It Happens So Quickly - These Things
“In music, the only thing that matters is whether you feel it or not.”
- Ornette Coleman
The Hoo Koo e Kommuter by Oliver Bicycle Works. June 2020.
It happens so quickly–
over and over again,
I close my eyes.
When I open them,
it’s another day.
Birds and rabbits continue
doing their animal things.
And I continue too,
doing my human things
as if opening my eyes
every morning
will happen over and over again.
I try to scribble down the words
that will ease the inevitable,
the over and overs,
the never opening again.
But words are like rabbits or birds when you blink
they’re gone.
Open your eyes.
A simple unconscious act.
I take a sip of tea
and watch the birds and rabbits
in the dew nibbled grass
of the morning–
each of us blinking,
wordless in this perfect light.
–
These Things inspired me recently:
“Harmolodic Manifesto” by Ornette Coleman
Coleman created a new sound in jazz through a new approach to jazz and music making, “It was when I realized I could make mistakes that I decided I was really on to something.” Coleman gets at these new approaches in his “Harmolodic Manifesto.” I dig how his approach to music begins with the individual within a society:
Communism, socialism, capitalism, and monarchy in the world (have) and are changing for a truer relationship of the democracy of the individual.
Also, remember in “Through the Looking-Glass” how Humpty Dumpty explained certain words in the “Jabberwocky” poem to Alice, that the word “slithy” is a combination of the words “slimy” and “lithe”?
You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.
Lewis Carroll made up the word “portmanteau” to describe making up words from other words. Ornette Coleman uses portmanteau to pack three meanings into the word “harmolodic” as a way of describing how he experiences music as the combination of harmony, motion, and melody.
If you’re not familiar with the music of Ornette Coleman, check out “Free Jazz” on YouTube.
“Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin
I’ve only just started “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” but OMG it’s so good. James Baldwin may be my favorite American prose writer. He’s so economically articulate and conveys such deep human wisdom so simply. I’ve read a lot of his nonfiction essays but this is my first time reading a novel by Baldwin and I’m really enjoying it so far.
“Alabama” by John Coltrane
You have to listen to “Alabama” off Coltrane’s “Live at Birdland” album and then read Ismail Muhammad’s experience and thoughts on this tune in a recent edition of The Paris Review:
Because the sonic landscape that Coltrane conjures on the track suggests something about the temporality in which black grief lives, the way that black people are forced to grieve our dead so often that the work of grieving never ends. You don’t even have time to grieve one new absence before the next one arrives. (We hadn’t time to grieve Ahmaud Arbery before we saw the video of Floyd’s murder.) “Alabama” gives this unceasing immersion in grief a form.
The Nine Habits to Increase Your Energy
Promises, promises, however, I’ve taken on most of these in the past six weeks and I’m feeling great these days. While there’s nothing we haven’t seen before in “The Nine Habits to Increase Your Energy,” I really dig Scott Young’s approach here: simple and some new perspectives on the ideas that were maybe difficult to keep up last time.
Looking to Get on a Bicycle?
I’ve been reading so many articles about how bicycle shops are seeing 300% increase in sales this spring and summer like it’s a bad thing. “So You’re Thinking About Riding a Bike” gives you all the information you need if you’ve been thinking about biking again or for the first time. Of course, there’s still an international bicycle shortage so it may take a bit to get that bike, but I think that’s kind of cool.