Aventurina King

Yesterday night, I went to see David Torn playing in 55BAR.

I equate the experience with listening to Theolonious Monk records.  Theolonious Monk is, to any jazz fan, a legend / genius / god etc. . .  Musicologists have analyzed his improvisations and gaped at the effortless complexity of his chord modulations and progressions.

I, in turn, tend to cringe.  My connection to art is over-simplistic and narrow.  It is emotion.  But emotions, apparently, are the wrong key to Theolonious Monk, and they are the wrong key to David Torn’s improvisations.  Their music is an intellectual delicacy.

So here goes my attempt at thinking.

David Torn, whose boisterous laugh and funky head nods don’t quite match the white hair on his head, played his guitar, nestled in a thicket of heavy gear, and flanked by a swift-sticked percussionist, a synth player and a towering saxophonist.  For most of the one hour gig, the saxophonist clutched onto the lead with a bogged-down version of Miles Davis. 

Beneath the saxophone’s nasal scale, David Torn forcefully coaxed ”magic”(as the woman in front of me at the bar yelled in her friend’s ear) out of his electric guitar and more so the huge stash of machinery with which he distorted his sounds.  This man-guitar-machine symbiosis originated interesting “textures”, ranging from rich and swamp-like moans and electric screeches to compact rock-hard spurts.

This was all punctuated by a frequent and enthusiastic “Wow!” from the giant beside me.  He was moving his arms and legs in cramped arrythmic motion and looked vaguely like the saxophone player.  I still haven’t figured out who he was wowing.

I was surprised to find myself laughing along with everybody else yesterday night at the Happy Ending Music and Story Series.  It wasn’t because I expected the gigs to be bad, but because this was the first time I attended those more artsy and articulate shows in downtown New York called “readings”.

It was rather low key, except for a husky doorman at the entrance.  The ceiling lights were red bleaching into purple, there were red velvet benches spreading into the wall and small stub-like purple leather seats.  An atmospheric gradient of darkness made it difficult to make out the figures at the back.  There was no smoking aloud, and despite the lights and the number of people, the air currents sent chilly spells down my back.

I was inappropriately seated on the floor listening to the first three songs like a child in Kindergarten.  The singer and guitarist was Katell Keineg.  She played and sang at the same time.  Her voice was throaty, but controlled, a bit on the airy side when it soared into the clouds.  She strummed her guitar as if there was nothing else.  I would say conventionally, she wasn’t extremely talented, but I liked it.  It felt human, and listening to her music, and the perfectly articulated Irish?-accented curvature of her words, I felt it must have been cool to be her.  To squeeze five syllables in the last blossom of your breath, and make a refrain out of one name.

Amanda Stern (the eternal curator and host of these evenings) ushered her out and ushered in the readers with circus announcements that they were all in love with Amanda Stern, and that she had caught rabies from making out with the microphone.

Three readers: Scott Snyder, Deb Olin Unferth, Adam Haslett.

After coming out of the show, I still felt it was possible for me to become a professional writer. But I know I was fooled.  The first two readings were funny and deceitfully simplistic, meaning they were minutely and expertly wired.  And the third, performed by a nervous Pulitzer prize finalist would have blown me away if I had only read it myself. 
I noted with a professional nod how the first reading uncovered the psychological layers of the narrator in just a few fleeting comments. 

Example (paraphrased): “I spent my summers looking at a farm of fat kids near by, and with my high technology binoculars and high-perched position, I could see the flab on their bodies….(a long description of the fat kids sweating off their fat.”  There’s something wrong with someone buying binoculars and building a tree house to look at children trying to shake off their obesity; weirder though is the matter of fact-ness, the facility with which the narrator switches his focus off of himself and onto these children.  Clever marketing, now I actually want to buy his short story collection and read it.

(What’s with the design?  I downloaded a new set of paintbrushes for Adobe Photoshop and attempted to recreate Happy Ending Picasso style.  Discuss!)
 

My first article in the Asia Times.