Reciting the makings of you

It's quite the thing how context can define music. Recently, I commented here on the intensity of the dancistic qualities of Curtis Mayfield's, Curtis. I'm now simply listening to the album, and although as I write this the intensity of polyrythmic explosions are building, there is such a clear and powerful message contained in the music through the blazing interrelations of lyrics and sonicality.
"We people who are darker than blue
don't let us hang around this town
and let whatever they say come true
we're just good for nothing, they will figure
a boy's grown up, a shiftless jigger
Now we can hardly stand for that
or is that really where it's at
Pardon me brother, while you stand in yr glory
I know you won't mind, if I tell the whole story
Pardon me brother, I know we've come a long, long way
but let us not be so satisfied, for tomorrow can be a...
an even brighter day"-Curtis Mayfield; Curtis, We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue

These lyrics encapsulate a place where the mind and body can converge into a deeper understanding of the human condition, and they also clearly relate to me personally how easy it is to simply intake one small aspect of reality. I'm bridging here beyond simply music, but it occurred to me that when I was simply trying to dance as exercise in possibly building towards a place where I could daily intake the spiritual extasy of movement as meditation, I was missing a crucial element of the power of music, which can be to bring together wild bodily intonations with the 'rational' as we (I) discover the convergence of that intense experience that is powerfully lost movement with the neocortical flashes of understanding that accompany the Samadhi experience. It's all about harmony or, as a neuropsychologist might say, expanding gamma sychrony (high level correspondence of electrical brainwaves in the various systems and sub-systems of the brain).
My pet theory is that in this state of internal, mental resonance we (maybe just me) filter out less of what we don't want to hear or are not capable of fully understanding, and we (again I'm just generalizing because I'm a philosopher at heart) open our minds to the Daoistic formless form, which is simply the no chaser reality where judgements are just impediments.
Ultimately what I'm trying to say is: Know yr own filter and don't be afraid to get meta with yr mind.
"Familiar music, familiar sound
Does mute your thoughts...for the underground
Lonely sight, for any turning light
Future prophesy...for the mask you see"-Curtis Mayfield;Curtis, Underground (Demo Version)

At the High-tone Cafe

I've been running with a nostalgic reminiscence across the far reaches of my own personal blogfolio, and I thought I'd make it the clean sweep. So, this is a story about a show at the High-Tone Cafe, a hip little spot in Midtown Memphis, at a time in my life when I was as outgoing as I would ever be.

At the time, I had just recently forgot to take my ATM card with me after taking my cash and my reciept, and so had no access to actual cash, only the plastic kind. I had a few bucks, which is usually enough for the minimal cost of entrance to the various musical extravanganzas that are the weekend glory of Memphis town. Unfortunately, the one I was aiming at was not the usual local fair. Neko Case was coming through town and charging eighteen dollars a head.
Not to be dissuaded, I spent about thirty minutes at the Circle K next door convincing various patrons to give me cash in exchange for the use of my plastic money, so I could make it through the door of the Hi-Tone. It took some doing, even with the favorable rate of exchange I was offering. People are generally wierd about such things outside the bounds of their normal non-triangular money exchanges, but enough customers were heading next door and so wanted to help a fellow music lover in his pursuit of the experience of it live.
After finally gathering up enough actual cash money for my entrance, I headed back to the Tone feeling truimphant and ready. A quick beer at the bar and a hello or two to some casual acquaintances was enough to pass the time before the show got underway. Neko Case is just lovely and a towering inferno of country-tinged beauty, and after the first set I was half full of a spirit of desire and turning.
At the time I was doing some intensive studying of microsociology and would extoll the virtues of Goffman, Mead, and Collins at the veritable drop of the veritable hat. It was just a quiet coincidence that the couple to my left were both graduated sociologists, and we excitedly engaged our concordant love of the field; A nice moment between strangers.
The second set interrupted our delighted conversation and erupted with the downbeat buzz of all that is great about alt-country. The pedal steel intertwined with the expanding plain of her voice was the spiritual most, and I just died with the savage wonder of it all. After the show, I went out and off down the streets singing at the top of my lungs some lunatic nothings that sprouted up from my brain. When I got home, I wrote this:
A Slight History of Music, which I pimped to associated content for four short dollars for no apparent reason a year or so ago. Forgive the excessively muddled grammar and meanings in the piece, it was written in a windstorm and published in a sandstorm.

