I’m listening to Lou Rawls Live and I sang one of the tunes tonight in jazz class called ‘St, James Infirmary.’ I’m trying to find my voice and, trusting my imagination that’s always shoplifting Picasso and electric cowboys, I love to cross genres or defeat genres or stuff them into an empty can of canned peaches and launch them into space. I have a bit of an allergy to genres and it’s year round. When my screenplay was in development a couple of years ago with an indie film company, the man I was working with, after three drafts an seven months of effort, told me ‘We can’t decide if this (the script) is a romantic comedy or supernatural thriller.’ That’s one of those moments in life where my ego plays it back with me making a real scene when in reality I just nodded. Today I was talking to my friend about how it’s taken me years to accept that I am a roving genric border buster…tear down those walls!…and I’ve never been totally sated performing in either comedy clubs or strictly theaters; there’s a nightclubtheatermadness neutral zone somewhere with the club buzz and the emotional heft and patience of theater. In class tonight I keep searching and poking a bit outside the normal bounds to the Bowie Rim, the outer reaches of a supernatural musical galaxy where there is no black market because there is no white market and notes and riffs are swapped and moshed together and form stars with song and anything played backwards may sound even better. When I sit and listen in those amazing moments when all of Brooklyn dials down and it’s almost cricket quiet I can hear, beyond the urban ringing in my ears, a sound of the stars, planets moving and objects colliding and twisting the blanket of energy they swirl inside. Somewhere, so close now, are tunes. I look forward this winter to stepping it up with my guitar Gladys and making sure I finally put a ring on her finger, so to speak and commit.
