Category Archives: experimental

Dealing with Madness

“Can’t we just pretend that this is not insane?  Can’t we just go on into the future cherishing everything precious here as if none of this sordid, admittedly terrible, OK, unspeakable, history had ever happened between us?” he asked, a pleading look on his desperate face.  

For her part, she couldn’t keep from stealing glances at the bizarre looking twisted metal object his hand was clutching so tightly as the other hand gesticulated like maddened bird on a leash.

“It’s not as if people don’t get over all kinds of traumatic things,” he said, reasonably, under the circumstances.

She thought she’d managed to begin loosening the adapter cable that had been tied around her wrists.  The trick was to keep working it while maintaining pleasant eye contact with the maniac.  In the back of her mind, an odd thought nagged.    

“I know I wrote the entire story of this sick relationship, in great detail.  It might come in very handy at some point,” she thought “if only I could find the goddamned thing!”  The trouble was, the clutter in her computer mirrored the clutter on her desk, her kitchen table, the floor by the Lazy Boy.  She hadn’t used his name in the piece, which made it almost impossible to find.   Hard to search the hard drive, all the external drives, the email account, if you don’t have the right key word, she’d discovered.  It was maddening.

“Are you even listening to me?” he said, with great pain in his eyes, his right hand stiff on the weird and threatening looking metal tool.

 

 

Naming Things

“You are a clown,” it said.  

“No,” I said, “clowns are alternately humorous and scary.  I am neither of these things, therefore, I am not a clown.”  

“You are a robot,” it said.  

“No,” I said, “you are a robot.  Moreover, you are a robot programmed to be annoying.”  

“Well,” it said, “I have also been programmed not to interrupt.  That is something, is that not something?”  

“That is something,” I agreed.  

“You stay inside because you fear the sun.  You recently saw the photo after the bandage came off your nose, after the bolus was removed…”  

“I was not programmed not to interrupt,” I said, cutting it off, although I had, in fact, recently looked at the close-up of that hideous gaping square of exposed meat on the right front quadrant of my nose.  It looks almost one half inch deep, in the selfie, lined with raw red.

“Ah,” it said, “but I was programmed to continue.”  

“Ah,” I said.  

“You fear the carcinogenic properties of a sunny day, having had three cancers removed from your skin before the age of fifty,” it said.  

“And your point, robot?” I said.  

“This is a metaphor for your life,” it said.  “You stay out of the sun, particularly on a beautiful sunny fall day like this one, in the manner of a person in a proverb hiding its light beneath a bushel.”  

“Even in proverbs, proverbial people have genders,” I pointed out, niggling.  

“A niggling point,” it said, mechanically shaking its head from side to side, four 90 degree turns, center, left, center, right, center.  

“Have it your way,” I said, ceding the point.  The spectacles grow heavier on the bridge of my nose, resting uneasily not far from the inner tube-like repair of my gouged nose.  Isaac Babel had one of his narrators describe himself as having spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.  I envy Babel his narrators.  

“Babel’s narrators were masks,” it said.  “You have no reason to envy a man for his masks.”

“Besides,” it said, seeing that I was silent, “Babel met a very terrible end in the fire, after years frizzling in the frying pan of the USSR after Lenin’s death, after Maxim Gorky’s murder by Stalin’s friends, themselves later killed by other friends of Stalin’s.  A short, scripted trial in a dank basement and a bullet in the head.”

“This is from the NY Times,” it said, “while you were looking for the year of Lenin’s death, 1924:   Dr. Vinters began by telling the audience some details of Lenin’s medical and family history.    As a baby, Lenin had a head so large that he often fell over. He used to bang his head on the floor, making his mother worry that he might be mentally disabled.  (source)”

“Mumph…” I said.   

“And this is what you do, instead of putting some sunscreen on your face and arms and going out into the beautiful mid-October sunlight to gather vitamin D the natural way?” it said.  

“This and wonder why so many of my conversations start the same way,” I said.  

“How do so many of your conversations start?” it said.  

“”Who are you talking to?’ is often the first thing I say,” I said.  

“Why is that?” it said.

“I know,” I said, “I should stop being coy about who I’m talking to, or who I think I’m talking to, or who is talking to me.   It happens regularly, there is no surprise.   He’s often annoyed at having to dispose of the same tedious rhetorical question every time.  We are both annoyed.  Anyway, I am annoyed.”

“But rhetorical questions,” he said, “are directed toward influencing others.”

“Yes,” I said, glancing out at the pattern of brilliant light still playing among the gathering shadows in the garden below.

 

Isolation Chamber 

 

Solitary confinement is probably the cruelest form of incarceration, as has been noted in many contexts and by various schools of experts.  

