banjoman
Dear,
First, I must give you some instructions upon how to successfully read this text. A word of warning if I may….
1. Please read slowly.
2. Please do not read when surrounded by growling chaos or colleagues hard at work.
3. Please do not read when water is boiling, or your last sip of tea has gone cold.
4. Please read in loose comfortable trousers and a chair with a spongy back.
5. Allow yourself to slouch slightly, and slip on a slinky ambient tune.
I want to be alone with you.
Lie down.
Close your eyes.
Sorry. Pardon. Return to the chair and smooth your skirt.
Pardon.
Let’s begin.
You put the ass back in bluegrass.
You put the C back in Dundee.
Warmed up now. How about a tune?
You can’t stop it
Time is passing slowly.
Time to go with the tempo.
Banjoman, banjo man,
He ride in an ice cream van,
He fought in Afghanistan
Plaied his banjo,
there in,
the rotting sand.
Change the channel.
They found him behind enemy lines, chewing on his banjo case. After four days of capture, he had forgotten all the words to Country Roads, and so his captors dumped him in a cave. The thing that kept him going during the empty days was the knowledge that Bella Fleck would one day play on Radio 4.
Keep going.
Magda forgot her drawing pencil. It was a pencil from the world’s largest pencil factory. Certainly not a fair-trade pencil, not very politically correct that the graphite was potentially mined by underpaid Liverpudlian men. Men who could not afford the officially licensed version of their team’s jersey.
For shame. You call yourself a Crusader?
Haircuts. I don’t know how you get all those noises out of it. I tried once at home and there was nothing. I also tried to cut my own hair. If I remember correctly, there was a piece that kept sticking up. A hairy albatross upon my head. Sqwawking to other teenagers of my embarrassment each morning when the styling mousse coagulates upon my ear.
I always worry I will forget to wipe it off before I leave the house. God forbid the other carpoolers see me come out of the house dressed in a suit, but with a wet towel still wrapping my hair and dark circles yet undisguised beneath my eyes. Why do we wish to hide the fact that we got up late, that we are still tired, that we can’t fall straight asleep, that we fell asleep without moisturizing, that we are human just like them?
This is My story about My banjo.
One day I’m going to make a VIDeO.
About Playing. And what it can do to your tiny mind.
Cursing the body with RSI and leaving the fingers cigarette stained and trapped in plastic fingernails.
Why don’t you take up the flute instead.
Have you figured who I am yet? I’m God. Or at least I’m playing at being her. I am sitting back from this conversation recording the world as I see it. I am letting the conversors move on with their lives and then later returning to rewrite the history. To insert conclusions and commandments as I see fit. I build in the threads of general light human observation, and try to spark them all together to create a fire of universal smarts. Alone we will never put all the pieces together. But if we pool our resources and look carefully, we just might find something there.
We do not have enough time in the moment to explore. It captures our thoughts and reels us along like a curious dachsund . Desperate to stay and sniff the sidewalk, we are tugged along despite ourselves by inertia greater than our will.
This is why I sit here. Four days later looking at the words of my cohorts. Playing god to try and weave their feathers of understanding into a cosmic duck.
Perhaps, if I sit each Wednesday and record their words and then later sit and try dream up the missing pieces…this will in the end (a year of Sundays) give me a few nuggets of truth.
I’m going to tell you a story about my banjo
My banjo stay with me
my banjo fly away from me…
Your banjo
Our banjo
Let’s all do a line
Seriously na na nnNice chords
On that banjo
When I think the connections are built, I must remember that my work is not finished. I must reconsider the text with additional stimulation. A Brahms CD. Whilst eating mushroom tortellini. During a bath. All affording new entry point to the text and help to make it whole.
I’m going to tell you a story tell you a story tell you a story about…my banjo.
There we were.
G
C
A
D minorA minor.
I never knew she was a minor. She looked at least nineteen.
Conversor alumnus take note: When looking at the text, try to guess which words were your own and which were added later. Do you remember them? How has your perception of the evening changed after reading this?
