post.racial.world.my.ass.

[thoughts on Grant Hill's response] [a response in three parts]

2011-03-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

duke is a school full of elitist kids. so is penn. and harvard. and yale ... and and and ...

sure. hill's parents are likely wonderful people. great. they work hard. wonderful. so did jalen's mother.

hill's comments, though, of necessity, cannot speak to the reality that animate(d?) jalen's comments in the first place: the structural inequalities that make it difficult or anomalous when someone from the hood makes it into an elite institution like duke ... we can act as if this is not the case. but i think our colleagues - myself included - display the sorta classist, racist, elitist assumptions that animate admissions processes. which is to say: most poor folks [which necessarily includes people of color] will not be going to *any* college, let alone an elite institution like duke. the ones that are from backgrounds like jalen's who *don't* play sports will likely be even more exceptional to the rule. so hill must swerve around and past the sorta institutional inequities that make him possible in a place like duke.

i'm not necessarily standing with rose. but i'm definitely not standing with the sorta politics of respectability narrative that is foundational to hill's piece: this narrative *must* dismiss the historical, material realities of inequality that operate within black communities in order to make a claim about work ethic as not negating the possibilities for blackness. as if blackness and laziness are the norm and that his parents and grandfather widened the notion of blackness to include a "strong work ethic"...

Hill's naming of work ethic is vulgar because he does not believe it and because it acts as moral injunction and general condemnation. If he actually believed that Jalen's mother worked just as hard as his parents, then his claims to work ethic of his family becomes an erroneous way to defend his placement in a place like duke and contradicts his argument. That is, work ethic does not necessarily translate into success. We've all read about inequities that exist by way of class, location, gender. If Jalen's mother worked as hard as his as he claims, then some other thing must account for his parents' and his successes. We typically recognize that as privilege, unearned, self-perpetuating and insidious.

He don't think that work ethic belongs to folks who don't succeed romantically, financially or emotionally in ways that mirror his parents for to do so, he'd have to acknowledge that hard work means little, not when kids are tracked, not when standardized tests are biased and not when the economic system under which we exist *needs* exceptional examples of "success"...

So it just rings hollow to me, his claims. And to be sure, I'm sure we all know that economics plays as much a role in educational opportunities as it does for romantic engagements. Sure. Hill didn't create these inequities but to act as if an institution like duke is neutral rather than founding itself upon these inequities is a mess ...

so ultimately, Hill appears to be interested in asserting his and his family's right to spaces like Duke, not necessarily because everyone has the sorta merit but because he and his family has a particular work ethic. denial to spaces like Duke --and critique of places like Duke from figures such as Jalen; even when in the language (i.e., "uncle toms" is sloppy and not well-deployed)-- would be a particular violation of rights. but he remains unable to think about how the violation that he is so concerned about necessarily must violate other people in the same ways that he sought to rise above: that is, the rights to and freedoms he so desires for Duke because of the claim for hiswork ethic must obscure the fact of labor and class stratification.

Secrets, Secretions / Lowdowns, Leaks

2011-01-19T12:19:00.000-08:00

Spring 2012

Duke English

This course will think through the concept of a “secret” and how it functions in literature and everyday discourse, how it is both a technology and an ethics. Given the recent attention to Wikileaks that declares itself a “non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important information to the public,” this course will consider the relationship of knowledge and publics, of the sharing and withholding of information. Just who determines what information is important and how to disseminate that information to the public?

The course will think historically about different revolutionary moments that have taken place by way of secret and secreted information, by “giving the lowdown” and the leaking of knowledge from person to person, from community to community. We will investigate, for example, the relationship between the songs and sounds of Underground Railroad that became the occasion for escape from enslavement in the United States with the most recent prison strike in Georgia, prisoners using contraband cell phones passed along to them by prison guards in order to resist for greater nutrition, pay and health. What of the "down low" as a "phenomenon" that at once names sex, sexuality, race and gender as a fundamental problem in need of control, control by way of detecting secrets and spreading rumor and gossip?

What is the discourse about knowledge and power when secrets are secreted? What is the relationship between leaks and solution, flows and poetics? We will think about how networks are constructed and how the first forms of “social media” were objects like songs, whispers and hushes. We will read from several genres including Slave Narrative, Graphic Novels, Speculative Fiction and comments sections on blogs and news website. Students will be required to write a weekly blog entry response to the course reading material as well as prepare a major final writing research project on one a particular topic of interest selected in consultation with the professor.

moth's powder (12.anotherthursday.04)

2010-12-18T19:18:00.000-08:00

from: a

to: moth's powder

12.anotherthursday.10

Subject: ...

dear moth's powder,

we were so deep, weren't we? i keep looking through all the conversations we've had because, well, you won't talk. i think this is when i knew i could love you:

moth’s powder (10:10pm): yo

a (10:10pm): yo...wassup

moth’s powder (10:11pm): nothin...sittin here thinkin...tired and ready to go home

a (10:13pm): you're not home yet? where are you?

moth’s powder (10:13pm): still on campus. had choir rehearsal tonight and now i have to study for an exam.

a (10:14pm): womp womp womp

moth’s powder (10:14pm): haha

a (10:15pm): what did you all sing?

moth’s powder (10:17pm): you know, you can still play for us. we really need someone who is good...

a (10:17pm): what did you all sing?

moth’s powder (10:18pm): we sang that song

a (10:18pm): you know how i feel about church

moth’s powder (10:19pm): by ricky dillard, the new fast one

a (10:20pm): church just makes me feel really out of control i think. and i don't know...i grew up and my father. he was just funny about that sorta stuff.

a (10:21pm): oh, ricky dillard. cool!

moth’s powder (10:21pm): what's your father gotta do with it?

moth’s powder (10:23pm): yeah, we could use you. jamison doesn't know what he's really doing. he's just learning. he's really not that good.

a (10:25pm): yeah. my father. when my brother and i were younger, our father would never allow us to sing with the jurisdictional state choir

moth’s powder (10:26pm): what's that? you know i'm baptist. must be some cogic thing...lol

a (10:28pm): the state choir was sorta like a statewide "community" choir where people from the churches in our jurisdiction in the state would gather to sing during our annual meetings and convocations

moth’s powder (10:28pm): oh

a (10:31pm): yeah...and so the reason our father was so against the idea was because, according to him, there were far too many gay men in the choir

a (10:32pm): they were too "funny" and he ain't want that to rub off on me and my brother. well.

moth’s powder (10:32pm): fail!

moth’s powder (10:37pm): wait...are you still there?

a (10:41pm): haha. yeah. my bad. yeah. i guess we could say that his desires - at least for me - were were a fail.

moth’s powder (10:43pm): haha. true. the same for me, sorta. i never wanted to sing a lot when i was growing up. i was already short and skinny and nerdy.

a (10:46pm): YES! well, not the skinny part but yes!!!

moth’s powder (10:48pm): yeah. and i just knew that the gays were going to hell. i knew that the gays sang. so i didn't want to do that

a (10:49pm): me too. it's weird. i was the same exact way

a (10:52pm): like, but what still is hella interesting to me the way my father linked the choir with being gay. and i ain't wanna be that

moth’s powder (10:52pm): true

a (10:52pm): but

a (10:54pm): and even though i loved music ...

moth’s powder (10:54pm): what?

a (10:59pm): it's like, my brother and i would "play church" and he would always be the preacher and i'd always - always - be the choir director and the choir and the soloist and the musician. pretty much, i loved everything about music and would write down lyrics of all sorts of songs just so i could learn them but after my father's resistance to singing with the state choir, i became much more hesitant to sing anything myself

moth’s powder (11:03pm): i didn't have a choice. they kept pushing me to do things at my church. sing, direct, play the piano. all of it. i didn't want to do it but i did. make sense?

a (11:04pm):: yeah. something like that. i'm so weirded out by how similar we are. or, how much we have in common. shit is such a turn on...lol

moth’s powder (11:05pm): it's a turn on that we're alike? so you really want to date yourself? narcissistic ass! haha...j/k

a (11:06pm): no no no! no. it's just...i rarely meet someone who gets me...like gets me, gets me. and i think you do. i mean...

a (11:08pm): i did not, at that time, want to be gay so i stopped everything that would presumably make me gay.

a (11:11pm): so i curiously began "catching colds" right before any time i was supposed to sing. and instead of standing in front of the choir to direct, i acted aloof as hell but would talk shit about just about anyone who directed because "i can do it better than them..."

moth’s powder (11:12pm): that's deep. and kinda stupid...but deep. we fight this too much. but you thought that being musical would make you gay?

a (11:15pm): i don't know. there's a book that i had to read a couple of weeks ago that talks about how even the phrase "being musical" was a code for being a homo in the early 20th century

moth’s powder (11:15pm): stop lyin...

a (11:16pm): but i'm dead ass. the book was talking about how a dude wrote his mother a letter that was pretty much a "coming out" letter where he was on some

a (11:17pm): mom, i'm sorry i can't be athletic...i want to be a musician and his parents were trippin because of it.

moth’s powder (11:17pm): damn

a (11:18pm): pretty much. so i mean, i'm not alone thinkin that "being musical" was somethin gay or somethin...my father thought so...and i thought so...so i just pretended to be sick...get around having to sing or whatever altogether.

moth’s powder (11:18pm): you're ...

moth’s powder (11:18pm): you're like ...

a (11:19pm): what?

moth’s powder (11:20pm): you fascinate me or something

a (11:20pm): but can a black man blush? because...i think i am...right now

moth’s powder (11:23pm): i mean, shit. you just made me think of this woman that came to our church when i was ten or eleven years old. i don't know what the hell she was talking about but i do remember her saying something about "sissies fanning over the choir" and about "bulldaggers"...

a (11:24pm): seriously? i ain't surprised though...she was probably a lesbian ...

moth’s powder (11:25pm): yeah. i remember it because when she said the sissies thing, people kinda sorta looked over at me, but not really. kinda like the gasp for breath that wasn't. you could almost hear everyone stop breathing ... because, if anything, i was kinda gayish

a (11:25pm): was? haha...j/k

moth’s powder (11:26pm): nah...you know what i mean, though. they knew i was different so even her saying something was a kind of jab

a (11:27pm): yeah. for me, i was always afraid of getting called out. this one white dude evangelist came to our church one time

a (11:27pm): and this was right after my parents got a computer and we had AOL and i began going online in chatrooms to meet dudes and had sucked a dick for the first time ...

moth’s powder (11:28pm): ...

a (11:28pm): my bad. lol

a (11:29pm): but yeah. so this evangelist was at the church and had a prayer line and was calling people out on some

a (11:30pm): someone is sick

a (11:30pm): sometime has a toe ache

moth’s powder (11:31pm): nice and precise, i see! lmao

a (11:33pm): haha...yeah. it was a mess. but yo. then he called out this dude i was messin wit that i met on the partyline (and i swear, somebody should like, do a study about the kind of religious and social life of phone chat lines...i've met more pastors and evangelists on there than anywhere)

moth’s powder (11:34pm): you a fool! lmao

moth’s powder (11:34pm): yo...keep typin...i gotta go to the bathroom...brb

a (11:35pm): oh ... iight ... hurry back

a (11:36pm): but yeah. so this evangelist is on some you've been hanging with people that aren't good for you ... god said it get it right or you will be destroyed as he destroyed the people of sodom and gomorrah

a (11:38pm): well shit. i was scared shitless. because my mother AND father were there and i did not know if they suspected i was gay or whatever. but i didn't want them to suspect it. so

moth’s powder (11:44pm): i'm back...

a (11:44pm): welcome back

a (11:45pm): so yeah. he does all this praying for that dude but ain't say shit to me or even look at me.

moth’s powder (11:46pm): he probably met the dude on the partyline himself

a (11:47pm): i wouldn't have believed it then. but damn. all that i've seen and heard? it's plausible.

moth’s powder (11:50pm): haha. plausible? they probably fucked right after the service. my music mentor took me to a service to hear her cousin play the organ. the dude that preached talked about how fornication was taking over the young people at his church but how he prayed against it and they won the victory. and how the spirit of homosexuality was going to take over too but they pleaded the blood of jesus

a (11:50pm): and wham! it was gone!

moth’s powder (11:50pm): just like that

a (11:50pm): in an instant

moth’s powder (11:51pm): who knew it was so easy?!

a (11:51pm): haha

moth’s powder (11:51pm): after the service...this fool says to me

a (11:51pm): uh oh

moth’s powder (11:52pm): right. he's like i can tell you're a bad boy and flashed a smile

a (11:52pm): what the fuck?

moth’s powder (11:53pm): dude. i was 16...i ain't know what he was saying or what he meant

a (11:54pm): that's crazy as hell

moth’s powder (11:55pm): dude! i said um...no... and he said it again no no, i can tell you're a bad boy!

a (11:56pm): but he wanted to preach against that shit right before?

moth’s powder (11:56pm): exactly.

a (11:59pm): i don't know, man. that's why i don't really fuck with church too much. too much contradiction.

moth’s powder (12:02am): maybe. maybe. but, i don't know. the preacher was in his late 50s at least, maybe even early 60s. he was probably lonely. the church sorta preaches that you've gotta be lonely to be holy, if you're gay or whatever.

a (12:02am): but it's not fair

moth’s powder (12:04am): it doesn't have to be fair. i said to a friend of mine, had he been cute, i probably would've "understood" him...he just wasn't attractive to me

a (12:04am): that's kinda fucked up, dude

moth’s powder: (12:05am) i don't know if it is or not. i know it's what i was thinking...

a (12:06am): but you said you didn't know what he was talking about

moth’s powder (12:07am): but i could feel what he meant. does that make sense?

a (12:07am): maybe. i think i felt what you meant when you told me to take your number down. i'm still like...in awe

moth’s powder (12:08am): why?

a (12:08am): you did it in front of everyone. almost like reckless abandon

moth’s powder (12:09am): come on! you're a pentecostal...you know all about lettin things go and lookin crazy...lol

a (12:10am): word? it's like that? lol

moth’s powder (12:10am): damn. i like you.

a (12:10am): it's reciprocal. you're very...forward

moth’s powder (12:11am): it's part of the charm. i'm dangerous, though. you shouldn't mess with me. i'll break your heart.

a (12:12am): but you're the one who came after me

moth’s powder (12:13am): i know what i like and what i want...doesn't mean i'm good for you

a (12:13am): but i'm already into you...you're gonna have a hard time refusing me if you don't stop now

moth’s powder (12:13am): well.

a (12:14am): well.

moth’s powder (12:16am): so what do you think, though? could you even be with someone? i know you told me that you've not been in anything real or serious before...

