TAURUS

As promised, I've put on Einstein On The Beach. It's something I love I play very little because it is 3 cds long and requires stillness on my part the whole time. Sitting here looking at the monitor wondering where to start, I remembered yesterday's promise to listen to Einstein On The Beach this time. See what happens. It was recorded 20 years ago and has not dated the least little bit. It's reminding me I don't listen to Philip Glass enough. I have a lot of his music and seldom think to listen to it. YouTube has a lot of short scenes from the performance, which is so expensive to produce I think it's only been put on in one place. I'd like to see a film of the whole thing. Surely it was filmed or there wouldn't be YouTube excerpts.







It's one of those stage productions that is site-specific NYC. It's one many reasons I've wanted to live in NY in the past. It's a city that has some of the benefits of a city, a lot of art in every form, to balance the horrors of living in a city. But it wasn't in my cards, it's not in my nature, obviously not in my karma. Big consideration: why live in a target? Why be a target for random violence? I'm too lazy to live in a high energy place like that. The lonely crowd comes to mind. It would be like living in a bee hive. I'd have to make a lot of money and have a lot of free time for all the reasons I'd want to live in NY. If I did live there I'd probably not do 1/100th of what I'd want to be there for. So I live on Waterfall Road with netflix and YouTube supplying my desire to see performance art, great films from all over the world. When it comes to blessed, I think of the Friday night music at The Front Porch Gallery, the best music in the area, and netflix. For somebody who loves a good movie, there's no better deal than netflix.







Josh Willis called from the next farm. He's in transit from Philadelphia to New Orleans, after being in Philly a few years after New Orleans for a few years after Katrina. He says he loves New Orleans and is on his way back, stopping here at the farm for a vacation where he intends to teach himself trombone anticipating playing it in New Orleans. I went over there and we talked over a couple of bottles of wine until it was late. It was fun talking with somebody whose only experience is city. It's a different culture all together from country culture, let alone mountain country culture. I was listening to somebody talk who the mountains have not yet put in his place, as Ralph Stanley said of the mountains. They do put you in your place. They put you in proportion to the bigger picture, by which I mean God, not Big Brother Government or whatever is presently correct.



Josh played some interesting jazz from the fifties, Zoot Sims and Duke Ellington. We talked of this and that. He swore he was going to get me on Ira Glass's This American Life, which made me laugh out loud. I laughed and he was serious. I'm of the mountains where words don't mean antyhing until action bears them out. He's of the city where words are everything, meaning not much. Yet he's a guy of meaning, so it makes me not want to write him off as absurd, though that's how I receive it. I've no interest in being on tv esp on This American Life, the freak show. It's the kind of thing where it sounds like he's serious, but I hope it's bullshitting with a head full of wine, "I'm gonna." Anyway, we had a good visit once we got off that subject. Somebody trying to talk me into something I'm not going to do, like go to New Orleans, like I gotta, and I had to say I don't cross the county line without knowing I'm going to be back to sleep in my own bed. I'm not going to New Orleans. it takes people a while sometimes to catch on that I'm a Taurus, I really am. You don't know what stubborn is until you set out to get me to do something I'm not going to do. My attitude is I'm in control. If I'm not going to, I aint gonna.



I'm so much a Taurus that just reading the general description is me specifically. We were sitting across the table, wine glasses between us, him telling me I'm going to New Orleans and me letting him talk. I'm not flying anyplace and not driving that far. My reason for flying is not fear of dying, but refusal to subject myself to fascism in airports. For all I know, I'm on the no-fly list. I ought to be just because I believe they're the enemy, making me their enemy. The time in the Navy threatening to blow the hell out of Santo Domingo in Dominican Republic, another helpless nation for the bully superpower to attack, because Communists were a problem. Communists in Latin America. Unthinkable. Not permitted. 57 Communists in Washington DC, 57 Communists in Chapel Hill, 57 Communists in High Point. Are they the same 57 or different 57s? Now we have terrorists undercover FBI men fire up to make some revolutionary statement on tape and zap them into prison when they were no threat at all. Just the thrill of putting somebody away. All of which is to say, I aint going to no damn New Orleans. I have all I have to do right here where I belong.