Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Justice
anytime I hear the word “justice” I put my ear to the ground and hear a commercial comin’ down the line
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Sheet Music For Behave Yourself #1
Here is the sheet music for the brief guitar exercise, Behave Yourself #1. It's a jpeg file that you can drag to your desktop, save, and print.
You can hear Behave Yourself here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8-RNIxdu4A&feature=youtu.be
You can hear Behave Yourself here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8-RNIxdu4A&feature=youtu.be
The Blind Tongue Libretto
A video of The Blind Tongue by Gary Lee Joyner and Mark Warhol can by found at this YouTube link (I wrote the libretto and directed this production):
Here is the libretto:
THE BLIND TONGUE
Gary Joyner
© Copyright 2000 by Gary Joyner
“Our motions resolved the landscape into concentric circles revolving at different rates depending on the distance.” Witold Gombrowicz
INTRO SCENE
Flute enters and begins playing. Flute is joined by He, She, and Marimba in a ritual circle. He gravitates to the center of the circle. Flute stops playing, turns to him, leans over and extends flute toward him . They can’t quite manage to touch.
He: (Sings to Flute)Some stammering god spit
And I was hurled into being
Against my will
Hesitant, unsure
(Spoken) No, that’s not right
(Sings to Marimba) Existence was injected into me
An inoculation of enthusiastic quickening
Immunized against this daily disease
(Spoken) Try again
(Sings to She) Someone sent a message
That never arrives
In a language I cannot read
He looks at the message, but the language is in the music, the flute repeats sounds from the opening of the play.
In the beginning was the word
And the word was night
And the night was a stammering circle
Of repetition
(He stops singing, looks to the left, to the right, and down. He suddenly looks straight ahead and says clearly) Begin
SCENE I
Flute enters, followed by He.
He: Ah, this one
I haven’t seen it for weeks
The message will be in blood
On the wall
Here
He continues to explore the area and follow Flute. Flute points out a new development. A woman has appeared. Her head is draped with a large cloth. She takes a step one way, stops, takes a step another way. Her fingers individually move as if they possess vision. Through the rest of the scene he moves around her in a diminishing spiral until he is near enough to remove the covering from her head.
He: (Spoken) Something new
She: He had the head of a rooster
With aquarium eyes
A leaky birdcage heart
That beat da-DA, pa-PA, da-DA, pa-PA
His hands were military parades
He was simplicity
He was a museum coat rack
He was an open window
He was the stillness at the center of a chessboard
He: Sister
Your fingertips
Alter the walls of this cave
They draw hunger and the hunt
They give shape to desire and need
(Whispers) Come to me
She: What do you see?
He: I hear the decay of ice
She: What do you see?
He: My nostrils flare
The stench of rotting snow
She: What do you see?
He: Mouth inside of mouth
Beyond the cave door
I see the horizon lift its lip
Exposing teeth smeared with blood
They laugh like a startled jackal
She: You confuse me
He: I see yellow eyes of wisdom
She: (Moans)
He: I see a heaving breast
Wordless
Animal
Breath
She: Temptation
Music builds to the instant when the man reaches out and whips off the drape. A red sash is bound around her head and eyes. She remains blinded.
He: (Looking out) Begin again.
Blackout
SCENE II
The woman is at a table. She is a seer of some sort. She studies a layout of fortune-telling cards. He enters.
He: I return.
She: Return?
He: I was here last night
She: It means nothing to me
He: (He holds up a picture of himself) What do you see?
She: I see a man
He: (Spoken) Ha! Your are wrong
(Sung) As always, you are wrong!
It is the image of a man
How can you help me
If you can’t get this right?
(Presents himself) What do you see?
She: Now I see a man
He: (Spoken) Wrong again!
(Sung) You are hopeless
I too am an image
A phantom of the night
She: What do you want?
He: To throw light on a mystery
She: Light creates shadow
Illusion is its child
(Looking into the cards) A dying red ember in a bowl of darkness
He: (He looks over her shoulder) What do you see?
She: First you must confess.
He: There is nothing.
She: Confess!
He:: (thinks a moment) In my home
Not one thought remains
I am naked
Before I undress
She: More.
He: (Looks at Flute, who has moved near him) I met a woman in a bar
She had the eyes of a cat
Her teeth were torn from a wounded fox
Her scars screamed blasphemies
I followed her into the night
She leaned against a tree
And wept like a lion in church
The flesh is weak.
Wash it away!
Now, what do you see?!
She: (laughs at his pretension as she repeats his words) The flesh is weak
He: (Spoken softly. He kneels before her at her table) Tell me what you see.
She: Rubies drip from a blue cloak
While a tongue is numbed by ice
No more
He: What do you see?
