Gary Barwin's Blog: serif of nottingblog, page 12

My neighbour John plays trumpet and I hear him while birds sing.

Gary Barwin · Bird Song

Throughout the pandemic, in warm and cold weather, I often sit on my front porch. We’ve set up a table and chairs, curtains and heaters. I can be outside and work on my writing despite the weather. Or in celebration of it. 

It’s very pleasant—fresh air, bird song, many trees. 

Across the street, I frequently hear my neighbour, the artist John Miecznikowski, practising cornet. I understand that his son was an accomplished trumpeter and he gave the instrument to his father to learn. (They also share a love of motorcycles, and John has told me some great stories about his riding exploits in the 60s and 70s.) 

Because John is “learning,” he often plays what sounds like hymns, or at least, simple tunes, but on cornet they have a English brass band sound to them. 

Recently as I was working on a new novel, I listened to the sound of the trumpet entangled with the sound of the wind and the birds. I had been working on a cello piece for my old high school friend George. I decided instead to write something for John, something that evoked that entwining of trumpet and bird song. 

I made a electronic track using field recordings that I made of bird song, hiking in the local Hamilton woods along with repeating alto flute, bass clarinet and piano. Then I wrote a solo line. I’ve given the recording and the music for the solo to John and he tells me he’s working on it. He also told me, mysteriously—and from behind the tall hedge which hides his garden—that he has something for me. Maybe a poem, I think he said. Hmm.



Here is a recording of me playing bass clarinet (playing the trumpet part) along with the birds. I think the whole thing sounds a bit like Morton Feldman taking a walk in a forest and hearing birds. If he would even do such a thing. 

It’s a great regret that I arrived at the graduate music composition program at SUNY at Buffalo just after he died. I’d have so loved to have met him and to have studied with him. Still, his influence appears in some of my work and in my musical thinking. His music is still a favourite thing of mine to listen to, often late at night in my bed. Constellations as mobiles permutating quietly somewhere far yet near. 

On Garage Doors: Do I feel like I am 16 now that I am 57?

There are all these accounts of old men and women explaining how they still feel like a boy or a girl, that they feel just the way they did when they were 16. And sure, I feel like the same person that I was at 16. It’s the same eye sockets that I’m looking through when I regard the world. The same grey hair. Ok, obviously, at 57 my body is substantially different than my scrawnier 16-year-old self. Also back hair. But though it is true that I do feel much in common with that youth—romantic, sad, often ecstatic, open to darkness, absurdity, sentimentality, mystery and immaturity—clearly there’s been change. I’ve three adult children, a wife of 33 years, grandparents, relatives, friends who’ve died of illness, accident, by their own hand, or age. I’ve seen trouble all my days. History unfolding. And also happiness. And, something I couldn’t even begin to conceptualize previously: contentment. 

I remember telling my mom, when I was around 16, I rather be right than be happy. I’d rather seek “truth” than happiness. Sure, I thought, some people stand on the driveway raising and lowering their garage doors with a remote and feeling happiness, I wanted to seek deeper truths. I wouldn’t settle for some kind of suburban petit-capitalist compromise. I’d rage, rage and accept no dying light. Or automatic light which turns on as you carry your two plastic garbage bags from the garage to the curb.

Also, I do want to tell that story about the neighbours and how their garage door went up and down everytime a plane flew overhead. Something about the wavelength of the remote. And that time the garage door came down and my mom got her fingers stuck between the panels and had to wait until someone else returned home to rescue her, free climber trapped by her fingers on the suburban wall. 

I realized today that I didn’t feel like I was 16, but that I think I might feel how I imagined my 16-year-old self might want to feel. Or that might think he feels. Certainly, he’d appreciate the reduction in panic, anxiety, insecurity and fear of the contingency of life. I’m not “wise” or “confident,” or steadily content, though much more so that when I was 16. And I have the advantage of being able to look back and consider the various ways of seeing, the insights that I might have stumbled on, that I might have worked towards throughout the last 40 years. Much of the world might not seem as new or fresh (which doesn't mean that it doesn't seem like a surprise or wonder) but I can remember when it did. 

For example, the moon. Last night in a cottage we’ve rented with our kids and two of their girlfriends, I looked up at the half moon. I could see through the sedimentary levels of awareness and feeling many way I might have thought about the moon over all these decades. I understood that my perception of the moon has a long trail—beginning with the feelings and context that I have now, all the echoes and resonances, memories and stories. And the trail goes back to those first impassioned times looking at the moon as if it were new—it was certainly new for me to look at it and feel these new things as a child, as a teen, as a young man. And O when I realized the capital letter O was the moon O. That parentheses were moon slivers ) 

I could imagine reversing this looking back. The new moon in all its newness with a long tail, the tail of all its memories and associations reaching behind it into the future. My future now. I live forwards but remember backwards. O )   )   )  ) ) )) A crenelating ripple through time, a wrinkling of the brain. The topography of memory. 

I do have a garage door now. But it’s not automatic. My wife pierced a hole in its blue surface when she backed a kayak into when parking the car. Did I have the homeowner’s frustration about damage to property or did I delight in the delicious image of a hole, a kayak, a car? 

Saying Chaos like Cows

This setting of one of my texts mixes a kind of free jazz with psychedelic visuals. The text comes from an anecdote where Derrida pronounced "chaos" as "cows." 
The music has sax, bass clarinet, bassoon, piano, drums, voice.

Passacaglia for i.

 

Passacaglia for i.  
A garden and a whole mess of i's in a variety of fonts, exploring the idea of the visual passacaglia (i.e. i as a repeating bassline/chord pattern.)

My grandfather's favourite bad joke which appears in Nothing the Same Everything Haunted

 

Interview on NOT THAT KIND OF RABBI

I was very delighted to do this interview with Ralph Benmergui about my new novel and related Jewish topics. Ralph was funny and charming and very knowledgeable. Here's the link to his great podcast, Not That Kind of Rabbi: link

Falling is just flying with bad PR: On Writing

 

I created this video poem/essay on writing to wrap up my year-long writer-in-residency at Sheridan College

New album with Gregory Betts, bill bissett and me.

 

One raging excellent day in 2018, Gregory Betts and I got together to create four tracks with the legendary Bill Bissett Later, in studio, I invited the The Opposible Thumbs Symphony Orchestra of Greater Knuckle Drag and musicians from The Benzedrine Klezmorim of the Upper Urals to add a handful of digital processing. It's here: https://garybarwin.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-not-a-sad-song

While you're there you can check out my other albums which are all quite different.

ABout "Nothing the Same Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy"—a video

 

I made this video explaining some of the ideas for the new novel came from. Humour, my grandfather, Hitler's grim inspiration from North American Indigenous genocide, and I included an old Yiddish song popular in Vilna ghetto and some images of old Jewish Vilna.
The book will be available in hardcover, audio and ebook on March 9, 2021. As they say in Yiddish, Yeehaw.

Thank you Charlie Parker

One day I want to write an essay about how studying saxophone in middle school opened up a vast world for me, that, as a little Jewish boy in Ottawa I had had no conception of. The rich imaginative, political, spiritual, powerful world of mostly black American musicians. I think about being in suburban Canadian bedroom listening to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and reading everything I could find about them. I'd babysit on Saturday nights and then make a pilgrimage to Sam the Record Man in the Bayshore Shopping Mall where I spent my earnings, learning about jazz. The world they lived in, their concerns, the sounds they pursued, the economic and political issues, the stories of their lives. Of course I could have no real understanding, but it was a portal, an opening that pointed to a much larger vision of what was and what was possible than I could have know otherwise.