CultureHack, Triangulated

The Sixth Excerpt From a Work-In-Progress

Christ, it’s like an establishment shot: The light raking across the impossible keyboard--eight octaves of ebony and laminate that float in the darkness of a dead-still studio. The only thing that’s really missing is a superimposed time-and-place. You sit here in front of the layers of lacquer, the hand-fitted hardwood and felted hammers, in a moment of zen silence that honors experience, confidence, passion and belief. A Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, better known to you as The Beast, where craft has been taken well beyond even unreasonable expectations.

The nine extra keys, all weirdly black, make this the porn star of pianos. And back in the day, you’d occasionally test them to make certain the dark octave still worked. But that was as far as it ever went; nothing was played down there. This was because you knew of no music that needed these extra notes: you’d been in the business of churning-out pop, with a limited need for repertoire--though you suspected that even in classical music, such pieces were extremely rare.

But here's the thing about that extra octave: it doesn’t actually have to be played. Just its existence down there at the end affects the other 88 keys. Piano strings resonate, they don't need to be struck, and something played in an upper octave inevitably bounces off those nine lurking strings. When the music comes back, it's been transformed by the trip, like a mind broadened by travel.

You know this because even though you played pop, your real love has always been jazz. And there parts of chords are often left out; only the tops of harmonic series are played--3rds and 6ths, 7ths and 9ths, 11ths and sometimes even 13ths. The tonic notes in all of these cases are provided by the listener’s imagination. But on a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, the sympathetic resonance of the extra strings fills those blanks and completes the chords.

As implied by their color, these additional notes are the equivalent of dark matter in astronomy--invisible, but changing whatever is played anywhere on the piano. An attentive audience can sense the extra octave; its proof is in every subliminal tonic. So yes, dark matter: something in the music that can only be explained by something outside of it . . .

Craft that’s been taken well beyond even unreasonable expectations--the thing on which you’re supposed to bash-out a formula that transcends itself. Which is ironic, because among the many things you lack are confidence, passion and belief. But since you know this from long experience, at least you’re assured of that: you’ve seen the block and been around it any number of times, just like the still-alive bomb defuser or, more accurately, a wily, old whore. In this Post-Steinman world, you’re not really sure if one out of four will do, but then again, with nothing else left, it’s the only thing you’ve got to work with.

You sit here in the perpetual studio twilight; finally alone, but not really: the black-lacquered Beast completely fills this corner and causes a tightness in your chest. You’re that guy in Alien, eating his breakfast and ignoring a bad case of heartburn, who seconds later is blown apart by something deep inside him. It’s been years since you’ve seen a Model 290--the past decade, after all, has been carefully designed to detour around this reunion. But all roads, it seems, have still led back here, to the dimly lit, looming Beast. Thus this struggle to stare it down, because you'd really like to look away.

You’re petrified that you can't do this anymore--you haven't written a pop song in 10 fucking years. And thinking back, it seems quite possible that maybe you never knew how. You had stopped writing because you couldn't fully express yourself--pop music had always been too tonic-based. To be crowd-pleasing, the chords always had to be completed, tidy and hummable. Just as each lyric had to be ground-down to the fewest syllables and tightest rhymes. Audiences had wanted nothing left to their imaginations, and in obliging them with skillful craft, you had made a generous living. Back then you had written on another Beast, because you once held hope for all 97 keys. But really, everything could have been composed on a battered, rehearsal-hall upright. Because back then the extra strings had resonated with the tonics that you dutifully provided, taking something that had been utterly obvious and making it even more so. Every blatant chord wound up with its own harmonic reinforcement, something touring had further underscored with a riser of backup singers. Doubled-tonics wrapped in doubled vocals--this had been the essence of your dalliance with Pop: in no way truth, but loudly done twice over for effect. Rhetoric, with massive amps and a truck full of custom lighting . . .

First, a word of explanation: This post is primarily for myself--see it as a chef 's annotation of a recipe, capturing the meta-stuff that transcends ingredients and linear flow. I've just finished revising a scene in the novel, and the solution--downstream from all the hair-pulling--ended up being emblematic of the larger work. And so, while I'm still thinking clearly about it, it's certainly worth making some notes.

