There is a light drizzle that persists, punishingly so this December 26th, outside my parent's house in the outskirts of Princeton Boro. Every good blogger has got to write from mom and pop's place. The whizzing current of emotion and inertia that is running through my brain as each moment ticks by could be termed, "unbearable", by those who don't enjoy things like the tea cups at whatever local amusement park you choose to advertise by saying thurr name out loud. Days like this bring me back to a beautiful book that was found at a local second-hand book shop on the outskirts of Nassau St., "Azul" by Ruben Darío. The opening of this text, itself a series of short stories and poems, is an open letter from Victor Hugo in which he declares (I'm paraphrasing/poorly translating) "all art is blues". Extrapolate how you will, fine reader, but Darío has no problem confirming such grandiose claims within the confines of his text. The first story begins with weather not unlike the conditions I currently face today, but, the author tells us, far, far away in a distant land there is a great kingdom full of riches, all the greatest material wealth concentrated in the hands of a single ruler. He meets a poor poet who scoffs at such a thing, thus perplexing the ruler whose entire life has been predicated on this pursuit of devouring all that came within his grasp. It is slowly, beautifully made clear to this man of material goods that the poet's riches cannot be seen, for they lie inside his mind.
Blues is a word that has been run through the meat grinder of American genrefication, thus making it a kind of fiction. Lazy art fans will mention Pablo Picasso's "Blue Period" as a time of great melancholy, when the painter was struggling to reconcile his passion, his talent with the world he found himself in. Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner quipped, "I'm not in love with the modern world," touché; it is this feeling of lovelessness, My Bloody Valentine may have gotten it too, that is at the core of a single often-highlighted aspect of the derivative motif we call Blues. By trying to distill the essence of blues in a series of archetypes, not unlike what the folks over at Pandora internet radio are trying to accomplish with their musical genome project, we are left with nothing more than well intentioned pastiche. Is this the great sadness, then? The music that came from a place of such radically accepted oppression by those who gained from it (I'll call it racial slavery), slowly, but surely became embraced by the progeny of its detractors. This is why gawker folks can write their vitriolic posts about movies like Avatar and the Last Samurai, that still place an emphasis on white superiority. Whatever the fuck blues was, we'll never really know. Some of the all-time greats were blind, this does not surprise me. In the sense that the more you read about it, the more you codify it, the less real it becomes.
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