Dream

Dream It's 1:00 in the morning on a Saturday night in the early '90's and my friend Jerry and I are at a bus bench on 5th Street in Miami Beach, outside the back door of a club. I hesitate to say "Mardi Gras atmosphere," but there's a *bunch* of people around. They're alternately packed so tightly that I see them shoulder to shoulder surge past us, heading eastward toward the ocean, and simply bunched together in groups, leaving us room to step into the street and be demonstrative in our speech, waving our arms in the air as warranted by the importance of what we're saying. We are--everyone is--pleasantly intoxicated, loud, boisterous.

It's hot, of course it is, sweat is part of the deal here on Miami Beach. It's noisy. Music is blaring through that back door, people are talking loudly, some are screaming.

We're gonna see David Bowie, we know it. He's gonna show up in the crowd, and Jerry has some business with him, but I've got an Important Question for the guy.

And suddenly there he is. David Bowie in the flesh, the Thin White Duke. He's wearing loafers, and a tan jacket, and Jerry steps up to him and respectuflly starts speaking to him. Then it's my turn and I stammer a bit, but he's listening to what I'm saying and I ask him how many shows he did in Miami Beach in the early days with Mick Ronson . . . and I'm tongue-tied a bit but I pull it out . . . and Martin Rev and John Cale. And Bowie corrects me, "no . . . John Cale was much later, but I did play many many shows here back in the day."

And I'd wanted more from him, I wanted the nitty-gritty of those early, crucial, Miami Beach days, but clearly Bowie hasn't got time for that. He was polite, but he's got to be moving on. So he takes off his jacket and hands it to me, and slips out of his loafers. I put his jacket on, but I'm flush with footwear; the loafers sit there on the curb.

Jerry and I keep talking there in front of the bus bench, not even about just having met David Bowie. I take out some Nyquil tablets from my pocket and twist the pills so that the gooey medicine inside the capsules drips into Bowie's loafers there on the curb. Jerry sees me do this, then he pulls out some Nyquil capsules from *his* pockets, and does the exact same thing.

Some time later, Bowie is back. He needs to put his shoes on. He does and it's clear he knows his feet are now all sticky with gel acetaminophen. Without saying anything, he walks across the sidewalk and as he passes Jerry standing there, he farts loudly. He starts walking away, but I chase him down and tell him I need to give him his jacket back. So he says, yeah you're right, and I hand him his jacket.

Later Jerry's wife shows up and we're telling her what happened and Jerry tells her it's only the second time somebody had farted on him in that way, the other time it had been my delinquent crack addict friend Jack.

Sheer Poetry

I dreamt

Of a longhair cat

His paws tracing sleepy cycloids

While

 
Dreaming of a

Shimmery goldfish,

Which

 
Encased in its transparent

Sphere

Anxiously swishing

 
Dreamt about a world

In which

It Could Dream

 
Of me.

Today, September 3, is Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones' 67th birthday, and isn't that coincidental, as I've been watching Danny Boyle's Pistol over the last week or so, and it's really hard to dim the light that Sid & Nancy shines on my soul, but for the most part, I've really enjoyed it.

It does seem a little off kilter to me to focus on Jones, when Lydon so naturally seems the primary in that particular solar system, but what do I know? I wasn't there, and it was Jones' book that Boyle tapped.

And I can't really take Lydon's disapproval very seriously, 'cause Johnny didn't like Sid & Nancy, either--and I *know* that movie's great.

On The Guardian: "‘Better late than never’: how Brian Eno and David Byrne finally laid a musical ghost to rest"

Check this out, on the eternally-relevant My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, from my favorite liberal British news -site.

Not as interesting as if, say, they had reinstated "Qu'ran," but OK, cool.

What's funny though is that every time this album comes again to the attention of the musical moment (and it seems to return every decade or so, like cicadas or the Sunspot Maximum), the terms "cultural imperialism," or "cultural appropriation" seem to come up as well, with Byrne and Eno all too willing to play the cheerful but guilty pilferers for whichever journalist it is rolling the tape this time around.

And good for Dunya Younes, I'm glad she's pleased with the way it turned out, and I sure as fuck want to see her get paid, but for me, as a white American dude living at the ass end of a subtropical peninsula, at the ass end of a period of global domination, I have to say that the only reason I even care about the music being stolen is the identity of the thieves.

Again, I want artists to get paid, but for me, as a fan of whiteboys like myself but with guitars, to pretend that Lebanese "mountain singing" as they called it but really Beirut pop, matters at all to me would be fairly disingenuous. I care about the sounds because they were selected by Eno (and to a lesser extent, Byrne). They are important to me not because they were recorded in 1972 Lebanon, but because they were appropriated in 1979 London.

And I seriously don't think there's anything wrong in admitting that.

So I sure as fuck don't feel guilty about it, and I don't think Eno or Byrne should, either.

Associated with a post on the same album I wrote in 2012

RIP Alan White, drummer for Yes, I couldn't possibly not say. He wasn't the most iconic drummer in the band's history, or the best, or the most famous, or the most eloquent, or . . . . if you know what I mean. But unlike the guy who fills in the blank on those other categories, Alan White most definitely, at all times, wanted to be in Yes.

And there's sure the fuck nothing wrong with that.

Plus Plastic Ono Band as the discography padder, who else in prog played on something like it?

You know what I wish I had right now? That $1.99 cutout of Ramshackled I bought at Specs 40 years ago.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor at The Beacham, Orlando, FL April 28, 2022

Powerful show, if only an hour and 48 minutes long. Not a word was spoken by the band to the audience, speaking of pretense.

The finale was a half-hour version of "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III," of which I've written in these pages previously.

I guess they still haven't figured out they'd been punked. Or--and I should mention the possibility--they knew the guns and the poem was all bullshit.

Anyway, it was a fucking orchestral treat, eight part toccatas and fugues, people, and I was glad I didn't have to hear them ask me to support Hamas, or anything.