    "Ready, then, to tidy up?" The voice seems to come from everywhere. And though you'd like to answer No, the car-wreck curiosity is irresistible. Turning away is useless because you’re already rubbernecking--even though this freakish accident happens to be your own.

    In a swivel chair on an oriental rug, you’re waiting for playback and remembering Steppenwolf: Well, you don't know what we can find / Why don't you come with me little girl? But on a different kind of magic carpet ride--one that's the opposite of escape. The dimmed halogens at the edges of the studio spill a tarnished light down the walls, yellowing the acoustic panels before smudging into shadow. This, even as the fixture above your chair blazes at maximum setting, containing you and the ivory-handled cane in a cone of glacial light . . . .

    In the hotel, at the window, you stare at the inlet and then past it, to the mountains, ice and sky beyond. At True North and unfettered possibilities. Standing here, now that she’s behind you; staring, even as  she makes her oblique way south, toward the narrow selection of unacceptable futures that put everyone at risk but her. Aside from a wrung-out bitch or whispered lover, what more is there left to say? . . . .

    "Standing by for 'Post-Modern Pop Song;' digital transfer of original mix, yes?" The Engineer makes this question an announcement, his voice omnipresent between the monitors. Squinting through the Arctic light and beyond its glare on the control booth window, you see him silhouetted against the halogen-glint on all that gear for re-polishing your past: Business-brisk, in service to the entertainment industry and bathed in the glow of his professional tools. Apart from a terse Let’s do it, then, what more is there left to say?

    And now you want a cigarette--for the first time in many years. Recording studio. Engineer. Hidden dread before playback. Making music means chain smoking--or at least it did. It's Proust’s madeleine-and-limeflower tea, but turned inside out: Circumstances have conjured up a sacred object from the past. And though you try, you can’t shake the desire because in addiction there is no gone. Absence there becomes abstinence; the dull ache of dormancy. Lou Reed materializes then, fading up with some mid-chorus advice: You're still doing things I gave up years ago--which are true words in a truer song . . . .

    “Ducky, there’s no irony in being a doctor who smokes. We all do things that just aren’t good for us; quite indefensible stuff, really.” Julia  shrugs and glances at the Silk Cut, her own indefensible thing. “Some of these behaviors are as blatant as this, but the less obvious ones are no less damaging.” Cigarette glow at her lips again, and more blue-gray smoke as she contemplates you. Then, after a long moment’s hesitation: “Well, Darling, just look at yourself . . . .”

    You're beginning to adjust to the disconnectedness at the heart of Studio World: A perpetual twilight between the centuries that might be anywhere. And yes, the time frame could be narrowed a little by identifying the modules and racked MIDI units. But the spartan trend in component design makes everything an echo of Jonathan Ive. Which is why the concept of Where is useless: The hardware’s international minimalism has eliminated any sense of “here.”

    But all of this is academic because you don't know the tech--at least not like you did: Well, after all, just look at yourself. And so you lean back in the chair: Surrounded by speakers, wanting nicotine and free-floating in a cloudy pool of maybe 10 years. It occurs to you that your resurrection fantasy had always been much more specific than this--even as the details of how you came to be here begin to soften and smudge.

    You'd written the hit song for a successful film. Except in reality you hadn't . . . .

Though Beatrice doesn’t live at the end of the world, this is beginning to seem a technicality. Because so far it feels like you’re driving through an early Springsteen album: leather, denim and baseball caps inside too many tricked-out cars. And the endless succession of skinny kids hanging around on every corner; like that one, with his upended bike, kneeling next to the ratcheting gears. The town exudes a civic pride in being a kind of Wayne’s World simulation, and this guarantees the wink you've been waiting for is never going to come: each one of these chop tops is aspirational instead of a John Waters reference, and you’ll need to think hard about that tonight, with scotch and a long journal entry . . . . 

