March 1, 2008
A flying fish out of water
…listen
…about the musicNeither fish nor… foul.
Out of town business trips can be a little tiring, and I seem to be flown somewhere to do something every month these days. Since each voyage involves music and friends on the touchdown end of the plane trip, and since I limit my travel the rest of the month, I have a great time. But I always look for things that make the tedium of the to- and fro- segments amusing and productive.
For the latter, my laptop and Treo are invaluable. Email and web access anywhere, any time, are fun fun fun! There’s always something to read or answer… always always always! And, I like having the chance to keep working (or work at all, if I’ve been putting it off) on essays coming due, or the arc and scope of a new piece that’s in the gestation stage. I sometimes write my compositions by literally writing about them. What I want the music to do. Where a certain section will lead. How a particular passage could be developed.
Adjectives and adverbs and occasional wildly scribbled drawings, too, are all used to move a piece forward to the next step, and when I get back to my studio, I’ve got a nifty map of what I’m doing. That is, until I do it and the music itself chooses to do something entirely different. This actually happens a lot. I often compare composing a piece with walking a border collie on a leash: you think you’re going one way, but the dog thinks otherwise. A kind owner will sometimes allow the dog to choose its own direction and not rein it in too tightly. I try to be kind to my music. Most of the time I think it has me on a leash.
One of the constants on my desk is a stack of CDs received from colleagues, all waiting to be heard with my full attention (I marvel at people who can have music on in the background and still function at other things). It’s often hard to carve out time during a week to sit a listen to a disc, no matter how wonderful, when there’s so much to be done. And many times at home when I’m in the deepest throes of composing, I just can’t listen to other pieces at all because the constant music in my head leaves little room for anything else. I wish the solution for catching up on my list was to take discs or MP3s with me for long trips. But alas, listening to music on a plane is pointless; the jet engine drone devours all the low and mid-range frequencies that the music does. Given the choice, I’ll go with the engine drone, since the lack of one would put an effective stop to any need to listen to those CDs at all.
Last week, instead of taking the 9-seat puddle jumper to Seattle and droning Boeing 737 points beyond, I spent an hour and a half on the ferry from Friday Harbor to Anacortes, a small town on yet another island named Fidalgo that’s connected to the mainland by a bridge. I had left on the 6am boat and my ride east was accompanied by a sunrise that gradually revealed all the islands we passed. From Anacortes, it’s about 2 hours east and south to Seattle. The first third of the drive rolls past farmland framed by snow capped mountain ranges to the south and the east. Glorious.
My trip down was filled with wildlife, right up to take-off. In an open field on the right, thousands upon thousands of snow geese had gathered. The bright white was nearly blinding against the green pasture. A few minutes later on my left, I passed another field with even larger, even whiter migrating birds: trumpeter swans. Hundreds of them. To cap it off, as we neared a Douglas fir by the roadside, my van driver pointed to a full sized adult bald eagle perched only about twenty feet up. What a sight. All of this. A nice morning commute, indeed.
Yet, inspiring as all these birds were, nothing could compare to what I saw from Alaska airlines, above, as my Delta flight taxied to the runway. The Oscars should hand out Best Art Direction awards for aeronautics. I’ve always seen the potential for planes as mural canvasses. Now my dream has come true, at least on a few metal tubes. After wild salmon, can grizzly bears and moose be far behind? The thought of all these animals flinging themselves through the air with the rest of us from one coast to the other makes me smile. In my search for productivity, I am almost always amused.
Glenn Buttkus said,
March 2, 2008 @ 1:48 pm
Divine Miss S.:
Wow, you blogged up quite a posting, full of several segues and creative sortes. The fish out of water is really great, and kudos for Alaska Airlines for doing it; much more interesting than just their old Eskimo face on the other planes. Murals on large objects are always fascinating. The sides of buildings have been willing pallets for eons, going back over a hundred years when Winchester and Tobacco companies would paint the sides of barns, cliffs, huge rocks, and put up those first few billboards. Mural artists are a different sort, for they have to dream and visualize on such a grand scale.
