July 13, 2014

July 13, 2014

“Truth is Marching In” by Albert Ayler is one of the great recordings ever, because it displays a certain amount of chaos, yet it contains itself in a melody that reminds me of my childhood.  Perhaps from a Shirley Temple film, but one imagined not actually seen.  The conflict between melody and noise is something that I can only listen to nowadays.  This morning I was watching the bombings in Gaza, and I noticed the beauty of the night, or the darkness and seeing flashes of light all of a sudden.  The camera was stationary, but one got a bird’s eye view of the landscape and you can’t see the buildings go down, or people being harmed, but you do see flashes of light.   It makes me think of Fourth of July fireworks, but with the bombings, the lighting is less aesthetic but somewhat more beautiful in its starkness.

The after-effects of destruction is never good.  The rubble is the hangover from the joy and high of destruction being committed the night or day before.  The one reason I go back to music is to see destruction and beauty on the same playing field.   It’s a tennis match, but there is no winner or loser, it is just the pleasure of the game being played.   For whatever reasons I don’t have that ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’ gene in my DNA, I simply like to pass the time, in its most pleasurable way.   Life as an endless loop can be very much a nightmare, but if one added a certain amount of tension in the way one lives their life, it gives moments of a rise and of course what rises must eventually come down.    To be stuck on repeat and go through one’s life as a movie one has seen over and over again, is truly not a life.  I think of Bob Crane’s endless amounts of film footage that he apparently shot himself of having sex with various women.  One time is fun, twice is dirty, and endless amount of footage becomes wallpaper.  War and its coverage in the various forms of media are that way as well.  I have seen so many detailed images of death from bombings that it becomes itself pointless.  I feel numb.  Yet I can admire the beauty of the flashes as it hits the ground from high above, and knowing that death comes after or at that moment, makes it more profound to me.

The families that will have to deal with the deaths, and will continuously do so, in their own intricate way of dealing with tragedies.  Friends and families will never forget, but over time, the public will soon go on to some other tragedy - because like Bob Crane’s videos, it becomes more of a habit than anything else.  The one thing about obtaining and dealing with power is that the results are not all that important.  The ability to destroy, as well as creating, is something one does, because they can do it.  It is as simple as that.