Exile on Main Street

Every once in a while I take a walk along one of the city's main streets.  It is one of the main streets by virtue of being the busiest, with the most vehicular traffic, leading for 3 miles from the freeway toward downtown and the cross street there that is really the main street of this city.  But as long and wide it is, there are few pedestrians along those three miles, and businesses along it have much trouble staying up.

Which is one reason I take those walks - to see what's new, who's taking chances opening a business.   Restaurants and coffee shops come and go, motels stay, gasoline stations are all located near the freeway where my walks don't reach, starting at a point downtown, and ending halfway to the freeway.

A new chicken wings restaurant called legion of Superwings opened up, I noticed today.  The empty storefronts I saw six months ago remain empty.  The supermarkets,  drugstores and chain stores selling imported tchochkis are long gone.  The hi-fi equipment repair shop is kaput. The old timers are still somehow hanging on. The store where you can order T-shirts with your own designs is still operating.  The last anywhere near and far electronics parts store selling all kinds of small electronics components for hobbyists and do-it-yourselves is miraculously surviving.  The music store continues to give lessons.  And there is even a typewriter repair shop.

American cities such as this one, even if they had been designed when first settled with some reasonable plan of layout, don't make sense any more, and neither does this city.  There is to my knowledge no street named Main here,  but if you found yourself on the street so named  in the nearby big city, you'd be scratching your head at whatever happened to it in the past 100 years, since the last time it had some significance.   Only small American towns, those which haven't yet been destroyed by suburban development, interstate freeways, and big box stores on their outskirts, still make some sense.

I wonder what city the Rolling Stones had in mind when they named their 1972 album Exile on Main Street. Was it the French town where they were at the time residing as tax exiles and recording this, arguably their best, work?

Unavoidable Art

No, it's not photography, and it's not prose or poetry that are unavoidable arts.  You don't have to look, you don't have to read.  Hang on.

There is in this town a tenor saxophone player who plays on the streets at various locations downtown, and sometimes at the subway station north of downtown.  He can be seen and heard, at three or four unchanging spots in the center of the city, and, as I mentioned, at the spot near the subway station entrance, but not close to the entrance where all other musicians who play there during late afternoons stand (there is only audio space for a single musician at a time at this station), but for a reason known only to him, at the edge of the plaza, close to the street and the bus stop there.   I suspect he chooses his spots for their acoustics.

He plays what I would call free form jazz, though there is probably a more precise name for the jazz subgenre he performs.  It is however abstract, atonal and unfamiliar to most ears.  I've never seen anyone at those busy pedestrian walkways stopping in front of him to listen or to drop a coin into the canvas instrument case at his feet, and for a while I thought that he just didn't care for the money, played what he liked and disdained any easy listening forms that could bring him listeners.   He wouldn't play Hey Jude or Feelings for the crowd.  Then, just last week, I was walking past the subway station on my way home, and heard him play for at least a continuous minute, and when he played a single phrase over and over again, then another phrase over and over again, I concluded that the man was just practicing in public spaces, perhaps to avoid annoying his neighbours where he lived.

I've never spoken to the man to ask him these questions, and following an unpleasant encounter, I don't expect to speak with him again.  It happened late last year.

He was standing at a downtown corner shown above, one step forward away from the camera where you see the man looking at the window menu of the restaurant which was once called downtown, but it's changed hands and is now called something else.  The corner of the building is cut, so that it is not 90 degrees, the door to the restaurant  is inset in a triangle of the sidewalk (the best way I can describe it.) He was standing inside the triangle, in front of the restaurant entrance (the restaurant opens in the evening, and this happened in mid-afternoon.)

I had my camera with me, and an idea for a composition occurred to me.   I don't usually photograph people, except in family and social situations, and in extreme cases such as the photograph below, taken last Saturday, which didn't come out as well as I wanted it, I'll have to go back there another weekend, in such cases, I see people as two dimensional objects populating the planes of my frame,  faces and expressions are of no interest, only shapes, light and shadows (take it as a brutal self-criticism of my photography.)