Building to Mayfield, Curtis

It's now become clear after Monday's workout that Mayfield's album Curtis (I think it was his first), it the now touchstone for intensity in dancing. Those rythmic explosions are hard to keep up with. I was winded by the second song. What a great album! It's a workout and then some.
Since then I've been totally halfway one the dance move, so let's get back to concert reviews because stories about failure suck.

lasting inhibited

I've been working solidly this week all week at the dance project, although I did forgo seeing St. Vincent tonight basically because I was freaked about having to go out in public a little bit. Really the thing was trying to get tickets from willcall at the Middle East. I wasn't sure how that process works at that spot, and I was freaked to have to try and ask around like a foolio. So I skipped it, which is lamoid spazzo, but such is life. Still I'm pretty beat down, and the show doesn't even start for another hour. Plus Saturday shows all go right up to or past when the T stops running, and the idea of actually driving someplace is a non-starter.
As to the dance project, I've been reading two books: Conditioning for Dance and Diet for Dancers. I figured the best place to start is with the basics. I've got some other stuff about movement and choreography, but I'm gonna hold off on that stuff and just try to build a solid routine of conditioning, health, and whatnot. The idea being to build dance into the very fabric of my life, as opposed to the special occasion-type deal that the live thing is. It's been good. I am willing to spend 45 minutes to an hour at it, and I've done so everyday this week without feeling taxed or stressed. Mostly I enjoy it and look forward to it, although I'm building some stretching and strength training stuff into the program so it's getting more serious. I'm trying to build slowly to a kind of eccentric professionalism and just generally get the move solid. In my past, I have trouble sticking to an exercise program on a long term duration, so that's really one of the main things; to keep at it.
Today's session was split between Rilo Kiley's Under the Blacklight and Shuggie Otis's Here Comes Shuggie Otis. I was having a bit of trouble really staying in the moment, and I was feeling a little cliched in my movement. Ultimately, it was a lacklluster day, but that's not out of keeping with how I was feeling. It can always be totally transformative, but that's the intended idea, to help to revitalize and spiritualize the self just a touch. So in that spirit, I do want to start and end dancetime with a meditational period to really help to get into the now. It is my honest intention not to overload myself here at the start of this process because that's how it always gets destroyed with too much added pressure of piled on responsibilities. So, take it slow, young one.
As an addendum, I will get back to the live concert review process, but clearly this blog has grown into both a reviewal forum and a discussion of the forward progression of the dance project. Let there be light, and there was light.

What we have left over from trouble

There's an elegance in fragility that I find very compelling. The strength of it is what I find most beautiful, and there is a certain contradiction to that. Such is the life we find in the world though, so make room for the possibility that a concept can hold within it opposing substrates and forces. It is in the spirit of delicate power that I speak and praise White Hinterland and Taken by Trees. Both these bands are fronted by women of magnitude and majesty, who also seem to feel as if they are more comfortable within the gates of their own soul than on a stage performing, and I say that as a compliment lest there be any misunderstanding. The performances were intimate and lush in a way that only comes from the lack of ostentation that accompanies the reluctant performer. As for dancing, there was to be none found in that most refined of audiences, and so I closed my eyes and let the music fill my being with the emotions it contained. I couldn't help but smile like a young child satisfied with things as they are in that moment, and barely held back the voice of my mind as it lept out with verses to go along with the lasting remnants of the music on my way back home. I'm going home.
Anyway, so I bought myself several books on conditioning for dance and choreography and somesuch, which is exciting. I'm going to try to start to take the process a little more seriously, and really try to school myself, teach myself, train myself, and build up the body of myself in preparation for becoming a spiritdancer. I really believe heavily that dancing is a crucial ingredient in my own spiritual fulfillment. Laugh if you must, but it is my truth. I am ernest and verdant in this desire to find comfort and peace in the ways of movement.

