London Calling

I think deep down inside we believe we have some kind of contract with Life, with God, with our imaginary parents, etc…, such that certain types of behavior or faith or whatever will get rewarded with success and other activities will be punished. We then tend to guide our behavior around these beliefs and then get mad if and when Life doesn’t pay off.

Either the real or merely literary Jesus of the Bible seemed to understand this, as plenty of times he was asked what sin caused someone’s condition, or why a tower fell over on them, or why they experienced some bad thing. And again and again he refutes this in ways particular to the circumstance.

You could argue that this proves there’s no such thing as God, because both the “good” and the “bad” have basically equal chances of reward in this life.

But on the contrary I would argue that, if virtue were always eventually rewarded, it wouldn’t be virtue. If evil were always punished, no one would do it. In other words, we’d all just be animals in some giant Skinner box.

No, the most virtuous actions humans perform are those performed with no belief in reward.

But all of this is philosophy.

Back in 2001, shortly after September 11th, I happened to be examining such issues inside myself and realized that a lot of my activities were performed under the guise of some deeply-held belief or template. I think that, internally, there was some sort of diety I was trying to appease and cajole into blessing me through our telecom startup. What I realized on that day was there was also a host of desires and other muck that I was trying to suppress or perhaps even convince myself weren’t there.

What I decided then and there was to allow myself to feel those desires and irrational things. This doesn’t mean acting them out or getting them fulfilled (most of the time!), but it did mean allowing myself to be completely honest with myself about who and what I am, and then working from there. I also felt/thought that if there was anything to the concept of Grace in Christianity, it would have to extend as far as the reality of ‘me’ as I actually am, not as I believe I’m supposed to be. In other words, I wou;dn’t necessarily be blessed or rewarded, but on the other hand if I faithfully and openly engaged this process then I would be supported by the universe in this, no matter the starting point.

…about Robert’s photos and description of his wife’s public appearences and attention: Without any doubt he prefers not being the center of attention and seems to revel in his wife being that center instead.

Over the years Fripp has given many well thought-reasoned and elucidated opinions on why he doesn’t sign autographs, why he opposes the ‘fetishization’, etc.., etc…and some of those arguments I buy.

In the end, however, I don’t think they matter much in light of the fact that Fripp is simply not well equipped or comfortable being all that famous.

Is that so wrong? On the contrary, perhaps this is one of the key strengths of his work and playing.

We always seem to want our music or acting favs to be great people, or to be able to navigate being famous or the center of attention with aplomb and perfect, superhuman grace. We want them to be better than ourselves, and perhaps we believe that this is what has made them ‘deserve’ the fame they have, because being famous is of course good and it’s own reward, right?

Sometimes, we seem to believe that life makes some kind of contract with people, and rewards those that obey certain unwritten rules and standards of behavior. Perhaps we secretly believe that we, too, will be worthy of such wondrous fame if only we can attain to the proper code of conduct and standard.

Woe to those that disobey that code, because life will withdraw their fame, and indeed we ourselves will not reward them with our attention and money. In other words, if they dissappoint us or act human or flawed or strangely (in particular when we are giving them our attention), then they are no longer worth of the fame and success that they have. And in fact, now that I listen to their music or watch their movies, I realize they suck but I didn’t realize that before I interacted with Celebrity X.

Could this be because we never were actually listening? Or what we were listening to was not really music at all.

At the Feng Shang Princess this evening (a not-so-authentic Chinese restaurant in an authentically Chinese fake boat sitting on the Grand Canal in Primrose), the wife pointed out that the blond, pregnant gal sitting at the next table was Gwen Stefani. Some time later in the evening she stated to her table-mates that it was no longer really possible to make a lot of money selling records, but that concerts did much better. But even that, she said, was more difficult these days as people have many more choices. She claimed also to have 19 million of her first record, and some X million of her most recent one (I didn’t hear the number), and that record companies were pretty much failing.

I would again point to Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail, and point to the Amazon phenomenon: Amazon sells far more books than any physical bookstore, but the bulk of its sales actually come from the ‘long tail’ of low volume choices, added together. In other words, it’s kind of a death of the popular in favor of micro-tastes.

