Random Notes on a Writer's Life

Productivity: as usual, I am sporadic. As always those critics who think all composers, writers, and songwriters are (or should be!) daily-disciplined craftsmen who write every day, and who dismiss inspiration and the Muses as beyond the pale, are wrong. I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore: the "you're not a disciplined writer!" accusation against me, because I'm not a daily-disciplined writer, but one who waits and listens for those inner voices to bring something forward—and yet the critics and writers who would chastise me for being "undisciplined" by their standards still can find nothing wrong with what I write, it's not inferior to their own work, I produce enough work to satisfy demand, and despite grumbling they often accept it for publication. My discipline is to always be ready to write it down, whenever it comes forward to be written down. I find nothing kills freshness like stale rote "discipline." It's true that daily writing practice can help you polish your art, and improve your craft—but if you have nothing to say, so what? It's just hollow words.

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So, as usual, I'm sporadic. Yet, in the past week or so, I've gotten down three poems, two of which are probably more in the song lyric column, all of which will be worked on more, later. I've also had some musical ideas floating around. In the next few months, I need to write another larger choral commissioned work, and I'm putting out tendrils to gather in ideas, inspirations, and texts.

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Last night I rolled into the computer a cassette of a Barbaric Yawps live show, recorded in July 1996 at the Madison Art Fair on the Square. I was listening in particular to my own solos on Chapman Stick for those world-music-inspired progressive/free jazz band pieces that we worlked hard to perfect; the Yawps always played on the fractal edge where form and chaos touch, always intentional but near the edge of flying off in any direction. There was a power and life-force aspect to playing with the Yawps that was one of my favorite things about the band. We opened this Art Fair set with one of my own pieces written for the Yawps, "Nomads," which is written in a post-Ellington complex (world music inspired) scale, with polychords; I can readily admit that "Nomads" was my response to "Caravan," just pushed further and a bit more off-kilter and polytonal. (I wrote a few tunes for the Yawps, but most of the music was created by reeds player Tom Lachmund.)

Last weekend I was at Interlochen, in Michigan, for the biannual Interlochen Stick Workshop, my second time attending. I want to do more Stick workshops. I need to reconnect with the music and musicians, and begin doing regular gigs again. This is way of both improving my own playing skills, and networking; both are beneficial. The social aspect of the Stick seminar was actually as powerful for me as the actual classroom work.

Hearing the Yawps recording from 1996, I hear myself playing chordally-complex jazz solos that I can still hear in my head, but haven't played lately. I can hear my conceptual zone in play there, and I had finger dexterity I lack, now. I know I lost ground when I was really sick, a few years ago, and didn't have the strength to do much playing. Now, I want to turn that around. I'm getting my strength back, slowly, and want to get my playing skills back. I like what I heard during this 19 year old performance: recorded before I was really sick, and before I moved out West, and things got chaotic and my (as yet undiagnosed) illness worsened, and robbed me of life-force. I no longer had the strength to practice regularly, and even though I was gigging when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, it wasn't regular, and it was more on the avant-garde and free-jazz range of music-making, which doesn't require me to deepen my performance technique, in some ways. Being at a seminar that forced me at times to back up and re-learn some basic techniques and ideas was refreshing, stimulating, inspiring, and enlivening. Give me more!

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Downside of being a lifelong science fiction, mystery, and fiction reader: I often spot the plot twists well in advance. It's partly because linear narrative has s logic to it, and it's partly because, as a storyteller oneself you know how stories are constructed. Even more than that, as a student of myth and folklore, and of the archetypes, you look for and find patterns in how stories are constructed. It's no secret that Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and anthropologist, was a student of Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who proposed the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious; and it's no secret that I am a student of both these teachers.

Still, when I encounter a storyteller who can really surprise me, or whose work is a fresh take on the oldest myths, I treasure being surprised. That itself is one big reason I still read SF.

(And for the record, nobody uses "sci fi" to describe the genre except outsiders and popular media junkies.)