My grandfather, who was a landscape and Western artist taught me how to make a sample drawing and then superimpose a grid over that that would correspond to the mural. In my case it was a scrim curtain for a backdrop for a play, a 50’by 50′ mural of a Mississippi paddle wheeler steamboat. It took me a week, and I recruited several others from the stage crew and supervised their painting of certain “panels”. My grandfather, as a favor to my mother, painted a large living room wall with one of his landscapes, all high mountains and sky, clouds, and incredible detail. After my mother died at a young age (39), my stepfather painted over the mural out of his grief. I never fully forgave him for that.
I love to read about your creative process, Alex. Man, first writing about it, using your talent with language, with prose, to begin to formulate that artistic space the music will soon inhabit, and to compliment that with sketches and drawings–that is off the hook.
So you have helped me to see, to understand, that there is a creative bridge between words, drawings, and your music. When I write poetry, the collie is off the leash full time. I just observe it, and describe its antics. When I was working on my novels, both finished and unpublishe by the way, I worked from an outline, very organized and systematic–but the writing does take its own course, the characters find and reveal their own dialogue. It does take on a life of its own. And in the case of my existential western, BLACKTHORN, after completing one chapter, and re-reading it for the blue pencil, the book, the story just spoke up and said,”I’m finished”. It did not follow my guidelines. It created its own. That is the final line of dialogue spoken by Oscar winning Daniel Day-Lewis as Plainview in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, as well. “I’m finished.”
That drive from Anacortes down past those farms and fields, with the North Cascades as back drop is a wonder; especially on a clear day. Blue sky seems to bring out the best in what we perceive. Especially here in the Northwest, where they are somewhat at a premium. It is like making love to your wife after 15-20 years of marriage; the times are less frequent, but that only makes for a more significant event when it does occur.
Snow geese, trumpeter swans, and a white-capped eagle, all nature’s clues to you that old man winter has just about had his say, that Spring really is in the air and on its way. I love that birds flock to you, to be near you, so often; something there in all that frequency, all those feathers–and you love them, and somehow, even aside from the seed handouts you provide for them at Rancho Shapiro, there is something else going on between you and the only other of God’s creatures that communicate with music. It puts me in mind of one of my older poems. Forgive me for resorting to my lexicon of old memories, but you seem to bring that out in me.
B I R D W O M A N
Feed the birds,
she cried
from the steps of St. Pauls,
five cents a bag.
An old woman,
so old
no one knew when she first came
to sell her bread crumbs
and talk to the birds.
She was wrapped brown
in a shawl of earthen patches,
and wore a hat woven
from dead grass.
One day
I could not take my eyes off her
as the herd stampeded by
scarcely noticing
neither her nor I.
She uttered melodious murmur
of people, places, and times of before,
her so like a dove,
white, alive, and free
to float high above the earth
with the wind fondling her breast
and her tiny heart bursting
with song.
I asked her
about the birds
and of her devotion to them,
and she replied
that she loved birds
above all the Lord’s creatures
because she knew:
At night
when the sun no longer
cascades through stained glass
and high open windows;
when the priests are asleep,
the pews empty,
the mammoth oaken door locked,
the alter cold and metallic,
and the ivory Christ
can rest on his cross;
the angels
on the walls and ceiling,
who hover forever in one spot
smiling and blessing
the bunch below,
are never alone.
For they can always hear
in a voice much like their own,
the cooing of birds.
Glenn Buttkus 1965
Yes, in my search for productivity, for poetry, for meaning–I am easily amused too.
🙂 Glenn
Alex Shapiro said,
March 2, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
What a great post, Glenn! Thank you. One correction, though: I flock to birds, but I doubt they flock to me unless I bribe them with seed! Ha ha.
Your early poem is very, very wonderful. Thank you for sharing it with readers here.