Just curious.
Remember, this isn’t scientific, this is existentialist.
The man from country western Sudan
wants to tell you a story…
About a Rastafarian banjo band
Rasta man in da banjo band
Dreadlock bluegrass.
Spliffs in da harmonica
Please don’t let me make you feel inadequate. Remember that I am putting even more at stake. As I am writing this I brim with confidence in the brief belief that THIS IS GOOD. THIS IS really good what I am writing. Man. I must keep going.
Later I will look at it and deflate. Hunh? Inadequacy enters the building (I hate him) and smothers me. What seemed brilliant just yesterday afternoon now seems juvenile and trite. I am embarrassed to hear my literary voice braying like a sick rooster.
No one must read this.
It needs a lot of work.
Chances are I will not return to this project. After humiliation it is dismissed. I cringe inside. My muscles involuntarily twitch into a grimace when I debate this in my mind, walking down the sidewalk. I pass in front of Harvey Nichols. Posh young girls twitter to see me make such a funny face for no apparent reason..
This seems a good part of the reason why I do not (have not yet) written a longer piece. Perhaps if I just keep writing without rereading and editing, I will be able to press on in the belief that what I am working on right here is a work of UTTER GENIUS.
BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW ITS NOT.
Jane called
She wanted to come over. For olive’s port and cheese
Electronic noises Jaw jaw
a whore so sore she can’t sing any more
spoons to hit our pots with…
Here he comes in his wheelchair
He like big tits and has blonde hair
Jaw wired shut
And an empty gut,
Wired up jaw of the banjo man.
What a committed committee.
We all go insane at the same time
Very promising
We ALL conspire to glue glitter to tents and tents to lampposts.
And lamp posts to amplifiers.
His song, your song, my song
We all go insane at the same time.
(Hybrid: Wide Angle Special (CD2). Track 2: BURNIN (live)
I want to take you to the concert. In fact, you deserved to be there with us in the dark tent with strobes and black lights flashing. The beat was a bear that sworded your chest. With weak knees you trembled and kicked at the damp sawdust. Without realizing it you closed your eyes and forgot where you were and who you were and that there were 10,000 other people possibly watching you dance. Of course they weren’t watching you dance. Your suddenly realise what it means to have charkas, and realise that yours are now open. Maybe for the very first time. Every so often you stumble a step, open your eyes, and look over to see Tim grinning like an idiot, kicking at the damp sawdust like a joyous bull.
The silhouette song Is sung All different
Preferably In a classy tone. Baritone.
Give me the zippy zip top.
You don’t wear shoes!
take it from the top.
THIS IS AMAZING. WE MUST PRESS ON.
Sometimes I forget when he’s around. Has a way of making himself invisible. Even with a ukelele strapped to his back. One minute he is sitting there and talking to you, the next minute he has evaporated. Then there are only four while he sneaks around, photographing the bottom of shoes and the voodoo dolls on the shelves. Life is an eternal crime scene for him. One never knows when a moment will become important. Risking nothing, he rather selects the moments to crown as memorable. He captures them in image the way I capture this night with words. And we both publish our findings online.
His are easier to read. The instructions are much shorter. More people definitely read his. But he is selective. I must learn this. The way a musician picks through tunes, I must learn to shelve and mix my words.
THERE IS A TASTE OF DIRT IN MY MOUTH. I SUSPECT IT IS THE INSTANT COFFEE. COFFEE AND CIGARETTES INDEED.
Now bandage wrapped and wheelchair ridden, Banjo man begs by the bench. Warms his hands beneath the blanket in his lap. Secretly fears it begicide to hide an empty palm while potential donors rush past.
BANJOMAN!! * flaps about * !!!
‘Take me to the beach!’
He has memories of the Taliban that the noise of water soothes. At the beach he has bangs pots and spoons to scare away rabid albatrosses that only he can see. ‘Disconcerted Killer Birds!’ Birds are determined to spoil his beach holiday. He fights to keep them away from his caravan. His pals at the caravan park fight to keep him sober, a losing battle in light of the birds attacking his brain.
