Is He Dead?
Argumentation, far from a lost art-- but it has really become more than just a prelude to violence, they way it was in the good old days. And there's a big difference in how this one or that might reckon the relative worth of time: time-to-quality or time-to-result or time-to-the-motherfucking-k etc.
The amount of logical twine it would take to bind certain wisdoms to reality would bust my budget. I'm not required to have an opinion about it, I can just understand it and leave. Thinking about thinking like what other people are thinking about is paralytic philosophy beyond my budget. The fact that it is statistically effective is another question entirely and not one of interest to me. I mean: I eat however the numbers go-- I don't mean that statistics aren't interesting.
Numbers are proper things to read today. Seeing some words printed in public used to feel like an idea or temperament had finally been pressurized and heated to a superlative hardness. Suitable for contemplation, climbing. But I guess people were dumber then, too--they couldn't help but express their opinions, expressions were presumed to be part of an ongoing conversation.
One of the reasons the work still isn't staged often is because it makes enormous demands on the lead character, requiring her to sing almost non-stop for two hours, and throughout a very broad range. Maybe the time is right for a re-examination of this work. In a changing world, we want more singers to have control over your own life. It was a crude beginning psalm meant to be adapted, I hope-- not adopted. Or maybe they really missed the boat. They had a window and they had to say something.
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Closets.
From time to time, it is required of me to interact in a little game set out by persons with the capability to withhold from me the very elements that allow me to survive. I am allocated, it seems, just enough survival to be encouraged that I cannot know, cannot precisely name the sources from which I derive what appear to be randomly earned stipends and then as part of the deal, from time to time, I have to run down a certain sequence of events that I assume I'm to believe are authentic and not in the least causally related to my precarious survival but which I sometimes admit to myself might be more crucially linked to it than the supposed work I supposedly do.
Once I got a phone message telling me to be at a radio station on a Sunday afternoon in the summer. I drove out there and was met by this guy, guy #1. The parking lot was empty, the offices were empty, and the studios were empty. As guy #1 escorted me into the place and down its halls I looked around and saw that it was outfitted with excellent equipment, that it had a tower out back and a dish. We go into a studio and I sit in front of the mic and we do a long interview. Guy #1 never switches on a tape or gives any kind of signal to any kind of engineer; no signal is ever given to us. He does not even put on headphones. We do the interview and I leave.
Two years later, when I'm playing at this bar I see guy #1 with girl #1. I have accidentally met his gaze so I wave but guy #1 doesn't acknowledge me.
One year later, I'm sent up to a residence on Central Park in New York to film some scenes on the edge of a stone parapet. I'm going to dress in a black body suit and crawl around at the top of a tall building. The photographer answers the door, it is girl #1. We go up and do the bits. We shoot for about 4 hours and not once does she stop to change film.
That same year I'm in St.Louis and after the show guy #1 talks to me while I'm packing up my equipment. He says he flew in from Sault Saint Marie (?!) just for the show. I thank him for taking the time and I say: "I hope you enjoyed the show." I should add that he didn't come up to me like he knew me and I didn't act friendly with him-- so I wasn't sure if this was guy #1 in the moment but I knew it had been guy #1 when I thought about it after he left.
What does this say about the world and the intentions of its most arrogant, persistent strivers? One of the reasons the work still isn't staged often is because it makes enormous demands on the lead character: Us, Me, Them. Overall, blue volcanos became that way from ash plumes creating vaccums to suck in tropical birds. All the colors mixed to form a light azure. Believe it.
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