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.