Guerrilla Love

It's time we take our society back. We are in a battle for the heart and soul of our culture, and it's time we take it to the streets. I urge you to join me in an effort to win over the hearts and minds of those who oppose us. It will be hand to hand, and it won't be pretty. But I'm convinced it's the only way.

It's time to engage in Guerrilla Love.

This is not a guerrilla war. The goal is different, but the tactics are the same. Here are the techniques we will use in our fight for guerilla love:

Memorials - We will honor those who have come before us with plaques. Not bronze, necessarily, but cardboard or paper - what ever you have handy. Wherever someone has committed an act of senseless beauty or random kindness, return to that spot with your 'plaque' and memorialize the act: "October 16, 2009 - On this spot, a young college student gave up his parking place for an elderly couple." "This is where a stranger came to prepay his neighbor's groceries."

Drive-bys - We will commit drive-by acts of guerrilla love. Small moments, like a wave or a smile, yes. But we will also commit bigger, much more powerful acts, such as stopping to wish an old lady a nice day, or stopping to put flowers on a doorstep. We will be a gang of love.

IEDs - Improvised Expressions (of Love) Devices - We will create devices that will detonate love and kindness all over those who encounter them: boxes of small gifts, remote-control perfume-release contraptions, surprise expressions of love for random strangers.

Honor the Foot Soldiers - We will honor those foot soldiers in our guerrilla love struggle by honoring them: the hairdresser who knows and loves all of her customers, the policeman who lets the driver go with a warning, the minister who refuses to preach a gospel of hate, the teacher who stays late to help one child with math. These are the true heroes in our struggle for love.

Fight the System - We will copyright the phrase "Guerrilla Love", expressly for the sole purpose of not enforcing the copyright, specifically so no one else will ever profit from our guerilla love.

These are our tactics, this is our credo. We will fight for love and beauty and justice and truth everywhere. Will you join me in my guerrilla love?

An exercise

You are driving in your car, and you pull up to a stoplight. Just before the light changes, another car pulls up next to you. You look over a look at that person as your sheltered, automobiled lives cross each other for an instant. It may be a man, maybe a woman - it doesn't really matter. Make it anyone you want for the purpose of this exercise. The light changes and you both zoom off on your individual ways. Maybe you'll see that person again, maybe you won't.

Now imagine being with that person in their car. Have a conversation with them. Who are they? What are their fears, hopes, dreams? Where are they going? What are they feeling? Do you like them? Does it matter? What do you see when you look over at your car from their perspective?

We live in a complex society. We all fly about in our own lives, driving like the devil, worrying about our schedule and our pocketbook, not thinking about the people like us in the car next to us, only three feet away. In the movie Crash, the Los Angeles lifestyle is given a brutally honest (and depressingly tragic) treatment where people are forced out of the comfort zone of their automobiles and into an uncomfortable relationship with the drivers next to them.

Our lives form a cross-connecting polyphony of different arcs and trajectories, different keys and rhythms, different modes of expression. And yet we really all share a very similar story, rooted in a common culture, with similar fears, goals, and the realization that - when all is said and done - this musical journey we call life will someday come to and end.

This is why Bach is important. There is no simplicity in Bach. His music is the music of complexity and interconnectivity. If we allow ourselves to get inside of Bach's music, he can show us the weaving fabrics of our lives' melodies. And we can begin to understand that the resulting harmony and texture of those melodies is the music of the cosmos, a glorious consonance and dissonance that exists for one reason only: in Bach's words: Soli Dei Gloria. "Only for the glory of God."

Songs

I just finished listening to the final mixes of the 13 songs that will be on "Musical Moonshine", and I had an interesting experience: I wanted to hear them again. There's much less musicial polish on these songs (all of them were recorded at home with one mic, no mic preamp, three guitars and a mandolin - no other instruments), but they sparkle to me. What's surprising is that these songs have been with me for a while, some of them for anywhere from 3 to 7 years. I have performed them dozens of times, and I haven't gotten tired of them.

