A song for Beatrice and one for me:
Update on the ongoing music project . . .
Turn them on, turn them on
Turn on those sad songs
When all hope is gone
Why don't you tune in and turn them on
They reach into your room
Just feel their gentle touch
When all hope is gone
Sad songs say so much
--Elton John & Bernie Taupin, "Sad Songs"
For those of you who have asked about the status of the latest songwriting reunion between Bazz and I, it's going--touch wood-- fabulously. Once again proving that it really is darkest before dawn. A couple of months ago, I was ready to leave my pop-music pen in its inkwell for good. Who knew? Certainly not me.
Artistically, this collection of songs is the nexus of a complex series of projects: The Formal Absence of Precious Things, a CD designed to be its own listening experience; Formal Absence, a novel about the fluidity of memory of a retired songwriter whose last set of songs was The Formal Absence of Precious Things; and Formal Absences, a theatre piece (containing some of the songs from The Formal Absences of Precious Things along with other songs) that tells a story different from either the song cycle or the novel.
As an artist, I am experimenting with the radical repurposing of my own work, imposing on it three different media and teasing-out three different messages.
Years ago, the Australian artist David Hockney photographed large objects like desert cacti with a handheld Polaroid camera, moving it slightly between shots until, say, 45 photos captured the scene. When Hockney then assembled the photos into a mosaic, a cubistic vision was revealed that often said more than an Ansel Adams silver print of the same subject. In a similar fashion, these three art projects are the equivalent of me circling around the a single set of themes, cubistically capturing them in ways that shatters the smooth surfaces of reality and fractures the stories we like to tell ourselves about our lives.
