Confessions Of A Rogue Cliché

It occurs to me a lot lately that I’ve become a cliché: an old man disoriented by a new world in which nothing makes sense. Customer services run by robot. References nobody gets. I met a young man once out walking & in a casual conversation referenced Jimmy Page. He didn’t know who Jimmy Page was. I said he played with Led Zeppelin. He hadn’t heard of Led Zeppelin. And so that world is gone. And we’re in a new one. I wouldn’t call it a brave new world. I’d call it a crisis. A catastrophe. A dystopia. But these are the words of an old man. They go nowhere. They get rendered in pixels in social media. For other old people. Who are likewise dazed & confused. 

        There’s an advantage to listening to music fifty or more years old. Many of the musicians are gone. They looked beautiful at the time, engorged with their own sense of beauty, polished & sent into the world in songs like “Walk Away Renee” & “Unchained Melody.” It’s a good lesson. I guess. The lesson being nothing lasts, grab it while you can, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. It’s a not a hard lesson to figure out, any child could do it, but it’s a hard lesson to achieve in a really meaningful way. It’s hard to swallow the fact of one’s non-existence when big emotions are coursing through your body, & most of the people from a particular time are gone. But the angst & urgency to live makes damn good music. “I am a passenger / And I ride, and I ride / I ride through the city's backsides / I see the stars come out of the sky / Yeah, they're bright in a hollow sky / You know it looks so good tonight” 

        Gotta hand it to Iggy Pop, going out on the stage at the Sydney Opera House at age 72 with a bare torso revealing a modest paunch & a rugged Viking face of hardship & joy & smiling crags. He’s still on the lithe side, & muscular. My molecules are having fun today. And yes, I wanna be your dog. Pain increases the savor of life, gives it piquancy & range. So does sniffing butts. The main thrust is metamorphosis. One minute human, next minute poodle. Or a churlish chihuahua. Or a metaphor wandering around looking for something to do. “And now I'm ready to close my mind / And now I'm ready to feel your hand.” Roll over. Show my belly. Let my tongue hang out.

        Is the world saturated with music? Yes, & it’s also a persistent aspiration. Someone singing off key underground. Breath is a franchise for the propagation of sound. An old woman milking a cow. It’s all a music of slop & pail, mushrooms growing at the side of the road. Jupiter. Paganini. Prague. Music is organized sound. It floats the idea of metal, as if a walrus flopped forward deepening the sense of address that a forklift loaded with eggs might have of the future, which is feverishly unreal. So the mind ties knots of sound to hold the air together, which become feelings written in chalk on a blackboard, equations to make the unseen seen, & articulate steel. 

        Meanings shift with focus. Reality is never any one thing, it’s a multitude of overflowing telephones, pullulations & gnarly engagements. If you pluck a string a genie appears with a cryptic smile & a cigar. There are cherubs to remind us that the use of levers can liberate the elephants from their labor, if the elephants can be considered as living creatures & not just stewards of wisdom. Consider, if you will, the gallantry of Spain, or the nature of quarks & gluons, which are words, which are used to solve the problems of the intangible, & cell phone signals, which are everywhere, & justify the weight of a pawn with the tweezers of a king.