She: No more!
He: Say it!
She: (She stands, looms over him, he crawls away and she follows, towering over him)
A locked door
Lonely thirst
A blade of steel
Hidden in a block of ice
Numbing cold
Painless, a tongue is shredded
The taste of blood excites flesh-lust
Ribbons of scarlet
Cascade from an unbelieving mouth
He: I don’t understand
She: (Laughs long)
He: (Looking out) Again
Blackout
SCENE III
He is down stage, throwing cards into a hat in utter and lost boredom. She moves around an altar up-center. It has a candle and a wolf’s head with an open maw.
She: No icons
No alters that rage
Only brilliant shadows
Across a landscape of holy need
He: (Spoken) She wore a silver amulet
In the shadows below her neck.
He: (Moans) The torment
When she bent forward
I ran my tongue over her body
Tracing unknown letters on her breast
He: First it was dry
Caught and dragged across her skin
Then pink streaks appeared
In a moist trail.
She: I melted with each pass of his tongue.
She: (leans toward him and laughs sensually deep in her throat)
No icons
No altars that rage
Only brilliant shadows
Across a landscape of holy need
She: A noise at the door.
He: It’s nothing
A messenger who never arrives
She: We embraced
In a fury of snaps and snarls
He: It’s only natural
It’s only…
A howling
She: A yelp
A bellow
A howling
He: I bite a bellow
A howling
I am natural
I bite nature on the thigh
She: Midwives revolt
Infants give
Midwives revolt
Infants give birth in the
He: Revolt
Infants give birth in the sunlight
And are sunlight
And are dragged beneath the revolt
She: Infants give birth in the sunlight
And are dragged beneath the sky
He: By red sunlight
And are dragged beneath the sky
She: By red veils
He: Coyotes crawl from their turbans
She: Coyotes crawl from their holes
He: And are dragged beneath the sky
By a red snare
She: Coyotes crawl from their holes
He: And erupt in their holes
She: And erupt in support
He: Another yelp at being holes
She: And erupt in support
He: Another yelp at being reborn
Both: With a broom to dust off
The yelp at being reborn
With a broom to dust off the moon
And howl again at the moon
And howl again at something beyond
They sing together wordlessly, in the new language. The music that finally fades up and away like the howls they described. Then, an uncomfortable silence.
He: (Looking out) Again…
Slow fadeout
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Layers of Creativity
I don’t tend to do breakfast. I don’t like breakfast, much to the consternation of health and nutrition minded friends. “Think of what you’re doing to your pancreas!” Of course, breakfast occurs whenever you eat your first meal of the day, but we’re speaking here of that top-of-the-morning affair that you think of when you hear the word. Fasting brings a crystalline mental clarity that is quickly dispelled when food begins to draw blood to the stomach. Even the brief and minor overnight fast can have this effect in a mild way and I hate to give that up for the day. I like to prolong it.
Today, when others would have been consuming a breakfast, I indulged in a first-thing-out-of-bed extended phone conversation with my old friend David…in truth, more brother than friend. David is a likeminded and highly creative artist who lives across the country from me. When neither one of us is as cranky and depressed as we can tend to be we inspire each other in various ways. I came off the phone today revitalized and raring to go. It was about noon. I decided to make a breakfast of pancakes. Those health minded friends of mine would have been tucking into a nice lunch right about then.
I decided to listen once again to Thomas Moore’s audio lecture, “The Soul of Creativity,” while I whipped up the hotcakes. I have listened to this recording many times. I could recite some of it from memory, but I always get something new and fresh out of it. Like all ideas that have legs Moore’s are amplified by whatever is on my mind at the time I listen to them. Today I focused on the section having to do with the sentimentalization of creativity. He talks about the various ways that this can play out. For example, when someone falls in love with the idea of themselves as a creator/artist more than the act of creating things. Or when we get hung up on whether we “feel” creative in a given moment, beating ourselves up when we don’t. He suggests that classes on how not to be creative would be as or more useful than the umpteen classes that are offered on how to be creative.
Moore went on today to speak about another way we sentimentalize creativity by imposing the need to come up with something novel and supposedly never done before. [This apparently preordained concept of creativity has actually only been prevalent since the latter 19th century.] He suggests that taking ideas that have been explored already and presenting them in a way that is meaningful today is also a highly creative activity. This brought to mind a great book I’m reading right now. Avant Rock: Experimental Music From the Beatles to Bjork by Bill Martin, published in 2002. A more accurate subtitle would be “from Sibelius to Bjork,” because Martin delves deeply into jazz and “classical” avant-gardes as well as rock to make his profuse and profound points. He is a philosophy professor at DePaul University with a number of books to his credit. He knows how to find nuances in the ideas he examines and to communicate them effectively. One of his observations has to do with the proposition that most or all music is rooted originally in song, dance, or worship activities. He suggests that rock music experimentation over the years has connected to and been accepted by the populace because rock has clung to its roots of song and dance. Jazz and concert hall derived avant-gardes have lost their audience because they have wandered away from those roots. Rock experimenters also fit the model that Moore presents when they base their movement forward on foundations that were already established.