At night they dine on beans, fish fingers and beer. Sitting in miniature Bavarian replica chairs. The caravan registrar is also cook and bartender. Later he will spin the tunes and watch the lowest element of society practice their best dance moves and sweat off their discount antiperspirant and cheap hair gel. He will see them couple off at closing time and think, Jesus, they are going home to breed.
Of course they must breed. If they didn’t, his caravan park would be forced to close. There needed to be lots of people living below the poverty line, lots who could not afford dream vacations to Magaluffe. Instead they pack up their teenagers and bastard grandsons to flee the council estate for a swathe of grass in the suburbs.
Lets call it camping. We’ll plug in lots of fairy lights to drown out the starlight. We can switch to cheaper plastic replicas of our lives and sleep on the hard ground. This way, when we return home after a week, everything will seem luxurious and rosy. And we’ll be able to cope for another year.
Sorry, I’m not listening. I have a disinterest in pain. I am an evolutionary dead end.
Ras said, “why is there cheese in my coffee?”
On the way home you had your tuner out
Who am I now?
I am god. who am I to you?
Yes, I’m she and I’m he too. I’m late for the movies, and I’m stronger than you. I’m the one that fell off their bike in front of you, I’m the one who smells of mothballs in the car. I know what you think before you thunk it, I’ve had every good idea two years ago. I can forget that it’s a sunny day just to spend a few more minutes with you. I don’t like it when you stare quietly at me. I don’t like the awkward silence when they wait for me to sing. I wish you would oil my wheelchair so it doesn’t squeak so much at the movies when I have to go out for a pee.
I’m the one who broke the last wine glass.
I’m The One
I’m banjo man.
Boo.
_
Afterward: See? You have done something today. Ok, you look like hell. And you didn’t make it to the Cartier-Bresson exhibition. Or for a walk in the sun. And you ended up getting stoned. And listening to two whole Future Sound of London cds….But at least you wrote something!
First, I must give you some instructions upon how to successfully read this text. A word of warning if I may….
1. Please read slowly.
2. Please do not read when surrounded by growling chaos or colleagues hard at work.
3. Please do not read when water is boiling, or your last sip of tea has gone cold.
4. Please read in loose comfortable trousers and a chair with a spongy back.
5. Allow yourself to slouch slightly, and slip on a slinky ambient tune.
I want to be alone with you.
Lie down.
Close your eyes.
Sorry. Pardon. Return to the chair and smooth your skirt.
Pardon.
Let’s begin.
You put the ass back in bluegrass.
You put the C back in Dundee.
Warmed up now. How about a tune?
You can’t stop it
Time is passing slowly.
Time to go with the tempo.
Banjoman, banjo man,
He ride in an ice cream van,
He fought in Afghanistan
Plaied his banjo,
there in,
the rotting sand.
Change the channel.
They found him behind enemy lines, chewing on his banjo case. After four days of capture, he had forgotten all the words to Country Roads, and so his captors dumped him in a cave. The thing that kept him going during the empty days was the knowledge that Bella Fleck would one day play on Radio 4.
Keep going.
Magda forgot her drawing pencil. It was a pencil from the world’s largest pencil factory. Certainly not a fair-trade pencil, not very politically correct that the graphite was potentially mined by underpaid Liverpudlian men. Men who could not afford the officially licensed version of their team’s jersey.
For shame. You call yourself a Crusader?
Haircuts. I don’t know how you get all those noises out of it. I tried once at home and there was nothing. I also tried to cut my own hair. If I remember correctly, there was a piece that kept sticking up. A hairy albatross upon my head. Sqwawking to other teenagers of my embarrassment each morning when the styling mousse coagulates upon my ear.
I always worry I will forget to wipe it off before I leave the house. God forbid the other carpoolers see me come out of the house dressed in a suit, but with a wet towel still wrapping my hair and dark circles yet undisguised beneath my eyes. Why do we wish to hide the fact that we got up late, that we are still tired, that we can’t fall straight asleep, that we fell asleep without moisturizing, that we are human just like them?