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Meanwhile, I had a real, genuine, short story published this year, in JONATHAN magazine. An actual short story! An actual, for that matter, science fiction short story! It was titled "Shimmer," and is in the May 2015 issue. So I guess I can legitimately call myself a fiction writer now, a storyteller.

And I have had a scattering of short-short stories accepted for next year, as well.

I have also had a number of poems accepted for publication later this year.

I don't submit a lot, and I admit I'm sporadic about writing. Sometimes I do my best work under deadline pressure, and when I am asked to write something. It gives me a kick in the pants to get it done.

And my art installation at Silverwood County Park, The Temple of Deep Time, has been extended for a year. And I am being asked to submit proposals for new installations, for other settings and occasions. So I am being asked, and I am working to meet those deadlines.

This also reflects my increasing ability to actually Do The Work. The return of life-force and strength makes me able to meet these requests and goals. For now, it's very helpful for me to have an external push; at some point, the external push will be less necessary, but always welcome. I am still getting used to the idea that, for most of my adult life, I was not actually lazy and unmotivated, I was sick. I was sick! Sick with an illness that robbed me of strength, of life-force, of motivation, of mental health, and much more. I am too old now to probably ever fully recover; and yet here I am, able to do more now than I could imagine a few short years ago, and with the desire to do it all. I will never have "normal health" for someone my age—but I can do more than I have been able to in a decade. I am aware, today, that when I am not feeling PTSD or crushed down by life, I feel so energized I can barely keep myself in my body. And I am aware of how much I want to get done in whatever remaining years I have left.

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It needs to be said, again, though: I don't make art for purposes of "self-expression," that hoary Romantic myth. Sometimes I do, but mostly when I make art I feel egoless rather than ego-empowered. There are things I have to say, and want to say, but a significant percentage of what I Make just has to be made, and I don't feel like I'm in charge, or "controlling" that, or the master of it. It just happens. Often I don't know what's going on anymore than you do—until afterwards. Craft is great for analysis, and theory is great for figuring out what you just did. It's not a very good prescriptive master, though, but more of a tyrant when applied beforehand rather than afterwards.

Sudden

I heard today that a good friend of mine died unexpectedly yesterday. He collapsed suddenly and couldn't be revived. He was a math professor at Marquette U. in Milwaukee, but our circle all knew him as the Friday night jazz DJ on the community radio station, WORT-FM in Madison, WI, and as a great improvising bassist, and all-around good person.

And I knew him as a good friend and a great person. We were in a couple of bands, mostly in The Barbaric Yawps. We played a few other gigs together, in other bands, as hired guns. We meshed well as a bass-and-Stick rhythm section.

"Uncle" Larry Hancock was a great bass player, but he also had a real gift was making everybody laugh, sometimes really hard, during band practice and gigs. I loved trading solos with him. I'd take over the bass line in a piece while he soloed, then he'd drop back into the groove while I took my solos. I played Stick, he played fretless bass guitar. He could also play clarinet, while I played percussion. I suck at clarinet, bad. Unk had a really sly sense of humor, very sideways. The tone of his humor could be very cynical and pointed; but at the same time he was raising two adopted children, and doing other quiet acts of service to the human community. It was all nicely balanced. Sometimes Unk and I would get to trading puns during a break in rehearsal, making everyone else groan mightily. Trading solos got to be almost telepathic at times; he was a good listener, which all great musicians are.

For my own Sunday night radio show on WORT, Unk lent me some albums a couple of times from his huge library of vinyl. Some really bizarre stuff that he'd collected. My show was one of the Sunday night experimental music shows, one segment of my show was called The Difficult Listening Hour, and it was well-named. All of us Sunday night DJs played avant-garde and experimental music. One set of LPs Unk loaned me was a set of recordings of various kinds of calliopes, and home-made instruments like the car-horn organ, a home-made instrument consisting of 25 car horns played by a homemade keyboard, all built by Wendy Mae Chambers.