a (12:17am): i'm sure i could be. or, let me say, i'm open to the idea.

moth’s powder (12:17am): just the idea?

a (12:18am): i'm really just too emotional. and too hypersensitive about things. i cried the day my maternal grandmother died...the entire day...before i knew she was dead. just didn't feel right...

moth’s powder (12:19am): oh...so you're a psychic...lol...that ain't holy! lol

a (12:19am): nah. not that. my parents knew. and i could feel the way they felt. and they felt sad. so i felt sad.

moth’s powder (12:20am): so what do you feel...now?

a (12:20am): i'm not sayin

moth’s powder (12:20am): why not?

a (12:20am): i'm not sayin

moth’s powder (12:21am): you copy and pastin shit?

a (12:21am): i'm.not.sayin...!

moth’s powder (12:21am): stop it

a (12:21am): lol

moth’s powder (12:23am): seriously. what do you feel now? it's ok if it's nothing...

a (12:23am): but is it ok if it isn't?

moth’s powder: (12:24am) if it isn't?

a (12:25am): what if its something? what if i feel something that i've tried not to feel for a while?

moth’s powder (12:25am): that might. excite me.

a (12:26am): but you told me not to get excited. why should you be allowed to and not me?

moth’s powder (12:27am): i just...i don't know

a (12:27am): don't know?

moth’s powder (12:27am): there's been a lot that has happened to me

a (12:28am): that doesn't make you special

moth’s powder (12:28am): that's kind of an asshole thing to say

a (12:28am): shit. i ain't mean it like that. of course you're special. i mean...

moth’s powder (12:28am): ...

a (12:29am): i mean, things have happened to us all.

moth’s powder (12:29am): true. but shit has made me...guarded

a (12:30am): the ole okeydoke

moth’s powder (12:31am): what does that even mean?

a (12:31am): it means that maybe i should just believe you when you say that you will break my heart

moth’s powder (12:34am): *sigh*

a (12:34am): wait. this is far too much for this conversation ... lol

moth’s powder (12:37am): i have always been an intense dude

a (12:37am): well. meet your match

moth’s powder (12:37am): oooh! is that right?

a (12:41am): i like you.

moth’s powder (12:42am): is that right?

a (12:42am): right.

moth’s powder (12:44am): so you think you could be in a relationship with a dude? a real one?

a (12:44am): i could.

moth’s powder (12:45am): how do you even know?

a (12:45am): i just know

moth’s powder (12:45am): that's not reassuring ... lol

a (12:46am): it should be. and i think you're making excuses. making me unbelievable. untrustworthyable. no. that's not a word. lol

moth’s powder (12:48am): shouldn't we eat together a lot more before that's determined?

a (12:49am): i could ask the same about your knowing that you'd break my heart...

moth’s powder (12:52am): but it seems that's all i do

a (12:52am): break hearts?

moth’s powder (12:52am): break hearts.

a (12:53am): but why? if you know you do it, stop it. i know this perfect guy too...

moth’s powder (12:53am): haha...do you?

moth’s powder (12:57am): and if it were that easy? well. i would've stopped it a while ago

a (12:58am): what. you turn into a vampire or some shit?

moth’s powder (1:02am): no. not that at all. one day, i'll explain a bit. right now? i'm still at the library and need to be finishing up this paper.

a (1:03am): instead, you're wasting time talking to me...lol

moth’s powder (1:03am): it's not time wasted yet

a (1:03am): flirt.

moth’s powder (1:04am):

moth’s powder (1:11am): but you really, really should think about music again. i know people that know you. they say some nice things about you on the organ.

a (1:11am): haha. they're lying, i'm sure.

moth’s powder (1:12am): your false modesty is cute. lol

a (1:12am): it's not false.

moth’s powder (1:14am): anyway. you should. i have a concept for a group that i think you'd maybe like

a (1:17am): maybe. i don't know. it's like, i stopped with the music because i felt that if i stood before a choir or group and directed their singing, or if i wrote songs, or if i played the organ, something of their voices would wrap around me and make me drop my hips, sway my head and get into it and make me, force me, compel me to be and become gay

moth’s powder (1:17am): but you are gay

a (1:19am): thankfully! lol. but now that i'm all cool with it, i'm just not all cool with the church.

moth’s powder (1:19am): you're hurt

a (1:20am): eh

moth’s powder (1:20am): it's ok to be hurt

a (1:20am): eh

moth’s powder (1:21am): typing with stuttering fingers again?

a (1:21am): lol

moth’s powder (1:25am): i'm just saying. we don't need to pretend that the places that were formative for us, the places where we learned to sing and dance and love others, where eat ate dinner and got hugs and lipstick smudged on us ... we don't have to pretend

a (1:26am): lipstick? pentecostals don't wear makeup! lolol...j/k

moth’s powder (1:27am): well, you know. we don't have to pretend that we weren't hurt. and that it's not real.

a (1:27am): i suppose

moth’s powder (1:30am): what's gained by acting as if you're superman?

a (1:30am): i have a funny story to tell you about a dream i always have with a white and black superman fighting each other...lol

moth’s powder (1:30am): um...lol

a (1:32am): but yeah. i mean, i understand.

moth’s powder (1:32am): do you? you seem to be still worried that someone will know something about you that you don't want them to know

a (1:33am): you're not the only one that's guarded

moth’s powder (1:34am): touche...or, just touchy. either way...lol

a (1:37am): i had to use my old typewriter to finish a paper at my parent's house last week. and forgot about the delete tape.

moth’s powder (1:38am): what?

a (1:44am): haha. the delete tape. it was this clear tape that you'd use whenever you have a typo. the typewriter was electric so it could "remember" what was typed and if you made an error, it would go back to that space and "type" over the error with the tape and the tape would be imprinted with the same letter and the black would be removed. so it would be a kind of "delete"

moth’s powder (1:44am): i'm...confused.

a (1:47am): well. i mean. it's weird. we don't think about deleting the same way anymore. or, maybe it's just me. but like, with the delete tape, the machine had to go back to the same spot in order to remove the problem. now, we can just click a button before we print. we might have problems with print cartridges running out of ink, but not with delete tape.

moth’s powder (1:48am): i'll just repeat...i'm...confused...lol

a (1:50am): lol. no. don't be. i'm just sayin. i don't feel the need to go back to the place that caused me problems in order to fix them. i can just...print something different altogether.

moth’s powder (1:51am): but what if you have a typo. you don't correct it?

a (1:51am): of course i do

moth’s powder (1:51am): then the difference is a bit illusory...or at least a ruse

a (1:51am): how?

moth’s powder (1:53am): you still have to go and fix it. even if it's just technology making a squiggly red mark under a word to let you know it's spelled incorrectly, you've gotta still highlight that spot to fix it. you may go there differently, but you still go there

a (1:53am): hmm...

moth’s powder (1:54am): and you still go there...the church, i mean. you engage it differently. but you do go. you have your way. you told me you only listen to gospel. and a bit of everything else.

a (1:54am): i suppose.

moth’s powder (1:55am): haha. i need to go, sir!

a (1:55am): then go! lol

moth’s powder (1:56am): only if you promise to talk to me again

a (1:57am): i want nothing more

moth’s powder (1:57am): until then...

we were so in love. and didn't even realize it at the time. well. it's snowing and i'm cold. and i wanted to call to say how much i wanted to wrap up with you. well.

a.-

moth's powder (12.anotherwednesday.04)

2010-12-15T10:47:00.001-08:00

12.anotherwednesday.04

dear moth's powder,

it is simply undeniable that there are social worlds that invite others to join in. it's not an essentialist claim but neither is it an anti-essentialist claim. it's something i think my friend Arthur describes as the "materialist retentionist" strain or grain that runs in and through and over black folks. he thinks that there are "levels" of culture that are enacted and performed based on material availability. he was over the crib yesterday and pretty much making the argument that when the enslaved were transported to the americas, whatever culture they could carry in their heads - the patterns, musics, dance; the ways of breathing and doing, ways of caring and sharing, ways of conjuring and conceiving - could more easily be passed from generation to generation as well as dispersed amongst people. it's a pretty sophisticated argument to say something like we remember, or maybe i've gotten his theory totally wrong.

but you know i've been talking about pentecostalism as if it's some sorta monolithic group. but there are all kinds of pentecostals with all sorts of doctrinal beliefs. but what i find most curious and most interesting is how there is a pretty consistent theme of movement, motion, migration, that most pentecostals - even if they do not themselves individually engage - do no balk at the sight of what others find unseemly praise.

of course, there's something seemingly a bit problematic in the construction of the above paragraph, beginning every statement as if it is some such would be adversarial conjunctive utterance. but the rhythmic feeling i was going for in that paragraph with all the buts is the same sorta quality for which, if anything, New Dawns aspired toward, some sorta pentecostal open-ended-like resistance to resolve. each utterance of the but, not contradicted or stood in contradistinction, but opened up a way, a way of escape, widened the ever widening circle of thought, emotion.

and it is exactly how New Dawns would perform. but Bobby would introduce some such rhythm. but you'd follow, with the bare architectaural blueprint, the bare bones, so to speak, of what would eventually become song. what you'd hum or moan or line out was both more and less than melody, it was evacuative structure, withdrawn breath, tendency and tentativity of the voice, hesitance and reticence, giving sound and words while remaining every so wary of them being somehow conclusive. stuttering, scatting, we might say that it was a poetics of pentecostalism: just as one plays at shouting, initiates by that delicate and jubilant dance, ever so and a bit lightly, not glibly but with eyes open, looking around while the feet tap-tap-dip, tap-tap-dip. well. your singing would begin with some such chant or repetition.

but we'd hear. but Jaylah would come first with that alto, full of vibrato and conviction, sometimes in a minor, plaintive strain against your melody though it was difficult to know. but it was not until Jaylah's entry that i would begin to figure out a way, a way towards harmonics, following and creating harmonic phrasing, clicking the tremolo then the chorale and back again. but Jalisa would enter, with her soprano register, oft changing the tonal center with her voice. cutting, augmenting what was already there. but Salim would round out the voices, tenor holding some such thread of melody. but then, and only after the entry of all voices; but then, and only after i was chording, would i end phrases with the bass pedal points. but of course there were tambourines, but much, much later.

i remember the first time we sang like that, each one of entering the sonic conversation from the pew, wherever we were seated and the congregation seemed dumbfounded. dumbfounded but they could not also help but be moved by our hollers and wails and tonalities. we revised prayer for zelophehad's children to zelophehad's daughters, and with the revision of the title was also the introduction of 5/4 rhythmic pacing and spacing, some new inheritable but nonreproductive call and call against response. our voices did not so much respond to the other as much as the voices called out in recognition of the other. the voices would allow each other voice to occupy is sonic space, a field or zone of some such voiced movement, wherein the voices tried not to touch and agree as much as they tried to detect distance and dwell together by buoyant engagement. the rhythm, of course, was Bobby's fault, but we made do and did something new. and true to form, voices simply fell out when they were exhausted from singing. the congregation would always and undeniably be in it by the time we were done, so the open-endedness worked, they filled in the space where our sound once occupied, we moved them and were so moved.

well.

i get angry when folks tell me, as did a couple of acquaintances said after one such performance, it don't take all that, that what we did was a shade on the side of excessive, too expressive and unnecessary. pretty much the same sorta critique i heard about growing up at the storefront pentecostal church, where services were too long and we were too tired to do anything once we got home sundays except sleep. it don't take all that is really a claim about authenticity, saying that, as my friend reminded me of Gertrude Stein's statement, there is no there there. it's a claim that approximates the idea that since it does not "take all that" to have an encounter with the divine, that which happens there, the "all that," that excessive and expressive strain is nothing other than posturing that posits something that is anything but "real." i can almost hear someone saying if i can be quiet and composed and have an encounter with the divine, your sweat is merely performance. the weird thing is this, though: i think most pentecostals would agree and say, no, it doesn't "take all that." but whereas the former is critique, the pentecostal claim of some such religiosity would be to say but we still do it and, most importantly i think, and you should join us.

i'm pretty cool with the idea that pentecostals don't get everything right. what i love about the tradition, though, is that it is fundamentally invitational, it constantly says to come in, eat, have fun, dance even if you don't know how to, tarry, sweat with us. the music of New Dawns was seeking that notion of joining and togetherness. we never finished a song but left it undone on purpose. we did not aspire towards perfection but towards pursuit, towards journey, towards carrying. sure. we could've sung normal songs and sung with staid composure. the performances toward the divine we created did not necessitate the excess. but the excess was the coolest part of the performances, i think.

of course, there was too much excess, not in terms of New Dawns, but you did charge me with that in terms of our relationship. i was, what was it? too intense? i believe that is what you said. and you were cool with it for a while, when you thought it was a passing phase or some such intentionality i would use to "get you," to make you amenable to and love me. but when you discovered that it was a fact of my life, that it was only intense for you but for me, quite quotidian to be and do in such excessive a manner? well. i suppose it was just...just too much. eloquence is not necessary here. it was just too much. and thus, the end. of New Dawns. of us. i wish we learned to expect more out of life, such that the quotidian is not excessive and the too much is a way of life. i still hold out for that possibility. at least between us.

love,

a.-

moth's powder (12.anothertuesday.04)

2010-12-14T12:26:00.001-08:00

12.anothertuesday.04

dear moth's powder

i should have known something of myself based on the ways i used to love to play the tambourine. i never liked the aggressive pop as much as the flamboyant jingle, though i popped it a lot and was not shy about the percussiveness of the pigskin (and no, the newer plastic tambourines, i think, are horrible; they don't have the same sound. don't tell PETA, though). anyway. i would shake and shake and shake the tambourine, just so i could hear the jingles. of course, the pop-doo-loo-loo-loo-pop-doo-loo-loo-loo-pop were cool, percussive or whatever. but the shack-a-lack-shack-a-lack almost bordering on some bells that jingle for the holidays? well. the jingles are slightly noisier and a bit more incoherent, which is why i like them so much. not so much angular in their address, they're more suffuse and diffuse. sorta just sounds like a shakeshakeshakeshakeshake or a shhshhshhshhshhshhshh and i can't ever hear it without thinking of the ways bodies moved and bounced when they were played. breasts jiggled. asses quaked. the entire body's gotta gyrate even if a little bit. and to be serious with playing such a sound, one would have to concentrate, pull their lips into the mouth so all you see is its crease and line, one would have to hold one's breath while beating whenever trying to create polypercussive rhythm of the bop-bah-doo-doop-bap-bah-doo-doop really, really, really fast.