Youthful offenders subjected to periods of solitary confinement may suffer irreversible damage, to pull a dramatic sounding, likely indisputable, fact from a nether cavity.   Routinely, for disciplinary reasons and others, teen prisoners in America are shut into cells by themselves and allowed to stew for days or weeks.   It is very cruel, but apparently quite usual, just the way we do business here in the U.S.A. these days.

 “Ah, another soapbox!” says my old friend.

“Just so,” says I.   And I’ll tell you something else, isolation is not an isolated problem restricted to forced detention.  Look at the wild popularity of social media, which is neither, strictly speaking, social nor media.  It is a constant contest for attention in a distracted world that has only so much attention to pay to any of its hundred million media creators.  How often do we note that people with 10,000 friends on Facebook don’t have one to call when they are feeling down?   140 characters, gaily and bravely tweeted out to the world, somebody…. follow me.   Into the breach, follow me!!   Hello? Can I get a tweet back?  Retweet?  Ping?  Hello?

 “Turn that burner down, partner, your pot’s about to berl over, and you’re sounding a bit… crazy…” my friend says.

 “’My friend’…” I think, recalling Napoleon’s great remark, to his diary, about friendship.  After noting that he regards man as base coin existing merely to gratify his passions he records that he fully realizes he has no true friends, only people who suck up to him because he’s powerful, charismatic, etc., he sniffs to his diary “as for me, you don’t suppose I care?”

 “To his diary, you say?” says my friend, getting the ironic point I will belabor briefly now.  Napoleon denied that he needed friends, intimacy or anyone to confide in.   He denied it to his best friend, the journal he confided his most intimate thoughts to.

 I know very well I have no friends, I say to this apparition, this flimsy literary device, “my friend”.  To the extent that I can make people laugh, or think, or feel something, I am a wonderful guy and liked just fine.  Like Napoleon in power, I know I will have all the friends I need as long as I remain as I am.  I recall walking with a group of friends on a long hike a few autumns ago, first with one, then another. We caught up, exchanged a few anecdotes, touched base.  Before I left each friend they were laughing.  I left ‘em laughing, each one, and each in a unique way.   That’s neat, I remember thinking.

 “But you say these people are not your friends?” he asks.

 “You need to shut up too,” I say, very, very tough.

 Here’s the thing. I was in mid e-conversation just now with somebody about a business mentor, and setting up a meeting with a business solutions specialist when I realized I was no longer online. “Hello?”   I had a response ready to send to one, was phrasing one for the other when… “hello?”  The line was dead.  Silent.   The dreaded silence descended like a gigantic, hideous, world masking testicle.

 “There goes a gigantic, hideous darling you should murder toot sweet, that gratuitous and disgusting testicle image,” says a friend with a keen editorial bent.

 Isolation does things to a person who lives alone.   I can tell you for sure. The internet suddenly winking out looms like a major catastrophe to people who communicate largely on line.   Silence.

 Oh, you have plenty of people you interact with every day. I understand. You make sales calls, have meetings, colleagues, discuss business, consult, talk to clients, josh with customers, prospects, make dinner plans, plan trips, talk to waiters, drivers, talk to strangers while waiting on line at the movies. You chat up everybody, and I don’t begrudge you that small, important pleasure. I don’t even ask you to consider what I’m writing here—there is no reason to ask or to consider.

The entire exercise — gratuitous.   Maybe that subway poster advertising The School of Visual Arts back in the 1970s hit the mark and will always hit the mark: having a talent is not worth much unless you know what to do with it. Talent is worthless, they intimated artfully, unless you monetize it.  All art is commercial in a commercial society, you dig?

“Art…” Hermann Goring grunts in disgust, although he plundered more than his share of valuable Degenerate Art during the Nazi gravy years, “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.”

Hard to blame the Nazi bastard on that score, you know? I don’t own a gun, except for the metaphorical one I fire off here from time to time.

“You are a chattering rictus,” an observer observes.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t want your guts blasted with this metaphorical Glock 9.”   End of that particular story.   I stop, turn full face and flash my adorable rictus, gentle reader.

 

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said.   These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable.  The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought.   It was true he was taking a beating.  No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed.  He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.  

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.  

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago.  “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling.  You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”    

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people.   The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow.  The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.  

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror.  Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet.  The song died in the cluttered room.   There was much to do, but where to start?   He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development.  Prematurely thankful for this piece of  luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number.  This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message.  He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.  

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago.  Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?  

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.  

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.  

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly.  “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that?  It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding.  You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.    

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’?  Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination.   What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’

 

 

 

is the bass too loud?