And, if I stood at the spot from which I took the photograph above, I would see only the saxophone player's arm and his instrument.   That's the composition I imagined, and I hovered around for a minute, waiting for a moment when the sidewalk scene became interesting (as I was aiming the camera at a wider angle to the right than the above photo), and finally I raised the camera to my eyes, was ready to press the shutter, when the saxophone player on the corner 24 steps from me, stopped playing, stepped out of the corner,  and addressed me in an angry manner. He must have been watching me the whole time. He is a big man around 40, over six feet tall, always dressed in black, and with a powerful set of lungs when he plays.  I didn't press the shutter, and I walked those 24 steps, stopped in front of him and listened. He was an angry man. Angry that I was taking a picture of him without asking his permission. Would I ever take a picture of a friend without asking permission, he demanded, without waiting for an answer. He went on, talked about my about invading his space. I didn't feel a need to apologize since I hadn't pressed the shutter, and since he was so angry and insulting.

Finally, without intending to do so, I managed to provoke even stronger insults, when I asked him if he had requested anyone's permission to invade their aural space.  And with that, hearing more insults chasing me, I went on my way. He didn't start playing again until I was a full block away.

Recently, I had my rude observation validated in an essay or book review I read somewhere, and as usual forgot to jot down and save, where the author wrote that of all arts, music is the only unavoidable art.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of

Last week I had a strange dream.  I neglected to write it down, but what I have managed to remember is sufficient to feed the question of how dreams are made.

I was working at a place which produced and shipped some food items. The dream did not specify what they were.  A young man I worked with, or perhaps supervised, was caught stealing cash. While I held him by his arm, police were called, and the Lieutenant who came asked me to type out a report. The typewriter was located in an adjacent room, and since I was still holding the suspect, and I did not wish to spend time typing,  I asked the officer if he had a recorder onto which I could speak the report.  He did, it was a small electronic memory device, and I proceeded to tell my tale.  The young man caught stealing was a long time employee who had disappeared twice before, and then re-appeared to continue his work there.  That's all I recall and that is where the dream ended, my recording of the story.

Now, nothing in this dream and nobody in it was related to any of my experiences, or any people I know or had known.  Nor, as far as I can tell,  was it related to anything I had been recently reading. So out of what brain material was the narrative of this dream constructed, I ask?

Balthazar

It's on its face silly. Before falling asleep last night I invented a character.  Why, I can't tell.

His name is Balthazar, and he is a friend of mine, as well as a distant cousin, though neither one of us is able to list the exact relations, though our sisters can.  He has German, French and Italian blood, i.e. he could be Swiss, has a Ph.D in Theology, as well as in Philosophy, and a bachelor's degree in Physics.  He is currently studying the ways of American Protestant theology and is having lots of fun doing it.  That is everything I know about Balthazar.

The System Resisted

There is a theme which reappears in American commercial country music, and that is of a man, rarely a woman, the song's singer-narrator, who aspires or is somehow brought to a high class society, or a social class higher than his own, does not fit, does not like it, and returns to his low class redneck roots, not altogether unhappy about  having done so.

Without having to look anything up, I recall three such hit songs from the 1980s or 90s: Randy Travis' Better Class of Losers, where the singer, temporarily stuck in a city high-rise penthouse suite, expresses a desire to return to friends who don't pay their bills on home computers (aha, so it had to be the 1990s then!), who buy their coffee beans already ground,  and don't think it's disgraceful to drink three dollar wines, yes, the better class of losers, Garth Brooks' Friends in Low Places, the title being self-explanatory, and Travis Tritt's Country Club, where the singer, following a woman he's just met,  attempts to enter a members-only country club, saying that he too is a member of a country club, why, country music is what he loves,  drives an old Ford pickup truck, does his drinking from a Dixie cup, and plays a mean game of pool at any roadside honky tonk.

From general we move on to specific, or personal.  Once upon a time, a good while ago,  I too once attempted to reinvent myself, as the process is sometimes called, and happens often in the Western states  of America, why it's an old tradition, if not even a cliche, as I attempted to enter a high society of theater, symphony and opera attendance, and, needless to say,  as in all those country songs, a woman was involved however marginally,  but since it all happened somewhat to the East of the Western states of America, where such self-reinventions don't easily happen, are not expected or welcomed, I failed, was rejected, the system resisted, why, I've no idea, perhaps it was a lack of a Hahvahd degree on my resume, perhaps it was my blue jeans and the haircut, or the way I held a knife and fork, anyway, in the end I was left with a souvenir of an elegant pair of Italian black leather shoes that I've never worn and will never  wear until some funeral.  Whose funeral, you ask?  My own, of course.

