As though I have wings

Some thoughts on art, music, and magic

The other day I picked up a few books at the music library on campus, then ducked into the Jack Arends Art Building and walked the hallways. It was late in the afternoon so classes weren’t in session, but handfuls of students were working in studios, painting or working with wood or metal. I stopped into an empty auditorium hall and was sent back my days as an Art History student as the University of Maryland (I minored; now I wish I’d double majored): the queasy thrill of a first day in, say, Modern European or Contemporary Art; the giant screen; scoping out the unfamiliar students, someone I might know, the cute loner girls with oversized canvas carriers; the knowledge that I’d be introduced to so many artists and works that I didn’t know and didn't know that I was so thirsty to know.

I remember my 19th Century European Art teacher telling us the first day of class, “We won’t be looking at any art in this class.” Wha?? The oddness of his remark momentarily interrupted our cool irony. “We’re going to look at reproductions of art.” Oh, I get it; and it stuck. You’ll have to go into D.C. to look at actual art, he said—which I started to do around that time, in head-lifting pleasure. I remember my contemporary art class fondly, and a particular favorite who cut through the reproductions to really enter me, among Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, and de Kooning, was Philip Guston, whose mid-1950s paintings staggered me.

My introduction to abstract expressionism, Guston’s work affected me so deeply in all of the clichéd ways: it felt like a foreign language, and so was a little frightening; it re-presented the world to me; it was utterly baffling and at the same time it felt oddly familiar. His paintings created a parallel universe wherein I understood texture as natively as I understood hunger, and graphically introduced to me a new way of seeing things; abstraction, essence, nonfigurative, inside-out, otherworldly, all of the mean descriptors missing the point. His paintings were both the thing and the definition, somehow both pre- and post-language. They seemed to somehow look how life felt without naming anything in particular. I can say with certainty and with a thrill, still, that my life was never quite the same after experiencing Guston’s colors, impasto, and monumentality. Nor was the world I looked at.

The Evidence, 1957

For m., 1955

Here’s Guston:

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

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Guston also remarked that a painting is “an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.” I’m currently reading Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Early in the biography Ratliff recounts a remarkable moment that took place between John Coltrane and saxophonist Wayne Shorter in Coltrane’s apartment on West 103rd Street in Manhattan, sometime in 1959. Coltrane asked Shorter if he was familiar with the concept of om, the holy sound, syllable, mantra, and invocation in Hinduism. No account is given of the subsequent conversation, but later,

Coltrane and Shorter sat together near the piano, with their saxophones out of their cases. Coltrane laid his whole forearm on the keyboard: dronggg. “See how many of those notes you can grab,” he said to Shorter. Shorter played as fast as he could, trying to match the tones hanging in the air. Coltrane asked Shorter to do the same for him. Later, they talked about improvising and language, and how it might be ideal to start a sentence in the middle, then travel backward and forward, toward both the subject and the predicate, simultaneously.

The piano notes that Coltrane sends randomly into the air, pieces of magic that Shorter has to (try to) hear and, in some way, see also, translate with his breath and his fingers, alchemy of sorts in a living room on the Upper West Side. Hanging above the musicians’ heads is a mantra, conjuring in sound the untranslatable, whatever it is that you believe in, or are skeptical of, that is beyond language, boundary-less. Ratliff reports that around this time Coltrane remarked to Russ Wilson at The Oakland Tribune that he intended to quit playing with Miles Davis, and that Coltrane had said to Shorter, “I have to leave Miles. What I’m playing with him sounds wrong.”

Coltrane might have been eager to forge new independent sounds, yet two years earlier he was already making magic. His playing on “Like Someone in Love” on Lush Life (released in 1961, recorded during sessions in the Spring and Summer of 1957, and in early 1958) evokes the enchantment and bewitchment of love, something that for all of its physical presence is damn tough to articulate in anything but sighs, tears, and embraces. (Cue the Hallmark Industry.) Co-written in the mid 1940s by Jimmy Van Heusen (melody) and Johnny Burke (lyrics), the standard in Coltrane’s hands becomes the very soundtrack of (the sound of?) affection itself. Burke’s lyric descriptions of being in love—“I find myself out gazing at stars / Hearing guitars / Like someone in love,” “Sometimes the things I do astound me / Mostly whenever you’re around me,” and “Lately I seem to walk as though I have wings / Bump into things like someone in love”—take shape in and as Coltrane’s playing, in his cascading runs that capture the headiness, and the wordlessness, of new, breathless love.

