed an old episode tonight: Clark Terry, recorded in 1994. I imagined riverboats on the Mississippi as he spoke of them, and the steel workers who would disembark to enjoy the good food, pretty girls, and cheap booze of St. Louis. (For Terry, this image is not just a story, but a biological structure caused by those steel workers, way back in time; they are weirdly still present in his body.) Late in the program, one of Terry's improvisations went to his famous mumbling place: scat singing that becomes an automatic music of inarticulate gurgles, consonants with no vowels, stray words and partial sentences. This kind of letting go is mostly not done in jazz, or anywhere. Joyce regarded language as a reflex, something our bodies can't stop doing, and Finnegan's Wake is kind of a picture of this regurgitative flow, but it's one thing to carefully plot the spillage at your desk for 17 years, and quite another to allow your mouth to erupt in this fashion in front of other humans. I had stopped moving and was deep in listening when Terry paused at the end of a phrase, and in this space Marian McPartland interjected, clear as a bell: "Michael Jackson." I do not know from what sub-basement of knowledge this chilling utterance might have emerged, whether it was spontaneous or premeditated (for she did not seem to be in any state of talking-animal flux), but it seemed to stop time, and I, as in the moment before a car crash, was frozen in a sort of cone of perception receding to slatted grille of the clock radio's speaker.

still haunted by sucky band practice

so let's think instead about what's right in my musical life:

practicing on the vintage (& charmingly broken) Musser marimba I've borrowed; loving the black keys; figuring out little melodies (like "The Longest Time" (I'm so inspired by you)); playing along with Phish (they are always in tune); cruising the Real Book; comping to a metronome (1st time this millenium); pecking through "Confirmation." If I were stuck on a haunted space station for eternity, having this instrument and a Charlie Parker Omnibook would make it alright. ("Omnibook" is also the name of the space station.)

I'm in love with Orff percussion in general. I think the idea is: give kids real instruments that yield immediate sonic (& kinesthetic) rewards, and they will find their way into the world of music without further instruction. It's working on me: I haven't been this musically curious since I got home with my first electric guitar (Boxing Day 1989) and started picking out riffs I heard on 92 Moose, like the sitar part to a certain Bon Jovi song. These days it's "Sounds of Silence," "Guyute," and "On Top of Spaghetti" on my diatonic glockenspiel, whose keys' amazing selective rainbow goes green, brown, red-orange, yellow, gray, blue, lavender. My new Sonor xylophone is diatonic, but it came with extra bars: switch F to F# to play in the key of Hilary's kalimba; then switch B to Bb for lydian b7. Ace and Sheels were over on Monday, and our four-part Orff jam (xylophone, glockenspiel, shared marimba) makes the electric rock band seem pretty much obsolete. (And doesn't Sonor Orff sound like the name of a friendly man?)

more hope for music: you can now listen to Chris Weisman's songs all the way through at his website. I listened to "The Wordbrare Sessions" tonight. This song has always put me in mind of John McDowell's Woodbridge Lectures, and the library in which I first read them.

A game: which of Chris's songs seems most to refer to mallet percussion? I believe there is a correct answer...

& no sweets before bed

Around Christmastime, after months of adhering to a strict low-glycemic diet (I had been chastened by the results of my glucose tolerance test in September), I embarked on a bender of late-night ice cream eating (well, mostly frozen yogurt) that continued until this Monday. See, I had discovered that I could read and eat ice cream at the same time. It's more specific than that: I found that Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a Boxing Day purchase, was particularly well complemented by Ben & Jerry's "Half Baked" frozen yogurt, due to the nature and timing of the rewards delivered by each. No longer really "experimenting," I continued to read the rest of Klosterman's oeuvre (except Downtown Owl) in this fashion, and then David Lee Roth's memoir Crazy From the Heat, before dropping the "reading" part of the equation. Stonyfield Farms' "Cookies n' Cream" was my constant companion throughout four seasons of Jeeves and Wooster. I knew I had hit bottom when I sat down to listen to Phish's famous 12/29/94 "David Bowie" with a quarter of a tub of Breyer's "Take Two," so when the midwife told Hilary to cool it on the pre-nocturnal treats, I felt that the message was also meant for me. According to Joyce, an inrush of simple carbohydrates shortly before sleep shapes and really kind of ruins in advance your whole next day's glycemic career.