I was on the air for over 7 years. I programmed mostly experimental music, avant-garde jazz, and so forth. But I also did a lot of live radio-performance pieces. One annual show I did was a live performance of John Cage music on the evening closest to his birthday. It was a piece using Cage's methods applied to recordings of his own music, that I titled Collections and Re-Collections Re: and Not-Re: John Cage. It was usually a big audience hit. Once I played the Six Gallery recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his poem Howl while in the production room at the radio station I set up my Stick with my bass amp and speaker cabinet so that it continuously howled with feedback; which I mixed in behind Ginsberg's voice, reading.

Unk was on the radio much, much longer. His show was called Crazeology, and the thing he did was play jazz that had been recorded on today's date. So, if it was Friday, April 24th, all the music he played from 11pm till 5am was recorded on April 24th of various years. His knowledge of jazz was encyclopedic, but he always had a light touch on-air and in life. A very good soul, who never got too heavy. Something of an enlightened being, if I dare say.

I remember a few gigs we played in particular, in jazz clubs around Madison, and once or twice for the Madison Art Fair On The Square in summer. We also did a gig with the Yawps on the Madison community cable access channel, Channel 4. We had a lot of fun together. Lots of good memories. It's funny, I was just thinking about him earlier this week, thinking about calling up and saying hi.

I'm going to miss him a lot.

I'm starting to feel like this place I live now, this small town back in Wisconsin, is a place where I've come to watch everybody I know die. I feel like they're all going to go away, one by one, a few each year, till none are left, and I'm alone here. Maybe at that time, I'll move again. Or become truly nomadic, sell my house, and live out of a camper van. After a certain point in your life, the dominant themes being to change: one of the big narratives becomes death, when it used to be eternity each morning.

So be gentle with yourselves, and with each other. Anything can happen to anybody at anytime. The world has seemed to me a very fragile place, lately. Tonight even more so. Be good to each other. You never know what your last words to those you care about are going to be, or when. Make them good words.

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Update:

I spent a couple of sleepless hours last night going through my archive CDs of the Yawps recordings we had made in the studio in 1997 and 1998. There may be some rehearsal tapes, in a box somewhere, that I might find another day. WORT-FM asked me to send them the Yawps music that I had, for part of their on-air memorial for Unk. I think I may have donated copies of our "official" Yawps CDs, From the Rooftops and Spiritcatcher, to the station's library years ago, but they may be missing; it doesn't matter.

Listening to that music again put me a really good mood. I remember how much fun it was to play it. There are other tunes I wish we'd recorded, I liked them so much; but I don't think we did. Much of the Yawps music was influenced by African or South American music, or other music from other cultures. Tom Lachmund would write out parts, fairly detailed, sometimes quite complex; but the mood was always raw, sometimes a little tribal, with a lot of energy and force behind it. The written music was really structured jumping-off points for a lot of free playing; at some point there was usually a groove section over which we would solo, sometimes appearing as a gap; for other pieces, we'd solo over the complex polyrhythmic structures. In jazz, you play the tune, called the head, then everybody takes solos over the repeating chord-pattern of the tune, called the changes. With Yawps pieces, we played the head, but it was not a traditional head, then soloed, then played the head again. Some few pieces were fully notated, with a section for this person to solo while the others played something notated; then there'd be another section for another soloist, with completely different supporting material. So it was both open and structures music. It certainly kept us on our toes as players. The group's strengths were thus both in complex notated music and in free blowing. It was a band that combined both, never letting go of a slight wildness; we rehearsed weekly, but even so we managed to preserve a rawness in performance—another kind of mix of structure and wildness. I listened through the recordings last night, including three tracks I'd forgotten that we'd recorded and mixed, but hadn't released on our "official" CDs, and the memories made me smile. A lot of great music in there.

For my own selfish part, I think that's what I'm going to miss most: playing music that was this much fun to play, with musicians that were this much fun to play with. It was a good period of my life, and I'm glad there's some record of it preserved in recordings.