Here anyway is a fine country song by a female singer Ashton Shepherd who declines an invitation to move to the city: More Cows Than People:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5pqfdo4Il0

Patterns

Sometimes, perhaps all the time, it takes an outsider to discover patterns and meaning, if there is a meaning to be found in those patterns, as we often hope, and often ascribe meaning to meaningless events.  Which brings to mind fortune tellers, astrologers, Tarot cards readers and other occult and New Age professionals to whom we turn to discern meaning, and for a fee they'll happily discover it for us.  But I digress.

Things have been happening for the past couple of months, things dramatic, traumatic, with outsiders, family, strangers, one local government agency involved, I won't go into details here today.  (No one's dead, no one's in prison.) My sister-in-law visiting from across the continent here and parts North with her husband the past few days discerned a pattern when told the story of recent events. She had been informed of them earlier, anyway, and had paid another  visit two months earlier.

"Look, every two weeks on the dot something happens," she said.  "Since something did happen last Saturday, expect another event in two weeks!"

And the meaning of it?  Of the two week pattern? She's gone now, but busy minds are working on figuring it out.

Far from the Center

I was living near the Center at the time, too busy in my private and professional life to pay much attention to those events and happenings around me that occupied front pages of the newspapers and leading stories on the radio and television.  One day I traveled to the Provinces where I knew a few people and where my high school friend was a well known personality.   When I arrived  there a festival was taking place, organized by my friend, and celebrating the historical achievements of the Center.

My friend introduced me to several people, organizers and performers at the festival, who viewed me with undeserved awe as a sort of unofficial  representative of the Center.  A young journalist from  the local newspaper interviewed me seeking my views of the festival. Needless to say, I was unprepared for and embarrassed by the attention I was receiving, but I figured I had to do my best to smile and play along.

At one point, I was sitting around a picnic table with several of my friend's acquaintances, sipping beer and shooting breeze, when I mentioned to the gathered people a story of a monk that was recently published in the Center.  One of the people, a bearded man of about 50,  immediately corrected me and added up-to-date information regarding this monk, information that I was unaware of.  I fell silent.  It turned out that this man was an expert on the matters of the Center, even published a weekly newsletter with the latest news and gossip from there. No one could compete.

It appears that the farther one dwells from the Center the more he becomes concerned about its affairs.

Shirts Made of Nylon

The ways of human memory are mysterious. Why do I remember some distant events and not others? We usually remember traumatic, dramatic events.  But not all, as it turns out. The one inch long scar on my left wrist, how did it get there?  I have to strain a bit to recall.  I was reminded of a surgery I once underwent, how could I have forgotten it?!  I had to remind my friend J. of an adventure we once experienced. He had forgotten it.  My friend P. reminded me of a misadventure I once had that he witnessed and that all our mutual friends remember.  I recall visiting my then friend, a Bolivian Indian who told us his name was Johnny Pacheco, the same as a band leader (though we were never certain that he was called that) at his apartment house's rooftop swimming pool.   But I don't remember anything of Johnny's apartment, which I would have had to enter first before going up to the roof.  Did it really happen, or am I making this memory up?

And so on.  Still, once you are reminded of something you remember it for all days.   My friend K. reminded me how we once teased a mutual friend of ours (whom I have completely forgotten) over his preference for nylon shirts.  Evidently, I initiated this at times cruel game.  Ten years later after that episode (of teasing), and not remembering any of it, I noticed and wondered about my boss' habit of wearing nylon shirts.   He was OK otherwise, drove a Porsche 911, gave me a break when no one else would , was a super guy, but these shirts!  Did I have a phobia about nylon shirts?  If I did, the change of fashion trends has apparently cured it.

Lucky Charms!

Last night, actually, early this morning, I found myself inside a parked city bus, which started rolling slowly toward the cross street, the driver nowhere to be seen, on his seat a large box of breakfast cereal.   I walked forward following another tall fellow (the shifting of bus' center of gravity might have been the cause of the roll), squeezed into the driver's seat pushing the cereal box aside, and looked for the hand brake, while the bus was already entering the cross street. Not finding a hand brake I pressed the left pedal which I assumed to be the brake and the bus stopped.  The other fellow was already outside, standing in front of the bus.  I then released the brake and the bus rolled backwards a few yards, its cabin resting against the wall.  I got up, leaving the cereal box behind me on the driver seat.

