Bubblegum Buddhism
on Arthur Russell, 'first thought best thought', Phillip Glass does a pinger and Grunewald Dreaming 2020
“IT’S MY WORLD IT’S MY SONG I DIDN’T ASK YOU TO SING ALONG”
Cello for me has always operated at the frequency of the sublime, but I came in my own sweet time to meet this immortal spiral boy, the one with the elsewhere eyes, cheeks like the surface of a new planet. In the university halls in the early 2-thous I’d heard his name uttered by associations of long, acoustic men just about often enough to file it away next to Will Oldham under ‘undoubtedly not for me.’ NYHC was the centre of my universe, kind of funny really because Arthur Russell was a regular at CBGBs.
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“Mantra chanting can be an extension of shaking your ass or raising your voice in joyful exaltation. With no fundamental associations, it's sheer joy to sing, a good way to loosen one's heart in the world.” - Allen Ginsberg
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Arthur was possessed by a refusal of limits, careening from countrified drawlers to transcendental disco and concrètish squallers as he built his ark of true banger canon. An Iowan by birth hungry to get on and Do It To It in New York where he developed his groove to ‘transmit the dharma through pop’ as Ginsberg, his onetime lover, neighbour, friend and lifelong supporter, put it. His route to this plotted a gentler, deeper reinterpretation of dilettante scouse George Harrison’s sometimes cack-handed aim of a “a spiritual infiltration of pop culture.” Unlike the Best Beatle, though, Arthur was already a firm devotee with a deep knowledge and practice by the time he got to church (Paradise Garage) in 1976. He had lived at Kailas Shugendo, a Buddhist commune in the Bay Area, from the age of 18, while studying at the Berkeley conservatory and boning up on ragas and riaz with Ali Akbar.
His compositional practice was informed by both Shingon and Vajrayana Buddhist teachings, and over time he developed an especially tender application of the core tools of mantra, meditation, visualization and sadhana (prayer or ritual.) Arthur even devised his own unique ‘matrix’ style of notation which his notebooks are crammed with. It’s the flavour vs. the depth, the ethereal tricking the tummy vs. the teachings that orients the mind. Pop culture was dismissed by most ascetic adherents as a base and thus corrupting pleasure, antithetical to the transcendent. In spiritual defiance of false binaries he called what he was going for ‘buddhist bubblegum,’ an advocate for the quiet holiness of A People’s Pleasure: dark rooms, bright light, brief encounters. Unsurprisingly he was confirmed total astro bitch, too.
Arthur Russell remixed tenets of pop-Buddhism long after popularised appropriations had first broken through to the West. One of my personal favourites of these has always been “First Thought / Best Thought.” The Tibetan poet and arguable father of modern American meditation Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is the originator of this phrase, but it was popularised by and thus often attributed to Ginsberg. My personal attribution goes to my friend Grace, who first dropped this one on me in a basement in Philadelphia in 2013 when we were writing a short song about a bad man for therapeutic purposes. I obeyed her intriguing directive and felt warmed by how quickly it gave name to my process for writing a song. I have always been one for standing inside the idea, of following my natural impulse to fill it out and paint its walls, shabby as they may be, mostly because other more baroque houses were never open to me. This shit has never come easy! I never knew its origins but I knew always how to stick with a riff, sometimes to a fault. Nothing is disposable when you’re painting with a very limited palette. In years since, I have used this maxim to bring order and possibility to first timer anxiety, and weaponised it to force my way through practices that might have felt otherwise turgid. You ever get that rush where you feel like you could be a thousand people in a thousand musical constellations making the best songs of a thousand genres all at once, then reality pricks your balloon and you realise you’re largely talentless mortal and what you have is a thousand half formed ideas and a need to be with others who can show you theirs so you can half mash them into something decent or maybe even magic? FTBT feels to me fundamentally a part of that feeling, the foundation of a will to collaborate as a way to extend the self and transcend my own shortcomings in talent: and thus mad godly. Tbh, all of this relational patchworking seem the opposite of Arthur’s solo mode and overflowing archive of endlessly reversioned sessions and takes, but you hear it in the detail. His monomaniacal dedication to a beyond-sound came easiest for him when there were few other inputs: collaboration seemed to Arthur more of a hiss on the line, interference to be worked around and yet he did it compulsively. His stint in bands ended like the way he quit The Necessaries (his power pop band with your fella from the Modern Lovers) by opening the door and rolling right out of a car in the Holland tunnel on the way to a gig at the precise moment he realised he didn't want to be in the band anymore. First thought best thought indeed.