There was a real sense of pride in these songs for me. I think they represent the best songwriting I've ever done. Some of them are experimental, while others are very straightforward, but they all work for me on some level.

I also have a better handle on the relationship between song and songwriter this time. I have always felt that songs were like children: you raise them up, and then let them go into the world, hopefully to touch other lives in a positive way. But this set, more than any other, feels like they are a part of me, maybe even a part I didn't know existed. I listen to One-Time Lover, a song about a rambling lothario and realize that - even tho I'm not a rambling lothario - there's a part of me in that cad. Or Washing Away, a stream of consciousness song that I realized yesterday is based in an experience I had four years ago. And the songs that are based on my relationship with Lynda are as simultaneously autobiographical and universal as I think any songs can be.

So it's almost time for me to send these children out to the world. But this batch is perhaps a little more mature and ready for the world than any I've done before, and they make me a very proud papa.

Follow-up to last post

As promised, I went and spoke to the PEO group. And although they were too kind to say anything or admit it, I fumbled all over myself. What happened is that I started in on the breathing aspect of this idea/theory/mess, and realized (as a woman in the back of the room began to fall asleep) that they were bored, and I had no idea what I was saying. So I shifted gears and skipped directly to the part where I used Mozart as a way of describing what beauty is/was in music.

And I am realizing now that the larger problem here is that there are many directions this conversation has gone with the various people who have been part of it with me. So before I get back up in front of the public again and start to spout this stuff off before it is fully formed, I better have some time to put it all together in my own head.

I walked myself into a teaching corner...

Last summer, I was asked by someone to teach a short class to a PEO Women's group luncheon. I said yes, she said she needed a title. I said 'how about "A Different Way to Listen to Music". There you go.

Problem is, I can't remember what the hell I was thinking about doing when I said that! The class is tomorrow, and I for the life of me can't figure out what I'm going to tell these women. Anyway, I'm re-reading correspondence I had with a colleague on breathing/phrasing/spirit (which is much too complicated to encapsulate here) to see if it was something related to all of this. I kind of think it was, so I'm going to run with it. First, I'll try out in blog form...

The basic gist of the concept arose from a workshop I gave at a choir directors' conference a few years ago, and it went sort of like this: The essence of musical life, and the essence of singing, is breathing. A musical phrase has the same arc to it that breathing does: a moment of preparation, where life does not exist, followed by a life-giving fill of breath. Once the apex of the breath is reached, a slow recede begins, where the breath leaves the body, slowly and inexorably returning the lungs to their original state.

The genesis of my desire to expound on this idea was a conversation with a friend about how this "breath" can be found in all music: first, it appears in the musical phrase: a string of notes that has a rise and fall, ebb and flow. (As choral singers, we find it most clearly in the way we are called to sing the lines in Renaissance music.) Write large, it also appears in the artistic, narrative arc found in all works: symphonies, novels, plays.

The results of these conversations were many and varied, but some of the tangents I was most interested in included the following: in this model, since life is represented by inhalation, and death represented by exhalation, that means that every musical phrase is a representation of life and death. Furthermore, since everything we say or utter or give to the universe is done on the exhale, our act of speaking and singing itself is representative of dying. When we breathe in, we take from the universe. When we give to the universe, we are partaking in the act of dying. This makes Christ's death on the cross all the more profound, as perhaps the ultimate example one can give in human form of artistic gift.

All of this explosion of philosophical whimsy flew madly between myself and two or three friends, and then it stopped. Stopped on my end, because I had no idea what to do with it. So what? What does it mean?

I'm still not sure I know, but I can say this much today (with a deadline looming): it's time for me to tie this back into musical phrasing, at the very least to try and find a way to teach a class on "How to Listen to Music Differently."

* * * * * * *

So here goes: If this idea is true on any level, it means that a musical phrase that taps into our spirit is one that is basic to our existence. But that does not make a musical phrase beautiful. What makes a phrase beautiful seems to be simply what a phrase does with our expectations of what that phrase does. Beauty in music, as described by countless philosophers and aestheticians, is the act of expectation arrested. When a musical line introduces a slight alteration that we do not expect, it changes what the next expectation is. When Mozart introduces a simple, short dissonance into an otherwise flawless line, we are surprised, titillated. The next time he does it, we now find ourselves listening for beauty in a new way. (If I can find it, I'll put a brilliant quote on this topic by Maynard Solomon here - he says it far better than I can.)