The new spirit of DIY adventure

I had a very successful livingroom dance session this morning, which I believe represents a new level in this progressionary move. It has been the general case that to really achieve a level of thereness and attunality in livingroom dancing requires a few cocktails, which is not a good thing. Moderated cocktail hour is certainly okay, and there is definite evidence that a beer, a glass of red wine, or the equivalent of a shot of whiskey a day is quite healthy. The problem is that strenuous exercise in combination with even a little alcohol is quite unhealthy, and I can get pretty strenuous with the dance maneuver, so...
Anyway, this morning after breakfast I spent about 45 minutes really getting into Fiest's album The Reminder in a way that has traditionally been reserved for the live setting or mild to heavy drunkenness. This I consider to be a major breakthrough, and the movement was also more fluid in its' transitions between the three vaguely outlined stylistic approaches that I've somehow developed.
Now it's hard to get a handle on a description of my style in relation to the other stuff that's out there. It has a definitive element of hip-hop movement, but moreso with relation to the dancing that hip-hop dancestyles developed from, and it owes some debt to ballet and martial arts.
Let me try to explain how I think my style has developed because it's not entirely clear. I've never taken any kind of formal dance classes and learned entirely through mimicry. When I was an adolescent, I would tape all the stuff MTV used to show with Micheal Jackson. Of course, this was before all the molestation accusations started flying, and back then they used to have whole weekends of programming dedicated to MJ. They'd have the long form video for Smooth Criminal, which has my most adored dance moment. In the longer video they have a break in the middle of the song when Micheal is in the pool hall all dressed in that white suit from the album cover of Thriller, and he and the other dancers do this kind of circular slow-mo moonwalk, which is just awesome. I used to spend hours trying to imitate that or learn, in it's entirety, his performance from the Motown Twenty-Fifth anniversary program where he does Billie Jean and performs the moonwalk for the first time. For whatever reason I was completely obssessed with learning how to move like Micheal Jackson. I even had some documentaries of the Jackson 5 days, and learned a few of those routines, altough they were way easier. Still, for whatever you have to say about Micheal Jackson (and certainly pedophile is a pretty damning criticism), he did choreograph all the J5 stuff when he was 10 years old.
Another percieved influence was that moment from Doctor Detroit when James Brown performs. That's the only JB stuff I can ever remember seeing, and I would try to recreate those moves minus the split, which I just can't do. There is a distinct element of his moves in my own. Also, I think seeing my sister's adolescent ballet performances is in there somehow because I do have an element of ballet movement in one particular approach I take. It is coupled with martial arts inflected movement, which comes from having studied Tae Kwon Do for about six months five years ago and watching Bruce Lee, Sonny Chiba, and others.
So there is a serious DIY quotient to my dancing, but it is becoming a naturalistic self-choreographical expression that is beginning to develop into a serious pursuit. I have been serious about dancing for probably eight or so years, but only within the live musical context. I've been dancing on and off for almost fifteen years now, but with a bit more determination and conscious intent now for about eight. Still, it is only within the past six months that I've begun this newfound personal, private, livingroom choreography, and it has exponentially changed the way I move, which is exciting. Soon I'll get the vid.cam, and begin to process the development through that filter and also post some of it maybe, so stay tuned for that. I'll keep you updated on how that goes. Sorry about the wierd tone of this post. I was listening to Chuck Klosterman's killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story this morning, and his formal style coupled with devestating ironic distance was so hilarious that the formality seems to have seeped in a little here.

Why I can't

It has become painfully evident that I have a distinctly difficult time trying to write about concerts in the same way that I write about films or even about music that I listen to in the pricacy of my own corner of the world. I think the reasoning behind this whole nonsensical nonsense is the way I process music when I'm experiencing it live. It's not an intellectual thing for me. It's an absolutely corporeal/ecstatic involvement of the limbic and sensory-motor systems of the brain and mind over and against any kind of neo-cortical rational process. I think that's why I come away from shows sometimes not remembering even what songs were played or that I was even really there but in a dream. It's all so ethereal in my memory that when I sit down here and try to get some verbiage around it, I fail. So, it'll have to be a surreality of expression that suffices for my somewhat salacious sayings on music in time. That was a little silly. Never you mind.
So, that's how it'll have to go, and that's what it'll have to be. Just the general events surrounding the experience, and my own curious ramblings about what the show was to me in my head.