So this is Day Four, and though I am at this moment tracing in thought the quickest path to what might in truth be called a frosty pint, I have been generally wowed by the difference in the overall depth and texture of my mental life. I want to shout it from the rooftops: consciousness lives again! Sitting in the balcony of Cumston Hall on Tuesday night, crying as the cast of The Comedy of Errors broke into a seemingly spontaneous rendition of "Wimoweh" during the curtain call, I felt that Shakespeare himself was by my side, marveling at the summer stock troupe who, four hundred years later, had recalled his artwork to life, set in motion all its vital parts, and in so doing lit up, at least once more before death, long dormant neural constellations of meaning in the skulls of all those present that night at the Theater at Monmouth.

sleep

is life

Record roundup 8/8 (today's haul from Strange Maine)

The Incredible String Band: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter ($3 "as is" (=some endearing crackles and one sort of intentional-sounding skip during Koeeoaddi There))

I've tried many times to enjoy ISB, and have hitherto succeeded only in appreciating the Minotaur's Song ("I'll do what's wrong as long as I can" was a slogan of mine during the bad old days (Paul Simon: "How many nights you think that you can do what you been doin'?" (many nights, years of nights, it turned out))). I mean, I felt I got what ISB was up to, but rejected it and kind of resented it. But I knew that Hilary liked this record, and my newfound nesting instinct said that this record jacket was a necessary element in our prospective daughter's home. I played Side One tonight while cooking dinner, and while I am generally not a vinyl fetishist, it may be that I needed to hear this music coming off some non-digital physical thing that has survived time and passed through many hands and has a big picture before I could like it. Several years' distance from Feathers and all they represented may also have helped. I felt as though I could hear 1.) the music of ISB, sort of how it sounds by itself, yet also 2.) its pervasive influence on Feathers and 3.) how awesome Feathers was. How lucky for the world of musical art that Feathers lived in its activity, in hearsay and rumors, and in the floating aesthetic imagination, but chose to die (& live forever) rather than pitching itself into the corporate space that seemed so hungry for it. (Williamson and Heron: what is it with all the twos of songwriting (it was sort of surreal to see how many more writing credits accrued to Messina than Loggins as I was perusing The Best of Friends this evening (& may I take this moment to praise Armstrong and LaRoche, whose music as Do'a is changing my life pretty much every day these days

Jack DeJohnette: Pictures ($4; cut-out, possibly never played)

Improvisations in the studio: some where Jack layers organ and piano over drum beats, some where Jack just plays the drums, and some jamming with John Abercrombie. Recorded in Oslo in February 1976, probably a beautiful time on Earth. Space is the element most lacking in improvised music (it is plentiful here (Manfred Eicher is a master of space, even in epic, composed music ("artistic freedom" may be the wrong concept to apply to an Eicher production, but come on, who else would put out an album even remotely like this? (bizarre and risky and highly personal solo records: a subgenre of jazz worthy of much greater study (musical risk-taking: the first track (Picture 1) has a propulsive, funky beat, and all this harmonically dense ambient organ stuff starts to happen once the rhythmic line is established: thank you Jack DeJohnette for daring to lay down a groove like that on an album of impressionistic, brush-strokey, Zen-like improvisations! (No rules but those generated inside the music.)

Phish: A Live One (free; scratched double CD, information totally intact)

Skot said he found it on the street outside the store. Groundscores apparently come in threes: I found $60 on Congress Street while biking to Dr. Reed's (I also found a saltwater fishing license that helped me track down the owner). The day after I returned the cash, I found $5 on Water Street in Hallowell, which I promptly cashed in for coffee and a (regrettably floppy) ginger cookie at Slates Bakery (thinking again about quitting caffeine even as I am now flying on a rare evening coffee; Slates: I am totally sold on the current Green Mountain Coffee cup, brown and grey and green mountain-and-tree silhouette waves motif (I believe that addictive drugs work by giving back what they take away, that is, spontaneous moments of connection and insight and clarity evaporate from life, but similar feelings are dispensed again during the first minutes of coffee drinking, and coffee and its paraphernalia come to represent the neurological events that the drug has locked away and can alone release (I am more psychologically addicted to caffeine than ever, and for the first time am looking at houses and seeing widow's walks or sunrooms or little rooms' weird sideways triangular windows and thinking not great spot to get high but morning coffee room, which I guess is an improvement and maybe an addiction I can live with