Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1310232301230.166@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: ..so we decided we'd turn one room dark and one room light
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 23:07:59 -0400 (EDT)
..so we decided we'd turn one room dark and one room light and put the instruments and humidifier in the dark room because the light really does pour in and in the bright room the wood will dry out and there go more cracks in the instruments, so we made an alcove near the bed and put as many of them as we could around it so you can see all of them as has been traveling with adam and azure and myself have made it and now the question is who is going to want to listen to these things here and who's around to play with and what do i do so i'm not a total freak here even though i might have to go running with azure back to new york since a lot of people here tell me that's the case and providence can't hold onto crowds which i do really understand since i lived here admittedly years ago but for a good thirteen or so years in a row and towards the end of that period i was getting tired feeling that i was in fact totally crazed and getting out was my only option so i opted for running down to the city which was of course new york as often as i could sometimes crashing at vito acconci's place on christopher street and for the rest i really forget where i stayed but those were desperate times and pretty soon i moved down into the city myself with my second life and we took a place that tom bowes had had and then that was the end for a while of rhode island for me and i never looked back but now here i am in a place downtown on westminster street and i'm trying to feel not entirely insane even with the medications the clinic doctor gave me which are all interacting in a kind of chemical soup so i called my brother and got some good advice from him about which to cut out before i kicked the bucket which is far too early for me especially when i end up wandering around the alcove looking at the instruments there are starting to play again for the big gig we've got coming up as part of the 50th anniversary of esp-disk at jack in brooklyn and i'm wondering how on earth do i get these down to the city and find parking and not stress over the car and focus focus on the playing before i make a fool of myself pretending to play anything from viola to one sort or another of saz or cumbus which are still sitting prettily in the alcove not realizing they may be about to partake of a strange and vast journey into musicland with the only but very major difference that we're going to be going back to providence, repeatedly returning in one or another direction and you know how stressful that can be which was the case that gravitated me towards the big city in the first place resulting in a somewhat muddied art career hanging out with amazing people and finding my own way at a place called mcgoos or magoos which i think had prostitutes on the second floor but on the first was the best art bar eatery ever as far as i was and still am concerned although now there's a place called food as part of as220 in providence that isn't really the same as the old food in soho which was always too expensive for me but that i passed by all the time on the way from here to there or some such and now wish i could return for twenty minutes to that corner just the way it was which is pretty much how as220 is except for the restaurant food per se but the rest of the corner and soho had a mean and hungry look and i wasn't playing music again at that time having given it up in the previous decade or some such as i felt like a fake and it was getting to be too much for me so i arrived and was busy with photography and video and showing and making one mistake after another which i threaten myself with that i'll keep doing the same looking out the windows on westminster and down the street past as220 to the overpass where the highway says towards new york in one direction and boston in the other and it doesn't say towards the city but after new york there isn't any other in any case so i move from the bay window back into the light side of the place we're in now and cross to the short hallway on the right where i take another right into the dark room and there among everything else in the alcove there are bowed and plucked instruments as well as some endblown flutes and i found of course there was no room for the pump organ there so that has had to stay in the bright side where it glows and usually has a shakuhachi and xiao resting on it for company and i keep thinking to myself these are lean times and what will go down in the end and will i live through it and what will become of us in this strange place i've returned to which is now replete with water and fire features downtown where the river used to be covered over but now is full of light where i worry i'll be trapped and unable to focus and just learn to relax and live here with the two rooms and just about no one to listen to or care about the music or media or theory stuff i do or see that stuff either and have i regressed and turned back into the crazed and neurotic person i used to be here which formed me into that uncomfortable mold or am i adding layers to it from the position of the home you can't return to because even that has been torn down or at the least turned into a house so i'll go into the dark room now and that will shield the world from me and shield me from the world until the story drains out or becomes so repetitive it's lost its way as i worry day in and night out that i've lost mine http://www.alansondheim.org/instsprov.jpg