The Inalienable Presence of Bill Hicks and Fidel Castro

Bill Hicks, martyr of the new word order, spellbound to the final laugh, which he is still having. Can you just imagine what he'd be saying now?! 

________

Visiting the home of my friend, a Persian man with whom I collaborate on various literary projects, I greet his entire family, half of whom are European. There is an air of social discord, as the meeting is secretly called in agreement to work towards peaceable resistance to the current status quo. 

A grandmother asks if I am to work on my first film as I walk along a series of picnic tables to have my outdoor meal. “The hummus is down there!” she calls, with respect to my vegetarianism. I sit with my friend’s son, a young and thoughtful individual, who reflects many characteristics of mine. Sitting by the edge of a flowing river, we begin talking about our ideas for social justice action through creative arts. The presence of Fidel Castro hangs over us like a wide-screen TV, as we endeavour to tackle the airwaves of radio with our alternative worldview for a new society. 

Fidel Castro speaking in Havana, 1978

Kicking a soccer ball back and forth, we converse after dinner in the yard, with a wealth of youthful insight and ideation. He kicks the ball in the water and I fly in, swimming in the filthy mud. “How clean is this water?” I ask. “Not very,” he responds, apologetically. 

At that my Persian friend warmly greets us and asks that we join him outside of the house. As we walk, we notice various individuals staging a full-scale rebellion. Although shabby and poorly dressed, they are the weary front of the struggle. Our filmmaking commences through their eyes. 

_________

coursing through the married rings of male-female becoming
like an ageless fight
against the cruel daze
with monotony and clever denial
bequeathed to the jealous children of war
boiling over the holy boom pot of re-created American cookery,
to flash discolored eyes
suddenly into the empty well-cast light
and sense a bravura of internal awakening without respite,
that judgment, cleansed from humanity, will see its day reborn

...

and the rusty match,
raised to presidential beginnings
at the final tuning
beyond a slow curve of national despair,
and the answerless dread, washing over the religiously tired
whose mouths sink into the sea
and blame the faithful for their troubling sense of diversity,
whose risen heart failed to beat upon hearing
her single step

- excerpt from "To There...a single step"

Reflection on Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

"Dreams and silence and night are the three elements, are very important for me. I just would like to in this album give it a question for the audience. What's happened, even in the 21st century we have this completely cosmic technology, and finally our life is longer but it is not so deep like it was, you know, 10, 20 years ago. What's happened is that this technology does not help for us in our life, that we are finally more alone." - Zbigniew Preisner

"Silence that arouses anxiety. Night that envelops sadness and despair. Dreams of hope for a transformation." - Lyrics form "Silence, Night and Dreams" sung in Latin and English, from Book of Job and Gospel of St. Matthew

Reflection on "Silence, Night and Dreams" by Zbigniew Preisner

This album stopped me dead in my tracks. In a pre-evening slump of energy, I dipped down into a reclining position, to receive the fullness of a truly heartened listening experience. There was no mediation, no other attention drawn, simply and fully, I became present in the music. And it took me there. The wave-like form of the movements called me into my own being. I lay, submerged in pure sonic form. An experience not yet had swept me into a simulacrum vortex, an open mind. I slipped as it were, directly into the centre of vacuum space. As I lay in my dark room, my eyes sank in the opaque mysteries of an unearthly darkness. The sopranos melted my heart and my body of water became as the grandiose demiurge of self-awareness.

One of my favourite aspects of Preisner's music is his use of silence. The storied conceptual sacrifice of John Cage flits in my mind, and then I hear a celestial soprano. What takes me away with this recording is how the singer, Teresa Salgueiro, of Madredeus had to learn to read music solely for this collaboration with Preisner, a self-taught musician himself!

Preisner's compositional style, ever-unique, reminds me more of landscape, at once abstract, at once pointedly accurate to the infinitesimal temporality. In my ear, it skies beyond "music" as knowably defined, and in a sense becomes likened to the essence of human experience, beyond expected form, the disquiet of artistic convention. For this reason, it is a personification of dream, a direct rendering of the heart of the maker. For more listening into Preisner's dream mind, listen to "Like a Dream"

Infinitely more could be expressed, for every one of the multiple listenings I've had since the full album's played through my airwaves, though I'll let your experience and mine to be yet further fulfilled in silence, night and dreams. Such is the character of night.

