There's A New Sound Now To Figure Out

There’s a new sound now to figure out. It’s a hard crisp slightly metallic sound, a thud with force and purpose. It’s the two panels on our new living room window shutting. They have handles, and slide easily within their grooves. I’m not used to it yet. They haven’t been opened much in the past several months. But now it’s May and the air is getting warmer and it feels good to air the apartment out. Keep them open until the interior smells like spring. The noise has an image: panels shutting on a late afternoon in May. Crisp as an equation. Resonant as a gong.

What’s it like being a musician these days? It’s a question I put to Google. Google came back with a list of answers written by musicians, who all pretty much said the same thing: if you love making music, make music. As far as supporting yourself, it’s really hard. They advise crowdfunding, live shows, and streaming services. Pretty glib response. And rather dreary, except for the live shows. AI has already begun undermining the market. Making a ton of money, but destroying the romance of creativity, and the quest for something real, something genuine, something pure and new and exhilarating. Imagine a medieval laboratory in a chamber illumined by a liquid boiling in the alembic of an alchemist’s quest for the philosopher’s stone. I think that’s a much better vision. Although it’s not music. It’s an image of artistry as a pursuit for the divine. Which is a little pretentious. Hard to picture the Ramones on a quest for the divine. Buy why should that be? As soon as I make one statement, another bangs into it from behind, and I have to start all over again, trying to make a coherent hat out of a brim of nonsense. Not a surprise. Much of the time is spent in idle speculation. And sometimes I just want to be sedated.

Will the public discern true beauty from the digitally counterfeit? Let’s hope so. Does freshly poured concrete dry in the rain? Yes, but not well. It’s weakened by the rain. The coolest thing to be in the 60s was a rock musician, or a writer. What is the coolest thing to be now? A billionaire? A game developer? A mobile app developer? An Ethical Hacker? An InfoSec analyst? A cockroach? A dung beetle? An AI sex robot?

I’ve got a satchel of prose and a ticket to Rye. Why Rye? Why not Minot? No particular reason. I gave up on particular reasons a particular time ago. I’m not particular now. I’m completely lenticular. And occasionally perpendicular. I’m at my best when I’m horizontal. And on a train to Kauai. By way of the locomotive I just plucked from the air. It’s made of ice, and rice, and extracurricular devices, such as a Dental Nitrous Oxide System purchased at Na Huhu Lani in Kauai. It doesn’t ride on rails it rides on dolphins and mermaids, and is fueled by Bo Diddley.   

I’m getting better at it. Not sure what. But I feel I’m getting better at it. Better at whatever it is I’m getting better at. How could I not? Do anything long enough and it becomes a meditation on an acoustic guitar, a trance by the fireplace, a horseback ride up a switchback in Bryce Canyon, or landing a rocket ship on the icy surface of Pluto, which I defiantly continue to think of as a planet, maybe my favorite planet, other than earth, which is melting and burning down, but it’s resilient, it’s been through all that before, and thanks to a lot of cyanobacteria we now have Zen gardens and green tea. The feelings grow distant with time, broader, more universal. The perceptions slip into various modes of expansion and malleability, depending on one’s capacity for sitting still for a really long time, and willingness to let things dilate and recede into mist.

I often wonder who uses those desks at hotels and motels. I imagine the mobile phone has obliterated that form of writing. Missing someone, being somewhere else, seeing something new and wanting to put it into words. It’s easy to picture someone circa the 20s or 30s doing that just before going to the opera or a walk down the shoulder of the highway to the closest roadhouse café. Or the 50s. There sits Kerouac in a Los Gatos attic hammering out the details of existence in a mode of creative transport fueled by whiskey and Benzedrine. Or the 60s. There I am at the Arcata Hotel in 1968 laboring to figure out how all those poets in New American Poetry created such lively poetry. It was a verbal paradise. By the 70s the whole idea of belle lettres was sadly obsolete. The sensibility did not comport well with Disco. And by 2024 bookstores once engorged with a gazillion titles had become stuffed with tchotchkes, T-shirts and coffee mugs.  

Favorite hotel is the Hotel Récamier in the 6e arrondissement of Paris, by the Church of Saint-Sulpice, where Baudelaire was baptized, and around the corner on rue Ferou are all 100 lines of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre. Life felt so different there. Richer, headier, more stimulating all around due to a beautiful Baroque architecture with its flourishing colonnades and classical tablature and bartizans and bay windows and chimeras rather than the brutalist architecture of the U.S. and its aggressively drab Philip Johnson office buildings. I enjoyed awakening in bed and turning my head in the direction of the window to see the wall of the cathedral where Baudelaire had been baptized and feeling a familial connection, as if Baudelaire had been my grandparent.

I’m also partial to the Hotel Sorrento in Seattle, where I got married. And Free Spirit Spheres in Vancouver, British Columbia, which are pods hanging from trees. And the Time Out Of Mind on Mars, which overlooks Elysium Planitia, and features a stunning vista of absolutely nothing.