All stories are ones of becoming.  This is the intersection of news and art.  One struggles to become something, endeavors to work out the ideal in the forms one can do out of the deeper ideals of the mind.

And so it is satisfying to find a piece wherein one becomes.  Something fresh.  Maybe a short story.  Enough different to be new.  And to be new, that short story, definitely, had to show something about its creator.  It reveals the deeper personality of its creator.

It's as if the whole exercise were a revelation of the deepest kind of personality there is, while still remaining individual personality (at which point it becomes debatable, as to self and non self, soul, higher beings from inner or outer space, etc.)  Go on YouTube and find "Jimi Hendrix, the Uncut Story," and, you know, I would bet part of you will leave satisfied (and if not satisfied, irritated with yourself for your own egotistical reasons, maybe a mix of both.)

And we know, from history, from our educations, that 'people happen,' that 'art happens,' that things are created and are taken as they are, fresh and new, an addition, a contribution.
To us as we study them, they are acts, mysterious, fait accompli.  To listen to Jimi Hendrix' first album, Are You Experienced, is to listen to something complete, full, showing mastery;  it stands as a monument.  We view it from outside, and it is satisfying to know, for example, that "Purple Haze" emerged out of a very long text of deep Hendrix thought, that "The Wind Cries Mary" broom involves a real broom picking up after a particular domestic incident involving a girlfriend, taking place in London.  It's left Hendrix himself to feel the incompleteness of it as far as serving everything he wanted to say at the time.  And in a certain sense, the songs of this, his first album came from the days of his musical touring, his earlier career on the road.

The thing is, something fresh comes out, arises.  It overlaps with the old, it takes part in tradition, but, like each of us, there is individual freshness, uniqueness, that stamp of individuality, the finding of something, in addition to all that, perhaps suddenly limitless, boundless, encompassing.  (And from thence forth there will always be a fresh audience for it, as there are new people born into this world.)  The nature of genius, then, is to reveal how people think.  (This could even be of fairly common material.)




And so we struggle to observe this transformations, ones that happen from long nights, rumination, steady effort, years, honed with skill (perhaps the most envious part.)  Hendrix, or Ella Fitzgerald:  one willing to be poor, almost destitute, in order to follow what it is one must do.

We all know the difficulty of life, of work.  Just like you, I would say, myself, the job I do, is a hard one, much harder than it looks, demanding things a job should almost not demand, weird hours, diminishment of life's hopes, habits diametrically opposed to normal anthro-existence.

I am feeling that difficulty.  And I do not know where what I do leads, but that it is somewhere, I just don't know where.  Have we come to a point where to be in a community--imagine--with other people is itself an art form?  Is it possible to see the person who serves you, who engages with you, as much of an artist as a Jimi?  No, probably not.  There can be art to that, sure, an art to it, a continual reference to art, but that will never be art.

We know our minds lead us somewhere, it's just a question of where, and then, yes, practically, what will happen to us then.



Tending bar was always a much harder job than what it might have seemed it should have been.  For one, it involves hours of absorption, hours of chewing on it all and simply coming down from the rush. And despite all its 'storied-ness' somehow I am left without any real stories, but those that I have listened to, people talking about their very real lives, where I go on, having no real life.