An explication and a dance revolution

So I realized that the way the blog reads currently, time is in a bit of a mobius strip overlapping two seperate points in time, which was not at all intended, but just happened in a interesting and synchronicitious way. I started this blog a month ago, because I wanted to spend some time writing about the experience of dancing with a thorough intensity, mostly in the live setting, although I have begun to work it out at home in my living room and started to work on choreography with more studied movement. It's actually a very solidly developing project, and I hope to have some footage of that to come once I get the vid.cam and can start to document the process of fully building a dancestyle, which is itself still in the works. It is quite different listening to music in the privacy and relative security and spaciousness of my living room, and experiencing it live. While the intensity can be as high, it's of a very different type. Live it's much more of an emotional/spiritual thing, whereas alone @home it can be much more about exploring the physicality and choreographical nature of dance and movement.
Okay, so I got away from myself there, and maybe I'll get more into the process of developing danceability on the homefront, but I was trying to explain why it seems like we move forward in time while we're moving backward in time through the posts. Maybe that was a poor explication, but here's what's going on. In my last post I talked about seeing Cat Power three nights ago, which was from her recent tour, and then in the post previous I'm referencing the Cat Power show from last July, which was a seminal moment in my life in that it reminded me about the power of music. It really reopened my eyes to how much of my life I had been shutting away by being a nutzo-freaknik and hiding away from the world. It really was a turning point, and by the end of the year I was going to see live music all the time, sometimes two or three times a week. Whenever I could find the time and money, I would go and dance with wild abandon. So, I started this blog to really look at that transformation, and how music helped to bring me out of my shellacking and get me back on the road to creative living where I ultimately need to exist to survive.

As to the dancerevolution, it would be so freakin' awesome if this country got swept up in it. I know the last dance craze was the macarena, which was a pretty cloying song and an even worse dance. I'm talking about something different. I'm talking about the dancerevolution, a complete reorganization of the way we experience music, as in bodily instead of simply in the ears. People really seem to take music for granted these days. I see people everywhere with there earbuds in shutting out the world, and few of them seem too enraptured. That's the possibility in music for this intense spiritual awakening that brightens the world and gives you a newfound sense of joy and purposefulness, not simply a distraction. If we could get people dancing, I feel strongly that we would be making that first step on the road to a total revolution of the modern mindset towards strictly capital and material collection and consumption. Then we might begin moving back into the light of our spirit that resides within waiting with unfathomable patience to be let free to roam the wild branches of the mind and really, truly become.

Ranting on dancing

So I went off on a pretty solid almost full-on rant in an e-mail to one of the music reviewers from the Globe over her contentions about what happened at Cat Power @ the Orpheum this past Thursday. Here's what she (Joan Anderman) said:

"But there was no mistaking who's the boss. When keyboardist Gregg Foreman bullied the audience into standing up, Marshall stepped in to say we didn't have to listen. 'Sit down,' she instructed, and then launched into Patsy Cline's 'She's Got You,' the night's saddest, quietest song."- The Boston Globe, Living Arts section, February 8, 2008.

So maybe it was the fact that she puts the statement into first person plural, as in the whole audience, that pissed me off. I am certainly not in that we even if I was in the audience. Whatever it was, I wrote the first missive of my life. Actually one other time I wrote a philosophical dissertation called The Objective Value of Improvisation in the Live Music Experience when a local Memphis reviewer semi-trashed my friends' The Gamble Bros for being too jammy. While it was a pretty solidly organized project, it had a missive-like quality to it as well, and I'm sure was taken as such (i.e. ignored). Anyway, I'll get into that whole discussion at some later date (I know I always say that and have yet to come through on it ever, but it'll come). For now I just wanted to include the contents of said letter because I didn't fully represent my position over on Hyperanaphlaxis, and I just wanted to rant a little more publicly. So, here's what I had to say about the situation.

