LIGHT THIS CANDLE
In astronaut argot, that means launch is set in motion, ignited, chemicals come together in an irreversible and fearsome conversion to surreal amounts of energy, and any objects attached are propelled past the forces that hold things to the surface, the mapped, the known. Space is known scientifically, but there’s very little experiential literature about what it’s like to be on the frontier of the emptiness that surrounds our infinitesimally detailed, scurried over, exploited world. Beyond there are worlds, but mostly dust. And yet this endless sea of unconnected dust has far more mass than the solid object we adhere to. I have launched my own untethered journey into a black firmament of unknown combinations ahead, unforeseen variations on the all-too-familiar earthly clichés of my homeworld, Seattle. Where I’ve been coming back to refresh and reflect and organize my music, my relationships, my self-definition, for the last 20 years. I arrived in Seattle in 1986, to attend the University of Washington. It was the first time I realized I was on a quest to absorb and experience and catalogue the intricacies of wisdom—as expressed by shared knowledge from humans, or their creations, or the mystical expressions of nature that impart messages from the very creation of the world itself. I wasn’t going to get a degree. I wasn’t there to make myself employable. I was embarking on a cataloguing mission, to draw my conclusions from as vast a body of experience as I could envelop and distill from this mixture the ur-substance called wisdom. I knew that music was my calling and thus my vocation was irrelevant. But as important and useful music has been to my journey, it’s just a tool. It’s a tool I use naturally, so it takes a prominent role in my life. But what I am really on earth to do is understand humans and use what I learn to provide a perspective that rises above the conventions that we accept in lieu of what is inside of all of us—the mechanism for reaching freedom, truth and harmony. No struggle. No attacking what one doesn’t understand. Effortless living in the pleasure of the moment. I find myself experiencing and creating those conditions often in my life—it’s pleasure, so once sampled it’s all you want to taste from that point on. Freedom feels like…well, what Buddhists and other mystics talk about—existence without need, but still with variety, flavor and stimulation. But without a price to pay, without guilt, without freaking people out because you just jumped the queue, exempted yourself from the rules. I have more than a few friends and loved ones who just keep believing that pleasure has to be paid for with unpleasantness, pain, and a Newtonian payback. It’s only true if you convince yourself it’s true.
So, choices lead you to opportunities, and you can’t fuck up. Every experience is an opportunity to know more. My huge leap of faith is to dive fully in to a new country, with a new life. Leaving the familiar and reinventing my situation in a way I couldn’t have imagined just 3.5 years ago. Thank God for my wanderlust. It’s kept me from familiarity in anything—I look at places, at my own relationship to people and activities in a new way all the time. I step back from a situation, leave it for awhile and come back to it and find that I’ve grown and the relationship I’m re-encountering is telling me something new—either it’s stuck, or it’s degenerating, or it’s transforming upward.
I left my house, which of course I’ve really altered in the last months, so it was a familiar place but also totally reinvented by the work I did in it. And I let it go. I had a long goodbye early this morning. The backyard was coated in fallen blossoms from a huge flowering tree. It was a deep pink carpet. I took it as a farewell present, a message, in its way. I got in my car and drove to the airport.
MEMPHIS 5/5
Mellow Big Star gig at the Memphis in May Festival—the crowd was more sober, less numerous, and more tranquil than I experienced in our past appearances. Our show was both mellow and rough around the edges. And then it was done. I had a couple of beers with Bill and Jeff from Rykodisc and Jeff Powell who recorded the big star album. I went back to my hotel and…that was it. I was in Memphis for about 16 hours.
Check out ‘SOAM5’, live performances from the Univ. of Minnesota’s ‘Radio K’. The Posies perform ‘I Guess You’re Right’ and you’ll also find live tracks from Metric and Sam Prekop & Archer Prewitt. www.radiok.org
Love
KS
On Air Canada flight 542 from Seattle to Toronto
