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Chet Baker In my function as translator, I want to be as constant as Chet Baker, who blew without caesura, the way the voice pours one word into the next, his trumpet the instrument of the world's coming out. I would like you to go in understanding that whatever you say is wrong but has its truth about it like sound waves. As for history, Caesar divided the world, and divided the ancient world from ours. But there was no year zero. Not even that immaculate note of Christian anthropomosis was equal to zero, the sustained C of waiting. The whole thing about un-, non-, and anti- is a religious war whose parameters give clerics orgasms and have no corner in Baker's work. Sadness is a kind of light. James Dean was a hero because of his quiet cowboy manner. Someone actually said that once - "he has a quiet cowboy manner" - and they used the words "pain in the neck." You should also expect them to bash your teeth in. Get a written contract. Don't dilly-dally. The only thing that counts is moving. Not motion. Is that jazz? The Christian hero has a quiet cowboy manner and suffers. Since creation is unreasonable, we need interpreters to mouth the chords, play the instruments as though each solo were the last, ignorant. At ground zero there is only the hand of the rocket, and you rely on the world to do its part like an answering machine you turn on around midnight when you know you will be gone. And you know you will be gone. It takes practice to get religion. Genius is a hymn sung into a vacuum, the sound of something over and above our heads, illuminating the corporal and the general. The position requires knowledge. Consider your family. Consider your relationship to your beloved artifacts, your really beloved, and how breakable.
by Brian Clements |