Episode 21: Grab-Bag! All Right, Jazz Poem, and To Own a Car in San Francisco

 

Three pieces -

• "All Right" (song)
• Jazz Poem (read live at Pianofight, San Francisco)
• To Own a Car in San Francisco (archive recording I dug up from 1999)

About that jazz poem. I believe I heard myself say in the interstitial patter that I'd include the text of the jazz poem in the podcast blog. Why, that would be right here.

The version of the text in the podcast is lightly abridged. But here is the full "Jazz Poem" as it appears in my book Pieces, Items, and Sundry Shorts.

A Jazz Poem

 

I'd like to read you my poem

            about

                                    miles

                        davis.

 

boooooo-aaaaaaah!

boooooo-aaaaaaah!

 

transgressive semiotic on stoned gold chuckwagon

            ridin' that

                        five-and-dime express

half six dozen of a birdbath catharsis griddle.

 

boooooo-aaaaaaah!

 

i met her in the

                                    rain

rain like plastic bucket of enthusiasm fish

            plastic: not a metal pail

rain

            like

drippy

fruitmeal

say i met her in the rain

on the

                        jazz

            train

 

jazz reverie cool & quotidian on nasal early afternoon midnight

            of

ghost-hour stanchion thoroughbred greenskeeper mongoose

 

                                                            jazz

                        jazz

            jazz

                                    jazz                                          jazz

                        jazz                  jazz

jazz                  jazz                                                                              jazz

            jazz

                                    jazz                              jazz

 

jazz like coleman and coletrain and ella and monk

herbie and billie and dizzy and duke

– personally, sonny rollins is not to my taste –

but jazz, like parker and bird and mingus and miles

                                                miles

                        miles

miles of jazz run ripchord down landscape of kosher corn beef and hash

            served in rusty beercan

                                    of

            a denuded middleclass dream

of fixed-rate mortgage diner-food

Armored Personnel Carrier pretty puppy

with

                        side

            of

jazz

like stilton wallflower emulsion junto pony nematode homology felcher dipilatory ape-chime

                        punchdrunk flywheel graft

9-&-three-eighths-type jazz

jazz in angry underwear

            like houseguest on electrified rug.

part

                        two:

the education

                                                of

            miles

davis

 

Miles Davis was born on May 25, 1926 in Alton, Illinois, soon moving to East St. Louis where he

            flew the fly                              as high as went by

                                    binged the bang to                   fling the fang

                        ran in the sand to live free of the man

and it was JAZZ, jazz like international turpentine gestalt

like cary grant and rosalind russell stranded in the Shan Plateau Range of western Myanmar

with nothing but a quarter ream of ledger paper and a masonjar of pickled duckbills

jazz

like miniskirt tirade of vegetable government

undue TOEFL exam in salad of jackrabbit wonderment

tornado pillbox of post-secondary nasal drip

soybean guttersnipe of preponderant dwarf

 

herein lay the education

                        of miles davis

 

 

Part Three: A Puzzling Numerological Interlude

 

1          the taste of licking a stamp, when there is no stamp

2          primrose blossom yields open to spring

3          rice bran breakfast cereal

4          the number four

5          is two plus three: therefore, primrose and bran

6          primrose times bran

7          primrose times bran, plus that stamp that isn't there

 

Part Four: precisely

                        sixteen                                                random

                                    words

 

Serrated masonic throwpillow necrotic stromboli encryption lug skedoodle venison proximate vegas ant-gargle shrimp if scrum bamboozle ass-turnip

 

 

Part Four-A: some conclusions

 

in the beginning, miles davis

                                                            then. jazz poetry.

in the end: an octopus

 

it always ends

                                    with

            an octopus

,

 

she

said

                                    on

            that

                                                                                    jazzzz

trainnnnn

***

And with that we prematurely conclude our podcast season. 24 episodes were planned, 21 were pushed out; and among the three episodes in limbo, the series finale (a rock opera named Psychonaut) went back on ice in November 2016 - where it had already been since 2001. But the unfinished projects will all be back someday for their revenge

So, till next time!

