Play It, Sam ...


... play As Times Goes By ...

"I'll bet nobody said to Van Gogh, Hey man, can you do Starry Night Again?" (Joni Mitchell, Miles of Aisles )

Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By ...

I like to play when I'm in tune and the sky looks like this.




This painting is so precise in its astronomical orientation that the village where it was painted can be deduced by astronomers as being Auvers-su-Oise, France. Soon I'll be in France and the Netherlands. I hope I don't forget to see the stars, and to remember Vincent's explanation of why he painted. He said, "I want people to say, 'He feels deeply. He feels tenderly.'"

He shot himself in 1890, at the age of 37.

"So much for taking that on."

There is a popping sound and the smell of shoe polish and juicy fruit chewing gum, because sometimes you have to start at the feet and work up to get to know somebody's under standing. So why not shine shoes with a dancing rag and portable raggae? "What are you talking about, Mr. Vincent?"

"I was thinking about Van Gough. He shot himself when he was 37."

"Wasn't he the one who cut off his own ear? I guess that's better than Evander Hollyfied's gettin' his chewed off by Mike Tyson."

"He wanted to share his sensitivity."

"Uh oh."

"Yea, so when he looked at the stars he saw them with a precise intellectual grasp of his mathematical relationship to his position in space. Then something came up through his feet, and he didn't know what it was because it didn't have a voice."

"That makes me think of what happened to little Bobby Crumb, you know the one had the brother into some kind of radical yoga? He took LSD and after that all his characters had big feet. The feet were the foreground, like he was laying down on the dance floor looking through a wide angle lens, so the feet look huge and the head's a long way off."

"Makes me high just to listen to you talk. What do you think of these shoes?"

"San Antonio's, man I see those I say to myself this is a smart man. He's a man that can find a fine wine for under ten dollars. Hey, any fool can pay retail. That's what my Jewish girlfriend says, and then she just laughs like she's tickled with herself."




"I'm coming unattached, Hershel."

"You still working on that list of what you own?"

"Yea, I'm getting it down to the essentials. My heart is breaking because I have two guitars, and I know someday it comes down to giving one of them up, at which point I will flatly refuse, because I need two, maybe three or four, and that's something that happens when you take up a guitar. You fall in love with the guitar because of the call and response."

"Yes sir, I remember a story about a duck -- they mate for life, you know that? -- anyway -- this man would feed this duck in a garbage can lid, and this duck imprinted on that lid. He mated with a garbage can lid. The duck was happy, and the lid wadn't bent out of shape. It got fresh air and food and the rest of it was supplied by the duck, who was the man between the two of them."

"A male duck."

"That's right. He was blessed with instinctual desire and no powers of self-reflection, which was fortunate for him and for the relationship for that matter. But what you figure shows up in the mix about right now?"

"The human factor."

"The human factor is right. The man that owned the duck just couldn't stand it. It was, 'Why'd he marry the garbage can lid?' and 'This ain't normal.'"

"Putting judgments on it."

"Precisely. Putting judgments on it, and trying to step in and fix something that just was. He leaves a note for the garbage man, says, 'Please take this garbage can lid with you when you pick up the trash.'"

"Cruelty."

"Forgive them Lord for they know not what they do. The duck sees them grab his wife, and they're taking off with her and he's running after them, calling for help, 'I can't remary,' he's yelling at them, 'I'm a duck.' and they don't even know it when they run over him."

"Dead?"

"Dead Duck. How do those shoes look to you?"

"Carefully done, without too much shine, but a consistent glow. Just the way I like them."

"So anyway, what happened?"

"To who?"

"Van Gogh. You said he felt something come through his feet that didn't have a voice."

"Nope. It comes in silence. You have to listen. I liked that routine Quentin Crisp used to do, about people who worry about not knowing what to say. He said, ' ... to have friends you don't have to know what to say, you have to know how to listen. Now ... we'd all like to have friends ... but if it means you have to listen, the price is ridiculous.'

"Now, I'd like to tell you what came up from his feet, and I'd like to tell you what Robert Crumb saw on LSD that changed his work and broke through visual barriers, looking from the feet up, and not from the head down. I'd like to tell you why you knew somebody was a fellow Christian in the days of Christ when he, or she, washed your feet. You all knew the new energy was coming up through the feet, but you couldn't talk about it. You could only wash the feet to symbolically open the doors of perception."

"And somebody that didn't get it couldn't turn you in because to them it didn't have any meaning outside of a foot bath."

"Right. It was just somebody being too humble for comfort, and why worry about them? Remember in Castaneda, the healer seems to be the one who calls herself the healer, but in reality is the old man who's her servant. He makes himself invisible to the rich woman, so that he can see her plainly. Some people just see the shoe shine stand but they never see the shoe shine man."

"Long way down, mercy."

Posted: Thu - February 9, 2006 at 05:14 PM