most recent publication
Autotelic Automatic --or how to build an abhor torpedo (poem) appearing in Maintenant 17: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art. Three Rooms Press, July 2023
Radix, Redux (poem) appearing in Maintenant 16: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art. Three Rooms Press, July 2022
Dogma (poem) appearing in Maintenant 15: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art. Three Rooms Press, July 2021
Unique Species (poem) appearing in Maintenant 14 A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art. Three Rooms Press, June 2020
I’m humbled by the company I keep – Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Andrei Codrescu, Anne Waldman, Nicole Eisenmann among so many others
the measure of
how would a young baby boomer (hippie, square, soul-funk, or rocker – any stripe, really) respond to a ’66 Cobra rolling by, blaring victrola music?
Not hailing from the irony age – perhaps with amusement or intrigue – but likely without a hint of Proustian recall. He/she might also wonder how to crank a gramophone while driving a standard.
In the 21st century, over-aired, fifty-year-old music regularly spews not just from anachro-mobiles like vintage mustangs, but from so many cars/drivers not self-identified as ‘urban’. Defanged by repetition, rockism in our streets, offices, mainstream restaurants, grocery stores, political campaigns, etc comforts the white, and unfortunately now, rallies the political right. Putting aside rock n’ roll’s current role as herald of (decaying) white cultural dominance in public spaces, I’m fascinated by its musical generational unification, like that of pre-recorded folk music’s. I bet there was little generational ‘new music’ until the advent of mass produced sheet music.
Brooklyn sustained a relative rock resurgence this summer – millennials blasting unapologetically familiar anthems in cafes -– singing along to unidentifiable cultural references such as ‘turn the page’ and ‘call you on the telephone”. Irony, like patterned baldness, apparently skips a generation. The first time someone told me she was ‘into ‘80s music’ was 1998.
Music itself is generated in time. In the century-plus of sound recording, music has also become our personal chrono-meter; soundtracks to our sense of self.
Hitting the pause, dividing time, time signatures, counting measures all refer to time. In school, we learn the duration between notes divides infinitely (as with the space between two steps, the tones between the tones etc), but that’s just playing. We’re stuck in the real world with earworms in our heads.
That music insinuated in your cortex – some clever composer wrote it, placing basic sound bits in order, in time. That composer’s brain has parts within it that exerted intrinsic, prospective control over it’s output’s sequencing. Time completely constrains writing music. In a non-linear biopic film, old age and midlife can precede childhood. In music, an ‘old age’ movement placed at the beginning of a piece renders it ‘childhood’. Time traps music, but can music trap time?
Tempo is one of the four musical features that activate emotion, (along with consonance, timbre, and loudness). Beats beget brain stem reflexes, rhythmically entraining mind/bodies –manifesting as foot-tapping, walking in rhythm, or calibrating heart rate to beats-per-minute. A cadence-conditioned brain oscillates, resonates with an emotion, and deposits that feeling as an episodic memory into your memory banks as it would an experience. (Thank you, hippocampal-auditory system). Now popped into your time line, the pop song may be ephemeral, but your emotional response to it persists.
That’s why the song remains the same.
Frontiers in Neuroscience. 2017; 11: 600.
appeared in: n0thing editions, volume 3, September 2018