It’s hard not to smile at such mental legend behaviour but I couldn’t help but picture myself as one of the other members, already fretting about load in only to be blindsided by Art being a pure knobhead. Being in a band with a genius can be a real drag. It’s that tension between the quotidian drudge of music making and the preternatural vision of An Arteest which animates much of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Matt Wolff’s 2008 documentary. Somehow the lack of any video footage of his subject actually speaking takes on a sort of centrifugal abundance. It’s just very lovely and right how sound comes first. It’s also as much a profile of the people who cared for, love and provided for Arthur as they were illuminated by his dedication. This is especially true for his long-term partner, the visual artist and educator Tom Lee. These relationships, in their warmth, patience and generosity, built the reinforcing infrastructure around Arthur. This seems to have bought a man so very not of this world the precious gifts of time, rent and dinner. It’s what let him walk around the city listening to one song on cassette for several days. Tom is enchanted by the second life Arthur’s music has had since his death of HIV-AIDS related illnesses aged forty, but he is also honest about the long, long hours he worked as a high school teacher to fund their lives. He recalls how Arthur would sit meditating from when he left for work and be in the same posture on his return, how he griped anxiously over not getting the recognition he so deeply craved, sometimes to the extent of being a jerk, how deeply he felt and sometimes projected the pain that floored him each time he felt his ideas were passed by.
There is one moment in the doc where, describing the time when Arthur is thought to have first contracted HIV, another frequency of Tom crackles momentarily into view, a devastating freeze frame leavened quickly by a knowing chuckle: “I mean, I thought we were monogamous.”
Tom was there ’til the end of Arthur’s time in this realm and some twenty-five years after his death, that care still bursts through the screen whenever he’s speaking about him. After all, it’s a special material that a love is made from that can recalibrate a relationship as an engine of service to their failing body, grieve-as-you-go while their soul only expands into all your corners. To then gift your lover an endless afterlife in ears long yet to exist and be animated by their voice for the rest of your days might be the most romantic gesture I can imagine, but who knows what we’d be capable of if someone wrote us Love comes back!
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1. A top five:
Dinosaur L – Clean On Your Bean
Loose Joints – Is It All Over My Face
Arthur Russell – I Couldn’t Say It To Your face
Arthur Russell – Get around To it
Arthur Russell – All Girl All Boy
2. I am desperately seeking any recordings of FAST FOOD; Laurie Anderson's first band that Arthur Russell drummed and cell’d in. Please help!
3. Okay you made it. Here’s the VIN DIESEL rapping over a Arthur Russell beat in 1986. Listen out for the point, mid flop, where Vin exclaims ‘It’s the white part of me fucking it up!’
“TRYING MY BEST TO LIVE A FUNKY SOUND”
Not unrelated if we’re doing high-low kultcha low-high L.E.S freaks, but this tune! It’s the S’Express – ‘Hey Music Lover’ Phillip Glass remix. The OG is a cover of Sly and the Family Stone song from whence cometh the phrase ‘playing records is my bag,’ no less. This version pumps like a cluster headache. If you’re of an age you’ll recall this group as one of the more tasteful Ravesploitation acts. In the process of this mental choice for a remix Mark Moore from S’Express took the ever curious Phillip Glass (then aged 52) out to an acid rave at his request. The inevitable moment came. Mark goes “We don’t want to upset you but we’re doing to do some drugs, Phillip.” He pauses, looks up and replies “You lot thing you’re the first people in the world to do anything, don’t you?” and before long the 20th century’s most lauded experimental composer is gurning with the best of them. (Also, Suzanne Ciani admitted Phil was quite shit at synths and had to be shown and reshown what to do all the time so she often did most of the work. Big Mood.)
