Simply Irresistible
About three weeks ago, riding the Volt bus back to DC after three months of being a single parent taking care of demented dad and troubled offspring, I had this weird idea of doing a music video for my wife Lu for her 50th birthday. And as soon as I thought of it, I knew what the song would be.
The older I get, it seems, the more I realize it's important to hearken to the urgings of instinct. My father, a man not known for generous impartings of wisdom, once accompanied me on a visit to a Franz Kline retrospective in Philadelphia, and at one point I, a callow 22-year-old, confounded by all calligraphic black slashes on canvas, noticed him spending a lot of time looking at one in particular. It looked to me like a lot of the others, so I asked, "What's so special about this one?" And he said two words: "It works."
I have to say I wasn't totally buying this as a piece of art criticism, but even at the time it made an impression on me. It's taken me many years to understand that there is in fact a reality that's beyond the power of logic to arrive at and the power of words to express. It's this unmistakable sense that something "works." It's not that it obeys certain rules -- or in the way I would experience it, manages not to break them. It's not that it "expresses" something. You can't justify your sense of it, you can't persuade people of it; they have to see it with their own eyes or hear it with their own ears if they can. And this quality of "working" inheres in the thing itself, not in someone's perception of it. People, with their peculiar, disorganized mentalities, born of experience and DNA, come and go. They pass the Kline or the look in a woman's eye or the way this stream tumbles over those rocks, and they see that it "works" (i.e. is perfect as it is) or they don't, but it doesn't matter if they see it -- the working is there. Things work or don't work. They are like a conspiracy or a joke; like my Timex: They work or don't work.
If we are lucky enough to perceive something working, to bypass the thicket of irrelevant thinking and arbitrary ideas we adopt just so we'll have something to say, then the organ that pierces this veil is instinct -- not the instinct of an animal to mate or fly south for the winter, but a peculiarly human instinct, independent of reason, that grasps all at once, as if in a gestalt, the rightness of something. In this moment, if we are lucky enough to experience it once or twice in our lives, our hard-won individuality dissipates, and we are simply the vessel of a perception, the only true perception possible under the circumstances. And it's this faculty of a species that allows us to know that something is working.
On the Volt bus bouncing down I-95, I suddenly saw everything whole. I knew how it would end up, and I knew what would make Lu happy on this, one of the more treacherous birthdays we encounter. I knew the pieces and players, the phases of its life history, the structure of the entire thing, and it wasn't because I was specially adept, but because the god of Love spoke to me and instructed me on the thing and how it would work. Whether it was possible never even entered into it. I knew it was impossible. But when a god speaks, we do well to listen.
So the rest of it unfolded as it had to, despite the inevitable resistance -- the way the copper in a wire resists the flow of electrons, the way clay resists the pressure of the trowel. The resistance, from people and circumstance, was part of it, it had a crucial role. And in the end, we had a music video for Lu, made by many people who care for her, to remind her that she isn't alone in this hard world. These people were brilliant and funny and generous and they worked hard, though this wasn't really the point. And there are flaws in the final product if you want to measure it against some standard you think is important. But this surely isn't the point. The point is that it worked. We showed the video after dinner at a little Spanish restaurant on Broome Street on the evening of 24 March 2013. She said it was the best thing ever. I know that too, but I also know why it was.
This is the audio for that thing we made. If you want to see the "thing as a whole," email me and I'll invite you to a Dropbox folder where you can see the video.
The Musicians
Chris Biondo, Bass and Keys
Freddy Kunkle, Drums
Lenny Williams, Backing Vocal
Clyde Spillenger, Lead Guitar and Vocals
Paul Spillenger, Guitar, Lead and Backing Vocals