Playing with Cecil Taylor immediately put me into the offensive mode. This was the avant-tout garde; we were an attack quartet, (sometimes quintet or trio), playing original, dangerously threatening music that most people (musicians, organizers, club-owners, and critics) were offended by, doing everything they could to hold us back and prevent us from getting work. In the six years I worked with Cecil Taylor (1953-59), I received an excellent education, not only in jazz, but also in politics and strategy.
Steve Lacy
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404
Copyright © 2004 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
I'm my own frame of reference.
James Ellroy
If you're going to write a novel, you need to live in New York, where the publishers
and agents are. If you're going to write a screenplay, you need to be in Los Angeles.
After you are established, you can live anywhere you want, but not before. Seeing
people, being seen, tapping into the zeitgeist, being part of the buzz, a player,
is important.
Whoever heard of writing world literature from Parker, Florida.
A 64-year old white guy.
The first day Brew saw the word multicultural in
a description of what New York was looking for it rang the death knell to his chances
of crossing over from the underground to the mainstream-from Vernacular Writer, or
outsider artist, to writer, artist.
Howard Finster writes,
As far as I'm concerned, ther ain't no outsiders of anything. If you're an artist, you're an artist. If you're a mechanic, you're a mechanic. If you're a farmer, you're a farmer. Ain't no outsider farmers, ain't no outsider mechanics. That's just something that someone's got up to class things. I ignore it.
Didn't Brew know he was a hick, therefore, a racist?
Who's going
to publish a racist? Was Brew crazy? That's like publishing a skinhead, a neo-Nazi.
A hatemonger.
* * *
A 64-year old white guy poet, jazz journalist, transgressive fiction, and
left-wing political satirist who did not graduate from a writing program, does not
teach writing in a university, has not won a writing grant or a literary prize, indeed,
has the stigma of self-publication smeared over every pamphlet, book, and homemade
web site he has published.
* * *
Unfortunately, the person who has got up a label to class things is the publisher.
You ignore it at your peril.
Brew ignored it.
Like Howard Finster.
Another self-taught hick.
Hick power!
* * *
Why did Brew live where he lived?
He wrote a book about it.
FLORIDA WRITER: WHY I LIVE WHERE I LIVE. AN UNEMPLOYED PERSON'S GUIDE TO FLORIDA'S
EMERALD, AND FLORIDA'S FORGOTTEN COASTS.
Brew lived where he could make a
living, as a technical writer, eat fresh seafood, fresh food out of Brenda's garden,
and yard eggs, and go hear live music by bands like Dread Clampitt at The Red Bar
every Sunday.
He had moved several times in search of work, he had moved
in with his mother, or Brenda's mother, several times, Swiss Family Boomerang Family,
and the last move he made was into a cheap house he could afford to buy and fix up,
Brenda's old home place in Parker, which they were buying from her siblings.
All stories are housing or job stories. Or, if you're poor, transportation stories:
how am I going to get to work if my clapped-out Key West car doesn't start.
If Brew sold a book he'd get rid of his car and take a limousine to the airport,
like a rock star.
New York is Hollywood, the writer is a movie star, or a
rock star, the bookstore in the mall is the Gap, and the Internet is the bookstore
in the mall.
The writer is at odds with the people who control the means
of producing, distributing, advertising, and selling his work.
What difference
does it matter where you live if they're going to reject it anyway, because they
don't like what you have to say, about them. You might as well live where you please,
where you know the people, the climate, the folkways, and the language.
Your
home. Your postage stamp of native soil.
Did Faulkner live in New York?
Did Larry Brown?
New York came whizzing at Larry Brown like a high-heeled
shoe landing in the 55 gal oil drum he kept his rejection slips in, the ones he didn't
paste on the bathroom wall.
Brew posted Potter's brake shoes on his wall.
* * *
Transportation stories.
Banned Book Readings.
Brew drove
the family car, your father's Oldsmobile, to Lansing, Michigan, for Banned Book Readings.
He wrote a pamphlet called Banned Books Week 2000 and gave it away
after the reading.