Author Archives: d.perry

Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps some day another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence. At the same time, I am still a part of life, and I am bound by this to protect myself to whatever extent I am able. And so I am here.

– Paul Bowles, Pages from Cold Point

Lou Reed’s famous maxim—“One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”

The city is the place that shifts desire
towards purposes sought after by
the city itself, unknown as of yet to observers.

The perspicacity of a dazed
tenacity lilting towards hunger,
the body takes over.

Win a meadow.
Win a million.
Out the window staring
at a hill, in season.

Tips on how to push past raw
into the place of one hundred beaches.
Shore always at once arriving and depleting.


I have arrived at that day of the fateful meeting.
Eyes scan the horizon but no sign gleams there.
Seagulls sobbing like angels
weeping through deserted season
after deserted season diverting away
from a crystalline moment
you feel for that one-in-a-million,
picked from the ocean of fishes
to be your jewel in this realm of nothing
as if anything could fill the ever-
widening gap between possibility
and what is now real actual everyday reality.


An age for an era gone like smoke disappearing
minutes after the audience has stopped clapping
and the stage is still crowded with gear.

“The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not…yet, I occurred.”

自由 [Freedom] has a relatively stronger Western connotation, related to the idea
of democracy. 自在 [spontaneous, or self existing] is more associated with the image of
a Taoist who wanders across worlds— “[flying] like Kun-Peng thousands of miles up in the air… carefree like little birds easing down to the field,” “being perfectly one with heaven and earth,” and “being heaven and earth” (Shang 131). These two images of Kun and Peng come from a story told by one of the earliest Taoist thinkers Zhuangzi in 逍遥
游 [Wondering Beyond]:

In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is Kun. The Kun is so huge I don’t know how many thousand miles he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is Peng. The back of the Peng measures I don’t know how many thousand miles across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.

One has to cultivate one’s ability to transmute in order to be free, to be 逍遥 [wondering beyond].

…

Deleuze and Guattari write that creating art is “always a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned, or of tempting it into an uncertain combat”

…

the late 1980s and early 1990s, people like Wang Fan, Yan Jun, Yangyang, and Li Zenghui were called Bei Piao. Bei means north, specifically referring to Beijing; Piao means floating or drifting. Bei Piao is an identity used to describe people who work or live in Beijing without a permanent residential permit or registered residence. These Bei Piao artists and musicians constitute lines of drift, improvising with the city and the world.

…

“music is only a means, freedom is the purpose.”

…

Utopia is a state of being.
State of being just exists. It is simple.
If the state of utopia has existed for one minute, does it still exist?
Its existence is eternal. If it was once there, it exists.
Many people deny its existence, because they didn’t catch this one-minute. We do not expect it to exist forever. One minute is enough.
We are quite satisfied with that.

…

A: What is music to you, especially to your 真我 (a true/authentic self)?
Y: Many bands treat music as a profession, but it is a part of my life. People often ask me “What do you want to express?” I do not want to express anything. I present myself. You hear it. That’s enough.

…

One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.

…

Listen. Transform. Exist.

excerpts (from ://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=ohiou1336097506&disposition=attachment)

While the number of visitors to America’s national parks and recreation areas is increasing each year, the amount of time each visitor spends at the attraction is in decline. The average visit to Yosemite lasts just under five hours, visitors stay for just under two hours in Saguaro National Park in Arizona, and at the Grand Canyon National Park, most visitors spend just 17 minutes looking at the magnificent landscape (Bernstein; de Graaf). In Yosemite National Park many visitors “simply rolled by slowly in their cars, taking photos out the windows” (de Graaf np).

Moment Form

In Stockhausen’s words, works with this property “neither aim at the climax, nor at prepared (and consequently expected) multiple climaxes, and the usual introductory, rising, transitional and fading-away stages are not delineated in a development curve encompassing the entire duration of the work. On the contrary, these forms are immediately intense and seek to maintain the level of continued “main points”, which are constantly equally present, right up until they stop. In these forms a minimum or a maximum may be expected in every moment, and no developmental direction can be predicted with certainty from the present one; they have always already commenced, and could continue forever; in them either everything present counts, or nothing at all; and each and every Now is not unremittingly regarded as the mere consequence of the one which preceded it and as the upbeat to the coming one—in which one puts one’s hope—but rather as something personal, independent and centred, capable of existing on its own. They are forms in which an instant does not have to be just a bit of a temporal line, nor a moment just a particle of a measured duration, but rather in which concentration on the Now—on every Now—makes vertical slices, as it were, that cut through a horizontal temporal conception to a timelessness I call eternity: an eternity that does not begin at the end of time but is attainable in every moment. I am speaking of musical forms in which apparently nothing less is being attempted than to explode (even to overthrow) the temporal concept—or, put more accurately: the concept of duration. … In works of this kind the start and stop are open and yet they cease after a certain duration.”

Coltrane said: “I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song and immediately he’d receive all the money he needed.”

‘I like exploring discomfort, “mistakes,” what happens when they are left in, incorporated. Silence is a mistake, we’re supposed to cut out the negative space on an album, in a conversation. I think I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I was a mistake, needed to change myself in order to fit in, which of course would involve talking more or better. Still struggle with it. I suppose in the silence there is a lot of trying to come to terms with myself, examining a need for slowness and space. This music is a room that I take care of, I help decide what is accepted. Here distortion and mistakes, silence, deep sadness and misunderstanding, they all have a place. They all fit in to the pattern.’

-Liz Harris