and of course, this sorta rhythmic sound could only be matched by a pair of new "church shoes" on a wooden floor. you know exactly what i mean too! you're probably, what, smiling a bit as you read this because you know whenever you bought a new pair of shoes, you'd say, let me find a good wooden floor because the sound of the new heel on wooden floor is so...churchy. pentecostal shouting ain't only about the move of the spirit, it's also about the move of sounds over the varied locations, making the building resonate with some such holiness and life. and nothing sounds better than a bunch of shoes clanking and clonking on some such wooden floor along with other hands clapping and the organ's bass runs and the yelps and hollers and the shhshhshhshhshhshhshh of some such tambourine.

pretty much, my affinity for the tambourine should have let me know, early, that i would be a bit difficult to pin down, nice to hear, but difficult to gather once sounded out. i'd need constant movement and motion for sustenance, couldn't pop me once and think that i'd reverb. no. i needed to be jostled and handled and moved. and it was you that was able to do that. words are failing me a bit today. but i suppose i am simply trying to ask: what is it to be handled and moved? you'd gotta know something about the environment, about the social world, in order to get what was going on. and you were able to see me but once, at your daddy's church, that one sunday and knew - and knew - after but one conversation that something about me needed something about and within you. and of course, the vice versa.

maybe it was in my reticence and astonishment at the very suggestion that we should "exchange numbers" and "hang out" in such a public space, with everyone seemingly looking on. you know there were all those rumors that you might be a bit "funny," that you were a "tambourine beater" for a very long time - or so you said after we'd hung out - so your presumption and gumption in front of all those people was telling. and that is to say nothing of the ways you knew that i would comply, that something in me leapt out toward you and needed you when we spoke. your astonishment and surprise and that surprised gesture of the brows going up, rapidly, quickly, and the way your mouth formed that o shape? i could not take my eyes off your mouth when i looked at you so, of course, i looked around and up and down and past you as we spoke. i did not want people to think i was flirting with you but i was so confused by what was happening. but you, of course, knew something of the church and the rumor and the gossip in that location to which i did not yet have access. so i just sorta inhabited it as best i could. and you said don't go anywhere. let me put this tambourine back and you winked so faintly that even i almost did not notice it.

well. of course it was when New Dawns added the tambourines that things really took off for us. we had that sound of spiritual quest and Bobby, of course, gave the down beat with the bass drum, hi-hat, snare and cymbal. but there was still some such lacking quality, in our fast songs at least, that needed some other diffusion, some sound that would have us sound more "churchy" given our, how can we say, extrabiblical commitments and ideations.

it's sorta like Abbey Lincoln. in the beginning of her career, it seems she was much more focused on being and becoming another sorta Marilyn Monroe figure for black folks, focused a lot on outward beauty, but also the notion of reproducing and re-performing Monroe's visual look. i mean, Ebony Magazine did this entire spread in 1957 pretty much saying that Abbey was nothing other than the black (and more beautiful) version of Monroe. the problem, of course, is that she had to comport and composer her self in the Monroe-esque, her more beatifulness depended upon aspiring to mirror as closely as possible that which came before her. of course, all of this was before the tambourine. by the time Abbey performs with Max Roach in triptych: prayer, protest, peace, well, she was changed. some might even say converted to a particular black consciousness. after we saw her live performance - Jaylah was all into black radicalism and making us listen to it, to use it in our own music; i'm not complaining! - in one such live performance of driva man in Europe, Abbey looks almost like we should be calling her Sister Lincoln. the long, mute dress, the plain hair in a afropuff bun, the two-inch heels the lack of makeup and the tambourine; the picture of pentecostal holiness and modesty.

what was in the transition to the tambourine for her? what social life did the tambourine index? Max, of course, played the saxophone while Oscar Brown, Jr. played the drums. her voice and her tambourine were her instruments of choice and as she sung driva man, punctuating each phrase with a hit of the pigskin? well. if we wanted to get saved? it was that sorta salvation.

well, New Dawns singing songs with lyrics about zelophehad's daughters was one thing; singing the words of baby suggs, holy? well. that was another complication altogether. but knowing that the tambourine could be some such sound that works against the common assumptions of New Dawns as "unsaved?" (well, we weren't, not in some conventional sense, at least.) folks just chalked us up to some sorta it's not about their lyrics, it's about their quality and tone. well. as true as that is, it is also false. we could not give the same tone without some such lyrics that would allow us to break free from all sorts of normative frame and ideology. our unexpected lyrics gave a way to explore sound differently. we contested and agreed in all new modes and forms. maybe it was something about the insistent jingle of the tambourine? or maybe some such conversion to blackness. who knows.

i've been trying to say something but i think i'm failing. i know i have.

shhshhshh,

a.-

moth's powder (12.anothermonday.04)

2010-12-13T11:59:00.000-08:00

12.anothermonday.04

dear moth's powder,

i have only partially been honest or, at the very least, have not been entirely forthcoming. i have been rather obsessed with New Dawns music lately, listening to cassette tapes and video recordings of us, though we only performed for a little over two years. and i have of course been listening to it lately because our anniversary is quickly approaching - not of our coming together but of our breaking apart - and i wanted to know if there was something in your gestures, in your face, in your smile that i could know and seize, on which i could think and meditate. to say i miss you would be the most vulgar of misstatements and half-truths ever. it is not merely that i miss you, it is that i am no longer me, that i no longer play the same musics, that i do not inhabit the social-sonic space that made me we. you know i don't necessarily believe in soul mates but something certainly happened that first day we went to the diner. the shy eyes, the reticent gestures, the bashful but ongoing pleasure of jumping headlong from one conversation to the next. who knew that that sorta calm conversation and knowing comfort were possible between strangers? who knew that that sorta wordplay and game, inflection and voice were attainable for some such folks not even yet acquaintances? and of course, you told me you trusted me. and of course, that made no sense if we were bound and restricted to some such linear time progression. our meeting, i think, at least for me, was the disruption of such linearity. it's as if i'd known you many moons ago, some half-life agone, that our communion and conversation could be traced back to some such agora.

anyway. what was most weird and cool and most interesting was that that non-date - whatever it was - was the first time you asked me, right before you left, if we could pray together and it made me quite afraid. i was not one prone to pray. (and still am not, truth be told; because if prayer will fix it every time, and i've prayed ceaselessly for you, for you to come back to me, for me to be able to smell and taste and touch you just one more time? just one more time? well? well prayer must not work.) of course, i grew up saying grace and going to prayer and bible band on tuesday nights and wednesday night prayer meetings (Mingus was entirely too correct), so i knew and know how to pray. i just didn't. and don't. i did not then because i felt it inefficacious, a joke, folly that tried to escape this life. prayer was infelicitous at best, some such performative utterance that did not do what it purported. then i met you and our communion, at the very least, introduced me to the notion of focus. of course, other traditions privilege meditation as a means to focus thought and breath but i had never conceived of those loud prayers from my mother and father along this wise.

you showed me and whispered to me and spoke in tongues to me and demonstrated for me how wrong i was. just because we're loud doesn't mean we're not focused or not contemplative is what you said to me. focused thought and breath is not only found in the quietude of buddhist meditational practice, in the soft hum or brush of yoga chaturanga poses and the like. it is found when my mother would be in the microphone and i'd be on the organ backing her up satan! the lord rebuke you! wherein she'd punctuate words with the letter t and the sound tuh! along with the intentional singularity of such words that were plural (think of rebuke rather than rebukes) for dramatic purpose and pause. satan'tuh! the lord rebuke'tayuh! as some sorta melismatic break of word and augment with new sound. what do you think prayers are? you'd ask me, then making me listen to my mother a bit differently because, well, she did not say satan'tuh when she was speaking, only when she was praying. so, and of course, you forced me to think about the intentionality of such breath and vocablic rupture and suspension.

well. we stood outside the diner, and you asked can we pray right quick? i mean, before we leave? and there was no way i could say no to you. you were insistent while asking but once. you were energetic by some sorta withdrawal. it was in your face. you became gravely serious as we stood out there, not knowing how to say goodbye, whether we should shake hands or hug or kiss, right there, in the lot, outside, for all to see. i wanted to do all those things but i did not yet really even know you, i just knew that i felt things that were either dormant or dead or demonic, all concurrently, all for you. so much boldness displayed by your query. so much strength. and conviction, i suppose. i just sorta stood there and you just continued by standing right in front of me, looking me clear into my eyes - i almost began to have tears forming right there, in the bottom of my heart - grabbing my hands with your hands, you lowered your voice a bit and said, ever so gently, we should...we should pray. i know this may a bit strange but i'd like to pray with you. for me? please? i did not say anything. i sorta stood there stunned by what was happening. loss of control. then a tear, before you began any such prayer, a tear formed and it dropped and, i suppose because you did not want me to feel embarrassed, you bowed your head and closed your eyes. the dropped tear, you felt and were correct to know, was assent and ascent. i bowed, closed eyes. then we stood there. and the wind blew a bit. and the street lamp overhead in the parking light buzzed a bit, almost backgrounded to the edge of nothingness. faint, ever so faint. you began to moan a bit, really quickly. then father, i'm thankful for the two of us having met today. keep him and me as we leave here. i would certainly like to see him again. in jesus's name. amen.

well. of course, all i heard was i would certainly like to see him again. and you hugged me. then: i hate to sound all James Baldwin-y but, bye-bye baby, so long, and flashed a smile, and got in your car. i never told you but i stood in that parking lot for nearly ten minutes after you drove off. i could not figure out what had just occurred with me, with you, with us. i just knew that i'd see you again. and so, i was very, very happy.

these thoughts of that first experience and prayer came to me today as i listened to the first song our group sang at that first concert some years ago, the one i'd written prayer for zelophehad's children. to say that mount zion church of god in christ knew not what to make of this motley crew of singers, musicians and songs is no misstatement. i don't think most of them had heard of zelophehad so they were confused about who we were singing to or for. this mattered less when i descended the scales on the b-3 but, still, most of the congregation remained wary of us throughout the two songs we rendered. (render, of course, is the best word for what we did because we had decided - you, i, Salim, Jaylah, Jalisa and Bobby - that we would literally improvise our way through the entire song; we made it up on the fly, though we practiced the structure of the song and knew the keys, we would allow you to lead us from tonal center to tonal center, and the harmonic progressions were up to us to provide as you gave some such melody; and, of course, i refused to sing and only sang that one time because i always hated singing in front of people; but i did what i could do on the b-3 in order to cut and augment the sounds you all made. zelophehad, and his daughters i suspect, would have been proud.)

breathing into our microphones and using the atonal sound of our breath as much as the harmonies, Bobby's percussive operations and the sonic architectonics provided by your melody and my response? well. we gave the meaning to zelophehad's daughters going to moses, telling him that he should be open to the spirit, to giving them what rightfully belonged to them, even if the laws and customs of their age dictated that women were not able to inherit land. our song was all about contesting conventional notions of the sacred, of the gospel, of the love of christ and the power of community. so we breathed a bit on and off, before and after the beat. we sang harmonies that clashed. and we hummed and buzzed. well. the congregation wasn't ready but neither was moses. but we kept singing, kept insisting, kept pushing through with improvisation and caprice. threw in a couple of jesus's for good measure. well. i suppose it worked. i miss that sorta blending and disagreement, that kinda sound and sociality, that prayer, that praise.

i do not pray often. but pray for you i do.

still,

a.-

moth's powder (12.anothersunday.04)

2010-12-12T12:00:00.001-08:00

12.anothersunday.04

dear moth's powder,

while reading some seemingly easy theory today (of course, i lie a bit because no theory can ever be described as "easy" per se) i was reminded how much i enjoy playing the bass runs and lines and pedal points on the b-3. and, of course, the acoustic environment greatly effects how that bass is heard and felt, either deep in the depths of the flesh or whether it sorta tinkers along, teetering on the trebled troubling clangs, going in one ear and - excuse the corniness of such declaration - out the other. of course, i prefer the sorta architecclesial space where the bass is base. it's all about attunement to placement of the leslie speaker in the church. if it is lifted off the ground and raised - imagine it in the front of the church building that must, of necessity, be large, raised twenty or so feet and propped on the wall above the congregation and pulpit, held by a small platform with two chains holding it such that it does not fall to the ground - rather than on some floor where the sound turns vibration turns shaking ground? well, don't expect much.

when the leslie speaker is raised, it seems to make the sound more diffusive and difficult to pin down. when it is on some such floor, the vibrations and the switches from tremolo for the fast speed (around some 390 rpms) to chorale for the slow speed (around some such 40 rpms) and back is literally felt in the body. and the bass pedal points are important for this feeling, this movement of the body by the vibration that is heard as sound. but also the body moves by that vibration that one almost does not hear because it plunges depths too deep but is still there. still there. this bass sound, at least for me, is a sorta foundational sound that does not necessarily make all other sound possible, but has the capacity in its depths to be radical and transformative while always moving and on the run.

the bass pedals when played with skill and intensity, which we could call intentionality, seem to be a sonic yes and an i can and any such agreement with the movement so taken. slow songs, of course you know, are my favorite to perform. so much space is opened up for play and praise when lingering in the moments and notes and chords. the yes lord praise song that we always sung

yes lord, yes lord, yes lord
yes lord, yes lord, yes lord

yessss, yesssss, yeh-esss
yeh-eh-esss, yeh-eh-esss, yeh-eh-esss

well, we'd sing this structure over and over again and it would be the chance for me to learn new methods to convey the same feeling and conviction and desire. curious and fascinating how the word yes is a mode of dissent and acceptance at the same time, highlighting, i think at the very least, the ambivalence of being and of being as human. but what i would do with the bass pedal points, i find now that i think about it a bit, to be most moving. because this song has no rhythm, i would often play the keyboard, left and right hand chords while utilizing the bass pedal points as punctuatory. my father loved to sing this song when we growing up during testimony service and he would sing it with all of the heart and soul he could muster. and so while he'd sing

yessss

i would use the bass pedal points only at the end of each chorded phrase, using the bass as the point and mode of transition from one sonic phrasing to the other

so if we were in A-flat for example, the yeh would announce itself with left and right hand chords, but the bass would remain heard only in its anticipation until the ehssss and then the bass would drop with my feet touching the 5th (E-flat) to the tonic (A-flat). and then again yeh, which would be only left and right hands, no bottomed bass and then again ehssss with the bass pedal coming in on the 4th (D-flat). and then yet again yeh, which would be left empty at the bottom until ehsss when the bass would drop down, literally by descent from minor-7th (G-flat) to minor-6th (E) to the 5th (E-flat). well. this is all too intricate, so i apologize, but i am trying to give you at least a hint of meaning. just think of it like this: some parts of some words and phrases are accompanied only by left and right hand chording while other words and phrases are accompanied by left and right hand chords along with the bass pedals. and the bass pedal sounds, i think, elucidate a sort of agreement or "holding" or "carrying" of the other sounds, holding and carrying by giving that which is below and beneath the sonic surface.

