A Spectacular Guardian of Sleep

"As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep."
-- Guy de Bord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967

Well, hello! I have a blog over here, don't I? Poor little critter has been neglected in the unusual avalanche of spectacle that characterized April and May of a year that has already proven itself a mad Sufi whirl, even before its halfway mark. No, I am not trying to deliberately push the sensual limits, to see what happens to pixelslip if my eyes drink so much they hate themselves in the morning. It wasn't me that gave us a late-April snowstorm knocking full-sized trees down everywhere, mere days before a big corporate personhood forum, which itself was mere days before student immigration walkouts and a Haunted Windchimes performance. And who told Shearwater they could come to the Walnut Room before I'd taken my first breath at the end of that April week? It wasn't me that just happened to place Frightened Rabbit, Heartless Bastards, and Flobots on three successive days in the middle of May, to be followed by Deb Walker's fabulous immigration forum and Bill Sulzman's study group on the Fort Carson Combat Aviation Brigade. (Oh, and ye gods, I forgot Vince D. visiting Colorado between the Deb and Bill events, sampling beers and listening to Smoke Fairies and Laura Marling. The event horizon starts blurring within 72 hours!)

One could always let certain events pass by, but then who would be living the unexamined life then? Or wait... is experiential passion unexamination? Don't ask such questions! Go away son, you make me nervous. There are plenty of bottles of patent elixir left to sell.

I will plead guilty to launching the cartoon version of One Great Big Conspiracy during this time of madness. Yes, Amir Fassad begged to be brought back to life, and what better time than during an oil-spill-German-funding-crisis-Greek-collapse-Icelandic-volcano-Kyrgyz-riot-Thai-boilover-and-Iran-bluster safety dance, all brought to you by Strategic Command? Below is the most recent installment, where Angela Merkel plays the lead role in Clarissa Explains It All.



Now for heaven's sake, don't worry about me out on that there dance floor, this is not a scene from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Leftover poems from poetry month are like overflowing flasks of water, and I've been handed wonderful refreshers from Marilyn Basel and Ruth Mowry and Carolyn Srygley-Moore and Sam Mills and Lee Upton and many more wonderful EMT specialists ready with intravenous sticks if the dancers are too far gone. Not there yet, not close. The dervishes stop reflecting when the spinning pixelslip makes the world fall away, and this particular spring dance made the world grow closer. But now it's time to change partners and do-si-do, which means the smart dancer catches a quick nap under the punchbowl.

I noticed something about deBord's quote at the top of this post. He assumes the spectacle is always a nightmare, yet my recent dreams have been happy and full of grace. The one you'll find sleeping in chains is probably the well-meaning agent of change who expected something that looked like evolution in this particular physical life. Silly rabbit. I told someone the other day, we have been Homer Simpsons for thousands of years, and Homer Simpsons we shall remain. Yeah, I've been touting that "loving universe of shiny things" shtick, and I'm shticking to it. But the shiny things are not all going to display provenient grace at once. In fact, some of them will look pretty durned nasty. But if each turn on the dance floor reveals a flash of grace, the chains have vanished and the spectacle is no longer a bad dream. It is only your underlying soundtrack until the next dance begins. For now, though, careful about spilling the punch, I'm sleeping right below you. I'll be up for another dance after Memorial Day ends.

Unanticipated Renaissance

"I don't know where it came from, it certainly wasn't in the forecast," he told her. "I only feel blessed to be here at this time, in this place."

There were atmospheric disturbances through the summer of 2009, to be sure, little fronts with meta-tags such as Beth Ditto, Lee Upton, Jay Farrar & Ben Gibbard, Florence Welch. But with the jet stream in such a ragged disarray, it was hard to know if these were summer showers or harbingers of things to come.

Somewhere around Thanksgiving, the torrent of prose got serious. Richard Powers' dazzling tribute to ecstatic daily living, Generosity. Jeanette Walls' deliciously tragic Half-Broke Horses. David Byrne's trips with his bicycle. Barbara Kingsolver's best novel yet, The Lacuna. Patti Smith's beautiful memoir of life with Robert Mapplethorpe. Spring book lists show no signs of slackening.

In late January, the musicians joined in. Xiu Xiu's Dear God I Hate Myself. Joanna Newsom's triple-disc, two-hour tribute to Victorian courtesan Lola Montez. Quasi's chaotic American Gong. Shearwater's memorial to the refugees from the Bikini Atoll. Local Natives' high harmonies. Tindersticks' turn to cowboy living. Vampire Weekend's turn to covert-agent living. The triumphant return of Gil Scott-Heron to the spoken word. Vibracathedral Orchestra's massive two-hour raga dances in six parts. Robert Pollard. Magnetic Fields. Laura Veirs. Retribution Gospel Choir. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. The last Jack Rose before his untimely death. The farewell kisses from Yellow Swans. And plenty of clouds on the horizon bearing names like Liars and Flobots.

The media hasn't paid much attention to a flowering of unprecedented proportions under the spring rain, maybe because it's difficult to discern any particular theme like punk, grunge, Latin American surrealism, whatever. The one unifying theme I see is the integrity and uncompromising position of the artist. This is not a renaissance designed for the benefit and convenience of consumer or patron. The books are complex packages not well-suited to either ADHD attention spans or electronic e-readers. The musical compositions are often an hour long or better, demanding a return to the old concept-album format, and ruthlessly denying being compressed into digital file formats. Gauntlets have been thrown down, and I will be eagerly awaiting to see if visual arts, film, dance, etc. follow the lead of prose and sound.

We can argue endlessly as to why this happened now - ongoing economic crisis? A move from below against digital homogenization? Not important. What is important is that you are present at the creation, watching one hundred flowers bloom at this moment, in this place.