MId spring, mid week, mid morning, midway through 14 days of Juju absentia, I'm driving way too fast on 93 and I can't seem to make myself slow down, on an errand that I don't really want to run, dying for a cigarette and trying not to have one, listening for the first time to Neil Young's Prairie Wind, gifted to me by an old and dear friend for no reason whatsoever, and it suddenly occurs to me that I have absolutely no idea what it is that I want to achieve in life.

This brings to mind a memory.

Back in my high school days i was raised in a lovely home.  The kid you see on TV with the awesome attic room, that was me.  Lofted ceilings, skylights, one room for to sleep and the other in which I could wail on my electric guitar, my own bathroom, and a fire escape on which I could sit on summer evenings and talk to my girl on the telephone, via an especially long cord  permanently attached to the wall.

Around that time, twas given to my by a singer, friend, then to become lover, wife, ex, and mother to my beloved and awesome son, a book written by one Jane Roberts, a medium through whom the wisdom of the ages, as dictated by a 'disembodied multidimensional personality' named Seth, were channeled and transcribed by her husband, and compiled into a series of books known as "The Seth Material". In these books I found many principles both broad and specific, to help guide me through my angst-riddled adolescence, and into my early twenties.  Some have stayed with me to this day, other have faded in the deluge of my experiences, as wisdom is want to do.

One particular thing I remember this Seth-spirit-person-thing saying was that the mind has a rhythm all it's own that does not coincide with the standard 24 hour scheme of our daily lives, and that one of the more active times for creative thinking was just before the dawn. So, taking this in hand, I began setting my  alarm clock for 4:30AM, seeking to rise and capitalize on this creativity-enhanced  time period.  Neither note nor phrase sprang from this effort, naught but this single brief memory -  I am floating at the pinnacle of my lofted ceiling, looking down at my sleeping body, and, not too slowly. not too fast, I 'descend into myself' and wake up. It is something that I have always carried with me, and for some reason, I have been inspired to revisit it on this day.

It occurs to me lately that it has been a long time since I heard music referred to as beautiful. There is a reviewer, who appears on the Sunday Morning program and writes for Rolling Stone, who's opinions, choices and descriptions I have come to respect - I think his name is Bill - who seems to subscribe to the "we got rock-n-roll right the first time around and it's been downhill ever since" theory.  His artist choices are unique and his reviews, though respectful in their critique of song writing, structure, lyrical content,  melody and production, always  somehow seem to recall the roughness and honesty of the early years, but never, by my recollection, does he mention the word beauty in any of it's forms. 

As a youngster, my mom used to get me records  from the public library. I remember how wondrous that part of the library was to me, with shelves upon shelves filled with record albums in their clear plastic sleeves and green bindings - it never dawned on me that these albums were the same as the ones lying around on my living room floor.  Two of which I remember most were the soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz and Peter & the Wolf.  I can still feel the feelings and get tangible somatics when I recall the tight chirping harmonies  of Oz, and the visual evoked by the oboe, clarinet, flute and bassoon in Wolf, and how the music carried me through the tales without need for narration.  I have always been inspired and awestruck by the fact that the great symphonies always told a story in their composition and by their use of instrumentation to paint images in the listeners mind. 

Nowadays, with music much more a commodity than an art form, and with pop music being in large part a literary endeavor, the emphasis is more focussed on production, poetic obscurity, groove structure, aimed towards the ever-changing idea of radio-friendliness, but the concept of beauty seems overlooked, particularly by the media through which presented.

Twas Plato coined the phrase "Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder", and I have come to believe that this adage has been misinterpreted - rather than the "To each his own" interpretation, which to me seems a bit of a cop-out, I believe that it is meant to be a command that we open our eyes, and seek out, find, recognize, acknowledge, and create beauty in our lives, and by doing so, we, ourselves,  become beautiful. These days art in all forms it's is critiqued, judged and deemed valuable based on technique, uniquity, and investment potential, but so rarely appreciated simply for it's beauty - at least not in the mainstream.

One of my heroes in life is Vincent Van Gogh. After visiting the museum in Amsterdam, reading and watching various depictions of his life, I became enamored with the way he fanatically attempted to capture a single moment in time, a single element of nature or the desparity of his human subjects, usually the needy and downtrodden.  His work was not appreciated in his lifetime and it brings me to wonder why his work is considered so valuable today. Is it because it is beautiful? If so, why was this not recognized while he was alive.  Are modern eyes more beholden to beauty  than those of his contemporaries, or the patrons of the day?  Do we appreciate the value of his work simply to asuage in ourselves a guilt for having missed it the first time around. Is it because he committed suicide, or for the fact that the intensity with which he poured himself into his work, only to be unappreciated, drove him mad?  Is it simply arbitrary, his work randomly selected by those with the power and money to create the illusion of value by their willingness to spend exorbitent sums in order to possess.   These questions plague me, perhaps for obvious reasons - I for one, find his work quite beautiful, and admire the depth of his commitment in it's creation ...  at least that's how the story goes.

Gazing up into the nighttime sky, as I am want to do on my many homeward drives from gigs, I am overwhelmed at what a paradise is this place in which we live.  Driving through the city I today found myself behind a box truck which sported the name of a painting company whose logo was a paint bucket pouring a thick coat of paint over the planet earth, along with the phrase "Cover The World".  I was appalled.  Is this not the very paving of paradise  against which we battle today, so symbolic it is of the ozone erosion,  cannibalistic defoliation and wanton consumerism that plagues us in the media. Must we mind-meld with the pathetic and questionable role models that bombard us from TV  and the movies, and play prey to the guilt and fear with which our governments. thru the media,  seek to impregnate us all? 

Postulate:  We live in a bi-polar universe.  This is a postulate in which I believe, based on the most simple of truths - as Shakespeare so aptly wrote, "To be or not to be".  It's one or the other - either we are, or we are not - there is no third choice.  Zero is nothing.  Add one, and it is one alone, and thereby fails the basic assumption of existence.  Add a second and you have recognition, comparison, dimension, stimulus and response, and forth springs  an entire universe of possibility.  When Jeff Goldblum ponders the path of a drop of water off the back of Laura Dern's hand, boasting that this is chaos theory in action, he is simply dealing with high resolution probability.  Life is an endless chain of single instances in which you must choose between two alternatives.  And like the circular waves emanating from a drop of water on the surface of the lake, these echoes are everywhere - the power of two was one of the first  mathematical principles ever explored, our bodies are the product of endless cell division, we mate in pairs, and communicate from source to recipient, whether one on one or to a crowd, it is still a bipolar system - both perfect and beautiful.

Perhaps it is the sparse simple beauty of Prairie WInd that gets me to thinking that as I struggle to complete my next CD I am plagued in my endeavor of writing, performing, arranging and recording my tunes by the apparent requirement in the music business to conform to the industry standards which are dictated by those who neglect, at least in rhetoric, to include beauty in their list of criterion, and focus mainly on, sound quality and texture, rhythm, and recognizability.  I think it was Duke Ellington, or Glenn Miller who once claimed "It's not the song it's the production" back in the early days of popular music's rise to the megamillion dollar industry it is today. 

We confuse beauty with success, success with money, and money with respectability on a daily basis.  I don't know if my music is beautiful or not, but when it brings a tear to Juju's eye upon listening, I guess that I am doing something right, even if only in my own tiny micro-universe.  I still have no idea what I want to achieve in my life, even after all this ranting, but I have to believe that beauty figures in there somehow - I have to believe that.

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