what is it to care for the bottom of things? you taught me to listen to it, to pay attention to it, to witness what the bottom can do. of course, there are the black bottom neighborhoods of places like philadelphia. but i'm really thinking about the first time you came to that old basement apartment in which i lived, and that being the first time you slipped off your shoes in front of me and i saw your feet. of course, i was afraid of your visiting my apartment but for your insistence, i let you visit anyway. that basement apartment with the dark mauve (almost rank) carpet, shabby and worn, and the small kitchen with floors that always had a bit of grease left on them, mucked on from years of cooking - not mine - that really could have benefitted from a steam cleaning. and the small bedroom with the full-sized bed (it was the first time i'd slept in something so big). well. we sat in the living room of my apartment - as if living room is a good description for it; it really wasn't much for living but we did do a lot there so, i suppose, life was there too - but we sat there in mostly darkness, the television the only light, because of the heat, it was too hot to have lights on and the window unit was only in the bedroom and it would've been a bit presumptuous to invite you in there.

so we sat on the couch that came with the apartment, with the tattered arms that almost barely were revealing of the wiry frame just beneath and propping the whole thing up, that couch that would make that squishy sound as we sat - no matter who sat really, regardless their weight, it was too much for that old couch. it was the couch that came with the apartment as was the full-sized bed. i did not realize that i was poor. but i knew that you had more money than i did and so i was a bit more than a bit embarrassed to have you over to visit me. i was cool with scraping money together to go to diners late at night just to talk. but to have you enter the basement, smell the sorta closed up smell of years and years of folks who'd lived there and have you, quite possibly, make a judgment of me, my manner, my taste based on my living in some such underground? well. you insisted, so i gave in. and, truth be told, i loved that place for all of its intrusiveness (the walls were thin, so just as we heard my neighbors, after that first time and they saw you leave? well, they knew what they knew because of what they heard).

and we sat on the couch and you slipped off your driving shoes that you always wore with no socks, i asked if i could massage your feet. you already were laying in my lap as we talked about something while the shadowed images danced on the thirteen-inch television that was borrowed from a friend of mine. (did i ever tell you that i moved to that location because of its location in the city? but that it was the best that i could get with the money i had? and that all the other, nicer places were much more expensive, at least double what i paid? and that i lived there instead of moving because it never even entered my mind to consider purchasing a car? well. i had bad credit, not that it matters.) but i asked if i could massage your feet and you laughed and laughed more. but you also said yes. so you pulled your head reluctantly out of my lap - it was comfortable there, so you said, and as i sat on one end of the couch that was only a shadow's breath longer than a love seat, you rested your head at the other end of the seat and put your feet in my lap. i took your right foot in my hand and as i massaged, and saw veins and hairs and felt smooth skin and smelled coco butter. and maybe i smelled oranges or tangerines too. as i pressed my fingers into your right foot, you'd sometimes wince, and other times smile. sometimes you leaned back and sighed faintly and at others you giggled a bit. i dug my fingers into the various muscles and parts of your foot, playing with your toes while listening to you breathe. and, well, of course it made sense to lick your foot. but just a bit.

and i'm sure i learned of the importance of feet when i began yoga, the feet as the base of stability and a moving, movable core, as the internal equilibrium and balance for movement and spin, lilt and twist. but of course, we could not end with me playing with the bottom of your feet, taking my index finger and lightly - ever so lightly - drawing circular motions over the ball and the heel, you being tickled and feeling faintly nervous concurrently. that edge and mix of both profane delight and holy terror. you said you wanted to see my bed, that we'd talked long enough. well. your being versatile but me desiring to be only a top, you taught me how to be be penetrated, and how there is something deep and profound and intimate about going in and in and in. you taught this by going in me while at once allowing me to go in you. and of course, i should have known this because the bass pedal points are the bottom which i explored. until you forced me to listen and to feel, i thought (not felt, thought) that the bottom was the debased. and base and bass, though it may be, it is celebratory. in other words: ain't shit wrong with penetration and being penetrated. again, i should've known this truth from the way i taunted and teased with bass pedal points as daddy sang yes lord so many days.

the point i'm trying to make is not about our (wonderful, of course) sexual appetite. i probably remember it a bit too nostalgically anyway. but the point of it all is that this experience of your feet and my new bottomed out versatility occurred the same night that the group we started had our first singing engagement. and so i write to you now because i finally realize what i did not know then: that the name of the group - New Dawns - was really about you and i. of course, notions of newness and dawning was in the forefront of my mind because the first day we met, you were at your father's church and i visiting, and you preached that day and we met after the service and exchanged numbers and you made a brief remark when we decided to have dinner at a diner that same night. you said something like we need a new dawning, which was your critique of what you called "the church" and its problematics, its stagnation regarding notions of sex and sexism and sexuality.

i'm thinking about New Dawns because, at this point, your silence is but the center of some such gravity and i write and write and write to approach this center as if to be the lighted edge that cuts darkness with the new day, shifting every second, barely detected by eyes naked. our group was similarly concerned with tonal centers and energetic fields, we tried to sing of the divine by modeling a new social of intimacy and warmth and love and religiosity. this meant dwelling with tones and singing slow songs a lot with layers and new atonal harmonies and listening to "world" musics and islamic prayers and gregorian chant for the chance and occasion for old new things. and because of the intentional rhythms and arrhythmias we chose for our songs, as the organist, i was able to explore and plunge the bass pedal points in ways i did not know possible that only matched and heightened the ways in which we plunged and explored each others' bodies.

my friend - who listened to our music, attended and recorded every concert and appearance - said she was recently watching a video of New Dawns and how, for her, the music we created sounds like the residue of a constantly haunting dream, how our singing and humming and moaning and instrumentality and cadence and structure and harmonies and melodies are similar to when one is abruptly awaken and how one so awaken immediately notices the loss of the material content of the dream the more one tries to recall, so one attempts to reconstruct the dream by rhizomatic feeling, that tendency of using the last sensation and emotion because, we know, it, if anything, remains. well. we use whatever such final feeling to take us back into that which seeks to escape, a gathering and organizing of ephemera, if you will. so, for instance, you wake up with tears in your eyes and you are astonished at such tears. but the materiality of such tears lead you to a feeling of loss and abandonment. but that feeling of the gap and hole lead back to the question: why do i feel this way and based on that question you reconstruct that, in the dream, your best friend from childhood - whom you've never met; this is important information - that friend is left standing, waving to you as you - that's it! you remember - as you drive away with your father in his red cougar with the top down and you see your friend becoming smaller and smaller and then you remember that you had had friends before you began moving all over the country but that this dream served as premonition (you began having this dream before you'd even met your father) because now that you move from place to place with such insistence that you trust people less and less and have few that you can call friends.

this recall, working from some such tear or smile or laugh or itch toward that which it hallucinates, then toward some question or general concern, further still to the even broader general field from which any emotion or sensation comes? that, of course, is how i'd write the music New Dawns performed. we were a difficult group to understand because we were after something so primitive and base and foundational and moving. and it was pentecostal only insofar as it was open to moving by the spirit. and tongues. of course, i had not intended to write you so haphazard a letter. but i was listening to a few songs of New Dawns and, well, it got me to crying which got me to thinking and got me to writing letters and songs. i'm not sure if you have any of the recordings but i'd gladly send them to you, just say the word. but of course, you are not talking to me. but maybe?

but maybe,

a.-

moth's powder (12.anothersaturday.04)

2010-12-11T15:00:00.001-08:00

12.anothersaturday.04

dear moth's powder,

what when winning is but an irreparable loss? (not that i believe things can be in disrepair, at least not while we are alive. still?) you have won. your desire for me to cease directly speaking to and engaging you? well. these letters that i have not sent, to be certain, still will no longer be passively aggressive in their address to you. at least not and maybe? but what you have won, of course, is some such loss, some such suppression of voice and tone and echo that animates us both. you've severed that which you desire the most. i hope you are happy. or maybe a different or new or more enriched frame of reference or center is needed to think through and toward, against and about what this silence and ceasing may in fact be or become. maybe: you have not won, i have not lost. maybe there is some such other measure or distance or way of understanding what occurred between us, between men, between call and no response.

and i am sorry for calling you last night. i broke the silence that we both implicitly decided was best for our moving on. and i would blame some such drunkenness or debauched mindset but i did what i had been wanting to do but for some time now. but when you did not answer? when you looked at your phone and saw my name, i'm sure, and when you decided that still silence was better than opening of mouth to say hello or hey or any such form of engagement because you knew and know that had you opened your mouth and broken your quietude that my voice would have had much too much joy in it and that i would eventually have had tears formed right here and right there in the corner of my eye because there would be - in your voice and my joy - hope, hope for a future, for a together and togetherness that we had always known was there and so desired but performed its impossibility? had this one-directional conversation become two? me to we? well. there would be a new way that we would both have to conduct ourselves and we would have to begin thinking of our moving and movements in other ways. i'd, maybe, think about how i should drive to you, see you, eat with you, look into your face one more once again, smile bashfully, watch you, watch you, watch you, open your mouth kinda like an o shape with surprise and happiness and a sorta youthful frivolity and cheerfulness that always, always, always made me smile and feel nervous right in my gut. yes. a mere hello would have been anything but, i suppose. and i know it because the mere hello from you would have only reinvigorated and refreshed me, extended the beat just a bit longer, given me just enough to hold on just a little while longer. well.

so in church, we would never "catch the holy ghost" (what is it? a baseball? we'd ask our friends whoever said some such phrase and, of course, we'd say: they're baptist! the holy ghost isn't something you catch, but something that lives in you. well. more on that soon.) but we most certainly were perpetually guilty of "getting happy" and these two phrases bespeak the divergence in theology and sociality in traditions. and of course my approach with you was with such latter tenor and conception. what does it mean to reach towards that which you do not have and, having gotten it, you reach further still? Mother Burke would be sitting and begin chanting and speaking in tongues from her seat. Mother Scroggins would begin to clap her hands vigorously. momma would eventually shoot up from her seat in the pew, begin walking quickly in between the pews, going toward one end, then the next, speaking in tongues.

they'd all be there, getting happy, together and of course, as kids, we'd be scared as hell but also fascinated and astonished. these folks would simply lose themselves with reckless abandon, they would be inside and beside and outside themselves in their praise to god. of course we could say that their prayers and praises were full of lament and sorrow. it was a storefront church and the members were, by and large, poor. i always would look at Mother James, in particular, because she seemed so sincere and so sad. and when i was a kid, i realized that she was older than me - much, much older - and one day i asked my mother why isn't Mother James married and my mother just glanced at me but never answered until i asked a second time and she said some people won't get married. she never did get married but she was always getting happy so i figured that the latter was the healing and corrective for the former. i wanted to marry Mother James when i was younger. the last time i remember seeing her - she moved back to georgia some years after i was born - she was in the church, had unpermed but pressed hair and you could almost still smell the mix of burnt hair from the hot comb and Dax pressing oil on her, she wore a plain dress that went below her knees, a belt, stockings and two-inch heels. she was a dark skinned woman with sideburns that she refused to cut, not that they grew wooly or were out of control, but on the sides of her face were the bits of hairy fuzz. whenever she got happy, her mouth - which was sorta wide - would open by her flattening her lips, exposing her teeth and gums, she'd furrow her brows. and she'd dance almost as if she were running, bending her legs at the knees back and forth back and forth dipping every now and then.

well. i wanted to marry her because she looked lonely and was a woman and i was a guy and though i was too young i wanted her to be happy because it didn't seem to make sense to do all of that praising and yelling and loving jesus but still be unhappy when one went home. of course, i assumed i knew what happiness was and i figured it wasn't whatever she was. she needed a man, right? that's what i used to convince me to be a husband. sure, i was ten years old. but i could make her happy. i would have gotten her tea and her slippers - something my mother always wanted as soon as she got home from church - and i would have combed her hair out and put it in a bun. i always wondered: does she have friends? who does she talk to when she goes home? she wasn't a member of our church but was, what we called, a well wisher, someone who visited our church often because she lived closer to our building than her "home church." but since i did not know much about her, she always was a bit of a mystery to me. and there was not much a ten year old could say to someone who may have been fifty or sixty years old other than hello. she was silent and vacant to me and i wanted to know what was the other side of that life. did she ever have sex? children? well. if anyone knew how to get happy, it was her. and getting happy is fundamentally bound up with the pentecostal theology of the holy ghost as living in you, as "indwelling."

and that's how i approach any such relationship. my erotic is pentecostal in its deployment. i want to abide, live in and with, i don't want to catch but want to be constantly in process of getting happy and love and joy. i may have been hurt and may have hurt you but i want to reach toward some such other way of becoming in the world. whenever i was with you, i wanted to stretch and extend and grasp and enter deep in and into you, unlock that hidden secret, that ephemeral discharge, some such thing otherwise than beauty and peace and love that is no less bound up with these qualities. melding and creating a new social by our screams and pants for breath and exhaustion. and the word exhaust is cool because of its relation to exhale and exhume and well, because i've accepted the fact that you are my ex? well. you know someone wasn't getting happy if they are not exhausted and out of breath by their completion. and at that point, at that edge is when something happens, when some other energy takes up residence and the person continues to pursue and praise and pray.

getting happy is kinda like how, before any such note that you'd sing, you'd pull the mic close to you and we'd hear - if we were really listening - that initiatory breath, the pause before the break into song, that quick - huh! - and then into some note or melody or phrasing. atonal with no melody or harmony, barely even audible but there for us, announcing that some such sound is to come, that breath is being taken in to be given out and away. that small breath making us anticipate being moved by the spirit, by the breath and life in you coming to us and dwelling. that short breath was taken into you and mixed with the already given set of capacities that you had for voice. you had something in you already and the breath taken became part of the admixture.

what i'm trying to say, i think, is that there is a theology of breath and life, a theology of getting happy and indwelling that thinks about inhabitation and living intentionally and with intensity. getting happy is not about the ownership or possession of such emotion or feeling but the perpetual movement of body and bodies toward such attainment. of course, had you said hello or hey last night, had you answered the phone and heard my quick breath into explanation and story? well. i would've been getting happy and you would have responded. well. weeping may endure for the night. maybe if i call you tomorrow morning, you'll answer?

i hope you're getting it...and me,

a.-

moth's powder (12.anotherfriday.04)

