Satchmo and Miles.
A short film.
A rivalry with
Egyptian imagery.
1895.
I
can do it by myself.
The dream featured
prefiguratively various famous jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Miles
Davis. It felt like a music history class, esp. a History of Jazz the likes of
which Prof. Weller teaches ostensibly as though it were a Theory class.
In the Dream Narrative I was
surprised (even as a Dream Witness) to discover that in fact both Satchmo and
Miles recorded their seminal albums in the Year 1895. Eager to commemorate
them, I arranged a short film with my old crew, the Suburban Shamans. We even got
the real Louis Armstrong to play himself in the short biopic. Miles Davis was
dead, so we got a guy to play him. The guy was relatively short on melatonin, but
we managed somehow (by means that might be too politically incorrect to utter)
to make it work halfway.
The film was chiefly an improv. Job.
In the format of a Rap Battle, except save for the rhyming, the two Black
Legends were to roast one an other. Satchmo started. His attacks upon “Bitch’s
Brew” and the like atoned for his relatively spaced introduction to the works
and foibles of his adversary. But even without that saving grace note Louis
would have won against the slew of slander that followed.
Either Miles or his Actor (in the
former case, we presume the actor to have challenged Miles Himself) knew
apparently nothing about Louis Armstrong. He began to harp incessantly about the
Egyptian Imagery and the Oppressive Symbols that the “Satanic Degenerate”
Armstrong had so frequently employed. Time and time again Louis made a point of
clarification, proving systematically that the imagery in question belonged to
various Heavy Metal Bands, such as Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Slayer. By
the end of it, Miles looked like Aziz Ansari in Flight of the Conchords. Having
been informed that it was Heavy Metal that he hated, and not the revered Jazz
Trumpeter, Miles ceded the competition, which had been intended, from the start,
to be a friendly game, and which had been corrupted and all most lost to a
private vendetta based on misconception.
The guilty conscience would
interpret this so: that Miles, the pale criminal who tried to emulate a
minority, was myself in Debate. But that is only one angle of it, and at that
it is the very conservative angle that Awilda (who is married to a nigger-hating
homophobe) would have assessed. The truth is that I AM a minority. I WAS borne
in the Soviet Union, at the end of the Cold War. I DO recall those kids at Ikea
who would not play with me because I was a Russian, back in Maryland. I AM an
introvert. I WAS misdiagnosed by psychiatry. And I AM a virgin in his late
twenties, in America.
The self-confident conscience,
which emulates Tom Waits in place of Elliott Smith, interprets the matter in
this way: that I am Satchmo. Louis Armstrong is a Leo (even though so was
Elliott), and as such he represents the Ego. In this situation, my Ego emerges
a victorious Lion, roaring with laughter like the trumpeter himself.
(Incidentally, towards the end Miles criticized Louis’ trumpet playing, which
Louis corrected him about by pointing out that “That was Dizzy, not me.”)
These are two warring factions of
my own personality: the Ego and the Shadow. The Ego protects himself against
all naysaying by keeping to the Facts and staving off all sorts of cynical pessimism.
In this sense, Miles represents not only my own reactionary period* but the
entirety of the Social Justice Movement which destroyed Debate in my place, and
which Awilda warned me (hypocritically, of course) not to fall into.
*Which was inspired by a dream
about Arthur, Awilda’s husband.
Miles is that part of me that
shares a radical bone with the proto-Fascism in Debate, but that turns that
bone in on itself until it snaps. He is not necessarily “accurate”, but he is
precise. His false evidence nonetheless HINTS, by its very dubiousness, at an
underlying TRUTH: that Slavery was not a white invention. Louis deflects this,
by asserting what the Ego loves most to assert, when it is Healthy: its
Individuality. Louis did not enslave the Jewish people; that was someone else.
BY THE SAME TOKEN: Andrew Bernard did not take part in the Slave Trade. His
ancestors were moral middle men; they did their social role, just as Kant would
have wanted them to, and even as participants they might likely have been
critics. This is not hypocrisy; it never was. It is Duty. Otherwise how am I to
regard my Military Neighbour who drove all the way down to the fields of Rancho
Bernardo High School in search of my dog when Pumpkin inexplicably got out?
The Dream was totally devoid of blame
or finger-pointing. The rap battle, gone sour, was ultimately thrown by the
very naysayer who had taken an ill turn. And besides: he was only ever an
actor!! All the while, some hipster was seated nearby, directing the entire
thing. It only ever was a game. And whatever aggression lingered in that realm
was shed in its last moments of sportsmanship.
11:55 A.M.
February Fourth, 2018.
Epilogue: the last moments of the
Dream had me as the Director. I must have been struggling to unearth the True
Nature of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, if not the entire history of Jazz
and Rock and Roll. Someone had told me that Slavery was invented a long time
ago by white people, because at some point in ancient history African people
themselves were white (a reversal of contemporary genetic common sense) and
that that was when THEY got the idea to establish this Peculiar Institution.
The only
bad thing American whites ever did was take credit for it. But my protagonist
had to PROVE this. And he insisted on doing so, Alone.
Dm.A.A.
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