Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song written by Dizzy Gillespie
Performed by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

Music is a mystifying art form. Multiple sounds, altered just so, organized for perception- the human ear becomes a conduit; memories and emotions blossom. So, what are we saying when we say we like or dislike a particular bit of music? I suppose the two most visceral reactions are happy feet and boredom. Physical pain from volume probably fits in there too.

So, I wonder about all those comments people make about not liking a particular form of music. I realize that it can make it easier to choose a radio station in the car if you rule out certain things, but then we leave the car and let those decisions define us forever after.

“I don’t like jazz.” I have probably heard that statement more than “I don’t like rap music,” which is saying something. When and where I grew up, the dividing line was “I hate country and western music,” which slowly morphed into “I hate disco.” After all, we need to define our own boundaries before anyone else does.

I was just as culpable, but deeply suspicious of any doctrine. It certainly seemed like Ringo was listening to country music. The Kinks were cranking up their guitars. All those English bands sounded like they had a thing for our parents’ music, which we disdained. Something about musicians allowed them to draw on all sorts of influences from around the globe, but we listeners would not permit ourselves the luxury of free roaming.

Unfortunately, checking out new art forms can be a lot like walking into a room where everyone shuts up soon as you appear. Without a guide, you can end up with the stuff that everyone thinks is crap, or at least turns out to be the worst introduction. Jazz can present one of the more difficult mazes to navigate. Only the rarest person can face recordings by Ornette Coleman or Sun Ra without any preparation and come away with a hankering for more. (I dare say it would be like trying to make heads or tails of John Cage without program notes. You might recognize the intention that exists behind it all, but you would be at a loss to settle on a meaning.)

Thelonious Monk had given me that impetus where I needed to hear more. I played the music regularly and tried a few other things, but just could not find that certain something. I have no idea how I cam to be in front of the tv for a PBS special about Art Blakey, but he was brilliant. He talked about rhythm and history and explained music in a way that made sense. The man changed the way I thought about art. Before I saw it in so many others, I saw in Blakey the need to treat your art form as something both beyond you and implicit in your everyday life. I don’t know that we need to restrict that sentiment to only those arts we practice. We can find it in how we treat the arts we appreciate.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 257 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Play written by Larry Kramer

I write this in the days following the shooting in Orlando, knowing that my editor has it scheduled to be published some time in August. Who am I kidding? I am the editor. Maybe it will go out sooner, but it is not timely. That would be the mistake- to assume that discussing prejudice is going to go out of style in two months. Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart in the 1980s. HBO (and Broadway for that matter) could still dramatize it thirty years later without losing the outrage engendered by the original script.

In 1986, finishing up my time at college in southern Ohio, I had directed some stage shows. In doing so, I had apparently developed a reputation for being a bit driven to do whatever needed doing to get the show up. Some friends in the local gay alliance were interested in doing a show about AIDS, which had come to our community with all its horror and little of the necessary understanding. We elected to do The Normal Heart, a show raising hackles in New York City at the time. As it turned out, we needed theater faculty sponsorship in order to stage the show using school facilities. (I don’t recall always obtaining such a vouchsafe, but if you wanted to do things right…) The problem was that school leadership at the time was not entirely comfortable acknowledging so overtly that homosexuals might be involved in theater. Ultimately, my adviser sponsored us, but urged us to dump The Normal Heart for As Is. Maybe he was right- the show was more anecdotal and just odd enough to fit my directorial skill set of the time. The producers and I agreed.

The show was a success for the space, the place, and the time. Some memories:
-finding and leaving undisturbed our lead sitting with two parents after a performance quietly talking with two parents who had just learned that their son was gay and had AIDS
-getting called outside during intermission and chewed out by two straight graduate students because two minor characters in the show were portrayed too explicitly as effeminate
-my good friend, Steve, making our simple set perfect by lining the walls with large sheets of paper detailing in colossal print the then-current statistics of the epidemic

More than being gay or a writer, Larry Kramer has stayed in public as an angry man. That anger has fueled some powerful social commentary that needs to be remembered two months from now and two years from now. Life comes in too many variations just within our species for anyone to claim perfect knowledge of the right path. You don’t get to define anyone else’s destination and damn you for trying. The best art, from Voltaire to George Orwell, has never stopped reminding us to let our brothers and sisters be as long as they are not hurting anyone else.

Scott and John, our two leads and my friends, have been gone a long time now. I formed a comedy troupe with Scott and we had some great times. I lost contact with both. It can be awfully damn hard to keep track of the things that are important.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 258 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Book written by Janwillem van de Wetering

So few independent bookshops exist anymore, it is hard to believe the Mystery Lovers Bookshop was such a going concern a mere twenty five years ago. They managed to host author talks with a true who’s who of mysteries around 1990. More often than not, whatever the weather, the small store was crowded with fans as writers pontificated about their works and lives. (They remain a going concern– go there whenever you are close.)

Among the literary notables, Janwillem van de Wetering stood out for his foreignness and unique store of personal experience which he described entertainingly. To be honest, I think his description of his mysteries as being about two detectives in Amsterdam solving mysteries through Zen (or were they Zen mysteries solved normally?) felt somewhat lost in translation.

At the time, I knew nothing of the history of the relationship between Holland and Japan, let alone more than a faint glimpse of Buddhism. As it turned out, van de Wetering started out writing non-fiction about his experience joining a Zen temple in Kyoto as a young man.

The mysteries sounded difficult, which they are not. They are fantastic. Be that as it may, I tracked down his first memoir and was enthralled. Few writers about any mystical experience are so forthright about the challenges, odd moments, and general silliness. He does a tremendous job describing hardship while avoiding the implicit message that he has been a martyr. Really, van de Wetering simply did this thing and it was rather different from things that you might have done, so you might be interested. Perhaps that is the nature of Zen, in that it defies that piety that we assume of the faithful (which does a disservice to the dedication required of monks). On the other hand, the experience described in The Empty Mirror sounds horrible, at least for someone steeped in modern conveniences. A week doing without is one thing… add in tolerating a strict instructor…

As a younger man, for whatever reason, I always assumed that one did not write about his life until he had lived to some advanced age. Granted, that probably deprived us of some interesting narratives by the short-lived, but there you go. So, what to think about the serial memoirist? Janvillem van de Wetering was charming and kind in that single brief encounter. He wrote two more books about his experiences with Zen later in life and they make good reads as well, more time spent with an old friend catching up. David Sedaris and Bill Bryson have mined similar territory by living and then talking about it on the installment plan. And then, here we are, with the blog, this ongoing commentary on whatever we happen to be doing at the time. I can’t imagine van de Wetering blogging his way through his initiate phase at the temple any more than I can imagine any of the more creative types out there blogging as they go through life, and yet they are.

Could The Empty Mirror as a thoughtful piece of work exist in the moment? Consider a world in which you have the ongoing description of the experience followed by the thoughtful retrospective consideration. Surely we lose interest in the latter if we have been following the former. Do we then lose something for posterity? Perhaps even the ability to consider and learn from our history?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 259 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.