Learning To Love Jazz Again

The first album I ever owned was the first record my dad ever bought, Time Out by Dave Brubeck. He gave me a cassette of this when I was 7 or 8 and I wore it out. I remember being in 6th grade right when ODB was huge and this cat Justin Reid letting me listen to his dubbed tape of 'Shimmy ya' on his walkman. I heard nothing musical about it. The non-threatening Brubeck still made more sense to me .




Later, I went through the obligatory punk and hardcore phase, listened to Minor Threat and Black Flag, and practiced my HXC dancing in a full length mirror in my basement. I grew up, broke my edge, smoked a lot of weed, flirted dangerously and shamefully with jambands, stopped smoking weed and got into indie, noise, and the avant garde. Jazz virtually left my vocabulary. I liked free jazz, having taken out Albert Ayler cds from the library I worked at but didnt really understand it until my freshman year of college at Purchase. I was the only person in my freshman class of 300 or so that wasnt taking a mandatory science class (i opted for intro to ecology instead). There was a mandatory lecture that night and I was alone in my dorm, alone in the freshman section of campus. Laying on my bed, I blasted Coltrane's Interstellar Space as loud as my cheap speakers would go and GOT it. Rashied Ali was laying down this incredible base of texture that Coltrane was just ripping to shreds with sheets, walls, cascades of sound. But it was as poetic as it was raw. Deeply emotional, even spiritual, exhilarating and fucking PUNK.





Purchase did ruin straight ahead jazz for me though. Very quickly I grew extremely jaded about jazz musicians. There were moments where jazz people seemed to bethe worst people in the world. The halls of the conservatory were clogged with self absorbed, tasteless, misogynist assholes. The music made by the Jazz Conservatory students every Thursday night in the cafe or at Jazz parties in the Olde was technically rigorous but emotionally false, lacking of any substance. When they attempted to reach beyond jazz, the results were even worse. The worst music imaginable: ska bands...sub-Dave Matthews frat boy music...awful funk or even worse, reggae. How could I associate myself with this lurid trash? I was way cooler than jazz and certainly cooler than jazz people. A friend and I briefly considered running a show on the campus radio station called "Fuck the Jazz Conservatory" and playing nothing but screaming, screeching free jazz and free improv freakouts.


But lately, I have picked up a Bill Evans Trio record and have been listening to it on the bus to the Garden Works office. This was a record that my dad would love; hell, I could play this around my grandmother. But it FEELS stupendous. It feels right. The level of improvisation is just absurd. It is as if the trio themselves are an instrument being playing by someone else. It is also fucking punk. Having graduated and continuing to grow, splitting the fucking East coast entirely, jazz is no longer a 4 letter word. Does this mean I getting old? Sure, but who gives a fuck? Bumping 'A Love Supreme' in an empty office in the pouring rain makes me feel like the move was worth it, makes it psychic-ly and emotionally right.

currently...

"Don't end up like Ted. Ted's just waiting to die"

Jesse said that to me in reference to our roommate Ted. Ted is older than all of us, easily in his 60's, with a pursed, rat-like face that frowns beneath a beret. Conversation with Ted is stilted; I think the age difference is more difficult to negotiate for him. His conversation alternates between how much pussy he used to get as a young hot shit jazz guitarist in the U-District and mild admonishments for leaving the doors unlocked. He seems most comfortable when talking about the old days, which as one might imagine in this house is far from an uncommon topic.

I do respect Ted. He's led a hard life. Jesse's comment made me see how much I recognized Ted's behavior and how much it mirrors my own over the summer. I was fixin' to die...whether out of sheer boredom or post-grad anomie. So many deaths last year; my own seemed just around the corner. As awesome as last summer was in a lot of ways with Jordyan and Amber moving into Fuck City and such a intense feeling of community, I did not expect to see the end of summer. How melodramatic and corny. Watching Ted now makes me feel very silly and helpless. REAL despair is an impossible force. How can I help you, Ted?

Finished but have yet to return 'oblivion' by wallace. have been carrying it around in my bag for the last few days, telling myself i'll return it first chance I get. Sort of like the letter I wrote Fuck City which now sits on my table, a month old and irrelevant. lent an Americorps friend 'baron in the trees'. She took my plea to keep the book nice a little too seriously and is keeping it in a plastic bag. appreciated but unnecessary.

mornings in seattle

late for work
microwaving cold coffee
walking through georgetown, listening to the new lightning bolt

Senior Project

Deconstructing the Ark:
Nature, Culture, and Species at the Central Park Zoo

more bee beards

recently

I very sadly moved out of Pjort Chester last week to come home and spend some time with my family as I anxiously await the move to Seattle. One of the most positive things about this is the increased time I have to daydream and paint myself even further into esoteric corners of my brain. As such, I thought I'd share some of the current weird currents of thought I am navigating.

-I am considering competing in the World Beard and Moustache Competition in 2011 in Norway and perhaps the New York Beard and Moustache Competition next year. Having won 2nd place overall and 1st in the Crumbcatcher Division of the Purchase Competition of 2008 (especially alongside noted Purchase pognophile Joe Matoske) has satiated my beard's ego till now. But to compete internationally as part of Beard Team USA would be a true accomplishment and perhaps the most patriotic thing I've ever done. My country needs my beard. Beard Team USA is led by the impressively hirstute Jack Passion (see photo below) who gives hope to us ginger beards that we may too achieve new heights of semi-ironic exaggerated masculinity.

I have already thrown away my razor.

-I read this article about this Parisian beekeeper/artist who's mapping cultural and biological diversity in Paris through honey and the variety of different pollens used in making the honey. Urban beekeeping sounds really, really awesome and is something that, if I were bolder and less bothered by bee stings, would try to incorporate into Garden Works.

'He's thinking about bees again.'

The artist cites it as mapping the ''geopolitical tectonics of honeys'. Let us break down this term really quickly. Geopolitical, meaning the politics of place and space, at both the macro, international immigration and migration, and micro, the 40 city block range of a single bee, levels, tectonics, meaning the building structures which support something, and honeys, obviously the product of bees. The artist is suggesting is the biopolitical and geopolitical intermingling of species, cultural shifts impacting nature and vice versa, turning honey intro bricolages of cultures within paris. This got me thinking about this intersection of the geo and biopolitical in the production of species and spaces, kinda what I was talking about in my senior project for those who read it (ahem) but with a different spin and maybe I can get some grad work out of this. What we see here in urban bee keeping is the importation of species into a 'non-natural' environment which then reveals the biopolitics of that environment in the management and immigration of humans and human culture. Clearly, there must be someway that we can connect the geopolitical and biopolitical then in the opposite, the production of the wild as species and spaces. This is the tying of species as biological units to spaces as geographical units. Where we see this most notably is wildlife refuges or areas that are set aside specifically as the habitat of endangered species. Ideas about the biological are forever tied to the geographical. A parallel must also be drawn with the movement of native americans onto the reservation system, also clearly the meeting of geo and biopower.

-I want to acquire a cat. I would like to name her Gorgoroth , I think.