homemade noize

I promise this becomes music related.

I work in a bad neighborhood. Some past mayor must have appointed his mentally challenged brother in-law as city planner. Warehouses and industrial buildings winding like a river through the area divide pockets of run down houses into shitty neighborhoods. People into those neighborhoods have no choice. It is mostly illegals with a minority of legal citizens way down on there luck. Who wants to live surrounded by salvage yards, carpet warehouses and pallet making operations the occasion that often go up in flames.

The thing is it has gotten hot but there are more street people than ever. And by street people I don’t mean just homeless. I include prostitutes, drunks, tweakers and other assorted sorry losers. Normally the heat thins there numbers dramatically. Normally there are not some many people outside. Normally not as many whores in thrift store prom dresses people outside and tweakers zooming around on bicycles over loaded with crap. The dive bar up the street must be bursting. People always in and out. You see a cluster of drunks when the door swings open. I love dives but this ain’t that kind of place. It not a place hipster hang out because Charles Bukowski drank there decades ago before the neighborhood was gentrified. This is the kind of place that sells fortified wine by the shot and you wish it smelled like stale beer. Twice I have seen a drunks stroll outside to piss on the side of the bar next to a long line of cars in the Taco Hell drive through next door. Not exactly an appetizer. Business I imagine most likely has surpassed the facilities.

Some of the things I see are in that neighborhood are better economic indicators than the clueless economist at the Fed will ever see. There seems to be a palatable sense of desperation in the air. You can breathe in the downturn. Even outside of that neighborhood people seem down. To steal a line from a famous peanut farmer there seems to be, “A Crisis of Confidence.” A kind of war that kind of has no end in sight, a credit crunch, a burst bubble, a disconnect between the American Dream and America and terms popping up not spoken since the era of my birth like stagflation. It seems like it one big bummer. You don’t need to be a pollster to know people aren’t feeling too great about things at the moment. It seems like people are cynical and tired. But It makes me feel more motivated about being creative. That malaise & desperation seems to inspire me more than when things are more warm and fuzzy and completely lacking that “Crisis of Confidence.” Smog makes me want to make art more than a rainbow.

It is really not that strange. Bad times in bad places make for good art. I am not claiming to be Barry Gordy Jr., Wayne Kramer, Iggy Pop or the Belleville Three but they serve as examples. When things got the most “interesting” in Detroit you got the birth of Motown, Punk Rock and Techno. The former murder capital has had made some damn good music. There are other examples like the summers of ‘76 in Manchester or ‘67 in San Francisco. Maybe if burst bubbles have silver linings it is these bad times will make better music. Whether we want to think about our problems or forget them the soundtrack might be better.

This idea reminds of the Harry Lime speech from The Third Man(it is at the end of the end of the clip.) It maybe more a about bloodshed but it still fits to my mind.

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. -Orson Welles from The Third Man

I can not mention The Third Man is with out bringing up the Anton Karas zither score. Maybe there has never been a better meld of music and film. The bouncing zither score would not have work so well with out the back drop of a battle scared Vienna that was that was suffering from very real post war fatigue. Great Art from bad times.

FIN