Glenn Buttkus said,
March 3, 2008 @ 7:56 am
Going to have to figure out one of these days why the media player on my home pc will not play your mp3’s. But here at the office, no such difficulty, and I lapped up the TrioforCiVivance 1:38 like the spring water it was. Was it clarinet, piano, and violin; sounded like that to me. It was a real traveling tune, putting us firmly into that seat next to you as you winged east, again. It brought to mind first prose, and then poetry.
The Full Gamut; Along the Gauntlet
Traveling lady,
leaping the continent
like a comet
of consciousness,
humming in the sky,
carrying the precious cargo
of music,
for those who care
about her wares.
Rising with the sun,
churning through the cold gray
waters, slicing and pushing
to reach America,
and then to zoom
across its back
on another of her incredible
commutes.
Rolling on rayon
first,
racing past those
sleepy farms
and fallow fields,
sending her salutations
to the animals and birds
swept up
in her wake.
And then to launch
herself again
into the turbulence
of the stratosphere,
skimming over
verdant forests,
and countless farms;
over rugged peaks,
past towering mountains,
brilliant white
in the morning sun;
on her busy way,
again.
Watching state after state
slowly revolve
and rotate
beneath her silver wing;
the ground dotted
with divers patches
of green,
punctuated by
vast vistas of arid
brown—
with snow in Colorado,
the Rockies wearing
happy hats, and
rain over the Great Lakes,
as Chicago blinked and waved,
hour after hour
with those behemoth engines
doing their Gregorian chant
while gobbling expensive
jet fuel
like a ravenous teradyktal;
sometimes frolicking,
covered in clouds,
God’s cotton candy,
only to burst
into great patches of blue,
as she resets her wristwatch
and begins the descent
through industrial gases
to drop down light
as a feather
onto the broad back
of a BigApple.
Glenn Buttkus 2008
Glenn Buttkus said,
March 4, 2008 @ 6:07 am
Snooping again into your wonderful archives, I found a passage from early on, from January 26, 2006, while you were living in Malibu. You wrote an inspired posting about the time of calm after a strong wind storm. Your prose was pregnant even then; pregnant with poetry.
Calm Again
It is striking,
actually unsettling,
just how utterly still
the air has been
all day and night.
Not a leaf moving.
In the wake
of the wind storm,
the only hint
of the previous madness
is the remaining pile
of small branches
and tarry pieces of roofing
lying at the doorstep.
I will find another time
to clean up the evidence;
for now I stare
at a large ficus tree
next to the house
that two days ago
threatened to break,
and wonder
how it can stand innocently
amid the tossed deck furniture
and broken planters
as though nothing
had happened.
The sole movement tonight
has been the sudden thunder
or well nourished raccoons
chasing each other
the 60 foot length of the house
and back again,
using my roof
as their racetrack.
The heavy dotted rhythms
of their gait
shook me
out of the undotted rhythms
of the passage
I had been writing,
and I palmed a flashlight
to have a look.
Standing under a bedroom skylight,
my eyes peered up
to follow
the battery-powered beam,
and were met
unexpectedly
with the equally curious gaze
of a masked creature
who probably wondered
what I was doing down here.
Before I could finish
grinning,
he bolted again
for the far end
of the rain gutter
to catch up
with another loud-footed
friend.
Down by the shoreline
this evening,
it was damp and still
as well.
Only my mind
continued to race
with the wind.
Alex Shapiro 2006
You never cease to amaze me with the beauty you find in the mundane, the natural, the world you inhabit and share with us.
Glenn
Alex Shapiro said,
March 4, 2008 @ 10:10 am
That was one of my favorite posts, Glenn, and you’ve given me the gift of reminding me of that long past moment. I remember that day/night very distinctly. And I think I prefer your poetic layout to my regular blog posting!
Thank you, once again, for being so attuned to the things I mention that I often suspect no one particularly cares about. Blogging is, like creating art, a vacuumous pursuit. Vacuumous, until others respond to it. I very much appreciate responses!