Something never thought about; something almost forgotten: The whir of a push mower and the play of sunlight on leaves that will be gone in three years’ time. Which makes you what? Seven years old? Or very close to it.

Your father's mower whirring in the front yard, under the canopy of limbs that will soon be diseased. But all the memories of him have been too-long packed away, and so you have to make do with impressions: He’s conjured up as short, with darkish hair; in a white tee shirt, inappropriate pants and the smudgy suggestion of work shoes. All of this Sears-Catalog neat; it’s almost conceptual clothing. Because you can’t recall if he sweats while working out there--or if he perspires at all. Which, it now becomes clear, is also the reason you’ve parted and combed his hair.

Another season’s whirring, across a less-shaded lawn, as the last elms in the neighborhood begin their rapid decline. The kitchen’s still there; it can still be imagined, complete with its strange dimensions: too narrow and too long and then all at once wide in a way you remember as momentary. It's where the savage intimacies of the family had most often been exchanged; collisions leaving many more scars than that dangerous drawer full of loose German knives. In the kitchen the family had been too distant and at the same time much too close; it had been a place where acceptance widened-out, only to narrow and close ranks again. The dining room, however, has become theoretical--as detail-free as the interchangeable dinners that had marked each holiday and celebration. Reduced to an essence half a lifetime later, this room’s revealed to have been the kitchen in a chandeliered Sunday Best; where weekday dictates and intolerance had been served up on good china. But its mislaid appearance has also faded these uneasy memories: the narcotic blessing of forgetfulness, though late, has at last arrived.

Still later, on a stifling night long before there’s any air-conditioning, a spray truck whirs past your tight-shut window, fogging yellow-lit neighborhood streets. This last-ditch rescue of the trees comes at the songbirds’ expense, because the insecticide kills many more robins than the number of elms it saves. The Midwest, however, is equal parts of momentum and determination--there once something is put into motion, no price seems too high to pay. Which isn’t surprising, because a comfortable rut is the most costly thing of all.

And then your father’s mower, blades glinting in the bright sun, trims around the new birch, avoiding the stakes. But the whirring this time is your childhood receding, leaving you earthbound, stranded and ten.

Wires and stakes, three sets of them; a new beginning secured in this stark new world. With the elms now gone, what was hidden is revealed: A ruler-straight horizon below a featureless sky. The kind of flatness that makes it seem you can see the neighboring states. But seeing forever is of little use when there's nothing to be seen: The town is bordered on all sides by regressions of itself; either countless other identical places, like the result of facing mirrors, or greener, simplified versions of a single, industrial sprawl. Urban and rural are cinched together by the Rust Belt’s psychogeography: Outside of the townships--out among the cows--the only thing that changes is the population count. The scenery shifts, but can never avoid the grim context of the region. The feel of heavy manufacturing thrums, even when it can’t be seen; an analog of the locust drone that had once throbbed throughout the elms.

Hand clippers are used to trim those places the mower is too big to reach, and with practice, you’ve become adept at keeping the lawn from obscuring the stakes. With the elm trees gone, the town is exposed; it’s like that scientific toy from last Christmas--the scale-model man with all his bones and organs showing through clear-plastic skin. You're beginning to see the town’s inner-workings, all the stuff that’s meant to be kept out of sight. And though too young to to do anything about it, you start to realize you want to get away. For one thing, the car worship is like weekday church, and the truth is you’ve never believed. But your friends had killed time watching from corners, shouting out models and years. And so at those intersections you had learned politeness; learned the benign dishonesty of manners, discovering that smiling could be a disguise for your deep and abiding disinterest. There’s also the bullying of those smarter or different; something shrugged-off like the weather. It’s tolerated in the kids because their parents also do it, with dismissiveness instead of scuffling. Getting good grades and reading books are invitations to be called a faggot. But the teachers won't help because they're unwilling to battle willful ignorance that's generations deep . . . You're wasting your life in this insular town, caught up in its rituals, repetition and rules. Because after you’re done faking all of that interest, after the hallway hassles over ruined grade curves, what’s left of your day is further splintered by narrow, ceremonial patterns: hymnals, baseball and frequent house arrest for asking unanswerable questions. So yes, now that the elms are no longer here, you can see things you want to leave behind. Is it possible staking the new tree to the ground is to prevent it from trying to escape? To keep it from pulling up its burlapped root ball before that becomes impossible? To guard against the birch floating away from this flattened desolation, to where its paper-curled presence has a chance of better fitting in? Standing here staring at the endless horizon, you feel a similar tethering: You may not live at the end of the world, but this is beginning to seem a technicality . . . .