Of course, our expectations are different when we listen to Mozart, or Sinatra, or U2, or at least they should be. And the person who uses one set of expectations to look for beauty in a different piece of music will surely be disappointed. But the process, I think, is the same. We look for the grass, and when we see a flower, we call it beautiful. That's not to say the grass is not beautiful - indeed, if we were walking through a field of tulips and came upon a well-manicured lawn in the middle of it, we would be just as pleased. It's the surprise - the splash of a new color - that makes the beauty.

It's the contrast in the breath that makes the art.

My next CD

Last night I finished the mixes of the thirteen tracks that will comprise my next CD, and I have to say, I'm very proud of these songs. One of the things that will be very different this time is that the songs will be unadorned - just me and a guitar, with guitar overdubs (solos) on two of the songs. That's it. No bass, no electric guitar, no drums, no keys, no background vocals, no hurdy-gurdy.

As much as I love fleshing out my songs with those ornaments, this time they will be bare. Most of the songs have been performed with combinations of instruments: guitar, cello, violin, vocals, mandolin. I could have recorded them in those states.

But I decided not to do that this time for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, this cuts down the cost of recording for me to almost zero. Second, I think of songs as framing. If I release these songs in bare format, everyone who listens knows exactly what the core of the song is. No bells or whistles or flutes to try and dress up a clinker. Either the song flies or it doesn't, and I have only myself as a songwriter to blame if it doesn't.

Finally, I decided I didn't want to wait for some recording opportunity to release these songs, or hold off until I had a wad of cash that would cover the cost of studio, producer, musicians. My 'back catalog' of unrecorded songs was getting long enough as it was. Indeed, two of these songs were written back in 2001 and 2002. There is a joy in these songs that I wanted to let loose. There is also the tale of a powerful love that weaves its way through many of them, my love for Lynda.

Last year, I thought about taking an extended break from performing. But with that thought process came the realization that "if I don't play these songs, who will?" And I got sad. Sad for these songs. As silly as it sounds, I feel like the work I create is a child of a sort. Once it grows up and moves out, it becomes its own being, able to affect and move people in different ways that I have no control over.

So, here are my new children (in alphabetical order), to be released later this spring to the world of listeners who care to listen:

As I Fall Away
Hold Tight to the Sky
Holding You in the Dark
I Remember You
Nobody Knows
One-Time Lover
Sailor
Simple and True
The Stars Sang a Song
Stranded Ghosts and Devil Dogs
Waiting on the Wind
Washing Away
You Were Leaving Anyway

Apples and Oranges

The oversimplified version of a conversation yesterday in a meeting at church: It often seems this church is stuck between two models of what churches are supposed to do and act like, and I wonder if this isn't the problem that faces most mainstream churches these days?


Now the overcomplicated version: We, like many mainstream churches, have tried to operate the way we have for five hundred years, with a few modern influences. (Blogging, for instance.) We still have committees (renamed 'teams') that do the majority of the work of the church, and the work itself has changed very little. And yet we struggle to attract and keep members in the 20-40 age range, which means that eventually this church will, like so many of its neighbor churches, die.


This is not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose. There has got to be a Darwinian element to this that says that social organizations that cannot evolve with the times should die. Except that the social organizations that too often are taking their place are dogmatic, conservative, judgemental, factional. There has to be a place in this society still for a place of faithful searching for life's answers that is a liberal thinking outpost that rewards inquisitive thought, doesn't there?


So here then was the gist of the discussion - how do we, as a church, honor the old way of doing church business... 'apples', if you will ...while exploring what the liberal church should look like in the 21st century... 'oranges'? How do you make that shift from what is tried and true for the 50-year members of this church to what is needed and untested for the 20-year-old members? I sure don't know the answer, but I'm here to keep looking for it.