“THE ONLY REASON I DON’T SHOOT MYSELF IS BECAUSE I’M REALLY UNIQUE”
When the leaves went neon last year O found an afternoon to take me to the forest and I supplied us a tongue picnic. Scalp started to tingle as we get off the train, and as we reach the summit of a former gravel pit filled in with sand in 1983, I see the white edges of a cluster of ruined geodesic dome flapping in the light wind. Teufelsee is an abandoned NSA spy station. This city really does lay it on thick. Everyone I know here spits a different shade of venom about how they visited it before you had to pay to go in and that it was now an exhibition space where they make you pay to look at street art. How perverted. O’s chatter is getting political as my tongue begins curiously tasting the inside of my mouth as though it were some new food. Forced now to jettison the lovely choreograph of spirited mind-jousting we ascend instead to the pre-verbal and it begins to rain. I have remembered the name of my childhood imaginary friend. This hike is ostensibly to Nico’s grave. The normal response to guard one’s body against water (coming down hard now) seems as alien and hilarious as the wavey suede turkey tails protruding from logs all around us. We go in some circles for a while and I’m possessed with the urge to pull the mental map out from O’s head to unburden the navigator of his task. Suddenly we are at a clearing with a sign for the Friedhof. Once an out-of-the-way final resting place for the hundreds of thousands of city suicides, subject to too much shame to go in the family vault, then an overspill for the corpses of the Battle of Berlin, eventually a sought-after death-res. We turn a corner past a low stone wall when I am reminded of what I have been told earlier that morning: that my Aunty Holly had died, aged 108. That feels like a very Big Thought, too big to share with another in this altered state of total spiritual co-dependence. Christa ‘Nico’ Päffgen lies under clods of warm brown right next to her mother. I remember that article about her howling, noxious anti-Semitism. That’s another Very Big Thought. Mad how we relitigate the dead now, when the truth is we rot in heaven or hell. Nico died after falling off her bike in Ibiza in 1988. I like her song ‘I’m not Saying.’
The massive hands of trees flap flossy like the tear-slicked eyelashes of an angry supermodel. Narrow pathways between graves are dotted with graceful swishes of red fungi, as though someone had sewn spores to decorate. An avalanche of Big Thoughts washes way down and I forget what my face looks like. We are not exactly lost says the dripping wet cracked iPhone. I pulse with benevolence and make a pledge that on this hike and in my new life I will follow more than I lead, and as it starts to get dark, I wonder at what strange circumstances these are to feel so safe. We are out of the woods like sudden new-borns, tramping across a highway intersection to run the trippers’ gauntlet of Other People. Next we come upon the wreckage of a burned-out pub which O tells me wasn’t burnt out last time he was here; how it was a place he loved. Just imagining how I might feel if that memory belonged to me almost knocks me over as I peer down at what’s left of the walls. I consider what technology I could use to pull this reality from my friends’ head for a second to try it on. Big Thought. Then I realise I have invented the idea of collective memory and decide with this new knowledge I may have solved the problem of the world???? Before I can build a sentence he is already through the gate and upon the trash pile of what’s left of this ghost kneipe. I think about how we will all spend some parts of the coming decades like this, knee deep the rubble of our communal places, pilfering for signs of leftover life. O picks out a beautiful painted mirror and frees it for our journey home, then changes his mind and sets it down on the pavement facing the road for the passing cars to admire themselves.
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