About a week ago on Twitter, I shared this epiphany: "Since I revise responding to the endless reading aloud of passages, the novel's "definitive" unpacking is my accent and cadences." And since then, I've continued to think about this in terms of consequences and implications. I suspect the pondering is because, for me, vocalizing / revising is an atypical workflow in a writing career lengthy enough to deserve a Doctor-Who regeneration. 

Prior to settling into my recent season of doctors and campaigning for Obama, I was on extended holiday in the American Rocky Mountains. Being Otherwise Engaged on multiple fronts is the reason for the lack of posts to this blog and also accounts for a recent sense of intercut reality. The past few months have smudged together in interesting and surreal ways: impressions of myself holding a kind of meta clipboard containing hybrid medical/political/revision questions (Does your family have any history of internal bleeding while convincing uncommitted voters to go Democratic in a perhaps-too-confusing and staccato flashback sequence?). That sort of thing. The culmination of this oddly recombinant period was waking up in the recovery room demanding assurances that (a) Obama was still president-elect and (b) fucking Chapter Seven remained finalized . . .

But back to the vacation: It worked liked a charm--much-needed distance was inserted between me and the book (especially fucking Chapter Seven); despite appearances, I actually feel recharged, though slightly worse-for-wear.

And since I can already sense the uncomfortable shifting, you have my word that this isn’t the preamble to an endless sharing of holiday snaps (As you can see, this picture of the Rockies is slightly bluer and less hazy than the previous vista of mountains--but a lot grayer and more distant than the range in the next shot). Rather, I’d like to explore a variant of that Arthur Conan Doyle passage about a mute canine:

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" 

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." 

"The dog did nothing in the night-time." 

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

In my case, the curious, attention-worthy incident is the non-inspirational nature of--er--nature: All the splendor had absolutely no affect on my writing. There was, of course, the obligatory amount of Wonder, Scale and Taking-of-Breath. As a civilian, I respond to nature (though I suspect in a more clinical way than most people), but as an artist, well, not so much. However, this still seems too cagey, so know this: In terms of art, I’m completely disinterested in the natural world.

With the exception of Turner, my appreciation of painted landscapes is entirely technical; minus my fascination with brushstrokes, composition and light, Monet haystacks would die in their amped-up attempts to Make Us Notice The Literal And Spiritual Benefits Of Rural Life In A Way That We Would Otherwise Entirely Miss (And So Thank You, Claude). I remain unmoved by landscapes in the same way I patiently wait for Springsteen songs about The Myriad Aspects of Blue-Collar Life That We Would Otherwise Entirely Miss (And So Thank You, Bruce) to finally end. In each instance, the very obvious has been made epically intense. And, because of the narrowing affect of the obviousness, it’s also about mind-numbing redundancy. (Pop Quiz 1: Explain how “Thunder Road” is in anyway different from”Born To Run” with the exception of tighter focus. Pop Quiz 2: Thematically differentiate three of Monet’s haystack paintings. See what I mean?)

My disinterest in Artistic Nature extends to other disciplines. In most cases, I’d rather saw off my leg with a dull butter knife than read pastoral poetry. Again, it’s the sheer predictability--despite all the passionate attempts to find the new, surprising and oddball detail-cum-angle. I get it--mainly because I got it: a long time ago, reading 400-year-old poetry. Nature is Big. I am Small. Natural Metaphors for What Is Churning In My Soul are somehow more resonant for being externalized (though no one really explains why nature-as-mirror is inherently better than self-examination). Nature is Authentic, whereas Civilization Is Artifice. 

