Music is the universal language,

capable of enjoyment regardless of whether one knows the language in question or not. Language is secondary to music, as it is to film. Writers don’t write music, and they don’t write screenplays. People ask me what I talk about with my wife as if the eastern reality must be incomprehensible to a westerner. You don’t have to read much Chomsky to realize that life is very similar regardless of the language(s) involved; and I’m a Sapirian. I do think that language influences one’s reality in the same way that a computer program or operating system or even your search engine influences your computing output. Certainly they’re both right. The fact that the geographically contiguous and culturally similar ‘Pueblo’ Indians speak not only different languages, but languages from four different language families only two of which are remotely related says something. The fact that their reality is (or at least WAS) far different from all other language phyla says something else. To describe as ‘human’ a creature without language is almost unthinkable.

Of course in every thing is the seed of the ‘other’,

like thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, or more like fashion du jour, and the 60’s and 70’s were no different. No sooner had psychedelic band-oriented rock captured the airwaves, than it was trumped by an expanded singer-songwriter acoustic-folk style that it itself had replaced only a few years before and an improved blues-rock format dominated by jazz-inspired technical virtuosity. This in turn was couped by gender-bending glam-and-glitter rock turning to disco when left to rise and baked. Enter a revitalized cosmic-cowboy style of country music and the re-discovery of bluegrass and some feel-good laid-back island-rock from Jamaica and you’ve just about covered all the easily accessible options for adaptation to album-oriented rock. Of course commercial singles-oriented rock just kept jingling along mindlessly in the background all along. Despite the soundings from apparently different corners, all this happened relatively simultaneously and the net result was money, Big Business, which, when combined with the corporate takeover of the film industry, re-defined the entertainment industry. Hollywood suddenly went global, with ramifications still felt to this day and probably far into the future. When Thais think of American music, they still think of it as they first received it, with the Eagles, John Denver, and the BeeGees listlessly ruling the charts, and Bob Marley still poster-boy number one for the disaffected. Still, the system worked, and antithesis saved the day from utter boredom. The punks and new wavers came along and of course said, “Fuck all this,” and started banging out kick-ass rock-and-roll once again, with a nod to the Beat poets thrown in for good measure, as if that were the one hand left to be played. There is a God.

EmptyVee

MTV is rapidly evolving from illustrated songs to Hollywood shorts, complete or incomplete with ‘pretty girl singers’ wearing little but shorts, crotch meat for the famished affections. Nevertheless, it’s an opportunity for a new art format. If only someone could see the connection between illustrated songs and sonically sweetened pictures, then there might be something there. Of course very few music videos qualify as anything remotely resembling art, while many short films do. Considering how much teen-culture crap serves as filler for music video channels, removing that should leave room for both music and film. The ideal way, certainly, would be to have only the best of both, or maybe the ‘edgiest’, thus bringing the two fields closer together. Considering the dubious trend of using the film industry and music industry to promote each other’s most pathetic commercial instincts, any new creative approach would be welcome. The widespread use of pop songs to decorate movies, regardless of true applicability, is bad enough without the movies now decorating the songs.

EDIT THYSELF

“Edit thyself” is the first commandment of writing and the hardest thing for anyone to do with his own work. We love our own work as our own children and hate to cut anything out. More than that, it’s just hard to look at one’s own work objectively, even harder to toss things out, knowing you might never get them back. That’s the feeling you get when the computer goes dead and you haven’t saved your work. It’s a question of negative space and positive space. Are you creating something where nothing previously existed or are you chipping away at the whole potato, just to reveal the precious sculpture within? Is the potato half full or half empty? Are you creating something out of nothing or are you merely clearing away the rubbish so that the diamond can shine through? As a child aficionado of popular music, I lamented the fact that most of the appropriate themes of life had already been discovered, and that therefore the future of the industry was grim, a sad thought, considering the amount of enjoyment that it’s capable of giving. Such are the vagaries of youth. There is no limit to creativity. Its potential is exponential. The more we create, the more there is to create, stone shards, wood shavings, clay splatters, paint drips, wasted words, all just like the film snips lying on the edit room floor of a life almost too abundant for living.