_______

Night on the bus route is darker than usual. It must be a new moon, or heavy unseen cloud cover. Friends sneer at my withdrawn attitude. “What is he concealing?” the fantasize grotesque in the bored clashing of spatial insensitivity. The mood is young and innocence carries a deft presence of unsightly, childish greed. I keep to myself. “Where do I get out?” I implore into the obscure open, unrecognized concrete slabs give the lonely night its shape. We are way out past our usual neighborhoods. I am afraid, though I hardly show it. The others step down at an abandoned building leading to a bridge into parkland, a notorious breeding ground of mischief for those called into the night. I get out at the next stop. As I cross the bridge, I am encroached on all sides by my jeering friends on the bus. They ask where I’m going, what I’m doing. I simply tell them that I’ve been working at a hardware store. The tower above me, they know I’m hiding something. The hallucinogens pulsate in my sleeves with the rumble of their own palpable life, an energy known by my night wandering guests as any intoxicating scent, wafting into their needful minds with a strength beyond another human presence.

_______

Night

"If you are surrounded by night in your dreams, you may expect unusual oppression and hardships in business...To dream of night time signifies obstacles in achieving your goals. You may find that some issues you are facing are still unclear. Take more time before making a decision...extreme darkness suggests that you are hiding something or are unwilling to see things clearly...The darkness represents a lack of awareness or illumination." (iDream)

_______

"you are as a message,
complete
full
with clarity & goodness in substance

a sleeping vessel,
purified constantly with the freshest, pure oxygen
gifted from up on high

a spiritual life force known only in the most ancient virgin forests,
an ecosystem wise with earthly pleasure,
swaying to magic rhythms

you bend your heart
scaling every obstacle
materialized by mortal touch

miraculous and soothing, not tempting but calm,
an emergent glow breaks the great fever
making modern man delirious with repeated history

your very being is the cure, and every expression a sacred step
bringing us closer to a shared peace among all humanity and all universal creation,
uniting us through a creative spark"

- excerpt from "you are as a message"

Jazz for the Year of the Dragon

The Dream


"Though we are told to mourn it, we must know that it was a noble sound. It had majesty. Yes, it was majestic. Deep down in the soul of it all, where the notes themselves provide the levels of revelation we can only expect of great art, it formed a bridge. That’s right, a bridge. A bridge that stretched from the realm of dreams to the highways and byways and thoroughfares and back roads of action. To be even more precise, let me say that this sound was itself an action..." 


The Dragon


"...Some people might ask, “What is this man doing talking about nobility? Doesn’t he know that this is a dragon-spawned and blood-encrusted century? Doesn’t he know that the dragon breath of our time is breathing down the neck of the year 2000? Doesn’t he know that this is the era of flash and cash?” ..."


written by Stanley Crouch, delivered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. 


This is the Year of the Dragon in Chinese Astrology. Let us listen to the ancient and modern forms of the myth interweave with our creative dream for a new reality, a novel sound, to transcend the European Dragons of Mythic Evil and enter into the Astrological Dream of Good Luck, Power and Creative Strength in this the luckiest year of the Chinese Zodiac.

Uninhabited Island of a Friendship's Whispering

On the Volga by Abram Efimovich Arkhipov

My friend shared a dream with me last night:

He said he could hear my voice in the subtle ambiance of a clear Caribbean sky. My friend had returned from the Caribbean only recently in his conscious life. In his dream, he said I encouraged him to move towards an uninhabited island.

You see, he is with the girl who introduced me to my wife. My wife is about his age, and his girlfriend is about my age, my friend and I are both of European ancestry and our better halves are both from Asia. There is an interesting mirror-like quality to our gatherings which resonates with crystalline friendship and mutual love. My friend is almost finished with school, and in the summer will travel with his girlfriend to Europe and China before they live together. This is very much how the relationship grew for my loving wife and I. After finishing school, we sacrificed our living arrangements to travel together to Mexico and return with the intention of living together. In my friend's dream, he hears my footsteps above him, beckoning him forward, to fearlessly transition into a new form of intimacy and trust within his enduring relationship and our circle of friendship.

The uninhabited island is, I think, a symbol for the unknown, a fate of complete originality, a calling to live, without regret, a life of authentic individuality. In his dream, he moves toward it, however awkwardly, with rubber scuba flippers, peddling a small boat over the foreign water. He is almost there.

Dream Memories Fleeing Religion and Hitler Himself

Over the past days, a series of dreams have not left my memory, and for that I wonder about their place within the whole of my Life.  As I continue to reflect on a dream that stays with brutal clarity within the near-reaches of my waking mind, the dreams I have anew continue to resound with equally inescapable clarity while awake.