2010-12-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

12.anotherfriday.04

dear moth's powder,

one of my favorite congregational songs is

send it on down lord, send it on down
lord let your holy ghost come on down
send it on down lord, send it down
lord let your holy ghost come on down

which, of course, must be finished with

power, power lord, power, power lord
power, power lord, power, power lord

and i love this song because, you know, we'd sing it and sing it and sing it sometimes for ten and others fifteen minutes. and that doesn't appear to be a long time at first blush until you realize that it is the same melodic structure the entire time and the lyrics do not really change. it's something so cool about singing around and around and around again, expecting something to come to you. even thinking about the song now, i can see Mother Burke with her white head covering, habit and stockings - she'd start the song from the pulpit when she was gonna preach, banging on her tambourine - and her voice was, i suppose, contralto, teetering on tenor, gravely, full of conviction and emotion.

she wouldn't just delicately sing send it on down but would add accent and texture send it ooown down lode, send it owwwwn down! and the congregation would have no recourse but to follow with just as much intensity and intention, clarity and conviction. and she'd bang that tambourine, and when she really got into it, she'd stand up from her seat and with the shack-a-lack shack-a-lack of the rings and pig skin held tightly together by wooden rim, nails and thumbtacks, she'd close her eyes, throw her head back and sing even louder. and the only way for me not to become bored on the b-3 was to become creative with the chording, sometimes laying into it and staying on one chord and then following with another, line by line, and other times switching chords and bass notes back forth back forth back forth.

what i love about the song, of course, is the fact that the saints would be moving and moving and moving in order to bring the lord's power down. you know i'm all into migration stories and have read entirely too many enslavement narratives where folks would escape from the conditions of enslavement by moving their bodies to above the Mason-Dixon Line, and to new york and to boston and to canada, which is cool. but i don't like the idea that seems to animate at least some peoples' thoughts about the folks who never "ran" but remained. there's all this moral judgment that is too close to implying that it must've not been that bad if people stayed, if everyone didn't just drown themselves in the sea throwing themselves overboard. whatever. it is easy to make pronouncements about well, what i would've done if i was a slave? i would've beat every god damned fucker who tried to touch me. this just seems a bit vulgar and wrong to me. and so i love the song because it changes what movement does, and thinks about it differently.

the lord's power coming down is about the recognition that we can use movement or stillness in order to bring something to ourselves. the lord's power coming down means that the singing and testifying and dancing and speaking in tongues is so moving and persuasive and powerful that not even the lord could stay on the outside, up above or some such exterior. no. the lord would be so compelled to move to where the sound and movement is going on. the song is all about how we know and give that which we have in us that can move things around us. or maybe this. movement is not always about going, but is likewise about things coming. but i wonder just what could we be trying to bring to ourselves? folks who read and take up Orlando Patterson would say something like because one is marginalized and enslaved that they have no honor, that this lack is irreducible. of course, they think that this notion of honor is what individuates and what makes a subject and so those who do not have honor do not have subjectivity. so they think that performing certain rituals and behaviors brings honor, respect and respectability and, thus, the ability to be a citizen, a part of this great nation and world.

well, needless to say, i'd disagree with this. if people are trying to bring anything to themselves, it is attention that is sustained and engaged. power, power lord is singing with power about the power one has in order to ask for more power. it is not a demonstration of fundamental lack or irreducible dishonor. rather, it says that honor as so defined by Patterson isn't desirable in the first place. desiring the coming down of the holy ghost is nothing other than knowing that there is something here, with us, in us that moves us. every song ain't about heaven. and i'd be all nerdy to say that this desire for the sending down is the repudiation of humiliation, shame and abjection in which some theorists and scholars would so relegate black social life. to say send it on down rather than take us on up is another way to think movement and motion, migration and flight. so no. folks did not have to leave conditions in order to critique conditions that marginalize and oppress.

you know, i'd written you about ecstatic asceticism, about being outside oneself together with others, but away and removed from such linear temporality. and i said that foucault would probably be against this sorta asceticism because it is a seeming renunciation of pleasure. i agree with foucault partially, at least. that is, what if asceticism itself functions as a mode of pleasure? what if renunciation feels good? what if staying is bound up with a different sorta critique, no less important? what in asceticism can require us to think pleasure differently? well. there was always pleasure in Mother Burke's voice, she was convinced and convicted that the lord's power could and, indeed, would come down. i guess the vulgarity is in the idea that she could not find a particular becoming together with others in a sorta ecstatic asceticism isn't possible, it's in the idea that she would only aimlessly repeat these phrases without such movement on the part of the lord.

well. more again, another soon.

until,

a.-

moth's powder (12.thisthursday.04)

2010-12-09T11:31:00.001-08:00

12.thisthursday.04

dear moth's powder,

it's not that i wanted to possess you, though i certainly did enjoy and envision a future of us where we seized each other. and i never could master you but felt that each new morning occasioned things about you unexplored. is it possible to relate without ownership, to capture your heart while banishing jealousy? well. i am a bit surprised about how upset i got about all of this last night while speaking to someone about some new sorta technology that could perfectly reproduce Art Tatum's playing on the piano. this technology has the ability to "listen" to music and recreate it. it would do something like see what our brains react to in order to infuse that in music performance. and i suppose i don't have a real issue with reproducing something. there's a guy - George Lewis, i think is his name - in new york who has been using computer algorithms for years to improvise, to think about improvisation and subjectivity. and i'm really cool with that because it seems he thinks of computer technology, not as opposed to human subjectivity but as part and parcel of it. you do know, right, that the first meaning of computer was one who computes? dells and macs and gateways are only the newest mode of such an old concept.

the issue i had with last night's conversation was the pressure applied to the word perfectly, that something could be possessed, mastered sonically by machines only in order to reproduce it perfectly. but i wonder, still, i wonder: what if the musician - Art Tatum, for example - was not trying to produce perfectly? what if, following Baraka's listening to and writing about Lady Day, one tries to create failure? or, not even failure, but what if perfection is not part of the sociocultural vocabulary of a world, or not a desired thing? do we even think this is possible? that the norm could be on bending bent notes until even the bends are bent? and what is assumed when it is thought that a new mode of some old thing now, finally, can create perfection? what does it say about ingenuity and emotion and drive?

i began arguing rather forcefully, i supposed. but it seems that there is a desire to possess and master without accounting for the underside of such declaration. it hallucinates the idea that the "original" producers had particular intent that could be fully realizable. rather than asking how does the technology become another occasion to produce failure beautifully, it gets taken up to say that it can reproduce without failure. well. it also seems to think that there is an essence of music performance that can be found, that there is some ground-zero, some foundational claim to production of emotion and thought and drive. and there seems to be, of course, the implication of an articulation of a critique of authenticity because if one could hear Art Tatum "play" without his vivid thereness, then, well, Art Tatum becomes inconsequential to the performance of Art Tatum, the materiality is dismissed. and, if the computer can reproduce perfectly what it has capture and mastered? well, then no one has the ability to be authentic. and i know anti-essentialism is all the rage with its being against any such claims for authenticity but i don't even think the right questions are being posed. like, what is perfection and how is it determined? if i said that Tatum's breath was just as consequence to his performance as his fingered weight on keys? well?

so, i was listening to the sermon let's get it on by Bishop Iona Locke again (for the, how-many-nth time?) this morning and it hit me. you know how we produce something - other than - but close to the concept of failure? she was preaching and in the moment of her whooping when the congregation is just all the way in it, screaming and clapping and providing that necessary background that isn't so backgrounded, she said

god said i will pour out my spirit...upon some flesh

and the congregation screamed back

all!

and then she came right back in

you talkin right. all! he said all flesh!

how would a technology account for that? she literally in her preaching moment opened up a space to allow the congregation to engage with her disarticulation of the scripture. she ruptured its flow, some flesh, knowing that the audience was right there with her production of something other than that which was correct. there is, of course, a world of difference between some and all. but she realized the congregation as part and parcel of her preaching performance. could the technology of such perfection - rather than improvisation - know that she was going to exclaim some for the audience to respond as such? there is incalculability that is part of the performance, some aspect that cannot occur before such sitting down at stools or standing up at pulpits. and if the organ wasn't there? and if the congregation wasn't standing and jumping and screaming? well.

she isn't the only one, though. think. when folks are up exhorting the congregation, or when the organ breaks during shouting music: there are all sorts of gaps and elisions and ruptures of sound, thought, texture, openings and forestallments that go against any such notion of "perfection " and reproduction that could ever be so termed. no. these are the calling forth, not just call and response but call and call, some sort of accretion and accrual, layer upon layer upon layer, each word and phrase and scream and breath engaging and revising that which came previous to it, affecting subsequence. in such performance is the recognition that the congregation has some such knowledge in them that is animated by and likewise animates any such praise leader, devotional singer or preacher.

sorta like how when you'd be up right before the preacher, giving words of encouragement during the momentary space between the dance and the yes lord praise where some folks are still praising and running while others are hunched over and yet others still are bent over with their hands rubbing on their outer thighs and over there is Patty throwing her head back aaaah and over here is Jesse clapping incessantly and you talk while some are trying to take your seat if ya can...hahaha!

you'd say something like i don't know what you came to do but i came to praise the ... you wouldn't, of course, include the lord but would leave the statement, if ever so faintly, still open ended. or how you'd say after all the things i been through, i stillll have jeeyuh... quick, crisp, staccato-like and the congregation knew what that meant. of course, you'd have to be some such one part of this social world to know that jeeyuh' meant joy and that opening was also a space for folks to keep it going. because the words do not necessarily cohere with what is desired. we've got to move on was as much a call for not moving on as it was to say that it was time to turn over the service. these are accents on and off the beat, not just slurred speech and weighted keys, but a way to inhabit a social antiphonal world. this world isn't abou perfection. it's about the power of the lord coming down and i don't think you can account for that with algorithms, though algorithms can help get you there. (i am not, of course you know, against technology. the b-3 for us is quintessentially pentecostal and without it, i wonder what the church world would sound like for black folks. and i'm still waiting on someone to write about First Church of Deliverance in chicago using the first hammond in a black church setting, and how, curiously enough, the pastor was - what would they have said then? queer? a homophile? homosexual? gay? - well. the technological, non-human machine that serves as foundational for the sound of this social world was first recognized as important by a someone very queer. there's gotta be something about dispersal, spirit and sound there. and maybe that purportedimperfection's relation to the sound of pentecost? well.)

it just seems that any desire for such perfection really spins out from a different sorta epistemological center altogether. assumptions of clarity and rigor and rightness seem hella limiting to me. and there is never an accounting of how perfection - when it is achieved - may be merely another form of improv. sometimes, i just wanna say: leave this alone, let it do its own thing, if you wanna join it, cool but if you wanna perfect it? stay back. kinda like how i wanted to join you and you know my chords behind you were hell good. not because i knew where you were going. but because i willing to go with you.

indeed.

a.-

moth's powder (12.thiswednesday.04)

2010-12-08T12:39:00.000-08:00

12.thiswednesday.04

dear moth's powder,

when we ended it all, my close friends immediately began to berate you, out of love for me no doubt. but had they ever considered that i might still have loved you? and that their commentary - surely meant to unmoor and unfix me from you - would only serve to make me defend you, to rearticulate and recalibrate, to internalize and improvise what you'd meant to me? and had they ever considered that berating you - he is egotistical; he is a flirt and flirted with all these dudes but i ain't never wanna tell you and get you all upset; he is intimidated by you and couldn't handle you...you're so much better than him; he's immature; he's phony; he's just not right for you; he's not cute; he's...he's...he's... - well, berating you only felt like some such underhanded snide remark about me as well. for if you were all those things and you were always all those things and that is what my close, dear, dear friends had always saw of you all of the time? well? well. then that would mean that each such time they saw us together was a moment for them to judge us both: you for being all that purportedly fucked up shit and me for either not being acute enough to see or being too short-sighted, horny, lonely or some other such befuddlement to care. so the berating of you only served to imply that either i'm hella ignorant or callous, unduly contented or seemingly indifferent.

i'm not ignorant to their love. i mean, i get it. i understand the why. i understand that above all else, they want to love on me and show me kindness and give me strength. but that should not come by way of the total evisceration of you. and yes, of course, it's at least partially my fault. of course, i berated you and talked and said all sorts of bad things about you. but...i don't know. there was an underside to what i was voicing. whenever i'd say yes, he's a mess! - i was at the very same time feeling, i love him. deeply. still, very deeply still! it seems that love and pain go hand in hand in too many situations. i want the love. but the pain can steal away. i wish they would've simply listened to me complain about you rather than join in because to me it seemed, for them, to be - not fun necessarily - but a bit of relief for them maybe, or a snide way to make a jab at me. now i know this is not the apparentness of it all, that it is the sorta critique that takes place below some such surface in ways unconscious even to the background vocalists.

but if they thought all that shit about you when we were together and said things and brought up ideas and concepts that even i'd not initiated - of course i said you were a mess, but never that you were unattractive - well, maybe they always felt that i didn't deserve the sorta happiness i was feeling? or maybe they were confused by my happiness and rather than have me articulate some of those reasons, they felt it cool to betray me by adjudicating for themselves my emotional capacities. when i was with you? well. if what they say is true about you, then i know nothing of myself either. i become one anonymous to myself, unable to know myself, only known by way of another's judgments of me. and if what they say is true, then i would never be able to know myself but would constantly have to seek their validation of my erotic and emotional energies to know if they are sensical. and that's nothing for which i'd volunteer them. and they don't want that job anyway.

i guess what i fundamentally mean is this: i never enjoyed listening to others speak so negatively about you even if you'd hurt me in the past (and i hope i am afforded the same courtesies). it's like the vamp for all those fast songs. like Ricky Dillard's more abundantly that entirely too many gospel choirs at high schools and colleges sung in the mid-90s. (i'm so very glad those days are over because, truth be told, i hated that song then and still do today; it just sounds like it was made for performance and i went to too many concerts at churches and praise nights and college expos where this song was sung.) it's not about the round of joy-joy-joy-joy / joy-joy-joy-joy from soprano to alto to tenor to alto to soprano to... it's about the theatrics of it all, about the rhythmic pacing and spacing and the end-full-swell of jooooooy with the three parts singing together in unity, though harmonious, not unison.