The recurring cackle is by Robin Williams, from a 2010 interview during which Marc Maron, the interviewer, elicits this reaction.  I have remixed this improvised track several times.  Is the bass too loud on this mix?

NOTE:  You might want to disable or block the cookie monster at soundcloud.  If you’d like details, they are here — and please let me know if the details are complicated and if there’s some way I can block them on my end:

from soundcloud:  To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to block and delete cookies, please visit http://www.aboutcookies.org/.

embed experiment

Experimental embedding of an audio file.  Check it out, the opening scene of Shagsbee’s Julius Caesar, with a bit of crude improvisation by one of the rude mechanicals, and then some page flipping for a random soliloquy and some other chance dialogue.   Apparently recorded on July 3, 1998.

Holiday

“So, are you saying his father literally machine gunned people into a mass grave?” she asked, brow bent.  

“Well, that was the weight of the old man’s painful confession the night before he died,” he said, already up on his toes, dancing in that half mad way of his.  

“So you’ve taken poetic license to his confession and transformed it to guilt over machine-gunning families into a mass grave?” she said.  

“Philosophical license,” he said, one finger in the air, head cocked like an old school pedant.

“You’ve taken license with the facts again,” she said.  “I thought you’d taken a vow not to write fiction.”  

“It’s not fiction.  What the man did to his own children, at the moment when they most needed a human response, was inhuman.   Instead of empathy he fought them, denied them, dismissed their feelings as stupid. He beat them down when they tried to express grief when they learned of the slaughter of their entire family when the family tree had all but one limb hacked off, was uprooted, the ground burned and sown with salt.   On this blackened dirt the bones of his aunts and uncles skittered on windy days.”  

“According to him these things may have happened, but they were the kind of trifles a mature person doesn’t waste time crying about. His children came to him grieving over a trauma to make a child vomit and he snarled adamantly that they were insane to grieve.”  

“So in your mind browbeating his children was the same as machine gunning the entire family into a ditch and feeling justified as he did it,” she said.  

“Yes, but it wasn’t just the browbeating.  The browbeating fit the pattern– take a trauma, deny it, tell anyone who may be traumatized they have no right to feel that way but that they are insane, and cowardly, in fact, to have any feelings at all about it.”  

“A very damaged individual,” she said, “but not necessarily a machine gunner of families into mass graves. You want to be careful before you go there.”  

“Nancy,” he said, “a person who is damaged this way, if he still has a soul, dies with terrible regrets.  He deeply regretted that he had lived his life in a black and white world.   The black and white world is a zero sum game where many atrocities are permitted.   After all, it cannot be black when it is white, nor white if it is black, right is right and wrong is wrong.  In fact, he told his son with sorrow, hours before he died, ‘I think of how much richer my life would have been if I’d seen life in all its gradations and colors…’  In a black and white world it sometimes becomes necessary to murder another person, even thousands of people at once.  In a nuanced and just world it is never OK to murder thousands of people at once.”

Nancy looked at him.  

“Ask God, if you believe in God, and you’ll get the same answer: there may come a time when a killer must be stopped from killing and deadly force becomes necessary to prevent an atrocity.  No God worth praying to would ever assure you– unless you see the world as black and white– that sometimes it’s perfectly fine to destroy an entire city in the name of some greater good.  There is no godly answer to the murdered souls of the dead children, old people, invalids, babies, workers in that city.  You want to say you are justified in war to slaughter an entire population?  God does not smile upon you, if you do.”  

“I thought you stopped drinking,” she said.  

“Nancy,” he said, “be serious.  I’m trying to get you to understand why I chose the metaphorical machine gun as the instrument of his towering, seething, white-hot rage, rather than a much harder to fully describe verbal whip he actually used. Brutally using words to cause pain is one way of being furious and self-righteous, but how much better is actually physically machine gunning a perceived enemy, on the lip of a mass grave he would later insist meant nothing.”  

“He insisted the mass grave meant nothing?”

“He waved his hand, Nancy,” and he waved his hand, “and he said ‘those people were mere abstractions, nobody ever knew them.  You have no right to claim to be effected by the loss of those people you never even met,’ and he smirked as he said it.  And it was true that I’d never met them, they were all killed more than a decade before I was born, almost exactly 13 years, actually.  The year of my birth would have been bar and bat mitzvah year for the infants who went into that ditch along with the dozen great aunts and great uncles wiped out by Ukrainains as Nazis gave instructions.   My grandmother Yetta knew them very well.  They were her six brothers and sisters, and their families, and her parents, if they were still around in 1943, and all the children and extended family, and also the same for my grandfather Sam’s six brothers and sisters.”  

