This new layout looks gay.
I know. I'm working on it. Besides, the preferred, uh... Homo-American, please.
Must it be literally daily?
Seriously, how much Bob does anyone really need? Why not Daily Bob, In a Manner of Speaking, or A Smattering of Bob Now & Again? Why tax what remains of your audience? You saw what happened yesterday.
Yesterday's post had a serious point. I just never got to it. Also, if one is going to improvise, one is going to fail. Way it is.
Breaking News: this seems to be happening more often. How old are you, anyway?
I know, I know. It's just that... How to put it...
For many years, it seems that I was "blogging to." Now it is as if I'm "blogging from." Retirement simply aggravates it, because I'm more or less always in the place from. I no longer have to find my way back into it. Rather, out of it. You could say I'm trying to write my way out, or at least bring back a small souvenir.
...
...
Dueling ellipses, eh? Okay, I'll bite. From where?
Speaking of mine, you just now reminded me of something I read the other day about train wrecks... who was it...
Booty judge?
Homo-American, please.
No, it was in the liner notes of a CD by the Allman Brothers. It's a comment by drummer Butch Trucks about
the pressure on me to hold everything together. If I didn't really focus on that, it could turn into a train wreck -- and it did on occasion! That was a part of who we were, because we weren't afraid to have a train wreck every once in awhile.
So, if one is going to be operating out there on the edge, there will be train wrecks.
Edge of what? Besides, you don't always have to hit that orange button up there -- you know, the one that says >Publish.
Would you like to be my drummer? Didn't think so. Besides, it's all a part of Who Bob Is, nor is Bob afraid to fail.
See breaking news above. And don't start referring to yourself in the third person. You're not Bo Diddley.
And you're not Jerome.
Blogging to and blogging from. Say man, what's the difference?
I think it has to do with the nature of theology, I mean the real kind. There's a fake kind -- or, not so much fake as...
Well, it's like the difference between a human jukebox playing carbon copies of their greatest hits on stage -- the fucking Eagles come to mind -- versus a band like the Allman Brothers, who never played it the same way twice.
Or Wayne Shorter, rest in slack. Only a few jazz giants are still standing: Sonny Rollings, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett...
Shorter was a very cosmic guy.
Yes he was. He always played from, but then again, he was always searching for at the same time: seeker and finder at once.
And just because it's my favorite photo of him:
Your new blog definitely has a different tincture. I like how you're doing your own form of jazz and just riffing from "where-here-there"!
ReplyDeleteHow do you rehearse the unknown?
ReplyDeleteI like that. It's like having a good conversation, you don't go into it with a list of questions and responses (or demands, as the case may be), you just spontaneously riff off the dialog.
Charle Parker had a song called Relaxin' at Camarillo, where he was hospitalized in 1946 for heroin addiction, and where I interned exactly 40 years later. This comment has nothing to do with anything -- another ticket to nowhere -- but it is unexpected.
ReplyDeleteSteely Dan has a song called Parker's Band, with a lyric that goes:
ReplyDeleteYou'll be riding by, bareback on your armadillo
You'll be grooving high or relaxin' at Camarillo
Suddenly the music hits you
It's a bird in flight that just can't quit you
Oh, and Wayne Shorter played the sax solo in Steely Dan's Aja, so, full circle.
ReplyDeleteThere's more: Steely Dan was successfully sued by Keith Jarrett for plagiarizing their "Gaucho" from one of his compositions. Gaucho asks the musical question,
ReplyDeleteWho is the gaucho amigo
Why is he standing
In your spangled leather poncho
With the studs that match your eyes
Bodacious cowboys
Such as your friend
Will never be welcome here
I have much more useless than useful knowledge.
ReplyDeleteSonny Rollins, bodacious cowboy.
ReplyDeleteWith Waylon Jennings relaxin' at the Armadillo.
ReplyDeleteVan Morrison in his gaucho period.
ReplyDeleteCalifornia converted Camarillo mental hospital into a state university campus. In other words, now the lunatics are running the asylum.
ReplyDeleteForm follows function.
DeleteOf the founding fathers of rock, Bo Diddley is the most underrated. Also underrated are Dion and Rick Nelson, although I guess they came two or three years later.
ReplyDeleteAlso underrated, founding mother Wanda Jackson.
ReplyDeleteWe live right by Patton. I hope to goodness it never becomes a college campus, we're far safer with the place as a prison.
ReplyDeleteHas everyone heard this stripped version of Mother by John Lennon? Fast forward to 2:50.
ReplyDeleteDecember, leading up to Christmas, is the fastest month. March, leading up to baseball season, is the slowest. Change my mind.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a young'un, it was the month before school and the month before summer vacation, respectively. Time is not uniform, which reminds me of Schuon's autobiography, in which he says that his life -- and every life -- may be divided in cycles, in his case, nine of them between 1907 and 1973.
Giving it two or three seconds of thought, sure enough, I was able to see nine or so easily identifiable cycles in my life. I think I entered a new one about six weeks ago, but it's hard to know for sure in the moment.
ReplyDeleteLast night I watched a Leonard Cohen documentary on Netflix, in which he quotes Tennessee Williams, who said that life is a fairly well written play. Until the third act.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure any of my cycles had to do with external events per se. Although there was at times correlation, now I'm wondering if the external was a function of the internal.
ReplyDeleteThe cycles are not of uniform length. In Schuon's case, the shortest was four years, the longest ten. In my case... hmm, about the same.
ReplyDeleteThe Cohen documentary was good, but by the end you'll never want to hear the song Hallelujah again.
ReplyDeleteI'm solidly in the grandparent cycle now, and I can report back that it's worth the wait.
ReplyDelete