Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0508280048050.10711@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Rock
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 00:48:26 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: send out around May 14? - Rock essay for website (fwd) 2nd time around 1st time here Rock fuck this didn't go anywhere it's not sounded be fame / Ashley Bickerton was having a show and Mary Boone said to me that the artists were the rock stars today. Mary Boone was a student of mine and opened the most famous 80s gallery in Soho and she still has a gallery. I haven't seen Mary in years. Chris Frantz or was it Franz and Tina Weymouth were students of mine. Al Wilson was a close friend of mine until he was Canned Heat, sometimes I hear his goin down the highway or was it another song I think he was called the owl then. We used to play together. I tried to play with the Talking Heads when they were The Artistics or was it the Artistics. Kathy Acker and I made a terrific tape together. I was on the stage with Bob Dylan at Carnegie Hall but I was really part of the audience. I knew Son House but not well. David Salle told me his style wasn't my style or was my style not his style. I'm desperate for fame, I'm a star fucker. I watched Vito Acconci and Laurie Anderson swell into greatness and I used to call them Vito and Laurie and I thought I was in love with Laurie when I was running around with Vito's ex-wife. Don Munroe or was it Monroe was a student of mine and then ran Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes on MTV. Nicole Miller the fashion designer was a student of mine, so was the artist Tyler Stallings and I knew Marvin Minsky slightly but not well enough to call him Marvin. I met Guattari in Paris and I might have called him Felix, Mark someone who translated was also there. I met Trinh Minh Ha and Gayatri Spivak at a friend's house at different times. But back to the rock stars. My drummer was Rafi Zabor who later wrote The Bear Comes Home and made a lot of money and got a lot of attention why he was even on the radio. I heard the Ramones and of course Talking Heads and Blondie from the very beginning but only the Talking Heads or The Talking Heads knew me. Rock's got that edge that goes on and off stage, it's furious, we're all lame walking around programming, it's a different thing, not even like Coleman Hawkins. I met John Fahey who loved my playing but didn't take the tape. I knew Bernie Stollman who took both records. I heard Mel Lyman many times, maybe he had his cult then. Geoff Muldaur too, but it was mainly Al Wilson. I was backstage at the Newport Folk Festival with the blues guys. I was a city blues player, whatever happened to Tim someone who was better but I was wilder. I. A. Richards liked my freshman year poetry I wrote at Brown University. I lived with Clark Coolidge and Aram Saroyan, but let's get back to rock, I knew Marty Mull fairly well. This is the only real there is, the real that takes the body, that names the body it takes. We're all going there, we're all wanting furiously to go there, we'd drop everything else in an instant if the doors were opened. I was within three feet of Janis Joplin at her cafeteria concert at RISD. I knew a lot of artists but they were artists, they weren't on stage. I still play guitar faster than anyone I know, but it's weirder, avant-garde, and no one plays with me, I've gone solo. It's my axe and I've had gigs. What about Maria Muldaur, she sent chills up down my spine. I yelled at Derrida, he had a bevy of academia hangers-on or I'd like to say hanger-ons. But I didn't envy Derrida the way I envied Tina Weymouth, and I never will. For she had what he'd never had and couldn't understand, why he'd fall flat trying to have it. "Is it just a need to make an adolescent dream come true?" Adolescent dreams are our last _true_ dreams, the furious sexual psycho emotional onslaught we spend the rest of our lives recuperating. You're _in_ rock, you're _in_ rockstar mode, or any _music_ mode that devours you. "Is it an urge to become more pop(ular)?" No, it's got nothing to do with that _thing_ which is always already elsewhere, that _thing_ that dominates as you grow older, turns into finance, economy, that _thing_ that becomes a matter/mass of calculation. It's inside, it's the movement of the body, the _twitch,_ what happens to the marrow of the bone and mind. "To reach a greater audience than the (net)art consumers?" To inhere that energy, injest it, to _move_ with it as a _tree_ moves or a _demon_ moves, to fuck god, not deny him or her or it, to swallow god, to turn the _thing_ upside-down. "Is it a throw at reintroducing pleasure in art producing?", its dance is the dance of pleasure-production, it leaves you behind, it's dragging the body with it, it's tethered to the body, it's exaltation, "Is it about making the body on the screen?", there's _no body,_ there's no _body,_ there's no _screen,_ there's no screen _memory,_ there's nothing at work, there's nothing at play, the words take you away, the words wrest you from them, "About taking control of the body of the word?", not on _your life_ when the word grabs you with the knife, when your skin _sears_ Peter's rock, when ecstasy makes you hear and there ready for anything that comes along, you swallow _anything,_ Jesus, Mary, Muhammed, Buddha, Marx, you swallow _anything,_ Confucius, Derrida, Bush, idi Amin, Gandhi, "Is it to escape from the emerging net art production patterns?" but what patterns when your body can't do but the walk the walk can't do but the talk the talk, it's not belief, "Is it because we believe 21st century rock stars will emerge from the net?", it's not cause of belief, it's the living sound of the world, the sound in which, as in every sound, the sound in which _matter vibrates,_ in which you can only _hear the things in the world,_ in which all existence is _the murmur of the world,_ and you're doing it, you're doing it, you're doing it - all tied up in star-fuck skein, in fuck-me-you skein, in fuck-you-me skein, in terror-bombing-paradise skein, is sweet-talking pillow-soft skein, in folded skein, stretched taut skein, in ready-to-break skein, in crying-broken skein, in your skein-skin, in her skein-skin, in his skein-skin, when _I sing_ my body makes a noise, there's nothing else, just air that does it, the air that lives me, it's that matter, it's all microsound, the body's no beginning, no ending, a bridge or a structure, flesh and its muffled motion, just as a wave is the wave of a grain, just as a particle is the feel of its wave < Anyway so is it this, the body/movement/fame/sex/langue/truth/teen/wave no not at all, it's the plan-out screech-wave, it's the cool theory David Byrnes wave, I couldn't play with him, I didn't hear the chords, I was going elsewhere, a total fuckup failure, I wanted _it_ so bad I could taste _it._ I use laptop, a lot of us do, it projects, you can get into it, sound/ projection, whatever, you can fuck up, you can't fuck up, it's all there, it's the screen-world, it's confined by your patches, well whatever you've done to it, whatever you've put _there_ like Diamanda Galas or Gallas how can I remember or Annie being a bad girl or Clements tilted or the other where Shulgin makes the screen the star and there's that economics again but it's after the fact, the spectators are _moving_ There's a big split between construction constructibility, building the grain-wave, and the flesh devouring, the grain-fuck wave-fuck, but they cum together when the sound begins but like when you play your axe and you're moving so fast and you lose track of your arms your hands your fingers it's just the sound coming out of you or being you but everywhere, no time to ask "Why is there being rather than nothing?" I want to _taste_ it, it's almost always 4/4 time, this constant _cutting_ into time, the other signatures are clever, superfluous, place half here, half there, begin again, or cut, it doesn't have to be a half, just use the haft of the axe, cut again, it can't go on forever, you hear around 22 notes/second or play that, of course they're exceptions, old difference between Lydia Lunch and Janis Joplin living on or in something spoken or sung in any case "When you're doing it, you're _doing_ it." fuck this didn't go anywhere it's not sounded out (too _male