This is My story about My banjo.
One day I’m going to make a VIDeO.
About Playing. And what it can do to your tiny mind.
Cursing the body with RSI and leaving the fingers cigarette stained and trapped in plastic fingernails.
Why don’t you take up the flute instead.
Have you figured who I am yet? I’m God. Or at least I’m playing at being her. I am sitting back from this conversation recording the world as I see it. I am letting the conversors move on with their lives and then later returning to rewrite the history. To insert conclusions and commandments as I see fit. I build in the threads of general light human observation, and try to spark them all together to create a fire of universal smarts. Alone we will never put all the pieces together. But if we pool our resources and look carefully, we just might find something there.
We do not have enough time in the moment to explore. It captures our thoughts and reels us along like a curious dachsund . Desperate to stay and sniff the sidewalk, we are tugged along despite ourselves by inertia greater than our will.
This is why I sit here. Four days later looking at the words of my cohorts. Playing god to try and weave their feathers of understanding into a cosmic duck.
Perhaps, if I sit each Wednesday and record their words and then later sit and try dream up the missing pieces…this will in the end (a year of Sundays) give me a few nuggets of truth.
I’m going to tell you a story about my banjo
My banjo stay with me
my banjo fly away from me…
Your banjo
Our banjo
Let’s all do a line
Seriously na na nnNice chords
On that banjo
When I think the connections are built, I must remember that my work is not finished. I must reconsider the text with additional stimulation. A Brahms CD. Whilst eating mushroom tortellini. During a bath. All affording new entry point to the text and help to make it whole.
I’m going to tell you a story tell you a story tell you a story about…my banjo.
There we were.
G
C
A
D minorA minor.
I never knew she was a minor. She looked at least nineteen.
Conversor alumnus take note: When looking at the text, try to guess which words were your own and which were added later. Do you remember them? How has your perception of the evening changed after reading this?
Just curious.
Remember, this isn’t scientific, this is existentialist.
The man from country western Sudan
wants to tell you a story…
About a Rastafarian banjo band
Rasta man in da banjo band
Dreadlock bluegrass.
Spliffs in da harmonica
Please don’t let me make you feel inadequate. Remember that I am putting even more at stake. As I am writing this I brim with confidence in the brief belief that THIS IS GOOD. THIS IS really good what I am writing. Man. I must keep going.
Later I will look at it and deflate. Hunh? Inadequacy enters the building (I hate him) and smothers me. What seemed brilliant just yesterday afternoon now seems juvenile and trite. I am embarrassed to hear my literary voice braying like a sick rooster.
No one must read this.
It needs a lot of work.
Chances are I will not return to this project. After humiliation it is dismissed. I cringe inside. My muscles involuntarily twitch into a grimace when I debate this in my mind, walking down the sidewalk. I pass in front of Harvey Nichols. Posh young girls twitter to see me make such a funny face for no apparent reason..
This seems a good part of the reason why I do not (have not yet) written a longer piece. Perhaps if I just keep writing without rereading and editing, I will be able to press on in the belief that what I am working on right here is a work of UTTER GENIUS.
BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW ITS NOT.
Jane called
She wanted to come over. For olive’s port and cheese
Electronic noises Jaw jaw
a whore so sore she can’t sing any more
spoons to hit our pots with…
Here he comes in his wheelchair
He like big tits and has blonde hair
Jaw wired shut
And an empty gut,
Wired up jaw of the banjo man.
What a committed committee.
We all go insane at the same time
Very promising
We ALL conspire to glue glitter to tents and tents to lampposts.
And lamp posts to amplifiers.
His song, your song, my song
We all go insane at the same time.