The libertarian in me is tempted to think that some sort of mechanism will eventually emerge by which small-volume (or at least some of them) can get paid for what they do, but on the other hand there really is no law of the universe stating that this must be. Is it the death of the professional pop musician? Might the most popular pop musicsians of the future need to have a day job working at McDonalds?

I don’t actually believe that, however. My belief is that humanity secretly conspires to bubble up some ’spontaneous structure’ out of our collective unconscious that will allow pop musicians to do their stuff full time. I don’t think we know what that world looks like yet, but perhaps we will soon.

Back in 1981 or so, a good friend of mine and I were making a series of very odd, very inspired sounds in his roach-infested apartment over on West 10th street. As it turned out, Kinky Friedman lived in the apartment upstairs, so that as a result John Cale heard us playing and came down and hung out with us for a while, perhaps seeing in us something similar to himself, pre-Velvets (he made a series of noise recordings in the early/mid 60s that are interesting and now available). This eventually turned into an invite for us to play with him on one of his gigs at the club Stillwende, down in Tribecca. This was how we became Doppler Effect, a footnote-to-a-footnote in the history of post-punk NYC.

Interestingly, it seems someone bothered taping a gig Doppler Effect played with John Cale at Stillwende, a one-time notorious punk club down in Tribeca. Doppler Effect was the band I was in during the early 80s and that technically had it’s first official gig with Cale, as you can hear here.

Meanwhile, as for the rest of the post-punk and no-wave scene, there’s a new book of photos that has come out and that’s certainly worth a look. This is the world of New York in which we grew up and the outside of which we scarely thought of or even imagined actually existed.

Between this and the other book of graffitti photos, for some reason I’m being led down some kind of memory lane these days. Here’s a couple of pix from those days, including Glenn Branca (whom Cale praised back in the day and who I finally saw perform live last year at the Roundhouse over in Camden):

As I now live in London, my brothers the Jazz musicians are living in my house back in New York, and this is stressing out my wife. She was raised in mainland China, and she views life as a pure struggle for survival. My brothers current fiscal state (they teach a few days a week and place a gig every now and then) proves all of her darkest fears and assertions about music and choosing any career that does not maximize your fiscal chances. She tends to regard anything else as pure frivolity and selfishness.

On the other hand, my brothers really have never been very money conscious, to the extent of arguably jettisoning any kind of real responsibility. And even they are now starting to worry as they age and as it becomes clear that they are not heading towards some kind of musical nirvana.

One thing I do have to say for those who choose a career in music is that you really have to be prepared to work very hard and promote yourself like crazy, constantly pushing and shoving to make a enough of a name for yourself so that people will seek you or your music out. But this will not be a magic carpet that will sweep you away from the grit and hard work: You will have to work and suffer and push and shove as in any career if you want to have any chance of making it.

If I were my brothers, I’d be putting together bands and constantly bothering the downtown club owners to put my band on, even on monday nights, but just so that I could keep playing and getting my music out there. This is what it would take.

On the other hand, my brothers just plain and simply like making music, and they just don’t seemed to be very motivated to make a name for themselves. They just like playing: I can’t blame them for that, but that also does not remove the reality of needing to pay bills.

How to resolve this situation I am unsure. I don’t want to kick them out of my otherwise empty house, but the wife also thinks we’ll be stuck with them forever. I’ve been trying to engage them on getting trained in something else, but that’s not a role I feel comfortable in or want to take on.

That thing that is often called the sun appears to be visible today, so I will try to bike my ass off, orbiting Regent’s park numerous times, I’m sure, and possibly biking the roads the surround Primrose Hill park as well. Maybe I’ll make it down to Hyde Park, but my last ride there wasn’t worth the trouble of risking my life on trafficky streets. As I also have a flat tire, I’ll have to boogie on over to Camden and get it fixed.

In September, I am scheduled for a charity ride from London to Paris, so I do need to get into shape for that, riding 60 miles a day for 4 or 5 days. That will be nice, if I can do it: Riding through small towns in France and connecting my sense of place and geography between London and Paris. I will certainly fill in many details of my mental map.