That Damn Cake

Jimmy Webb posted on Facebook a link to an old video of himself playing and singing his most infamous composition "MacArthur Park", about a park in Los Angeles.  Why infamous?  Because of the lyric line which reads:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

... and is sung operatically by perhaps everyone who's recorded it, starting with actor Richard Harris on his album produced by Webb titled " A Tramp Shining".  During that time, biggest  radio and jukebox hits were recorded by artists of other genres, and "MacArthur Park" was recorded and made into niche hits by the Four Tops and Waylon Jennings (shame on him!), who, if memory serves, garnered for it some award from the country music establishment.  Harris' recording was one of the longest AM radio hits, over seven minutes, and if I remember correctly was issued as a single on a 33RPM record, B/W "Didn't We".

But about that notorious cake in the rain. Webb is fully aware of the notoriety of this lyric and in his Facebook post today mentions rain falling in New York, where he's performing, and adds: "Leave your cakes outside!"

The lyric has puzzled listeners and critics ever since it appeared in 1968, and I don't believe Jimmy Webb has ever explained it.  It has been the source of endless puns, jokes, and parodies, not to mention criticisms as something that makes no sense.

Well, this is what caught my attention, the criticisms and the responses to them.   The responses which diss the critics for failing to understand the supposedly lofty metaphor.  I have seen it before many times, and noted it, the defense of a dense phrase or lyric, defense  that relies on dismissing the critic as someone who fails to get it.   But as usual,  just what he fails to "get" is never stated, and in this story the cake left in the rain remains as mysterious as it was when Richard Harris sang it on an otherwise beautifully arranged and performed recording. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHS8hj4TdT8

Windows

I was watching on my computer a low key television program which consisted of one-on-one interviews with writers and philosophers.  They discussed books, ideas. The interviews took place in a city cafe somewhere,  with the two principals sitting on stools at a tall table near the cafe window, sipping coffee or mineral water.   Little of the cafe was seen, no other customers or staff members, except for an occasional reflection in the window, but outside that window, or windows as the two men sat in a corner, so that we saw through two windows, outside that window a busy city square, with cars, buses, streetcars, coming and going from three direction, and of course pedestrians right outside the cafe, who only occasionally noticed the camera and briefly stopped to gaze inside.

Since the scene inside was static - two men conversing, what was most interesting visually was the scene outside, the busy city, people's faces, clothes, manners.  Very few seemed to be in a hurry.  For some reason or another, I expected or hoped to see a familiar face to appear, even though I am far from there, and don't know anyone.

Now I wonder if the producers of this program realized what they were creating.   I suspect they did, otherwise they'd conduct these interviews where such interviews are usually conducted, in a stagey television studio.

I sit and read books in a brightly lit cafe with large windows at a busy city corner, and while my back is usually to the window, I frequently turn and watch the city scene.   Someone's recommended reading in public, and I've found some benefits to doing it.

A Man From the South

A story strangely familiar, or, if you prefer the usual cliché, eerily familiar.

A man from the South arrives in New York City planning to marry his sweetheart who lives there, and to move there or thereabout.  It is October 2001. For the time being he is staying with his somewhat quarrelsome relatives, who don't look too kindly on his relationship, and one of whom has known his sweetheart for some time.

He sees her daily, they plan their future life, and they begin looking for a place to live.   A month passes and the woman breaks up the relationship without an explanation.   Devastated, he returns South, where his friends who had once prayed for his success are surprised to see him back.  He falls into a deep depression, starts drinking heavily, thinks suicidal thoughts.

After some time, he is led to a doctor who prescribes powerful tranquilizers.   His condition improves.  He continues thinking of the time in New York, still unable to understand what happened and why.  Was it his relatives who sabotaged the relationship? Was it the woman's relatives? Her priest? The Tarot cards that she sometimes consulted despite being religious?  Was it something he said, did?  He doesn't know, cannot conclude anything.

Years pass.  Four years after the disastrous affair, he watches on television  an interview with a film director who is making a film about 9/11, the event which took place less than a month before his arrival in New York.   The director, who lives in New York City, relates how deeply 9/11 had affected him.  And he tells the interviewer about his family doctor who recently asked him what happened to his family that it's been having health problems in the past four years.  Not serious health problems, but problems that the family had not experienced earlier.  And the film director realized that it was 9/11 that affected him and his family so strongly that it affected their physical well being.

Our man now thought that he finally got a clue about the events in his own life four years earlier in New York.   Perhaps it was 9/11, which did not affect him as powerfully at the time, as he was busy planning the new stage of his  life, perhaps it was what affected his then sweetheart.  Perhaps.