Episode 20: The Drinking-Song Trilogy

 

The Drinking-Song Trilogy

AmusiaMusic · The Amusia Story Podcast 020 - Drinking-Song Trilogy

xxx

Episode 19: Dog Dad

Kevin Spacey was turned into the household cat this past summer, in a film that was apparently terrible. For me, I think the notion of "Dog Dad" was rolling around in my head long before. In my notebooks you might see the concept pegged as, "Family romp a la Freaky Friday pursued to remorselessly dismal conclusion." Because those are the sorts of things one would find in my notebooks.




So this time around the idea was not to be original, and to play on familiar templates. I could even add that Dog Dad is a "spiritual ancestor" (as narrowly distinguished from self-repetition!) of a story I wrote around 15 years ago called "That Goddamned Dog!". It formed part of my book Platitudes for a Life in Hell, and I eventually made it into this little video.

Episode 18: Grab-Bag! Magus & Quanz #2, Reunion, and Bachelor Party

A little cluster of three pieces this week, as we return from being dark for 'round and about a month.

Episode 17: "Bracing for the Joy" Preview

Bracing for the Joy performed in the San Francisco Fringe Festival, September 2016.

Episode 16: Inside the Music

Here's a quick, silly one that would go well with weekend coffee or the like. The story follows from a pressing question: why do society's arguably freest people - rock stars with protective staffs, endless latitude, and millions of dollars - always blow it in the same way? Why can't one of them get really into exotic fish or ham radio, instead of cocaine? (We know it's possible: consider the lonely example of Brian May, who spends his free days on astrophysics and the defense of hedgehogs.)

Episode 15: Mr. Meaningless

Cheerfully dedicated to Robert L. Darling:

Episode 14: The Royal Road

I can say I owe a debt in this story to Arthur C. Clarke's Nine Billion Names of God. But in the history of science fiction there's no shortage of stories on the theme. So call this a new spin on an old classic.

To my knowledge, recasting our inflationary universe as some kind of geometric problem is original: given the vast amount of science fiction I'm ignorant of, I could be wrong. But to that degree, "The Royal Road" is an original idea to me, and I'll stick widdit.


My only footnotes are that (1) I could have been more specific in mentioning it was Ptolemy I Soter who studied with Euclid. He wasn't any-ol' late Ptolemaic king, but rather the first Ptolemy to rule Egypt - just installed by Alexander the Great. The royal road Euclid had in mind would have been the one built by Darius the Great, connecting Persia with Asia Minor....

(2) I placed this story at Stanford, and went out of my way to mention its situatedness by California's first highway, El Camino Real, because that name means, in Spanish... oh, you know. ECR connected the original Spanish Missions in California, and has roots going all the way back to the late 1600s.

(3) In the story I refer in passing to a family of superlogical abstract maths, with the power to reconcile seemingly conflicting concepts, called Balalgebras. That's utterly made up. (This idea comes from a long-ago and somewhat longer version I had written of this story.)

(4) James Franco and Morgan Freeman are real actors, used fictionally. They were not harmed in the making of this story.

(5) (Note from 5 years later, 3/2021) In preparing a new thumbnail drawing, I relocated from Stanford a little north up the peninsula to the NASA Ames center; and I swapped in ~1980 Scott Baio in place of James Franco. Why? Because I was moving real fast with these drawings and did not bother listening to my old story for specifics. Also, I did not care. But in reading these notes now, I can see how confusing my choice of new illustration might be. Well, whatever. Baio seems funny to see in the sky, and I am keeping him there.

Episode13: The Alchemist

A lot of sources to mention here! My most important recent read feeding into "The Alchemist" was John Fleming's kaleidoscopic Dark Side of the Enlightenment. And of course magician Ricky Jay's marvelous new book from earlier this year, Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living.

As the existence of the second book implies, Buchinger is a real person, and my use of him fits within the limits of what we know about his career. On the other hand, my protagonist Hartwig is very much made-up... though his former patrons are not. Maximillian II Emanuel and his wife Theresa Kunegunda Sobieska are real people - Electors of Bavaria in the Holy Roman Empire, who resided in Nuremberg, and were caught up in the now-well-forgotten War of Spanish Succession. I have, I admit it freely, libeled these people 300 years after the fact by inventing an affair between Therea and her astrologer. I officially apologize. There is no evidence for this. There's no evidence she even had an astrologer!, but that part's not too far-fetched.