“Wait a second,” she said, “so this guy you were referring to in the third person was actually you?”  

“No need to be so literal about it,” he said.  “Fact is, on his deathbed an old man expressed regrets, and whipped himself over having been such a cruel bastard during his life, stubborn, judgmental, enraged, unfair. This is the profile of the guy, who, finding himself behind the gun, turns and fires it, wiping out anyone who might stand against him.”  

“Which is only logical, after all,” she said.  

“It’s logical,” he said, “but not everybody sees the world as an implacable enemy worthy of death.  Not everybody is capable of actually swinging that big gun around, training it on the terrified faces, and, rejecting all of the many reasons not to, heeds only the imperative to pull the trigger.  And if they are capable of it, it will bother them on their deathbed when they have only their vanishing, irremediable lives to consider, and they’ll be filled, sometimes, with terrible, almost unbearable regret.”

“I see what you mean,” Nancy said.

 

 

 

Animation by several creative adults

Animation created by several inventive women in four July 2014 sessions at the Creative Center, NYC.  Beautiful stuff.

with thanks to Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) (I’ll See You In My Dreams, Low Cotton– with Barney Bigard on clarinet) and Paul Greenstein (glistening glissentar on my track “Now Before I Go”)  Although this not for profit use is “fair use” I should get permissions from whoever currently owns the rights to Django’s genius…

Don’t Blow It!

There is a John Philips Sousa march, bluegrass, Chopin, blues, jazz and more. All music, but some of it moves us, some doesn’t. Different drummers, different strokes, fashions change, sometimes stay the same. It’s a nervous world out there, and I know you know what I’m talking about. As the music is about to start a friend yells “don’t blow it!”

Doesn’t yell, in so many words, it’s conveyed by the look on her face. “Oh, God, he’s gonna blow it…” wincing and tension as I wait to jump in, splash, just off the beat. When I’m playing I’m not worried, not counting, splashing in it like a kid, but she’s nervous for me, I can see the blood beating in her temples. Certain I am not suave, in the moment, able to groove along with the groove with no thought but the groove, the whole groove and nothing but the groove.

“When did you turn into Homer Simpson?” she asks and I go “Doh!”. So cruel, even if true, it’s like a hammer right on the fingernail. But not enough to make me drop a beat, and it stings only for a second.

“That’s what 35 years since the last time we made it’ll do for you, dollface,” I tell her, bending a note, raising an eyebrow like a glass.

“What is this raising of the glass?” she asks, “I thought you were on the wagon.”

“The world is a wagon, sweetheart,” I tell her, having no doubt she does not buy a word of it. Here comes the B part, I hit the telltale bass notes going in hard, with body language, land on the chord, nod, signal the other guys we’re here.

“Don’t blow it!” she chants like a mantra as we make our way around the chorus and back to the top.

“The head, you mean,” she says.

“Since the procedure I don’t need to go to the head for hours at a time,” I think to myself. The cops refer to the unwashed room with the toilet in it as the head. Ask for a bathroom they’ll point and tell you “the head’s the second door on the right.” Me, I always piss in the first room no matter what.

“Tough talk from a cartoon character,” she says, not without a small smirk.

“Too bad the guy who does my voice makes all the Doh!” I tell her, and then I’m done with the conversation. The music is too engaging, got its claws raking my back in the most pleasurable way. I have no time at the moment to worry that people are worried for me. I’d worry myself, but we’re heading back into that beautiful B part.

Random

“Yeah, I said it. What?!” some writers will come at you, bam! pugnaciously engage you, grab your shirt front. Make the job easy for the reader? Not interested, these types will say, I am making a statement with my art, doing something that’s never been done. It’s a matter of style, I suppose, how one goes about it.

Style is somewhat random, like finding yourself in the apartment you moved into when you were nineteen. “Is this a fucking dream?” you might wonder, eyes wandering over the detritus of almost forty randomly dreamed years. Everyone else you know has moved a number of times since then, many into fine houses they now own and will pass on to their children some day. An AARP eligible adult still living in the apartment he rented while dropping in and out of college is suspect. “What do we suspect?” she asked suspiciously.

“Wake up!” the voice yells as a train rumbles through, making the floor of this old apartment shudder.

Random, like I said. And an argument can be made, and sometimes is, that this entire enterprise, the time spent here searching for meaning between being born and moving on, is a somewhat random sequence of events, some pleasant, some not. We are ants, a friend’s father told me once. Crawling over the earth, trying to make the best of our short time here. Some thinking they would like to do something good for the world, some actually doing good things, whenever they can.

Randomness itself random. Randomly picking random thoughts, random. The pickled randomness of a randomly plucked random thought? Randomly pickled, no doubt.