I find these ideas to be endlessly stimulating. Bill Martin has joined the ranks of Thomas Moore and some others in showing me things about the activities I’ve pursued intuitively for the past 40+ years.
As I mentally played with and pieced together these layers of thought regarding creativity it occurred to me to add some powdered ginger to the pancake batter and layer banana slices on the cakes as they cooked in an attempt to recreate some pancakes that a local restaurant used to serve. It worked wonderfully. I recommend trying it. Or something else that occurs to you as you build on the recipe…
Comments Appended to One of My Recent YouTube Items
Solo prepared electric guitar and voice recorded by Gary Lee Joyner in Mill Valley, CA in 1983. It was recorded into a two-track Walkman Professional cassette recorder. The sound quality has been cleaned up a bit. Other than that this is precisely how it sounded that day. The first half of the recording is an improvised guitar solo. It moves directly into the song performance.
Photo: GLJ, 1972. Here are some loosely related anecdotes to read while you should be focusing on the nuances of the guitar solo for which I still have great affection. The photo was taken ten years before the recording playing now. It was taken at a session at Moon Sound in Minneapolis, a session of the first and wildest version of The Fixation Band. The music played that day was very much in the same vein as Pretty Black Marks. Sadly, the tapes are lost. I was working with a particularly crazed saxophone player at the time, a fine lead guitarist who did some creative mods on the guitar in the picture, a drummer who later worked with me in San Francisco, a keyboardist who committed suicide soon after the sessions, and Grosse Johann Divine who played bass with me for years.
As it happens, I was the first person to record at Moon Sound. The studio at that time was a dark smelly coal bin in the basement of an old house, but Chris already had a window between the bin and his control booth. He was using a Teac 4-track that ran at 15 i.p.s. By the time of this picture the studio had moved into a larger cellar room. That's burlap hanging on limestone walls for sound absorption.
A huge party was held at Moon Sound on my 25th birthday. Someone poured beer in the studio piano, someone else set my bongos on fire, the crazed sax player took the stage for a wigged out solo and wouldn't get off...then things began to get out of hand.
A couple of years after this photo was taken rumors started to float around the Moon Sound scene that Chris was recording a 16 year old kid who was writing his own material and playing all the instruments. A real monster who showed signs of going somewhere in the biz. And he had a weird name...Prince...
Photo: GLJ, 1972. Here are some loosely related anecdotes to read while you should be focusing on the nuances of the guitar solo for which I still have great affection. The photo was taken ten years before the recording playing now. It was taken at a session at Moon Sound in Minneapolis, a session of the first and wildest version of The Fixation Band. The music played that day was very much in the same vein as Pretty Black Marks. Sadly, the tapes are lost. I was working with a particularly crazed saxophone player at the time, a fine lead guitarist who did some creative mods on the guitar in the picture, a drummer who later worked with me in San Francisco, a keyboardist who committed suicide soon after the sessions, and Grosse Johann Divine who played bass with me for years.
As it happens, I was the first person to record at Moon Sound. The studio at that time was a dark smelly coal bin in the basement of an old house, but Chris already had a window between the bin and his control booth. He was using a Teac 4-track that ran at 15 i.p.s. By the time of this picture the studio had moved into a larger cellar room. That's burlap hanging on limestone walls for sound absorption.
A huge party was held at Moon Sound on my 25th birthday. Someone poured beer in the studio piano, someone else set my bongos on fire, the crazed sax player took the stage for a wigged out solo and wouldn't get off...then things began to get out of hand.
A couple of years after this photo was taken rumors started to float around the Moon Sound scene that Chris was recording a 16 year old kid who was writing his own material and playing all the instruments. A real monster who showed signs of going somewhere in the biz. And he had a weird name...Prince...
Monday, January 9, 2012
A Messenger In the Hand Is Worth Two Babies Thrown Out With the Bathwater
People in conversation have a habit of confusing someone attempting to identify and describe a particular point of view with someone stating an advocacy for that point of view. As a result, instead of "thinking about" they "argue with". This is very tiresome to an idea explorer. It is a dualistic, challenging method of facing off with concepts that has been mistakenly taught as "critical thinking".
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