Feelin' Better!Pain in ears is finally gone. Can finally hear stuff and have been cranking out reviews at work
by the fistful. Am much happier and relieved - don't like being deaf.
Session Notes for de fenestra 3/6/2005Went to Will Soderburg's in Southfield on Sunday last and did some true multi-track recording -
first time in a long time for that! Adam Mokan was also present and played electronics - Will played
electronics, except where noted below, and recorded everythig. I just played guitar, frequency tester
and drums as noted.
I want to inscribe the session here before I forget the details:
(2005/3/6-1) Will Soderburg & Adam Mokan: Improvisation (recorded before I got there, length unknown)
2005/3/6-2 "Homebodies*" Will Soderburg, Adam Mokan & Uncle Dave Lewis (ca. 42 minutes)
2005/3/6-3 Improvisation Will Soderburg (guitar), Adam Mokan & Uncle Dave Lewis (drums) (ca. 27 minutes)
Adam went back to Flint after this one.
2005/3/6-4 Guitar Duet I Will Soderburg, Adam Mokan & Uncle Dave Lewis (ca. 15 minutes)
2005/3/6-5 Guitar Duet II Will Soderburg, Adam Mokan & Uncle Dave Lewis (ca. 12 minutes)
2005/3/6-6 Uncle Dave Lewis: "Day of Fire" Digital stereo mixdown of piece done in January (6:39)
Allisyn took some pictures, and some of this music was really quite good. We should be able to get a CD
out of this. l didn't much care for our second duet, in which he played over-the-top heavy metal guitar and
I played over-the-top No Wave guitar - he called it "indulgent." I liked it, and hope it's usable somehow.
The main thing I remember about the session was that Adam was using a keyboard so new to him that he
was readng the owner's manual as we were recording! I thought that was a riot.
Atop an UnderwoodI am reading a great book right now, "Atop an Underwood," a collection of short pieces written 1936-43
by the young Jack Kerouac. Even at this early stage Kerouac has a kind of cloudy, cluttered aspect to his
writing that I embraced in my youth without thoroughly understanding it, rejected in my early adulthood
once I started to, but now embrace and appreciate anew now that I no longer hold my own work to his,
nor any other yardstick of creative success.
One reason that "On the Road" is so clear and sharp is that he revised it at least twice over, more so than
any of his books. I don't like the story that Lucien Carr told that he supplied Kerouac with a teletype roll to
write the original "On the Road" and that Carr's dog ate part of the manuscript and "that was the only part
that Jack ever revised." (Carr, incidentally, died just a month ago at age 79.)
The actual paper roll of "On the Road," achieved in just three weeks in 1951, is on tour at present, currently
showing at the University of Iowa. It is pasted together from sheets of Japanese art paper. Kerouac spent
five years revising it after it was initially turned down. To illustrate how much effect these revisions had, here
are the opening lines from the finished version versus those of the 1951 scroll.
1957 (finished version)
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother
to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything
was dead.
1951 (paper roll version)
I first met Neal right after my father died.
All of that luscious detail appears in the 1957 version, plus the changing of the catalytic event to the breakup of Kerouac's first
marriage, which had happened actually a couple years before, from the death of his father, a more immediate and thus more directly autobiographical event. And that great line - "my feeling that
everything was dead" - is all Kerouac the second time around.
Another Kerouac book that is unusually crisp is "Big Sur" (1961), which I think he was exceptionally careful about in terms of what he wanted to say, as it deals with a part of his life that was tremendously humiliating to him - the realization that Buddhism was a wash for him and that all he was ever going to be was a screwed-up, repressed Catholic. It's a depressing read, but I dare say is one of his finest achievements.
Anyway, "Atop an Underwood" is great. Everyone should read it. One of the things I love about Kerouac is that when he's really on his game, he writes with an energy and enthusiasm that is fresh. Even if the technique and subject has been treated before, he approaches it as though it's being addressed for the very first time, and that he is making literary history everytime he sets down to write. Oh, to have a taste of such unoccluded idealism once more! And Jack's ideas, without regard for how well they are realized in a technical sense, are always good ones.
Uncle Dave Lewis
udtv@yahoo.com