It’s Miles’ birthday, so I’m going through the catalog and listening to everything and since we’ve been talking about opera and minstral shows and Porgy and Bess too… I chose this cover. It was very controversial at the time of its release, because the chick reads as white and she’s grabbing at his horn and he looks like the black of night as always… they didn’t call him the prince of darkness for nothing. You can imagine him loving to put the race spin on a thing like Porgy, while still loving the music and Gil’s arrangements. It puts me in mind of how European T.V. is probably showing all sorts of Miles footage and celebrating his genius and I can’t even find him of BET Jazz… so I am afraid of Americans, or anyone else who has no regard for their history. These paintings are some Coney Island studies I’ve been working on for a while.
But let’s start at the beginning, when I headed down to the subway on 9th Avenue and suddenly a huge plane came up over the arch bridge… flying way too low and all the folks next to me on 4th Ave gasped and cursed and then you saw the persuing fighter jets and thought… “Oh Shit! It’s happening again! It took us all a second to see their fabulous formation and realize; “Oh crap it’s US, not THEM, whatever that means.” Suddenly I was surrounded and part of B.K. U.N. stamp: tall black man, short hispanic guy, chubby white boy me and the passing Asian student. We reassured ourselves it must be some one, or some THING very important on that plane. Later I read the Metro paper and realized it was all for show… Fleet’s in… hide the booze and lock up your daughters the boys in white are going on the town… me? I was heading for Coney to do Willoughby by the sea.
When I got to Coney the were there too reforming the formation out at sea (it is extremely hard for and f-16 to fly as slowly as this lumbering sub spotter… I am afraid of Americans, but the bastards sure can fly airplanes.
There is something really surreal about squadrons of jets flying tight formation over a crumbling beauty of a rain-wet theme park (acually there was some architecture news going on at the boardwalk, but I’ll discuss the future plans for this place of great past tomorrow… what a sentance). You can see the white dots are the F-16s showing their white tops in the sun, but they look like U.F.O.s and the whole thing sort of reminded me of Hour Of The Wolf by Bergman, which I saw at Harvard a million years ago and haven’t seen since (it did recently come out on Criterion, but before that, it was hard to find).
You arrive at Coney by following a Dante-like path past a necropolis and horrible Moses-like developements… with the 911 flashback, it had me thinking of the karmic wheel and eternal return… metumpsychosis… or whatever Joyce calls it…
So I went and walked the whole boardwalk doing Willoughby Narration from start to finish of the story, while shooting ships and police choppers and gulls and the sand and the wood and ended the story at the end of the boardwalk… A place I had never been before and as I came to the death of Clark, it started to rain and the final confrontation of Willoughby and the narrator was played out with the drumming of rain on the umbrella… oh and I was listening to Miles’ In A Silent Way the whole time. Should be creepy… I haven’t watched it yet. Oh and the video up there is an omEGG study.
