"Ring them Bells." - B. Dylan

Push yourself past the point of exhaustion (this was not by design) and you begin to see things in a different light. I found myself flying along suburban roads on a hot summer night and the colors and sounds and textures of things seemed to have an extra shimmeriness. I noticed patterns made by streetlights, telephone wires and electrical structures, pasted on the blue and darkening sky, the vibrant green of the trees, (trees, these big, bold living things that loom over us) and I thought, these patterns, these random intersections of lines and colors are very much an "art experience." I was reminded of Robert Irwin's formulation that art is what happens inside the observer. If the observer can really "look and see," without labels, without naming, he can begin to perceive a completely new aesthetic universe. The label, the name, can blind us to the reality of our own perceptions. The common, mundane, street-scene, one that no one even notices, offers us color, sound, shadow, line; the observer's eye can select and discover themes, patterns, and yes, even beauty.

Like I said, I was really exhausted. I was playing The Who, really loud, (The Who is one of my "road pleasures," since the Lovely Carla and the little birdies back at the Hacienda, don't appreciate Keith Moon's monster bass drum, or Pete Townsend's majestic major chords). Roger Daltrey was singing, "I once heard a note, pure and easy," part of Townsend's idealisitc version of rock and roll as some kind of new salvation. Pete's Vision: we all contain one pure note, we are all notes in a musical score, each of us resonates at a unique vibration. Our mission is to find that place of purity, to open up to that "pure and easy note" and ring out!