Amerigo

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America is a white beard, it is a wool suit layered over a yellowed, lace collared, white shirt. It is the good gray poet. It is a wide round hat, it is free verse in a rocking chair with piled papers. It is an old man sitting with children. It is one hundred and twenty pale portraits. It is Washington, New York, Camden.



I am so ambivalent about the Levi's "Go Forth" ads.

Perhaps it is my own jealousy. I wish I made them. They rush with faces, sounds, voices and poetry. They vibrate with the "Other". They have an urgency like I have never seen in a commercial before. They are so well constructed I don't care about jeans, I care about the people and the words.

I suppose the ambivalent part is what would W. think? I know as good as anyone the insidious nature of advertising. It's subversive.

Is it working on me in these ads? Levis's wants me invested in their product. I feel invested in the art.

It's a constant battle in advertising: Art vs. Commerce.

Who wins in these?





Today, the Edison Proposal is headed into the studio at 10:00A.M. to record our Christmas song. I am nervous as to how it will go. We rehearsed it a bit again yesterday and worked it a bit more. I'm nervous about how it will go with Dave.

I want our track to live up to the great tradition of tracks over these last ten years. It's hard when the Ages have set the bar so high. They have perfected the modern Christmas song. And quite honestly, I think they have contributed to the Christmas Canon. Perhaps in twenty-five years the world will know their magic and all will sing about altar boys over-eating on Christmas Eve at an aunt's house!

Part two of this podcast will come later today after we record. Hopefully they will be words of joy. Or in W.'s words:

Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician,
Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night.

I hear thee trumpeter, listening alert I catch thy notes,
Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me,
Now low, subdued, now in the distance lost.

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