Interestingly, that ‘mapping’ has been important to me, though I don’t know why. Wherever I go or stay for a while, I tend to look it up on a map afterward and understand how that place relates to other places nearby I may have been. The ultimate goal is to begin to knit these experiences into a larger map.

Coming to the UK and Europe two years ago, this was a low-level goal of mine. No, not to map all of Europe, but perhaps to have enough of a map that I could begin to sense the greater picture, and begin to (accruately) imagine how to get around. That is one practical goal for building maps, but there’s another. I think that on a deeper level we tend to relate our daily experiences to stuff we have seen and already internalized; our internal grid so to speak. In my travels and mapping, I was hoping to establish a deeper and different grid on which to map my future experiences. And this, as a slow but steady means of transformation and moving away from the ‘me’ that has guided my actions all of my life. In other words, to become a new person, or at least a freer one.

So by riding my bike I am becoming a new person.

1. The bubble doesn’t appear by force.
2. The bubble isn’t tied to any particular system, dogma, or category.
3. The bubble can be imitated, but not for the wise.
4. The conditions by which the bubble comes about are never exactly the same twice.
5. Ceremony and rituals can bring one to the door but not shove one through.
6. The bubble is strongly attracted to small to medium-sized groups.
7. Large crowds tend to repel the bubble.
8. Within the bubble the laws of physics are not overthrown.
9. Within the bubble the laws governing conventional experience are cancelled.
10. A group that shares some common beliefs can more easily step into the bubble.
11. People that have had limited experienced of the bubble end to equate its appearence with their particular system of belief.
12. People that have had extensive experience of the bubble tend not to care much about the system through which they enter it.
13. People with limited experience of the bubble can be fooled into believing that a certain person and their personality are responsible for its presence.
14. People who have equated the appearence of the bubble with a certain personality can be manipulated by that personality.
15. The bubble is the essence of Buber’s Thou.

Just saw it. Damned entertaining.

Some reviewers are giving it crummy reviews, but that seems silly to me, as if they were expecting something far far better, or perhaps hoping to recapture the sense of novelty and wonder they felt seeing the first one. Let us remember that this is the fourth of these movies: The character is well defined and known. Moreover, this was never a deep and penetrating movie experience, it was basically a well-made and engrossing entertainment. So let’s just relax here and enjoy ourselves and not worry about this meeting any exalted expectations: As usual, ‘Indy’ the archeologist descrates tombs, destroys valuable artifacts of a lost civilization, kills enemies that ‘everybody’ knows are evil (hence they get killed), and at least one person dies because they reached too high for secrets that are beyond their station (a spinoff from the whole hollywood idea that scientists become evil if they seek to know too much about the universe). And you know what? It’s fun, so let’s just back away from our finely tuned moral senses and relax for a while.

Jumping over to the Fripperblog, Fripp has posted photos of his amblings in Menton France, along with a few of him and his wife.

Looking at the two ‘official’ photos I find almost startling. There, in the photo, is a much younger man than we have seen on stage in recent decades. That’s not a 62 year old, but a 32 year old staring out all of a sudden. There’s the young man that played wild guitar in Crimson in 1981 or so or that solo’d on Bowie’s Teenage Wildlife.

Awesome. May all of our spouses bring out such things in us, and may we endeavor to do the same for them.

I’ve gone back to flickr and am posting a photo or two I took while in Chongqing last summer. Chongqing did experience some damage, but not as much as Chengdu from what I understand.

Technically, actually, Chongqing is no longer part of the provice of Szechuan, as several years ago it was changed to an autonomous zone and administered by the central government. But it is a traditional part of Szechuan province and regarded as part of Szechuan culture.

Here’s a couple of photos from the center:

And in another direction…


A street scene…

Technically, I think this temple resides in the Chongqing region, though it is about 24 hours down the Yangtze river…

Downtown, on the way to the Yangtze River ship…

Here’s the Chongqing municipal building juxtaposed with Kentucky Fried Chicken…

Walking with the tour group back to the bus after shopping (everyone else was Chinese American so I tended to stand out like a sour thumb, even after remembering my blend-in-with-China skills)…