(Full disclosure: I have been a hypocritical enabler. At one point, I critiqued some pastoral poetry as a politely down-played but huge favor. What I still remember is the dumbfounded respect of the writer--as if it took special intelligence to discern that, yes, geologic time was being used as a metaphor for a relationship; that, um, Things Change Just Like In Nature. Whatever. My critique was in no way brain surgery, and yet I was deemed Yoda-like for the “insights.” However, the real reason for my carefully chosen, seemingly Zen-like advice had much more to do with me being too polite to explore the author’s psychological reasons for projecting personal feelings onto geological forces. The resulting deflection, disguise and avoidance produced the opposite of truth, which, I finally realized, had been the unconscious intent of the pieces.)

For me, nature-based art is inescapably hackneyed in terms of theme; the metaphoric natural world has been stripped-mined of meaning. Which places it in the same relationship to me as the Blues--so rigorously ritualized in both form and topic that any relatively recent stuff can only be significant in terms of bravura performance. (And, as I learned in my season critiquing pastoral poetry, talented nature poets are as rare as Glenn Gould caliber pianists--journeyman versification of cliched beaches/clouds/flocks of birds/rain/waving grass is as deadening as a cocktail-lounge piano player vamping his way through predictable pop standards.)

All this is a very circuitous way of saying that I inserted myself in the Rocky Mountains to get away from my writing, and not for inspiration. Artistically, I thrive in big cities and interstitial neighborhoods: Fringe-dwelling urban neurotics--my inescapable tribe--give me the ideas and energy that make the words flow. 

In this Age of Palin, where “elitist” is the new sneering code word for being smart--dismissive of intelligence in the same way “faggot” denigrates gays-- Blue-Collar Authenticity is all the rage. And, being noble savagery with a new coat of political paint, Blue-Collar Authenticity is especially shrill if the Proudly Uninformed also happen to live near equally Authentic Nature (cough--Alaska--cough). My problem is that I don’t see authenticity in the leading of a patently “low-information” life, and the Rockies are no more or less authentic than Manhattan. (And with a scotch in me, I’ll probably confide that Manhattan is actually more impressive, being the product of human aspiration and design rather then entropy and tectonic plates.)

I also went on a walkabout through the mountains because I’ve been forcing myself to do things I otherwise wouldn’t: Ranked absolutely on my personal Things To Do Before I Die list, the Rockies don’t even figure in the top 100. Which made them a perfect choice because they were sufficiently outside both my desire and comfort zone to be perversely intriguing.

Which leads to the dodgy matter of productive masochism--the Rockies were also chosen to address my incapacitating fear of heights; the kind of terror that can literally freeze me in place and screw my eyes shut. However, limping across the tundra above the timberline at the edges of precipices is in itself still giving me nightmares. Thus, despite my intentions, the trip’s takeaway did not have the edifying, arc-to-a-moral of after-school specials: I in no way mastered my fear of heights. After-the-fact and much closer to sea-level, I can see no benefit in the experience. I’m still as neurotic about heights, but now also struggling not to become completely agoraphobic. So much for self-improvement . . .

The more successfully diverting parts of my journey mostly had to do with the region’s wildlife. Episodes with bear, mountain lions, elk, and moose were satisfying encounters with the Other Than, and, being on foot, were also dangerous enough to underscore my view of Nature as brutal entropy in glamorous drag; a serial killer with a deceptively charming surface. For me, Nature is Tony Perkins in a lushly Technicolor version of Psycho (to best convey all those sunsets)--really nice right up until you step into the shower.  Just like mountain lions are majestically nice right up until you find yourself surrounded by scat embedded with feathers, smell the ammonia waves of cat piss and slowly--very slowly--look up (do not turn your back, do not crouch and do not run) . . . 