Snow at Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley

Dream 1

Inside of a large cathedral, with many rows of seats, I stand from a balcony. I look out, and the audience attending seems to resemble that of a large concert hall, stock full with individuals in highfalutin suits, they mostly represent a rich, upper class of solely European ancestry.

I am told by an individual sharing the balcony beside me that all of the congregation is from Brazil. At first, I wonder, am I in the church of the Santo Daime?

Then, suddenly, out of the back hall, a Torah emerges from the crowd, towering to the height of the near ceiling, whereupon the highest balcony leans down to touch the top of the Torah's immense scroll handle, reaching upwards towards the top of the cathedral wherein the light pours with blinding illumination.

As the crowd exits from the cathedral, one man stares at me, he is much darker in complexion, and appears to resemble an individual I had met near the border of Brazil.

Dream 2

I am in what seems to resemble a mechanical tunnel system, similar to that seen in films set within the body of a spacecraft (2001: A Space Odyssey; Star Wars). I am fleeing through the endless tunnels with my wife. We are fleeing from the wrath of Hitler himself! He follows us with a few of his heavy-handed cronies. One catches up with us and strikes my wife on her shoulder with a deadening blow that sends her wildly stretched out into the vacuous space of the concave tunnel. Hitler himself is fast approaching. I look at her shoulder, it is very bruised, and I fear for her ability to continue to play music! Nonetheless, we continue on, fleeing on into the endless tunnel system.

Next, I find my wife is caught behind, she is executed by the wrath of Hitler before my eyes, and disappears. I exit from the tunnel system out into a nighttime snowy landscape. I find that there are people following who are in much better condition. They have guns. I am in the midst of war time. In the middle of a field, I am stunned by the encroaching enemy. Surrounded, I am snuffed out into the deadening silence of nature's own wintry night.

I find Hitler himself is caught within the tunnel system, I have extended myself beyond death and reach into the tunnel system to finalize my own revenge against Hitler and keep him in my newly found giant's grasp. I reach into the tunnel, and what emerges but a violently green bird with a red tuft around the neck. The bird flies away.

Vegetative Spiritual Union between European and American Culinary Culture

The Marriage at Cana by Paolo Veronese

In any moment, winter changes into summer and back again. I am endless fields; they seem to be wheat fields. We are vegetarian spirits, and there are women dressed as Hindus in traditional clothing, singing while playing traditional instruments. 

On the horizon, summer changes to winter as cloud formations leave a hilltop covered in white flurries, a cross though somehow between cloud and snow, a wispy frozen mansion sits atop a hill where a youth in winter clothes plays with a white furry dog almost twice his size. And then suddenly, we are in what seems to be the mansion, dining at a long table set for about twenty to thirty people. 

The people are a mix between Scandinavian and Mexican. We are given a menu, on it there are choices of many different breads, breads with different names, Russian and Nordic names as far as I can tell, the breads are seasoned and sweetened. I choose two, yet can’t pronounce the second, so a kind fellow from across the table tells me he can lend me his dish which is the same to try it, it’s delicious, a cinnamon sugar-type braided bread, and then he calls for one in the right tongue for the new wife and new son. 

Then, a man to my right calls attention to the table. He wishes to make a toast, though a toast in the booming of his voice stretching over the table to all ears. 

He speaks in a Scandinavian tongue first, saying "there is an old saying," and then he changes to Mexico, saying "in Veracruz, they say…” 

It seems a meaningful and comical touch to the dining pleasures of all, and we are somehow strengthened in the notion that we are eating from the land, a 15^th century delicacy for the educated and mindful, who in central Europe begin to adopt new habits in eating that leave behind the rabble pouring over scraps of pig stomach and chicken bones. It is part of a revolution that cultivates self-dependency, health, and communal celebration in the joy of a diverse humanity.

July 5, 2011

A Stern European-style Friendship

Man in the Cafe by Juan Gris

I sit aside from a political conversation, between my friend who is Metis (of mixed French-Cree and German ancestry), a politically engaged and stout character, and a man from Eastern Europe, they speak about the politics between Russia and Israel. When the foreign man resolves that the warring faction in the political strife should be tried for war crimes, his demeanor is final and exacting, so my friend softly congratulates. A firm resolve is respected and appreciated.

Thurs, April 28, 2011