...A little more distantly influencing the story, a favorite book of mine is Rupert Hall's From Galileo to Newton, which I read ages ago and like to leaf through again from time to time. Also, in the last year, a great book has come out touching on the interplay between truth, falsity, empiricism, and mysticism that were all warring for intellectual preeminence in Europe in the 16- and 1700s: this is John Glassie's Man of Misconceptions, about the seemingly-half-mad Jesuit polymath Athanaeus Kircher. (I only found space to name-check Kircher in passing in this story. But if you're ever in Los Angeles, make a point of seeing the exhibit about him at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. Fascinating stuff, and also... sort of... funny?)

In its best form, "The Alchemist" would make up a little meditation on how close mystical and superstitious thinking can be to any more refined concept of scientific method. Newton was an alchemist himself, Leibniz rubbed elbows with the practice (and with everything else under the sun). Kepler was as mystic as they come.* I am not suggesting anything woo-woo, just that to get science right is hard. And it seems to require sliding through error and weird thinking on the way.

In 15 quick minutes here, I only wander into the neighborhood of that theme, the thing which at bottom was really on my mind. So maybe someday I can extend and expand on what I have. But it does me good to have pinned this much down! A draft of a chapter to serve as down-payment toward a novel. That's what we have.



* Obscure Note: In the story I refer to calculus as the original invention of an Otto von Hohensteigen, independently rediscovered by Leibniz, plagiarized by Newton - and that the whole thing's a kind of kabbalistic mathematics. This is a deliberate muddle on at least three levels. One: Hohensteigen is a person I invented in an unreleased story, which no one has read, so that is really obscure. But, fun for me to slip in. Two: Newton has priority over Leibniz for nailing down calculus, but I am picturing my characters as partisans for their fellow-German. And needless to say, Three: calculus has nothing to do with the kabbala. But my guys are speaking of its strange symbols and surprising results in the terms that make the most sense to them.

Episode 12: Morbid-Vernal

Here's a deep echo coming up from 1999.

In the 24 episodes we plan for this "season" of stories, today's is probably going to be the only one brought out of our archive. It was a nifty achievement when we recorded it - fifteen minutes of integrated storytelling and music, straight to tape without a single edit - and it pointed the way for what Michael and I have had the happiness to be able to work on together since then. Plus, barely anybody's ever heard this thing.

So. Morbid-Vernal:



.

Episode 11: The Racist Police Support Group

So this is a touchy one. (For one thing, the title doesn't imply exactly what it sounds like.)

Why invite misinterpretation? Well, why not. Damned if you do or don't. Overall, the trouble seems to be that Americans feel one must support our police in the dangers they face on the job, or oppose the fact that people - routinely innocent and predominately black - are being shot in the streets by police.

It would be hard to think of a better example of a false dichotomy. That you're either against police or for shooting innocent people.

In the story here (maybe it's more of a "bit" than a story), I posit some enormously conscientious police officers, rubbing elbows with some highly racist ones. This seems accurate enough, to say we have both. --And then, hopefully before the whole thing gets too uncomfortable, we launch sideways into a loud advertisement for the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.



!

Episode 10: The Cruise

Here's the link:

• Sound effects this week (wind, seagulls, helicopter) were gotten royalty-free from soundbible.com.
• A distant inspiration here was David Foster Wallace's essay about a Caribbean cruise, published in Harpers in 1996, called Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise. It was later reprinted as the title essay of his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The inspiration from DFW's essay is very distant, but I like including the link just in case somebody might actually go read the thing. It sets a kind of comic equivalency between luxury and unreality.
• I cop to cribbing the slow, florid announcer voice from Lorelei, a hostess on the Danube river cruise my wife and I were enormously privileged to be able to take last year. (Also, yes, the tour of the Castle Schmönigkönigstein was inspired by that cruise.) All of the diabetic comas are invented.