20. Along the Wildflower Parade
Your float completes its swivel onto a broad avenue, throngs teeming on both sides.
Multi-colored tufts of smoke mingle in mid-air — clouds of curlicues — some from roasted spice popcorn a few carts ahead, others the lingering ghosts of fireworks launched towards the statues of Helios and Perse looming off the neighboring volcano, as tradition calls for.
It’s loud even with your ears covered: the crowds are excited, dramatic cheering erupts the moment the sun debuts this wintry morning, and everyone wants a cookie.
Decorated as a golden disco ball, your oven *dings*, summoning a swarm immediately, mostly children, craning their necks to see how you’ll do it.
The road is wide, with enough berth for two parade lines. A marching band overtakes your float. Behind the drumline it’s acrobats tumbling, jugglers covered in lights, and another band approaching — this next one heralded by blue-feathered batons pirouetting through the sky. Your procession is the slower-moving, this side of the street chosen, wisely, by the peckish contingent.
You open the disco ball while leaning away from the heat-cloud expelled: out slides a five-level tray stacked full of butter biscuits. While news of the aroma fans out across the audience as if along lines of dominoes expertly coordinated, you dip two cookies into a vat of simmering chocolate, in one swift motion laying them both gracefully next to your trusty assistant.
She steps off her perch, waits for the chocolate to cool just enough, and begins to peck out a poem of her choosing.
Lauriel’s the true star of this show. Her beak clasps around the first finished cookie —hot off the Poet Parrot printing press — passing it to you to hand out, in order that she may commence her next creation.
You place the cookie on your palm and offer it to the closest child. Before he grabs it you’re able to read the top-side, perforated:
Joy is not made to be a crumb.
// Side B //
Thank you for tuning in! You were listening to two studio clips concatenated: one from July ’09, the other March ’16. The photograph was taken in Croatia at Plitvice Lakes National Park, a wondrous reserve with mysterious bat-filled caves tucked off to the side.
When we visited, we unwittingly stayed past closing, only realizing later we were the only humans left — sharing this gorgeous expanse with melodious insects, the iridescent stars, surrounded on all sides by lake waters burbling in endless effervescence.
The poem excerpt pecked out by Lauriel the Parrot is the last line of Mary Oliver’s “Don’t Hesitate” —
Open-Air Studio
I’ve begun taking Monsieur Magpie out to the local airfield-turned-park and could not be happier with how it’s going. Here he is next to Head Honcho. 69 keys/60 kilos.
Some frame repair1, voicing of the pickups2 — he’s got pickups! — and sanding + needling of the hammers3 later . . .
. . . and into the wheeled trolley he goes — 30 minutes later, hooked up with a front-row seat overlooking the eventual sunset:
My mission is not busking or street-performance (which focus on collecting donations and pleasing crowds). Though I do hope people enjoy the music, for the music is given in the spirit of The Gift, I have two other goals instead:
To get comfortable playing an unfamiliar and new improvisational style — no matter how chaotic or distracting my surroundings — and
To showcase a different type of public art, one that prioritizes the possibility of evoking curiosity and wonder.
Towards point #2, I’m swapping the “hat” or “instrument case” out, for printed concert programs instead, to frame each outing as an invitation rather than exhortation. And in addition, setting up a “lounge area” for visitors to hang out on bright area rugs, sign a travelers’ log, maybe pour themselves a cup of tea . . .
Though the goal is music-first and audience-second, I am ecstatic to report that audience interactions have so far been lovely, filled with surprises and joy.
If you wish to attend live in Berlin — or any upcoming live-streams from anywhere — join the instagram channel4 to be notified. I’d love to see you!
🏖️
Over the next 3 months, I’ll roll Mr. Magpie on public adventures, to prepare to record The Tributary in-studio. Because: after playing two private concerts with Tributary material, I learned that I wasn’t able to fully enter the space of free creation, which the music needs absolutely.
The Tributary is an approach to piano improvisation that I’ve never heard before. Genre-wise it’s closest to jazz, but it isn’t. This set of mini-dialects expands a core language that I am simultaneously discovering and learning how to speak more fluently. Since it’s nearly all improvisational, it requires familiarity with a process of action; but since there are no piano recordings for me to reference, I cannot yet speak it in dialogue with other musicians (except in brief encounters where I introduce someone to it, one person at a time . . . more about this in the future also).
Which brings us to The Secret. Last issue, I announced that this issue (No. 20) will introduce a paid section to Campfire Sparks, and the following issue (No. 21) will reveal the music and why everything is so hush-hush.
The plan is intact.
But at the bottom of this issue, for paid subscribers, I’ll show a brief teaser of what the in-progress Tributary sounds like.
Fun Tips That Are Also Hot*
The latest
entry is a curious blend of peaceful and playful: Turnings.This low-key-high-octane ROSALÍA track is getting queued up a lot at my precise geo-coordinates lately:
I’ve filled another notebook and it’s onto the next Archer & Olive. So many cherries: two cloth bookmarks, thick pages, ideal footprint & hand, paper pouch in back, carefree elastic pen holder, and the venerable dot-grid (still inexplicably a rare occurrence across the wider notebook landscape . . . I mean how oppressive, obtuse, and ugly is lined paper?).
Like a track on repeat, I find myself coming back to this photo by Guy Bourdin (1979), and wonder how much its enchantment is enhanced by my fascination with the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) —
Proof of Play quadruplet
Day 199, “rose petal umbrella over a field mouse wedding” (full log) —
Day 201, “from soil to sky” (full log) —
Day 207, “the fog lifts over circe’s menagerie” (full log) —
The Tributary: Windfinding
It’s been odd, publishing music steadily, especially to “show what I’m working on” — while what I’m working on calls for strict secrecy. A bit like welcoming you into a design studio, where fully 70% of the gadgets and signage are draped under white cloth.
With the introduction of a paid tier, kindly imagine with me — with all the attendant pomp and circumstance — us, standing in the same room, as a team of assistants lifts the collection of white cloths up in the air, revealing . . .