First off, I want to say that I'm not an angry ranter. Okay, let me correct myself and say that I am an angry ranter, but not one who normally sends letters to the editor or angry e-mails to journalists because someone doesn't see things the way they do. So, having said that I do want to rant just a little bit because I don't think you accurately portrayed what went down at the Orpheum last night in the last paragraph of yr review of Cat Power's show. Was Foreman bullying the audience? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps he was venting his frustrations at playing for a rather unresponsive audience. Now, that is a matter of interpretation, but Chan did not "instruct" the audience to ignore him and sit down. She told the audience that they could sit if they so chose. This undoubtedly based on the fact that they were no more responsive while standing than while sitting, so what really was the point? Later in the show she offhandedly and semi-sardonically thanked the audience for sitting there and clapping, no doubt a reference to this little moment.
What, you might ask, if you haven't already deleted this e-mail as an obnoxious rant from a sycophantic Chan-loving fanbody, is the point of all this? While all of the previous sentence may be a truism other than maybe the sycophantic part, I am also a true believer in the healing power of music as part of modern day spiritual rituals of soul retrenchment for the positive push thru to a better and more solid world for all of us stranded here on Spaceship Earth, and as part of many traditional spiritual rituals the participation of the audience as interactive dancers is a necessary and key ingredient. Taken as a given that music is one of the only forms of modern entertainment that can engage the audience in a participatory, interactive process that is both spiritually and physically healthy, it boggles the mind that a crucial element of it is shunned so often as some kind of boorishness or reprehensible behavior. It's almost like dancing is the new smoking. 'Come on buddy, take it outside.' That's how I feel sometimes when I go to a concert, and for me it's not just a minor inconvience to have to remain sitting, it is an emotionally very heavily afflictive situation. It twists my soul up into a pretzel and nibbles away. While I can at least understand the rationales behind conservative positions on fiscal policy or social issues, this I do not get. Okay, I'm done now. Just a thought.

So, while I've now outed myself as a Chan-loving fanboy, I do think my point is made. Just because you spent 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 dollars on tickets does not mean that you don't owe (that's right owe) those musicians up on the stage yr intensity because their trying to give theirs to you, and if you just sit there like it's just an amusing way to pass the time, then the show you get will be less than it could have been if you were willing to participate and really show how much the music moves you.

I've gotten way out to the outer reaches on this stuff, and I don't really begrudge people who feel uncomfortable dancing or whatever the situation may be. Actually, I of all people can understand what it means to feel uncomfortable in public situations, but it gets easier I promise. If that's all that's holding you back, it does get easier, and you do feel less self-conscious after much practice. Admittedly not when yr the only person dancing which has now happened to me on way too many occasions, many at the aforesaid Orpheum because of the theatrical conversion design. I also wanted to say that I really respect Joan Anderman's opinions, and most of the time I'm in total sync with her reviews and stuff. Maybe that's why this one, especially after reading the trash that The Village Voice had put out on Cat Power, really set me off. That's what a rant looks like, folks, and I'll get to my actual discussion of the show as I get to it in the chronological move. I've got like a dozen more shows to get through before I get there. So hold on to yr hats, the wagon train's moving out.

They call her Bebel

After Cat Power I was pretty amped on the whole get down and dance project, but I would find it a little difficult. In Memphis, I knew all the local bands and venues inside and out. I knew that if Mouserocket was playing at Murphy's it meant Alicia Trout was gonna throw down some righteous punkishness, and there probably wouldn't be too many people around to hear it, or if Lucero was playing at The Deli, it would be a seriously crowded and not very dancetastic scene but with whiskey-tinged alt-country awesomeness, or if The Gamble Brothers were playing at The Hi-Tone Cafe, it meant jammed-out jazzfunk for an upscale DINKish crowd with a side order of hippies. That doesn't even include the blues scene down on Beale St. or at Wild Bill's or any of the larger venues. I also knew people who worked at most the bars where music was served, a lot of the people who would show up on whatever scene, and a lot of the musicians, so I felt completely comfortable just showing up where ever knowing fairly well what was in store.
Now back in Boston I was adrift. When I scour the Calender or the Sidekick from the globe, I don't know any of the names or places, and I fear the unknown.
Long story longer, I spent the two months (yah, it really took that long) trying to figure out where I might feel comfortable, and what I might want to see. I finally settled on a show at the Paradise Rock Club with Bebel Gilberto and Furro After Dark. Bebel Gilberto is the daughter of Joao Gilberto, the nominal and very real father of Bossanova, which is some of the most reassuring and fear assuaging music on the planet. It just makes you feel good, and Bebel trades in this warm the tummy musical tradition herself, which I found out after a little wikisearching. It sounded like a winner to me, and by that time I was itching to scratch my dancing feet something fierce.

And now back to our show...

If yr just tuning in our hero is going to see Cat Power. It's the first time he's been to a concert in almost two years, and he's trying not to go into full on catatonia from his anxious/avoidant personality.

