kept company
riffing......
maybe you could use a laugh? or two? or seven? if so you are enthusiastically invited to upcoming comedy. the lineups are top notch.
Trans Art Jest - comedy show THIS SAT - May 16th at 8pm
Breath Door Show - June 5th - get your tickets or tell your NYC people
it’s on as they say……… (I am they lol)
I continue to have the experience of feeling totally understood by music. There is a voice in my head scoffing like oh, you like music? You and literally everyone else on the planet. I continue anyhow. The ~power~ of music has something to with time, the dimension of the month apparently.
What I’m saying is I turn on a song and it’s like damn how did you know that’s what it’s like right now? How did you know the chords, the speed, the layers of instrument and language for what I am going through?
I guess this is a pun, because I am invoking multiple meanings of the word, but I feel utterly accompanied. Music goes with me to the places, the ones in myself, the ones in my life. I can’t think of a place it hasn’t gone to.
There is an unnerving/electrifying recognition that comes from reading, when an experience is articulated that you didn’t realize you’d been weathering and someone’s articulation offers witness, clarity, awe, or even commiseration. But! It simply doesn’t compare to when that song comes ON.
Music might have the most direct relationship to time (bending, stretching, tarrying) of all the art forms. I wonder if music is a kind of reclamation of time, a way to name time, to wield it.
We talk about how the great works are timeless, but maybe they are actually timemore. I can feel like time is waves crashing down on me knocking me down slapped in the face water up the nose. Gerbil on hamster wheel, tick tick tick. Yet musicians, singers, drummers, all of them say hey! I am the one who will be selecting the time signature, I make the beat, you all are gonna listen and even groove and move your bodies at the pace I choose. The gumption! The insistence! The style! The generosity! I respect it. I trust it. I feel it. Sometimes I feel it with my foot tapping before my mind has even noticed. This power is part of the championship tradition.1
By suspending time as we know it, tilting it, throwing it up and catching it, perhaps music makers make reconciliation possible via defamiliarization (also known as miracle). They make surrender fun instead of wrenching. Ever so deliberately, ever so gracefully, they bring us their very own time. And by the time they’re through, we’ve all stopped counting, and they’ve still got more to give away.
Stuff that made me drop my shoulders since last week:
Toni Cade Bambara writes, “Ali, in his autobiography, I Am the Greatest, defines a chapmion as one who takes the telling blow on the chin and hits the canvas hard, can’t possibly rally, arms shot, energy spent, the very weight of the body too heavy a burden for the legs to raise, can’t possibly get up. So you do. And you keep getting up.” in What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow 163
"actually timemore." "the gumption." "the generosity." 🙏🏼