CECIL TAYLOR: NEFERTITI, THE BEAUTIFUL ONE, HAS GONE

  There’s a Twilight Zone episode, based on a short story by Richard Matheson, where a little girl gets lost in the fourth dimension. Her parents do what any of us would do in this situation; they call up a physicist, who immediately comes over wearing the classic Physics Emergency Ensemble (pajamas and overcoat). One thing leads to another, and the girl’s father has to be sent into the fourth dimension to rescue her. And the physicist has to hold onto the dad’s legs the whole time, to make sure he doesn’t get sucked permanently into the 4D universe.

  It’s a race against time, incidentally, because the dad has to rescue the girl before the episode is over, and Rod Serling comes back to encourage us to smoke the brand of cigarettes he smokes while churning out scripts. And this kind of TV advertising was itself a race against time, because celebrity tobacco pitchmen only have a few years before their looks go. 

  My forays into the fourth dimension of the avant-garde (20th century composers like Bartók, the noise of the Velvet Underground, the Sheffield surrealism of guitarist Derek Bailey, etc.) have always involved somebody holding onto my legs, also, like the dad in “Little Girl Lost.” Unlike some artistic explorers, who tell the physicist in pajamas to let go of their legs already, I’ve never wanted to leave my roots behind. I didn’t stop listening to Phil Spector just because  my pop sensibility was recalibrated by “Pet Sounds,” and my interest in Brian Wilson didn’t go onto the high shelf in the closet just because I got interested in scabrous guitar noise. (Lou Reed’s didn’t either, a key reason why Reed has always been one of my favorite rock and roll artists.) 

  Likewise, I haven’t renounced my dedication to the music of Bob Wills or Louis Armstrong just because of my enthusiasm for Eric Dolphy. 

  My reluctance to choose sides has hurt my music career, I think. People in DC (and perhaps elsewhere too) like to be reassured that your music can be explained at bumper-sticker length, and mine can’t. I prefer that people discover my music accidentally, because they were just drinking or eating somewhere and suddenly this weird Karl Straub guy got on stage and started yammering. I prefer to not answer questions about my influences, because they include an ark of polarizing names and genres that instantly turn off the uninformed. I know how they feel; when I’m told that a get-together will include karaoke, or whitewater rafting, or clowns, it’s hard for me to retain an open mind in the aftermath of such revelations. (For the record, if you’re trying to convince me to go to a party, mention fondue.)

HIS DEATH DIMINISHES ME, BABY!

  In the first place, I haven’t read much Tom Wolfe. I only really read one of his books all the way through, but that’s sort of like saying you’ve only participated in one full-scale riot. 

  I have profoundly mixed feelings about his work, which is why I’ve avoided most of it, but if you care about American writing, you can’t reasonably ignore him any more than you can blow off Melville or Hawthorne.

   Wolfe is tough to explain away with brevity, unless you’re satisfied with superficial, glib putdowns. Wolfe certainly wasn’t. I’m struck by how often in his early work (I refer to the “new journalism” pieces he wrote which made him famous, collected in Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) he seems to make fun of some American’s outré behavior, only to get so caught up in the subject’s language, clothes, hair, pace, and obsessions that it doesn’t seem to matter anymore what his “take” on it may be. The one thing that’s always clear is that he’s EXCITED about it. He’s excited by what he’s seeing and hearing, excited by what it represents in our culture, and excited to bring you into it. He’s like a host who can’t wait for you to sit down with your drink so he can tell you what he saw on his vacation. 

  The question of whether Wolfe was conservative or liberal (and I don’t mean in the political sense) is moot, I think. Where Jack Kerouac used a new kind of writing to capture something he felt was coming to life in our country, but for all his official status as a bohemian outsider, was shot through with a kind of midwestern naive reverence about the new America he chronicled, Wolfe “goes native” without ever completely losing himself in the oddball world he’s writing about. He never stops reminding you that he has a Ph.D from Yale, in SOMETHING, but he also never stops paying attention to all the craziness around him, generally perpetrated by eccentrics who care more about their custom cars, or drugs, than any book learning.

YARD SALE OF THE APOCALYPSE

  It’s yard sale day! 

  Excitement is running high here at StraubCorp (a proud subsidiary of controversial parent company Strauby Lobby), because this yard sale has been imagined, mooted, and hashed out over many months. (At one point, there was even a Netflix “re-imagining” of it, starring Hugh Jackman.) I’m not sure what the exact gestation period was for this momentous event, which in my official capacity as Head Officer-In-Charge, I fought with every ounce of my remaining strength. It quickly joined the long list of family decisions where my veto was overridden by a 2/3 majority, as required by our Constitution. (As an aside, if you have a kid who spends all his time sitting on the couch, the most effective remedy for this time-honored American tradition is another time-honored American tradition- buy him a pet. The purchase of a goldfish, for example, with its damnably specific daily requirements for feeding, cleaning, and burying, will magically change your child from Inert Holy Man Who’s Made a Vow of Silence to a footloose boulevardier who spends more time out of doors than most surveyors. You won’t see him again, except at mealtimes, and even then, you might miss him if you turn your back just long enough to take care of some quick chore like tying your shoes, or scooping a dead fish out of a bowl.)  Following a sequence of events too labyrinthine and numinous to detail here (if you’ve ever seen a Nicolas Cage film, you don’t need it spelled out for you), it was determined that I was the only person in the administration who would be available on the appointed day to actually sit outside with the junk and deal with the public. 

I HATE POP MUSIC

  I hate pop music.

  I have many outré viewpoints about many societal shibboleths, but nothing I ever say out loud bugs people more. I see it on their face first (unless I’m driving, because I try to keep my eyes on the road), and they immediately start objecting to it. In my experience, knocking religion or sports isn’t nearly as likely to set people off. 

  And I always regret saying it, because it always sets up a 45 minute clarification exercise, which they constantly interrupt with further objections. This process is tiring, and usually fails, despite my many years of practice. 

  So this is my attempt to plunk it into the public record, so I don’t have to keep explaining my position. Of course, I realize that this won’t work either. It will be long, for one thing; I can see that already. And people won’t read it. (Here’s a good place to put my annoyance about THAT. “TL/DR,” one of the many irritating anti-intellectual toadstools that have sprung up in the internet era, means “too lazy/didn’t read,” and I’m happy to say that no-one’s ever typed that in a comment on my posts, but I have occasionally seen “I was going to read this but then I saw how LONG it was.” I wonder how many of these people have had the patience to take one of those intel-gathering Facebook quizzes about which Smurf they are, or whatever. Or the patience to wait in line to get into a dance club, or to see a prop comic. If you are waiting in line to see Carrot Top or Gallagher, you need to re-examine your life.)