So, it's raining something heavy and I'm wandering around for just a minute for the hell of it. It seemed like the thing to do since it didn't take too very long to get to Kenmore square from my then new residence in Dorchester. I wander in the general direction of what I think I remember is where the Avalon is, and I was not wrong even as it had been over ten years since I had been there last. The line was full of hipsters trying to keep their fully coiffed just-got-out-of-bed hair intact. Okay, that's just not true, I wasn't paying any attention to the others. Mostly I was just trying to get to the bar.
After a few Jack and Gingers and a singer/songwriter singing songs he, no doubt, wrote, I slipped into the crowd gathering on the dancefloor waiting, waiting...and for our patience there was music. When she took the stage and started in on The Greatest, I could feel my heart welling up with the joy that only music live and warm can bring. I could feel the tender beat of my emotions chanting through my very pores, and when she sang those words, Don't Explain, I thought my heart would explode with the sad gladness of a song that strikes deep in the chords of my being.
And on the show went into the soul sounds of Memphis where I comfort myself many a night, and I danced, and I danced, and it was all so beautiful. I can't explain, but Chan with her leather-strapped wrist, her waifeshness that dissolves in the power of her intensity, and her off beat, strange dance-like movements that were so endearing, she was the supernova of my galaxy that night. The giddily pronounced 'Bu-bye' that ended the show sans encore was perfect and right, and I went gliding out into the streets singing until my lungs filled with tears.

The Greatest

I was moseying around the internet last July when I saw that Cat Power was playing that very night at the now defunct Avalon. The Avalon was a great spot for artists who are too big for the Middle East, but don't necessarily want the formality of the Orpheum. It's a nice, big general admission place with a really large dancefloor, which I love. I hadn't been to the place in years, but it suddenly seemed like the time to get just a little bit out of my rut, and go see a good show. So, I scoped some tickets and headed down the way.
I hadn't actually been down to Lansdowne St. since I moved back to Boston, and I didn't want to get to the show too early. I was by my lonesome, which used to be my favorite way to see shows because I would always meet such interesting people, but now I'm too anxious in crowds to really meet people. Anyway, my friend Ami and her boyfriend Josh, who have become my partners in crime on the show-going scene, weren't around, so I was flying solo. I know that may seem weird to some people, and undoubtedly it is a little bit. I really like to spend time alone. I don't necessarily mind people, but I'm a bit of a lone wolf.
Okay, so enough of the freakaside, it is surely clear that I'm a strange one, but on the dancefloor I think that's a good quality. A little insanity gives you a little something extra in yr dancing shoes. If you watch those old anthropological shows on PBS and you see those dancers in the rainforests and jungles, yo, the ones who are dancing are probably what we in Nacirema here call chemically imbalanced. Those cats can freak, too. Alright, I've gotten totally away from myself here. Not entirely uncommon, especially when I'm trying to justify myself. I'll get into the show next time. Same Cat time, same Cat channel.

The old soul feel

If there's any artist today that has that old soul feel, it would have to be Cat Power. The haunting etherealness of her voice, the tender intensity, the minimalistic nature of what is ultimately really powerful music. I'm totally enamored with her, so it was no surprise that I jumped at the chance to see her live. I hadn't been to out to a concert in quite a while. The last thing I had seen was some friends of mine playing in a bar in Memphis almost two years ago, which for me is a long time between engagements. There's a lot to that, but I don't want this blog to be about all the crazy shit that became of me in Memphis. Let's just say that I was struggling to survive and mingle with the normal people, and that carried over to my return to Boston. It wasn't until I saw Cat Power was playing that I decided it was time to get over my people fears and venture out.

The intensity of my freak

Okay, so before I get into actually talking about and reliving some of the unbelievably righteous shows that I've seen in the past six months, I wanted to expand a little bit on a theme that I started in the last post. I was trying to describe what it's like to throw some major intensity on a dancefloor, and how that effects a band. One of the things that has changed for me over the years is that now I almost exclusively go see shows in bars or smaller venues mostly because I like to get right up where the action is and get my freak on. I'm almost without fail the first, and on occasion the only person to lay the freak down. Mostly people pick up the energy and will move, but there are those indie-rock shows where people seem to be too hip to get down. I say that with all due curiousity and misunderstanding. What is the deal with that? Do ya'll just really not like to dance or what?
I can't even fathom, although I did see someone in the paper talking about how obnoxious the guy standing next to him at some concert was who was dancing when all he wanted to do was watch. I'm sure that guy, if it wasn't actually me, felt the same way about you. I know it drives me crazy to be squished in with no room to dance, or, horror of horrors, to have everybody sit down. I mean, I'm not gonna be the obnoxious guy. I'm really not. I'll sit down if that's the prevailing attitude, but understand that I could, in all seriousness, have a heart attack from the stress of it. I won't take more room than is there, but if you give me some space, I'll show you what it means to be a fanastic freak.
My experience has also been, from the musicians that I've discussed it with, that bands and musicians love it when people dance. They always tell me how much they love the intensity I'm willing to put on it because I go full bore from the first note, and they feed off of it, so the show ultimately will have more energy and be more exciting when people are dancing there arses off. So the point of all this was GO...Dance yr arse off to some live music, tonite!