or it's like Charles Hayes and the Comsos's version of everytime i feel the spirit. the song was his 1982 take on the standard, a bit faster and rushed and loud. it must've been the acoustics of the church in which it was recorded but when i listen to it, i can hear the robes and the wooden floors (but the floors were probably carpeted; don't judge me!) and i can see the hairdos of the women and the sissies (yes. i'm sure there were at least some. and i'm thankful for those godfathers. well!). anyway, this song is cute in the beginning: everytime i feel the spirit repeated, almost by way of a whisper; you can almost see them pointing to the audience on everytime and then jerking their hands back real quick and pointing to themselves on i, visualizing the choir and congregation engaged in choreo-sonic movements and thoughts.

well, it starts with words a little above a whisper, almost secret-like, telling the audience some such intimate information that only they could possibly bear, that only they could possibly apprehend. but then they sing, moving in my heart i'll praaaaay and, well, everybody can get with that. so things get gooder and gooder, louder and louder. then that expected chorus: everytime i feel the spirit moving in my heart i will pray-ay-ay! but sung with a different set of sycopational, rhythmical concepts buoyantly moving the song along. but, really, the entire song moves and moves and moves because, really, the song is about the vamp. it's about the repetition and the clapping and foot-stomping and the way the vamp is yet another taking it to church with suspended and minor chords, and i'd say, conviction. right in the bottom of their voices, conviction. i dare you listen and not feel moved.

anyway. for me, it seems that the words are not as important as the rhythm, some sorta centrifugal spin out and out and out while concurrently centripetal, pulling in and in and in. the congregation and the listeners are pulled in to the sound by the sound being spun out towards them. and the choir is pulled in to the congregation by the congregation's cacophonous sonic response. this isn't some mere deconstruction where what one expects is overturned. this is more like what Adrian Piper desires in one such performance, it is a withdrawal into the external world. the external world is the sounds of the hands and feet and floors and organs and atmosphere and hairdos and robes and sissies and old mother sopranos and choir directors and drums and bass and breath and hollers and yelps and whew! they spun that sonic materiality out so they all could get into it, so they could inhabit the space and feel the spirit moving and move by the spirit.

i suppose if my friends gave a bit more attention to the rhythm with which i'd enunciate he's a mess! they'd know that i was also going for what the Cosmos accomplished with their withdrawal into some such external. but they'd also know that the external i wanted was the warmth and comfort of peculiar silence, of rhythmic agreement: slurred speech, slowed pace. inflections on their response: well...yes...but he wasn't that bad where the well becomes melismatic break, ruptured in two - weh-elllll, high note on the weh and grounding out on the tonic elllll. you know what i mean. or even the refusal to speak while i spoke. that's what i wanted. they'd know that i missed him. still. miss him deeply, still! they'd know that my speaking was the desire for some sorta ecstatic asceticism, i wanted to be beside myself, outside myself, away from myself, looking down and up at myself - not necessarily alone - but with folks who'd sing in harmony. i'd take the alto and they'd take the soprano and tenor, both holding me up and covering me.

and this ecstatic asceticism wouldn't even take place in time, it'd actually be a suspension of time itself, no past, no present, no future, but some such dwelling together with each other outside the general ruse of decorum that would have me be over it all and over you by any now: you'll get over it soon; you'll be alright in the future; time away from him will heal wounds; you’re still not over him? well. is not this temporality dependent upon some linearity, some progression? and what happens if i do not progress in ways that i should? well, then is ushered in a judgment of me as amoral and immoral, as fussy and argumentative, as pathological. ecstatic asceticism lets us pause, syncopate, rhythmnate, chill for a bit and sing with different pace and with a different peace – passing and surpassing all understanding, taking imaginative leaps and flights of fancy. we’d sing, whether loud or soft. and i'm sure Foucault would be all against asceticism because it renounces pleasure. but this is the sorta asceticism that pleasure makes possible. the pleasure of singing and changing pace and becoming together with friends.

there's something i learned of conviction listening to my mother preach all those times, all those many times. i certainly didn't agree with a lot of what she'd say. i'd sit on that b-3 and she'd know that i wasn't agreeing, but i'd throw up my hand and wave it, i'd back her up with the most preacherly chords i could dig out from my feet and legs and thighs and stomach. i had to reach down. way, way down to find a sound consistent with her preaching. and it was in this: she was totally convicted about what she'd say. she felt that young women should save yourself for marriage! the lord will keep you if you wanna be kept! i know because he kept me! and everyone would look over at me by a sorta glance or whatever because they knew, especially right before she died, that you and i were living in the same bed, worshipping in the same church and preaching sermons that were pretty much the antithesis of what she'd preach. (and there was, of course, all that nervous chatter amongst them - it was a small church you know - that you and i were talking of beginning a bible study that would turn into its own church and they didn't like that one bit but she would not let them talk about her sons - plural - they my sons and ya'll will not speak of the badly, she'd say. she was convicted of that more than anything.)

well. i wasn't convicted or convinced that you and i were over. so the immediacy with which my friends berated you alienated me because, if we'd ever gotten back together, then i'd have to explain myself to them and, most detrimentally, to myself. i'd have to forestall pleasure and become and ongoing ascetic, existing in this temporality, with no recourse to ecstasy. and everytime i feel cool air on my arm as i turn over in the bed and reach for you? i pray.

everytime,

a.-

moth's powder (12.thistuesday.04)

2010-12-07T14:16:00.000-08:00

12.thistuesday.04

dear moth's powder,

i remember the first time i actually listened to Aretha Franklin's a brand new me. though my parents bequeathed all their secular music to my brother and i when we were younger, i never paid much of the music much attention, save a Michael Jackson tune here or there, a Temptations song every now and again. i'd listen to those phonographs sporadically, if i needed to feel nostalgic - and the desire for that feeling was very rare, indeed, for what had a young person to do with nostalgia when every experience was so fresh and alive and vital and who wanted to reminisce when one had not yet lived at all, but one thought they knew everything about the world and its sorrows and joys, well. when i did finally listen to it and not just hear it, when i was attentive in ways that allowed me to groove to the sounds of the rhythm? well.

this short song begins with something sounding like a tap dance shoe tapping on wooden floors in a dance studio, large space with high ceilings and mirrors on all the walls such that the sound echoes with each short, staccato caaht caaht caaht; definitely not a mere tap sound but a bit more textured and lively and tarried and layered. (yes. i know. it's the drumstick against the rim of the snare drum. but bear with me.) drop the piano arpeggios and chording. then. her voice's clarity. and the melisma and the dew-wew-wew-hoo! well!

i finally understood why people were all into her as the Queen of Soul because whatever sorta life and love she had in her, she gave to the audience, singing with her all in studios and nightclubs and churches. with that light piano following behind her, i discovered what everyone else already seemingly knew. i was surprised that a song so short, so sweet could be so sensual and seductive because i generally think of the latter two as sounding out with trumpets and saxophones and low, melancholy voices and slurred speech, slowed rhythms. but, of course, at the end of her song, her daddy came out of her - he had breathed into her, one knows, by way of his preaching and whooping and the end of his sermons. well, a brand new me inhabited the same sorta sonic space, she took it to church with the minor and suspended chords. tension and release? maybe that's where libidinal materiality resides, always in excess of the regulatory and relegated. seriously. if we had a soundtrack to our lovemaking and fucking, well, it would definitely be the "preaching chords" and not "nothing music." feel me?

she knew something of moving an audience, working a crowd, engaging a congregation that she learned from what Baldwin always calls the first theater: church. and, well, church has certainly taught me to be attentive to motives and intentions with and against behaviors and actions. some would call Aretha's sorta cohabitation between the "church" and the "world" contradictory. i'd just say: she grew up baptist. or: there is a theology at play that makes possible certain forms of seemingly contradictory living. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, of course we know, was not as fortunate as Aretha, though one could (and maybe should, though few would) argue that she was one of the first major figures of gospel to break into the "world." while Aretha was still singing in her father's church Rosetta was already performing with her guitar and pentecostal blues on stages. and COGIC was already saying that she had backslidden. of course, when Aretha takes it to church in her secular music, it is thought an extension of who she is, of her life world and love. when Rosetta did it? not so much. she was seen as utterly problematic and in need of control and change. it's not that she saw her production of blues and honkeytonk as problematic but the social world to which she belonged, those folks around her, saw her movement from one space to another as the foil.

it's sorta like how there is the term falsetto that my friend says is the desire for a "new word, new world" because the falsetto "curiously rescues and abolishes" the word (and world) as we know it. and my friend N. played some Al Green singing love and happiness to prove his point. well. though he was certainly on to something, i'm all interested in how falsetto is generally a gendered term. we can speak about falsetto for men: Sylvester and Tonex and the Chi-Lites. but i've been thinking about writing an essay in response to the essay "Towards a Theory of the Falsetto in New World African Musics" that explores the relation of falsetto to gender. you know i teach. and i have this fantastic student writing a paper about Celia Cruz's voice, how it is like the falsetto in that it explores a new word, new world. but her voice is "lower" than expected, it reaches...downward. if there is something buried within the reaches, Cruz's voice is the limb that refuses phantasm, grasping through toward the underground, the underneath, the submerged. (i almost too quickly added the submarined because, let's face it, the voice shares a relation to water - no saliva, no substance, too dry to sing, maybe - and african musics no doubt know something of middle passages and boats; folks are down in the water; maybe Cruz's voice reaches for them?) i'm sure something of an analysis is there though, true, Cruz's voice is no lower than my Aunt Hester nor even, really if you listen, Rosetta's.

but what my student and i both noticed is that there is no term to succinctly discuss the lowered voice, there is no opposite or antithesis of falsetto. contralto might be the closest, though it is a general descriptor for the lowest female part though falsetto indexes what is unexpected, surprising, it is the unnaturally or artificially high-pitched voice or register, especially in a man. well. that is, there is no unnatural or artificially low and lowered voice, there is no voice submerged or buried for a woman. of course, maybe an analysis would also think about gender as performance, always false for a man singing a certain kinda way but always and only possibly true for a woman?

but, well, Sister Rosetta Tharpe's actions could only be understood spatially and this spatial organization was theological. to sing the lord's song anywhere other than the lord's church was to eclipse the possibility of being on the lord's side. well. this is me just being longwinded and obscure. but i do think there should be an analysis of the impossibility of the falsetto's opposite. and i do think there is a theology that inheres to this impossibility. if falsetto bears the trace of falsity, what such voice is true? and if truth is not possible for the voice, do women mark this by way of an irreducible contrariness (contralto, of course, is to be against the alto)? intriguingly, though Aretha sang about being brand new, it was Rosetta who had to, of necessity, remake herself after every such performance on a secular stage. a brand new me each and every time she rocked in the bosom of abraham...at the Apollo.

of course, i told you that i'd not write you ever again yesterday. that may have been false. i'm just being contrary.

love,

a.-

moths's powder (12.onemonday.04)

2010-12-06T18:59:00.000-08:00

12.onemonday.04

dear moth's powder,

the problem, of course, is the ontic relationship between being and becoming, or maybe even the possessive apostrophic and that which is possessed. you did not want to be homosexual, so regardless of how you felt as i'd hold you, you thought (not felt; definitely thought) you were being something other than your "self," as if we ever are nothing other than the continued movement and dissent, the perpetual suture and rupture, the dehiscence that emerges. if we are anything, if we occupy any stability, it is in that the core is itself nothing but flux, tones up, chords down, sound that cuts and sound that is cut. you did not want to be possessed by the becoming, by the fundamental choreographic emergence of an irreducible togetherness. and it was seen in the ways i held you and you would tense up every single time. every. single. time. i'd put my arms around you and, ever so faintly, you'd shudder a bit, your body physically reacting, wanting to throw down and off and move out from that which was becoming: too good. you were wary of the sustenance of such becoming, thought that emergence would eventually subside and you'd be some shit you didn't recognize and wouldn't be able to hear. well. but isn't that the beauty of the apostrophic possession? the way that possession and plurality - against singularity - tether to the other. one could, of course, say: the shoes that belong to Betty. but to say Betty's shoes? well.

there's this wonderful little group of short stories by Faulkner titled Go Down Moses and i was impressed and totally into this one character who was referenced as Tomey's Turl. in the story, he is enslaved but on the run, on the run - yet again in almost a dance of game and play with those who so owned him - toward the woman he loved. he was Tomey's child. Tomey's beautiful, beautiful child. well, i had one professor once who argued that to be Tomey's Turl was to be - to smuggle in a bit of Du Bois - a problem, a fundamental problem. of course, i don't think Tomey's Turl thought of himself that way, he likely looked at his movement as aspirational, as exuberant, as ecstatic against individuals and institutions that would desire to rob him of that possibility. the professor argued that because enslavement had that "status of the woman" law, that Tomey's Turl highlighted a more general sorta irreducible dispossession of black folks, that he made very real the fact that black people are melancholy and abject because we do not so possess: Tomey could never claim that which she bore and this inability was the disarticulation of motherhood or some shit. Tomey's only relation to Turl would be through negation and Turl by dispossession, or so that professor taught.

let's just say, i never really liked that theory much. i think people misread Du Bois much too much. of course, they sorta skip over the fact that his explication of the "strange experience" of being a "problem" came after he said that the question "how does it feel to be a problem" was asked of him and even the asking was a sorta refusal to ask. you know, i don't think that Du Bois's Negroes thought of themselves - ourselves, really - as fundamentally problems or problematics. but it is our movement itself against the stillness and abstraction that is posed against us in the guise of policy procedures and Rockefeller laws and Rodney King beatings. people take up Du Bois's question of the being of problem without thinking more about how this state of being is exteriority enforced and placed, how it befalls the one who would be so problematic.

of course, maybe we could recalibrate - if we want to think from the position of the one so called - and ask of ourselves: what does becoming problematic feel like? well. i think that's a bit closer to you and i. and i think Faulkner was smarter than to posit Tomey's Turl as some sorta being rather than a fundamental becoming. and i think we can know this because the story starts with Tomey's Turl moving and running and escaping. he was reaching for something, loving for someone, creating a path, constituting as a way of life. maybe possession by one like Tomey critiques the notion of the ways in which folks try to own their children as possession itself. it's not that Turl does not bear a relation to or have an intimate relation with Tomey but when constituted (rather than constituting) as Tomey's Turl? well. the only thing he could do was run, not from Tomey, but from the institution that would both name and misname him by notions of self-possession. his running for love was instantiation of giving oneself away.

but why your shudder when i held you? of course, when i wanted to have becoming with you, when i held you - though you learned to surpress or regulate it as much as possible - there was something that you had to fight, some exterior, some way of being that befell and continues to befall. we might call it theology or religion or wanting to be loved by your family. and mine. we have both been indoctrinated in a world, in language and in the idealization of the individual, one who owns and possesses oneself most fully, the ability to control oneself and the many things around us. i think your shudder was twofold: you loved my arms and the warmth but knew that yielding to such feeling would likewise to throw off the ruse of the bourgeois subject. me would, of necessity, become we. and it happened ever so wonderfully and for a long while, we worked. or, rather, we was working toward some constituting of new ways to becoming in our world. see? even the ways to say this are jumbled, our language does not accomodate for such togetherness without occasional, if not overt, misunderstanding.