(Hybrid: Wide Angle Special (CD2). Track 2: BURNIN (live)
I want to take you to the concert. In fact, you deserved to be there with us in the dark tent with strobes and black lights flashing. The beat was a bear that sworded your chest. With weak knees you trembled and kicked at the damp sawdust. Without realizing it you closed your eyes and forgot where you were and who you were and that there were 10,000 other people possibly watching you dance. Of course they weren’t watching you dance. Your suddenly realise what it means to have charkas, and realise that yours are now open. Maybe for the very first time. Every so often you stumble a step, open your eyes, and look over to see Tim grinning like an idiot, kicking at the damp sawdust like a joyous bull.
The silhouette song Is sung All different
Preferably In a classy tone. Baritone.
Give me the zippy zip top.
You don’t wear shoes!
take it from the top.
THIS IS AMAZING. WE MUST PRESS ON.
Sometimes I forget when he’s around. Has a way of making himself invisible. Even with a ukelele strapped to his back. One minute he is sitting there and talking to you, the next minute he has evaporated. Then there are only four while he sneaks around, photographing the bottom of shoes and the voodoo dolls on the shelves. Life is an eternal crime scene for him. One never knows when a moment will become important. Risking nothing, he rather selects the moments to crown as memorable. He captures them in image the way I capture this night with words. And we both publish our findings online.
His are easier to read. The instructions are much shorter. More people definitely read his. But he is selective. I must learn this. The way a musician picks through tunes, I must learn to shelve and mix my words.
THERE IS A TASTE OF DIRT IN MY MOUTH. I SUSPECT IT IS THE INSTANT COFFEE. COFFEE AND CIGARETTES INDEED.
Now bandage wrapped and wheelchair ridden, Banjo man begs by the bench. Warms his hands beneath the blanket in his lap. Secretly fears it begicide to hide an empty palm while potential donors rush past.
BANJOMAN!! * flaps about * !!!
‘Take me to the beach!’
He has memories of the Taliban that the noise of water soothes. At the beach he has bangs pots and spoons to scare away rabid albatrosses that only he can see. ‘Disconcerted Killer Birds!’ Birds are determined to spoil his beach holiday. He fights to keep them away from his caravan. His pals at the caravan park fight to keep him sober, a losing battle in light of the birds attacking his brain.
At night they dine on beans, fish fingers and beer. Sitting in miniature Bavarian replica chairs. The caravan registrar is also cook and bartender. Later he will spin the tunes and watch the lowest element of society practice their best dance moves and sweat off their discount antiperspirant and cheap hair gel. He will see them couple off at closing time and think, Jesus, they are going home to breed.
Of course they must breed. If they didn’t, his caravan park would be forced to close. There needed to be lots of people living below the poverty line, lots who could not afford dream vacations to Magaluffe. Instead they pack up their teenagers and bastard grandsons to flee the council estate for a swathe of grass in the suburbs.
Lets call it camping. We’ll plug in lots of fairy lights to drown out the starlight. We can switch to cheaper plastic replicas of our lives and sleep on the hard ground. This way, when we return home after a week, everything will seem luxurious and rosy. And we’ll be able to cope for another year.
Sorry, I’m not listening. I have a disinterest in pain. I am an evolutionary dead end.
Ras said, “why is there cheese in my coffee?”
On the way home you had your tuner out
Who am I now?
I am god. who am I to you?
Yes, I’m she and I’m he too. I’m late for the movies, and I’m stronger than you. I’m the one that fell off their bike in front of you, I’m the one who smells of mothballs in the car. I know what you think before you thunk it, I’ve had every good idea two years ago. I can forget that it’s a sunny day just to spend a few more minutes with you. I don’t like it when you stare quietly at me. I don’t like the awkward silence when they wait for me to sing. I wish you would oil my wheelchair so it doesn’t squeak so much at the movies when I have to go out for a pee.
I’m the one who broke the last wine glass.
I’m The One
I’m banjo man.
Boo.
_
Afterward: See? You have done something today. Ok, you look like hell. And you didn’t make it to the Cartier-Bresson exhibition. Or for a walk in the sun. And you ended up getting stoned. And listening to two whole Future Sound of London cds….But at least you wrote something!
posted by Camille at 2:22 pm
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