Mood For the Day
Today's Mood on Thu, 26 Jun 1997
An emaciated guitarist plays to the tune of girls long past the age to tease their boyfriends by tousling their hair. The self-important and clinically repressed all rise to dance, as they call the flailings and nominally rhythmic gesticulations which emanate from their imprisoned psyches.
Soon the song is over, and another takes its place as the players refresh and recycle themselves: the pieces of flotsam move and change, but always the same wave can be seen bearing a piece on the same spot.
Bodies bob, while the heads which must be assumed to control them wag in directions wholly unrelated to the purposes by which those bodies bob.
Couples unsure of which way their attentions should go fairly light up the ceiling with their different thoughts, as if their every thought were a different color and intensity plainly visible through the transparent shells of their skulls. Immaculately maintained bodies house wild, irrepressibly undisciplined imaginations which collide and cascade among themselves like so many hallucinogenic prisms.
The people with us engage in conversation, praising the integrity of the band. This self-honesty stands in stark contrast to the self-deception and posturing which permeate their audience scant inches from its very antitheses. It's as if the only true honesty in the room lies concealed behind outworn stereotypes and false prejudices.
We break through those barriers within ourselves to find the integrity that awaits; as honest as the body's reaction to the very music which drives the most repressed to shed their inhibitions and flail about the floor like an electrocuted trout, if only for those precious moments while their egos are not looking. Music in itself is not holy, but just as anything else, it acts as a gateway to all which is noble in human consciousness.
Musicians praise call-and-response no less than orators, whether done flawlessly or imperfectly. For most, that call-and-response stays within the members of the band. How much more the point when the call of their playing is echoed by the response of the audience's dancing! The interaction with sentient beings thus is its own ecstatic reward.
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