i think Faulkner is the quintessential southern writer and i don't think Tomey's Turl ever spoke but i've been thinking a lot about southern accents and the north's positing of itself as cosmopolitan. by now we're both well acquainted with how that particular president of ours - no, we did not vote for him, so i suppose we should not claim him, no apostrophes here - but we are aware of how he is cast in the media as inept and stupid, and this by way of his voice, by the accent he utilizes when he speaks. of course, this happens as much in audiovisual reproductions as well as in texts and transcriptions of speeches. and i find the latter - the transcribed word from spoken to written - intriguing. not because he doesn't say em instead of them. he indeed does, and we have both heard it. but it is curious to me because other folks who have likewise served as president or some other such position of power and authority have not been transcribed with such speeched text. it's as if the media wants to show this is but another way to know that this guy is stupid. well.

do we even give attention to how accents are racially and class coded ideas? i wish that em wasn't used to index some purported inherent inability to grasp knowledge. but of course. well. i am more intrigued by how the north conceives of itself as a place that was (and is) progressive, how they lacked enslavement. of course, we know this to be a farce and particularly after the Fugitive Slave Act, each state in the union effectively became a slave state. whatever. but the north posits itself as progressive and often by way of the lack of accent. (this, of course i'm telling you now, is on my mind because recently at a bar someone told me that i do not sound as if i am from an "urban area" because i sound "educated" and "clean." i almost had a fight. right there. in the bar. well.) to lack some accent is to remove the sound material - what Derrida called phonic substance - for some type of universal language. of course, the north can conceive of itself as cosmopolitan and progressive because they never had slavery. and never having slavery is never having had the close, intimate relation to blacks who share in that southern accent. the north, i think, gives itself a non-black accent and the whites in the south are sullied because they speak with such close intimacy with blacks.

well. of course the north as a concept is a ruse and farce. and of course, this depends on being rather than becoming. but i wonder what being is - philosophically - when it is fundamentally becoming, or, when it is always in process, begotten rather than made? i wish you knew that never wanted to possess you, only wanted to be becoming with you. there is, my dear, a difference. maybe if i use my suthun drawl, you'd hear me. and the concept of our separation is also a bit of an untruth (i wouldn't say lie, of course). our bodies have rubbed up against each other in so many ways, you've read my thoughts, you've heard my voice, felt me inside you and i've felt you in me. we'll never be accentless. our voices will be intermingled and whenever you speak, something of us will emanate. i am, of course, thankful that this is as true of me as it is for you. i only hope that you are likewise. but do know: i will never write you again.

maybe,

a.-

moth's powder (12.onesunday.04)

2010-12-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

12.onesunday.04

dear moth's powder,

i knew we were wrong to end things because the week after you called things off and i - lonelier than i'd been in a while - went on a date with the most fascinating of people, he told me things in two hours and connected with me in such a way that i knew he was an angel telling me that what i felt for you and your fear of me was right. he was that break allowing me to hear into and explore what you would have said had you felt safe enough. it was such a song, you see. the bass guitar, that pluck that reverberates and reverberates and vibrates and vibrates. one pluck letting presence the boong sound, letting presence the very thereness and materiality of intention to sound out and move and relate with other tones and sounds. boong again, the bass string plucked. that was the date with that fascinating guy one week to that very day that we decided that we would no longer be whatever that was that we had described so imperceptibly to each other: as love.

what i mean is this. listen to the bass dexterity of Me'shell Ndegéocello: in love song #1: haunting, faint, barely audible, pulsing, backgrounded you've gotta hear it under - way underneath - the guitar and the hi-hat and snare and that warm voice, mellow tone. of course, love song #3 is where you really hear this bass. it begins the song, repetitive: boong, bump-boong. yes. love song #2 is the conduit, the in-between the over and under, it is the interstice, the point of aperture and departure, that space gathered up and thrown down by the confluence of human and technological sound: sounds of a baby opens, then drums with the hi-hat, then the bass, then the singing. what does it mean, i wonder, to have these three songs, these odes to love and rapture paced differently, announced differently? well.

love song #2, i think, was my date the week after you and i ceased speaking to each other, difficult given the fact that we lived together. the guy told me of how i was beautiful and how he was moved to meet me and pleasantly surprised and how in his entire life he had not imagined the possibility of sitting at a diner with some such dude he just met and - he wasn't out or anything - holding hands with this stranger dude across the table so much so that the waitress brought two spoons when i ordered hot chocolate and ice cream and she asked us how long we'd been together and we'd receive stares and glares from other folks in the diner but were so lost in the conversation and each others' eyes that we did not see what they saw.

you make people do things they don't want to do. i don't mean that in a bad way, just things i never thought about doing, i'm doing with you. right now.

i could not help but feel and know that he was the angel i needed to let me know that i'd done everything i could do in order to make things up to you; i needed to be convinced that i was, indeed, lovable and that i was, indeed, striving and striving and striving to make a life for us both. this fascinating guy had no idea that him saying to me you are beautiful was more than anything because you would say that to me but ceased because life became too complicated and though i tried to hold you and had held you many times and whispered in your ear right before you'd drift that i loved you and meant it? well. you were fatigued with this idea because you constantly had to guard your heart and head because you could no longer believe me so i would not hear that i was beautiful from you. and i needed to hear it because i doubt it too much. i really do. i suppose your distrust of what i'd say about you and how you saved my life with your smile and gave me heaven with your laughter finally lept on me and i was beleaguered likewise.

the baby's inarticulate goo-goo ba goo goo voicings: like me. i was pushed out of the relating with you in such violent fashion as if it were a birth, me born again to some hell, me crying daily because i missed you. and still do. but still. my father called me today and asked me how i was and also have you heard from him? i could not answer because that simple question showed he cared about me. and when he asked me if i heard from you? well. he did not ask where you were. he did not ask what you were doing. he asked if i heard from you and he knows that i'm a musician and that a lot of the shit i've been creating lately has been created in some such relation to your silence so to ask if i'd heard from you was to force me yet again to realize that i'd always want to hear from you, even in the house when id hold you: your voice, your feet on the Pergo wood floors, your singing in the shower, your snoring, your hesitations, your sadness, your joy. of course, my ear has been inclined to hear from you since the day i met you and i have not stopped turning my ear toward the ground to hear, to hear, to hear something, anything, everything from you. have you heard from him? every night. when i dream. when i smell sandlewood and white musk? i hear you. when the fascinating dude said i was beautiful? i heard you...so my father asked me the one question that could make me cry and i cried like the time we sang

i love you, i love you, i love you lord today
because you care for me in such a special way
and yes i praise you, i lift you up, i magnify your name
that's why my heart is filled with praise

as i stood in the front of the church where it seemed that i could simply cry, for the living and the dead, cry. of course, it was the year of my mother's death. it was a mere cry, i suppose. but a simple sort of overwhelming overtook me and i was overcome with grief and joy. it wasn't a hard cry. it was the kind when you just sorta stand or sit baffled, numb to the world, numb to that stream of tears that flows, your breathing slowed and slow. if my heart was filled with praise it was because my eyes filled with tears.

a simple cry. a simple overwhelming.

and it was then that we announced to the church, through our gestures, that we were together. you came up to me, walking down from the pulpit, and though some suspected where you were going, no one knew, including, most of all, you. you walked to me. stood in front of me. grabbed my hands. stretched our arms as if we were on some cross (and, honestly, we were crucified by at least some of them soon after). took your arms. wrapped them around me. bent my elbows. against your chest. took my hands. covered my face. cried. cried long streams of tears, almost silently, barely audible. but you heard. and the rest of the singers. sung. but you heard my tears. and whispered in my ears. shh, baby. shh. yes. in front of them all. and i cried more. and a bit louder. still. shh, baby. shh. and you. held me. me. in front of them. all. some gasped. some gagged. some glorified. finally, they knew. they knew! shh, baby. shh.

you held me like that for at least ten minutes. some left the church that very moment when they realized our pastor wasn't throwing us out but was smiling. at least that's what you said. all i remember of the actual experience was the feeling in my stomach of you being there. and the feel of your breath on my ear, whispering your spirit and life into me. have i heard from you? hell no. i wish i could hear from you. like that. well.

that's why i cried today when my father asked me that simple question. i want to hear from you. i want to be between songs. is that not what love song #2 is in the sequence? that middling position? it's like she pressed pause between 1 and 3, and in that infinitesimal space, crack, fissure, she gave us all this sound of life and love and baby and bass. between 1 and 3 is a world of birth and technology and breath and trouble. so yes. the fascinating guy was an angel that you sent. you must have sent him to me. gave him the dialogue you wanted to say. because though i know he meant what he said as his thoughts, it was also from some other such place that he did not know existed, that he did not know was possible. his telling me of my beauty was him feeling something deep in him that was quickened. but what he felt in him was the connection i had to you, given in my eyes and our held hands, deposited in him. what i mean is that it is impossible for anyone to meet me and not know you. i carried you. across thresholds, in dreams, in my heart. always. still do.

my breath and song and conversation? it is the giving of you with each enunciation. you have not left me. your breath is still in me, animating me. those tears today were my recognition that though i wanna be done with you, i cannot be. and possibly never will be. and this is not pathological. it is the brutal honesty of the human necessity to be in relation. the bass lets us get into it. lets us descend the gap between notes by the constant vibrational qualities. and i do not feel bad for crying. i remember that sermon you preached - when can i cry? - and was more moved by that than anything. i will be Tamar and will disallow your silence to be my Absalom. i can only but say i miss you. and cry for you. when can i? now, i suppose. come. hold me as you did that day. or something

a.-

moth's powder (12.thisfriday.04)

2010-12-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

12.thisfriday.04

dear moth's powder,

i almost critiqued myself for writing you too many letters. i almost pressed pause, stopping myself from ever again noticing the picture album still in my house. that pain was much too real to actually want to inflict a sorta violence against myself by thumbing through pictures and pictures and pictures of you and i and us and me and we and all that togetherness with family and friends and dog and... but mostly, i was going to write you to say something almost like (akin to?): i know that i've taken a rather romantic view of of the pentecostalism of my past. but i then regulated that regulation (would that be a full out and out deregulation? like a double negative? or would it be a doubling, making it more insistent, more intentional, more intense? you know, when black folks wanna do something, they say it twice: i'm ready to eat eat, emphasis, of course, on the first eat. unsure. still.)

the point is that i stopped short because i realized that romance and sentiment and sensuousness are deeply intimate partners, typically denigrated under the general rubric of the excessive and far too emotive. sorta like how, when growing up, one - some, really - of my non-pentecostal friends would say to me something like it don't take all that, meaning that our praise and prayers were far too loud and uncontrolled and getting happy shouldn't likewise mean getting sweaty. well. it's as if we weren't ever thinking about what we were doing but were merely acted upon: by the music, by the sounds. it's as if we weren't intentional but certainly given to romance. it's as if there was nothing in us that was making and creating and constituting but that we were empty vessels waiting to be acted upon. we breathe in, but never exhale.

of course you know the romantic era ended with the age of reason because reason is so reasonable and enlightenment so regulative and romance too sexual or some shit. it's like how we can enjoy champagne but not kool-aid because the latter is linked to folks who are thought to have very little judgment for pure taste in the first place. as if they can't judge and have little reason to be reasonable and thus, are not. that which is thought romantic is supposedly purely feeling and feelings whoa, whoa, whoa feelings are somehow less thoughtful. so i was gonna go through this entire self-critical critique of how i romantically remember the past and how i romantically think about our romance gone awry but then i listened to some music and refused the regulation of the pleasures i would so enjoy by thinking pleasantly about the past. well. i got into the music. i wanted to taste it: the chords and melodies; i wanted to step into the time and the rhythm and explore.

i'm finally cool with romance and i mean romance in the fullest sense (pun intended), in the capacites we all have to know through our senses and the robust deregulation of the relegation of this kinda knowledge, this sorta experience. remember how we'd lay in bed all night talking until three or four, you falling asleep mid-sentence in my arms as i spooned you only to wake up an hour later and begin again? me, right behind you, my left leg covering your lower body, my left arm on your stomach, your left arm right under mine, your left hand on top of mine almost getting a bit too balmy so we'd separate our hands and move our arms a bit so that cool air could surface between us because - and you know this - holding someone for a while is both beautiful and hot, the humidity emerging between bodies so close that between seemed to be a ruse.

you'd wake up and finish that sentence and you'd not even have to look at me and not even open your eyes and barely begin the sentence again before i was reawakened and reengaging and taking my index finger and running it along your arm and taking my head and moving it even closer and deeper still into your collar bone so i could hear you. i wanted to get into you as much as the music. to make you feel what i felt inside me. to transfer the butterflies that i thought about and saw in the pit of my stomach anytime i heard your voice. it never changed. it never changed. it has not changed. i want to hear your voice and still imagine it in the same ways that i'd always imagined it and even as i sit here and write to you i begin to feel that same way again and you'd smell a bit musky with that cologne and oil you wore and i'd take my finger and slip it in your briefs as you talked and play with the hair right down there, twirling and twirling my finger and around and around and making a bit of a knot and then taking the hair and smoothing it out again. and i would respond to your speaking but my eyes would be closed too and

that was the romance. and for the assholes who think there's no knowledge produced or created or experienced in that movement of bodies into each other - fucking could not do what our voices and laying almost still did, though it certainly approached it, yes, indeed - but we learned and taught and dissented while spooning. something about the small moans and shortnesses of breath and the snoring and the smells of our bodies - once sweaty, once humid, once balmy, now cooled and held - and the taste of your ear in my mouth and your lips with the ketchup from the fries we shared earlier that night. remember that night? those nights? what happens when we remember things as sense and not through them? i don't want that feeling to go. neither do i want that knowledge.

and i think that is the point of taking it to church or taking it just a little higher or by another saying that announces the vamp, let's take it home. it is the fact that there is something there that can be taken, that has life and breath and spirit, that there is something carried, held previous to the giving of breath as song that also curiously enough remains after the last chord and note and hand clap recedes. so yes. isn't that the music, the sequestering and organizing of sound that we hear? the song is an object that we use to reach things, to convey things. we turn our voices into objects, we instrumentalize our bodies for the master's use to sing and dance and pray. well. and with each breath - singing just makes this explicit - two things: we enunciate and articulate the weight and depth and materiality of the thing carried; and we are the weight and depth and materiality being carried. when we take it, we announce that there is something there that compels this movement, some spirited object that resists being stilled and stilling.