Not that there’s anything wrong with this. Perkins the Mountain Lion is merely doing (or attempting to do) what Perkins does. Perkins has an admirable purity going for him: Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, Perkins gotta eat me (though mind the iPhone, Perkins; I waited in line too long for it to end up embedded in tomorrow’s scat). Perkins’ big-cat life is a perfectly straight through-line from his jaws to the pulsing carotid in my neck. He is without nuance--just like the natural world that surrounds him.

And here, at last, is what I like about Nature: Its lack of agendas. Paradoxically, however, this is also why I have no artistic use for it: Going hand-in-hand with my preference for large cities is a fascination with humanity’s bedecked selfishness. Perkins doesn’t have a string of divorces behind him, and to rationalize them, he’s not reading Smart Predators, Stupid Choices; Perkins has no passive carefully wrapped around his tooth-and-claw aggression; Perkins doesn’t network or politick; Perkins doesn’t manipulate, he merely pounces if the opportunity presents itself; and in the twilight of his big-cat years, Perkins will be guiltless about his savage, red-meat life--there will be no mid-life crisis and, thank god, he will not reimagine himself as a vegetarian. All this makes me want to hang-out with Perkins (albeit at a safer distance), but not write about him.

Each of us is our own spin doctor--we have a deep need to remain the hero of our respective lives, and so we’re constantly riding the gain of self-serving rationalization. Our life-narratives are naturally sloppy things because lurking just below the careful civility and sociality is a Perkins-esque through-line that passes from desire to possession, and it severs anything caught in the middle--particularly the through-lines of others. Happiness; stability; lifestyle; love; material things; spiritual satisfaction; validity; freedom; the perfect job; the perfect family; brain-melting sex: Take your pick--each ultimately arrays itself along the line between desire and possession. Though we will never admit it, there’s often a single degree of separation between us and the mountain lion--we’ve merely learned to lie to others and ourselves. 

Be it ever so grim, this is what I write about--our endless streams of often conflicting self-narratives and our endless patching of the frequent holes in their logic and decency. Hero-as-martyr, hero-as-victim, hero-without-a-choice, hero-annointed by destiny: After-the-fact and by necessity, there are many ways to explain the unavoidable and often subtle carnage we cause--the feathers in the scat we leave behind. Marianne Faithfull once sang, ‘Beyond a certain age, every artist works with injury,’ and I’m inclined to agree with her.

I’ve never believed in objectivity, even as child; I’m simply not wired that way. But as I’ve grown older, even the idea of varying degrees of tarnished truth seem increasingly less likely. Perhaps it’s simply occupational disease, given the daily struggle with my book, but I’ve come to see that we’re all just our latest self-revisions, the momentary sum of our constantly morphing delusions. Let’s put this another way: Though I ought to know better, I sometimes introduce new material in these late revisions of the novel--and doing so forces me to pour through the earlier sections, tweaking for continuity or consistency in metaphors. Like a stage magician, I work backwards from the latest effect. And, I think, this is what we all do with our lives--it’s the real function of memory, which is why recollection is the central subject and driver of the book. We are constantly adjusting the past to account for the present; the only parameters being preservation of personal continuity and our status as indisputable hero of the our respective stories. 

And so, yes, when it came to taking a break from the book, I temporarily inserted myself into an agenda-less world. See it as a much needed exile from my material. A day spent tagging along with a herd of elk didn’t resolve into fire-illuminated, furious scribbling in a Moleskine. Remarkably, it didn’t even result in many photographs--probably fewer than 30 shots for my entire time in the Rockies. Being artistically unmoved by Nature doesn’t preclude briefly intense and intimate interactions, but they’re inherently fleeting and intensely private; pulling out a camera usually felt as out-of-place as it would be during lovemaking. Roy Batty says this in Blade Runner:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time . . . like tears in rain . . . Time to die.

Roy’s last-moment epiphany is an understanding that memory is both self-defining and ephemeral; a cupped handful of experience that inevitably slips through the fingers and back into the coursing stream of reality. And this is pretty much how I felt about all those sunsets, waterfalls and mist-filled valleys: You people wouldn’t believe what I saw; their significance is too personal to be pixelated as a digital image. Better to allow them to slip back into the rush of time . . .