Letter from Brooklyn

yeah i saw the article in yesterday's times. and it was cool. but this is something else.

hey i think i told you when i was 23, and working at kinkos on 12th and university, and ostensibly here to play the drums, i was already into walking around haphazardly on the streets after work to see if i could sniff out what was happening, and that is how, i think i told you, wandering around, i found this cafe that there used to be back then, this cool little cafe on saint marks place on the south side between A and first. it had two bays of kinda wide-ish windows with a door in the middle. it was shabby-chic simple east-village style and there was an anomalous heavy sheet of brushed iron on the left wall that said "Sin-é" in cut out letters.

so when i went in there were these two irish longhairs sitting at one of the like 8 tables in the place, looking like they owned the place, which i later found out that they did. and there was this pretty, sad-looking tough girl with frizzy blond hair working the coffee machine, really mellow. it was still light outside so i got myself a cappuccino and a beer and sat down, and i tried to look available for conversation, which didn't work, but eventually the longhairs paused and looked at me and gave me an in, and i asked what was going on that night and this gaunt guy with long stringy grey hair around these supersharp eyes looked at me for a second and said "Ah, it's good music tonight. jeff buckley. y'heard of em?" and i said definitely not. and this younger dude who kind of had robert plant hair, who was similarly quiet and precise, said this jeff guy was tim buckley's son, and that didn't ring a bell either.

but i hung around alternating coffee with beer until it got dark, and
eventually there were maybe 20 or so people, mostly the kind of office women who think they know what's up, sitting in there drinking either cappuccino or beer or wine, that's all the cafe had. and then finally a thin guy in a white wife beater walked in, sat down at a table where there already were some people, and talked to them while he took out his telecaster guitar and tuned it real casually, leaning back and talking, and everybody else in the place was talking too, it was not like a starstruck thing cause he was unknown, but people were definitely more psyched since he was there. after his conversation he stood up and plugged the guitar right into the p.a. system, there was no amp in the place, and started doing a little fingerpicking, like he was just fucking around. but he kept it going and then after a few minutes, he stepped up to the mic, sort of looking like he was now seriously in the zone, and started singing, and it was real nice and delicate. for the next like 10 songs everybody shut up real tight and all you could hear was the occasional steam exhaust from the coffee machine, and breathing and little talking and stuff between songs. the songs were long and he stretched them out with really relaxed and pretty fingerpicking on the guitar. more people arrived little by little, but not too many. i didn't move from my seat.

so at the end of the night, the place was pretty hopping, and i gave the irish dudes and the blonde girl the salute-bow of respect, and i decided right then and there i would definitely come back almost every week for many months, and I did and it was each time kind of a different revelation. i've seen all the jeff buckley music videos but they seem to have all been made more self-consciously- and i especially don't recognize the experience cause the music changed with the backing band, and all these videos were made after I moved back to virginia.

but finally today this video appears on an english newspaper's site, and it's the only one i've seen that shows what he sounded and looked like standing upin that really small cafe. I think it's maybe not even a lipsync, i think it's a straight up filmed performance of the song. he really did sound just like that, i think he maybe had a chorus pedal or something between his guitar and the p.a. board, but nothing else, it was just eq'd.

turns out the coffee girl was from hungary - this was 1992 and she was really on kind of an adventure with no plan B - and eventually i asked her out because i saw her like 3 times a week and she was unstandably pretty and mysterious. her name was marianna. she told me not to mess with her, she said i seemed nice but she thought she would probably break my heart, i hadn't experienced the things she had.

yeah.



http://music.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,2079313,00.html


written by Andrew Nimmo

Put-up of the day

Art-Walk roundup

Thanks to all who made it out in the rain
for our open studios. September's (real)
open studios will be massive.

{we hope to have our in-studio sauna built by then}

Anyone who wishes to be added to our mail list
should email either Cheryl (cheryl.time@gmail.com)
or myself (klicova@gmail.com).

Art-Walk

We're participating in the SOWA art walk this weekend. Unofficially.
Directions and more info here...

"Man would have only four years of life left..."

...without song and without honey:

On npr the other day, they were talking about the sudden and rampant disappearance of bees in North America... one theory, not entirely implausible, is that the navigation systems of the bees is blocked or disrupted by radiation emitted from cellphones- which prevents them from being able to find their way back to their nests, resulting in what's called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Ow.

THEN,

Tom Ashbrook hosted a woman who discussed a similar thinning-out occurring in the songbird population:

"We are losing our migratory birds. ... Over the last 40 years, many
species have lost 30 to 40 percent of their numbers...a lot of migrants
are coming back earlier because in general springs are coming earlier.
Birds are tracking climate change and they are noticing"


The solution: to toss the phone, and build bird-habitats in the backyard?
Well, there's more at stake here...

For millennia, bees have been symbols of perfect polity. Pliny,
Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch- they have all pondered upon the
virtues of the little buzzers... but that's wild bees. The disappearing
bees mentioned here are domestic. When man domesticates, he corrupts. He intends to be symbiotic, but cannot help but abuse. Bees have had enough, are leaving, going back to their own perfect, natural polities.

If man threw away his cellphones and went back to nature,
he'd corrupt nature all over again, in another way... we won't
settle for stasis, but will always seek progress. Being human is a
blessing and a curse, but for nature, the existence of humans is
definitely a curse. Humans doesn't need nature if they have
technology (which can make food out of non-nature), and other
people (to define themselves against); nature doesn't define
itself against humans, and doesn't take anything from
mankind, only loses to it...

The irony is that even man- who anthropomorphises
nature (as in the ancient symbols of birds, whales, bees)-
still corrupts nature.

The story of disappearing species is a metastory, a story that unites and transcends an already established tradition of stories, which use anthropomorphisation to express fundamental truths about man vs. nature. The new metastory restates and supercedes the same: humans are incompatible with nature, even and especially when they are doing their best to be compatible. As every man dies alone,
so does the species. There is no home to go back to, there is only us. As we stand.
Alone, together.

Hippies and druids and greens and others are right in their
actions, wrong in their thoughts; there is no balance between
man and nature that can be recaptured or recreated. Man has
been an anomaly, a sore thumb sticking out, ever since he
appeared in nature. Those who glory in being an anomaly say
the same thing, but in reverse terms: Nature is here for the
sake of man, for man is special. Man is the paragon of Creation,
Creation was created for man's sake. In either case,
the anomaly theme unites the greens and the priests.
So may as well stop pretending otherwise.

Hence the prophecy is wrong: when bees disappear,
and birds stop singing, it shows we're doing great.

And they're not.