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“Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There’s not some trick involved with it. It’s pure and it’s real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.”

That’s Tom Petty, indirectly describing how I felt as a kid in the basement listening to the family albums and 45s for the first time, moving between them and the weekly Top 40 countdowns on the radio. Raised Catholic, I was urged to shut my eyes tight during the consecration at Mass, mutter under my breath My Lord and my God as I summoned, and strained to believe, the image of bread and wine turning to body and blood. No such machinations were needed in my basement. The Monkees, Elton John, Simon and Garfunkel, the Partridge Family, the Sweet, the Beatles, and countless other sonic miracles were made manifest as their records, and my head, spun. If faith if the evidence of things unseen, as Hebrews puts it, then “Sometime in the Morning” in the air above my head was all of the evidence I needed

Around this time I got vaguely into magic—a friend at grade school was an “enthusiast” as I remember. Barry’s Magic Shop on Georgia Avenue was a fifteen minute walk from my house in Wheaton, Maryland, a cramped store packed with tricks, gags, and all sorts of aids to clumsy, boyish prestidigitation. I took a magic class once at the Wheaton Rec Center, the same place where my mom and a couple of her friends took Chinese cooking classes, but it didn’t take—something about the humming fluorescent lights made me blue, surrounded as I was by kids my age showing varying degrees of enthusiasm. A distinct memory I possess many decades later is a glimpse of the teacher, some game neighborhood volunteer, climbing into his car in the parking lot at the end of the night, in the rain, throwing his boxes of tricks in the trunk, a melancholy tableaux to me in ways that I didn’t understand. I recall one of his “bloody thumb” gags falling into a neon-lit puddle, but I may have imagined that.

I discovered all the magic I needed in revolving records and in eight-track tapes. Something would fizz up inside of me, reactions as strange and exciting and as miraculous as what I’d try and whip up in my junior chemistry set that sat a few feet from the stereo. I’ve carried this awe with me. I’m as undone by a chord change, a turn of phrase, a guitar solo, or harmonies on a bridge as ever, marveling at how those moments can wholly alter my mood, my thoughts, the day. I’m bemused by those Visualizers that come bundled with most operating systems and streaming services now, the light shows that shift and move to the sound waves generated by a song. (Their origins lie in the trippy psychedelic graphics that were projected behind “rock bands” starting in the late 1960s.) At the top of this post is screen grab of a Visualizer as it danced its 1s and 0s on my Mac while I played Coltrane’s “Like Someone In Love.” Here are some more—

—each translating in graphics the invisible goings-on inside of us as we listen to music, each failing, like many translations, to capture the magic of the original tongue.

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I took pianos and drum lessons as a kid, but I’m not a musician. I think that I prefer to be on the outside looking in, amazed at it all. In the summer of 2001 I was temporarily living in New York City while working on my first book. I was hanging out with my brother Paul in his apartment in the East Village one night when, inspired by an earlier walk though Chelsea, a stray comment from a friend of Paul’s, and plenty of beer, we sat down at a keyboard in his cramped bedroom and banged out an instrumental that we titled “I Hate Chelsea,” a bouncy, early-80s/New Wave thing with a bit of ‘60s Twist thrown in. For someone listening without context to our little jam, it’s unlikely that we richly evoked the mood of that West Side neighborhood, but the song told a story, my brother’s and my story, for that night, anyway. A kind of poor man’s magic.

“For M., by Philip Guston, 1955, Oil on canvas,” cropped, by Peter E via Flickr

“Philip Guston, The Evidence, 1957. Oil on canvas (1913-1980) by Rob Corder via Flickr