the looming question is: what is the it so carried? well. the sorta simplistic answer would be the note, the key, the tonal center and i suppose those would all be correct. but what if we're talking about our romance and our laying in bed while spooning? what would be taking that it higher? how could we take it, to know that it needs to be carried while concurrently carrying us to some something? i think it would be that insistently unnameable presence and feeling - butterflies? effects of butterflies? - that confounds the senses while heightening their receptivity. maybe an ongoing openness to openness.

or something. i don't know. what i do know is that we have not even begun to explore possibility. it's like how a lot of folks think the earth is the only place in the vastness of space that can have life, or that life can only be found and sustained when it looks like what we think it should look like. i wouldn't be surprised if some scientist somewhere in the world sometime in some future found that there were other ways to live - biologically - that simply had not been considered. like, what if arsenic could produce life (because, you know, we only think carbon-based things are "alive"). i only ask because i'm all into thinking about what music would mean if there were other forms of life, other modes of being alive. shit. don't black folks testify to the fact that life happens in what is thought as impossible environments? like in Cabrini Green or some shit. people eat and drink kool-aid and go to church and fuck all of the time in places that are thought to be nothing other than zones of death. well. people, i guess, should stop being so rational as to not feel. anyway. if we just pay attention to the music. well. then we'd know something about breathing and moving and living. when the time is right, i will tell you exactly how i feel.

until then,

a.-

moth's powder (12.firstfriday.04)

2010-12-02T17:53:00.000-08:00

12.firstfriday.04

dear moth's powder

what is it about modulation, about taking it higher, about, what Mahalia'd sing as the tendency to want to move on up a little higher? think about it. of the many songs i have directed or played, we would want to take a song just a little higher, just a little higher, just a little higher, continually moving up the scale, recalibrating our voices, rewriting the possibilities of the song by way of stretching our vocal cords and widening our mouths and with each successive key change and release of a whooooo! just after we'd "land" in the new key. well. i think by now you're starting to get a sense for how i think about music and sound as locational and sorta maybe like literal places that listeners inhabit. and no, you have not written back and no, i haven't sent these letters to you so no, you don't know of their existence though something tells me - some presence, some haunting, some haint - that you still know that i'm writing to you and thinking about you and each letter that i think and breathe and write to you becomes just another such version of me taking it just a little higher, revising the concepts and ideas and dreams and visions of you i have with each subsequent writing that would give you maybe a bit more knowledge of the one whom you said you knew so much that you could not stand to any longer know. well.

we begin songs in one key, kinda like how we dance and shout, trying to withhold energy until the vamp, the drive. and then, finally, we let them have it: we give it a go, we exert all that we have within us. modulation occurs in some such songs, making audible migration and movement and motion, modulation as that sonorous refusal of stillness and being stilled (though, of course, being stilled is merely another "movement"). and the audience sits - well, by the time of the modulations, probably no longer sitting but is moved as the choir is moved - so the audience stands and is moved and amazed and surprised and enraptured by the heights achieved that were not initially imaginaned. and there's something rather sensuous about it. something a bit erotic. it's in the ways taking it higher brings all of the attention to our wearied bodies. though our voices are worn out to the point of exhaustion - but right there, at that broken edge, when the voice reemerges with new vigor and life and love - we sing and go higher and higher and higher, centering the very bodies that would be so discounted and dismembered in our theologies. many of our christian theologies are - i don't have to tell you, i know - really restrictive about what our bodies can and cannot do. i mean, we both know that pentecostalism was disdained and thought occult initially because of the focus on embodied holiness and sanctification, and because of the dancing and shouting and clapped hands and stomped feet and rolling on floors and sweat, the sweat, the sweat and they didn't even have air conditioning then, so it was likely very much also a smelly experience. can you imagine a religious tradition that not only allowed for the senses to be attacked by corporeal praise but desired this assault? well.

when we sing and we go higher, the congregation hears the voices...and more. and the more is the way they look at what the voice does: to the mouths opened wider than they should be and the lips that quiver and the chins that quake and the necks twist with veins protruding and with the sometimes wagging, sometimes prostrate tongues, and with the sweaty brows and foreheads. no one can keep their eyes closed with all that modulation. so the audience, of course, must attend to the visual aspects of such a - literally - moving sonic performance.

so indeed, at least in western musics, this thing called modulation is the changing, moving - nay, transitioning - from one tonal center to another. and the notion of a tonal center is all about inhabitation and marooning, about staying and leaving, about the constant movement and migration and flight, what a friend's friend called the dislocated African's pursuit of a meta-voice. it also makes present the fact that each of us has the capacity within us to move over and above and away from that which would keep up regulated and relegated, that which would keep us bound and beleaguered. modulation renounces one tonal center for another, does not seek rest but rather, seeks occasion for new words and new worlds. modulation is the chance, the encounter, the moment. modulation is event.

i don't know. when i think of modulation, and certainly when i hear it, i think of the choir arriving to a new key together and that arrival is but a short inhabitation in that space or field of epistemological exploration of the sonic zone, to, let's say, have a look (again, by way of throwing the voice) around at the new digs so to speak, the new space opened up by way of some such new tonal center. but then, of course, arriving at that tonal center cannot last too long but some such director will - exuberantly, probably a bit too excitedly - take their hands, form two fists while, with their thumbs stretched giving the choir some sorta thumbs up motion; or take that one hand (for me, it was always the right hand) and point straight up, stretching from the arm through the index finger pointed, and breathe all yoga-like air into my finger or whatever - letting the group know it was time, yet again, to take it just a little higher. and i think, most profoundly, is the notion of arrival because it does not denote final destination but it certainly indexes that you've left somewhere, some place or space from which you sought release. well. each modulation as the event of arrival? can we modulate together? i'd like to arrive...with you. i carried you in that dream after i arrived to the house. we arrived in the bedroom after i carried you across thresholds. and we arrived to libidinous joys - ok, we ejaculated and released and screamed after moaning and grinding and fucking, yes - after we arrived together in the bed. we arrived at heartbreak when joy ceased and our visages created more turmoil than butterflies. but we do not need to stay any there but can move to some such other event. grab my hand. let's go.

when every voice is a bit of a fugitive, on its run away from normative function and form, well, modulation becomes but yet another occasion to critique the general field of normativity. if, as Arthur Jafa might argue, every note in black singing is inherently unstable, given to caprice, is bent before its own being bending, is worried previous to the occasion, well, then every taking it a bit higher is the possibility for critiquing the sonic space just evacuated and escaped. similar to how, with melisma, several notes break the syllable when sung such that the notes are both that which break and that which are broken concurrently, well, modulation both moves from while moving to (and too). it's kinda like how Harriet Tubman escaped Eastern Shore, Maryland, arrived in New York and was, for all intents and purposes free but returned to that very place that enslaved her only to bring others. freedom for her was fundamentally social but it was also - excuse my obfuscatory nature - modulatory. constantly, freedom was being enacted by movement toward the spaces - New York, Canada, above Mason-Dixon Lines, etc. - where freedom could be enacted. double movements, we could say. sorta like how being a runaway could very well mean (and did for someone like Harriet Jacobs in the crawlspace; or Henry "Box" Brown in a box) not running at all, but being stilled. sometimes, i suppose, stilled movement migrates just as effectively.

i've only once heard modulation that occurred by way of declining the scale rather than - excuse my desire to sound witty - scaling the scale. and there, too, was the element of surprise and joy by each step downward. well. what is it to be able to talk about reaching for heaven but not hell? if your silence has taught me anything, it has been that i should continue to revise and restate and recalibrate and that i could reach down, into that seemingly empty sonic space to get something from you. that silence, of course, is putative. that silence, of course, is noisy as hell. so i'm descending its reaches while, at the very same time, moving just a little higher. so this is me, taking it just a little higher in hopes. in hopes. i'm tryin to steal away, steal away home, because, well, i ain't got long to stay here. gonna sing a new song in a new home sooner than you will soon think. some call it nirvana. but i'm not there yet. i still want you. and my wanting you is evinced both by my writing you and my refusal to send to you. gotta figure out a different means of communicating. maybe if i ascend the Empire State Building, sing you a song from the rooftop and throw you a paper airplane that reads something like "say you'll go with me?" would that be high enough?

who knows.

a.-

moth's powder (12.firsttuesday.04)

2010-12-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

12.firsttuesday.04

dear moth's powder,

remember that show Out All Night that starred Patti Labelle a few years ago? the show was about a woman named Chelsea - played by Ms. Labelle herself - owner of a nightclub "Club Chelsea." in the show, Chelsea was a singer with a former career in "the industry" and, as such, the nightclub would feature various live performances. (really, the show was merely an excuse for Ms. Labelle to sing on television weekly; i am not complaining!) there was one episode i remember in particular: she sang the song you are my friend and the song is some such inspirational, secular (then, i would've said, non-gospel and thus, worldly) tune about being friends and having love and sharing it with the world. the song slipped into words that were almost familiar to any gospel ear, so much so that my father was excited and possibly on the verge of saying that Ms. Labelle was not only showing that she'd grown up in the church but that - and he'd say this with a bit of enthusiasm right in the bottom of his voice, restrained a bit - you know she knows the lord, right? the words in the song i've been looking around and you were here all the time resonated with him but it was also the appearance of Ann Nesby - famed for singing with the gospel-esque (but certainly, not gospel) group Sounds of Blackness. well. Ms. Nesby and Ms. Labelle screaming and wailing and walking the floor and waving hands and stomping feet was as reminiscent of "church" as it could get for my father, so he was pleased and because he was pleased i was happy. something happened right there after the song ended when Ms. Nesby threw her hand up and almost said - almost but restrained herself from saying - hallelujah!

and i've always tried to figure out that moment, that break when things transition from one mode to another. it's like when a gospel singer or group - think the Clara Ward Singers or Shirley Caesar or even Ricky Dillard - is performing at a decidedly non-gospel awards ceremony and they say something at the beginning like let's take it to church which means you're gonna hear someone wail in the microphone, there will be an organ filling the air with sustained and minor chords and arpeggios and there might be a tambourine struck here and there, now and again. pretty much, taking it to church indexes some sort of building of tension sonically in order to be released after a break. you also hear this when people are dancing and shouting at church. at first, folks may be a bit polite with their dancing or may just stand and clap. but the music builds and swells and builds and swells and then - pop! - snare drum struck and the organist grinds, sliding up or down the keys, breaking: and the people fill the instrumental gap with the sounds of their feet and their voices and their clapping. the break is the moment of encounter, the moment of the ever so faintly after the tension built exceeds and overflows occurs.

or it can be much simpler. like when singing congregational songs during the testimony portion of a church service, when we go from one tune to the next because they have the same form, the same chord structure. going from this is the day to in the name of jesus (we have the victory) to victory is mine to bless that wonderful name of jesus to there is power, power, wonder working power in the blooooood of the laaaaamb... well. you get the point.

the point? at least in the social world and social life of the curious churches in which i've been a member or which i've been a musician, there is a much more general disposition toward transition and disposition seems to be bound up with dispossession. in the transition - after breaks, or from song to song - one descends and ascends simultaneously, one gets down by going higher. that is, one creates centripetal and centrifugal space in which to inhabit in the tiniest cracks and crevices, easily discounted when one isn't given to nuance. getting down, going higher, descending and ascending in small space wears and abolishes the limits of location itself, lays bare the ruse of boundaries. and this social world teaches, if anything, self-critical nuance and attention to detail. to have a disposition towards transition is, to me at least, the realization that transition is the relinquishment of position and location, it is movement on the move that is constantly moving and never arriving. it is the present participle (to get all linguistic on you, apologies) that makes real philosophic contemplation of temporality and being. i mean, what was most intriguing about the transition from song to song was the aspect of and ability to be - especially as kids, particularly as kids - surprised, to be inspired and struck with awe and wonder.

it's like that time i heard someone leading praise and worship sing

we worship christ our lord / we worship christ our lord
we lift our hands to him today / we worship christ our lord

and transitioned to

we worship christ our lord / who is worthy to be praised and adored
so we lift up holy hands with one accord / we worship christ our lord

well. not just a surprise but also the pure joy and beauty of mixing the second song - blessed be the name of the lord - with the first to create something new from something old at the point of transition. something i read recently said something like: the great thing about black church musicians is that they had to simultaneously fulfill a role normally thought only reserved for "composers" in western classical music. one must be adept with a range of sonic ideas, chord structures and progressions in order to cohere with singers. but one must be able to do this while learning and creating at the moment of performance. well. this is not just a musician thing. this singer created a new song from splicing two old songs. and the congregation, as was i, pleased. and he was pleased we were pleased. and we all emerged from the situation differently.

of course, you're wondering what this has to do with anything and why i'm writing to you. this is connected, i think at least in the way i've been thinking lately, to how i've stopped calling you a "friend." at this point, as i've written you already, my family knows we are no longer together so they've stopped referencing you - god bless their hearts - as my "friend" (of couse, they meant "partner" but had not the language for it and probably would've obscured it had i insisted otherwise; but they didn't know how Foucaultian they were really being, you know, friendship as a way of life and whatnot). but i had still been saying to people - new people i've been meeting that i'd love to replace the space in my heart you still have (and i am not afraid to admit this) - but i've been saying to them oh, i have a friend who lives... well, you know where you live, so that's not of import. what i finally heard myself say one day without realizing was the surprise in my voice when i transitioned to some such other idea, some otherwise than friend for you: my former partner lives... and i startled myself, to say the least. then i realized. i do not and never did i want you to be my friend. if i really do think Foucault was right, it was in that he said that we should work at becoming and not being some such thing called friends. there is a world of difference in that present participle and that thing as (already and only) present.

and if this is the demonstration of the tendency of the disposition toward transition it is by way of dispossession: i never owned you, you were not my possession and my love for you could never hold you down, nor should it have. dispossession is a concept of relationality, it is not what someone is, it is what we do. but we let things go only in order to receive. we, as my friend Fred reminded me today, exhale in order to inhale, we are poor in spirit in order to disperse that which is in us so that we may constantly receive more. if we do not engage in dispossession, we will never have anything, we will cease to be. try holding your breath. it won't work. gotta give up that shit that we want the most. but giving it up, relinquishment allows for renewedness and renewal, for refreshment and is this not the chorus, the refrain? dispossession and breathing, it seems to me at least, are bound together. well? well, indeed.

breathe easy,

a.-