Fictions of the Interlude I
Impressions of the past few weeks with a focus on Mingus and the moon
I’m working with Mingus’s daughter on a birthday broadcast for NTS Radio. His birthday is the day after mine, April 22, a cosmic nearness that’s always amplified the innate kinship I feel toward Mingus himself. I think we share values, and a ribald and rebellious nature bent on invigorating elegance, not just regions in the regimented time we abide. We share the steady and exhilarating temperament of spring, and of April, the cruelest month, both bright and withholding, subtle in its constant bloom and arousal, so stable you wonder if it's even there and when you realize the value of that, it’s gone, and you are split in half by the gemini spirit, mirror rich and jagged ebullience. Mingus and I share a love of inventing personal dogma, and of composing and writing in the style of those inventions, spontaneously or with the help of intense and focused labor, unwavering labor. When I befriended Mingus’s daughter Keki after interviewing her during his centennial year, I learned she shares these qualities too, and is candid in a beautiful way, about her father’s defining modes and behavior, the lore and where it unravels or withholds even more outrageous lore. About three weeks ago, we visited LunaLuna, the traveling art installation that reinstalls a fair for children featuring artists like Keith Haring and Basquiat (who designed a ferris wheel set to the rhythm of Miles Davis’s “Tutu,” a song Miles made for Desmond Tutu, one of his few overt protest songs). The original Luna Luna was stationed at a park in Germany and truly for kids, a diversion to soften the post-war years. The new version is a rigid replica, memory becoming spectacle by way of itself.
While examining the meticulously curated moonscape, Keki reminded me of two events of mythic proportion linking her father to the art-world Luna Luna inhabits.