Intro the outro

I had it in my head that I was going to include this articleish bit of prose I had written several months ago. It was actually the first thing I ever wrote with the intention of going blog with, so for sentimental reasons I had wanted to include it here. It was called, Does Boston Rock: From article to blog and back in thirty seconds, and that was kind of the spirit of the thing. I was really trying to talk about what my experiences have been going to shows and dancing my arse off, which is what I do when I go see live music. I was gonna include it as is bookended by commentary posts, but in rereading the thing it's just not fit for even semi-public consumption. It really was all over the place trying to describe what music is like and my physical reactions. The one sort of difficultly is in describing my participation in the music because when you dance with the intensity and with the years of practice that I've had, it effects the music, and I've always been a little shy about trying to express that. I struggled with that in this piece, and ultimately that is what made it unsuccessful. So I pulled back at the last minute, and I'm gonna blow it off, but I do want to explore the original notion: Does Boston Rock? The original article in my head was from years ago and was called: Does Memphis Rock? The essential point being that Memphis was full of great music and a really vital garage rock, alt thing going on, but the audiences from those shows were way to hip to dance. At least, that was the impression that I got from going to see a lot of bands from that genre. It really felt like the cooler-than-thou attitude was inhibitory to any kind of dancing because to dance you have to be fearless about making a fool of yrself. That's just the way it is. If you want to learn to dance, you have to go through a time when you look like an idiot, and without a live band, it is just not the same. Well, just a few off the top of my head kernels on the subject of dancing. Next on the agenda is to get into specifics about the shows from this past year.

Currently listening to: Lupe Fiasco's The Cool

Manifesto of Intentions

Okay so, why you might ask (if you cared or existed) is this guy setting up yet another blog? This is the third blog I've started in less than a month, and one solid reason is that I'm hooked on the whole concept. I've always felt that life is an art, and as a writer it has always been my thing to try and turn my life into written art in some form or another. Now the blogform gives us an opportunity to integrate these two ideas a little closer in presenting aspects of a life for exhibition in a semi-straightforward way; the lifeart of existence and the written art that comes as a by-product of that lifeart now also begets a written journal of the lifeart. That was a little convoluted, but I think my point is basically made.
The reason I'm starting another blog is simpler. I started my first blog as a catch-all for whatever tidbits float out of my head and into the keyboard. It seemed like the thing to do for me, but quickly it became clear that I wanted to start a more structured blog that was specifically about the process of writing and would be a journal of my attempts at various different projects. So far I'm still working out how that's gonna go, but the blog thing is structurally really loose, which I love and have embraced fully.
Anyway, this blog is meant to catalog and describe another aspect of my life that I feel I should spend some time on and go back to sort through, which is concert going and dancing. In many ways that is the thing for me. As much I enjoy and am fond of writing, it's still a lot of work, even when it's fun and off the cuff like blogging. Dancing is never work. It's always this intense, ecstatic experience. In many ways it is very spiritual. I'll get into the whole argument about that in the future. For now it's enough to say that the world would probably be a better place if more people were willing to let loose and shake their bones a little bit.
So there's plenty to talk about: the spiritual nature of dancing, it's connection to traditional religious rituals, it's relegated place in modern societies, etc. Mostly I'm going to start just going back through the year 2007 in concert-going. I had laid off on going to many shows for a lot of reasons, but the last few months of '07 were just chock full of great shows. So that's were I'm gonna start. Go back through those times, dredge the old memory storage and see what shakes out, and then take it from there. All vey loose with a basic structure, just what the blogger ordered.