David Meltzer
Impossible Music
Brilliant ideas arrive like celestial comets as Mercury conjuncts Uranus. Think of your mind as a radio transmitter and receiver. The Aquarius has one of the sharpest intellects of the zodiac. Paint the town red tonight.
The old tale teller’s ploy: Where to begin? How to start? In the middle of the night and day of you are the one, it’s always been music and never words enough to say it, within it or beyond it. Profound dyslexia. Metaphor abounds. But no way into what the music is, was, does, reveals, conceals. Ammiel and yrs vaguely spend a late afternoon in The Musical Offering cafe in Berkeley. “Ami” “El” = “friend/beloved of God” (?) and “David”, singer/psalmist, the Temple music director, in a delere. The music jones; Ammiel back from a blitzgrieg at Amoeba in San Francisco and David fresh from a quick taste at Berkeley’s mothership Amoeba, backpacks stuffed with CDs zagging and zigging across crashed empires of diaspora and meltdown. If you’re in the predatory imperial mode, one can buy and therefore own any CD art wafer from too many disasters of class warfare, racism, pimping between the two lines of defeat, exploiting the exploiters. Hip-hop gangstas are square because they align with market capitalism venality -- hey, we’re fucking entrepeneurs; we drive Mercedes and don’t pay taxes. We’re just like you, why do you hate us?
When we talk of music it is about love impossible to speak of.
Jazz Kabbalah, the black & white of it, the page, the letters, ink, its black absence its white presence
describe the revolutionary harmonic shift wrought by Debussy, Ravel, Satie, a jazz pianist said, ‘Yeah, they’re playing the black keys’
the sounds made are colorless until pulled out of the air & transcribed, not even trance- scribed, but blacked onto white onto black lines of the page
don’t belive it: Scriabin & Huysmans -- one shapes sound, the other pages, but others see chromaticism as color-coded & kabbalistically each letter has a musical equivalent or each word in Hebrew explaining or deliniating a musical term is mutable & permutable --
thieves invent moral order;
crooks create classic art;
salesmen are at a loss even though they win when poets don’twe riff our ruin into say-no amulets & say-yes run-the-lotto-down
dream-book number code
moving the move to alert
Publishers Clearing House to reroute its TV crew in the new SUV to my front doornumbers & letters
notes & tonesimmense hope of overcome & underpay plus underplay oy vey to reach-out & pull into ongoing networks connected at the core of more