Mandrake

It's so surreal, returning to work routine after a succesful show. It's not just that my work has no connection to my reality - it has no connection to any reality. It's all smoke and mirrors, fake money and paper waste. It's been the kind of day that takes Klonopin and The Smiths just to get through work. A return to the familiar tropes that get you by - pretty girl on the subway, the scent of spring flowers, tulips at the cemetery.

So Saturday we partied and on Sunday I recovered and watched a documentary about Johnny Cash. I came to a conclusion - our generation does not know what sincerity is. It's part choice and part cultural indoctrination, but when it comes down to it I don't think we know how to recognize sincere expression or to express anything sincerely ourselves. We assume so many alterior motives that we create them, partly because human interaction has been reduced to a series of transactions - business, artistic, sexual, electronic. We transmit, not communicate - messages over email, credit card numbers over fiber-optic wires, diseases through blood.

When I watch Johnny Cash sing, in grainy footage from 1969 - just a man sitting at home with a guitar, casually strumming a new song for his guests, wife sitting by his side - it almost makes me want to give up music, it's that pure and honest, with no self-consciousness whatsoever. We've lost that forever I think. Lost it to market concerns and promotional tactics, to major league indifference and indie elitism. Lost it to the dollar, to the commodity, which renders any artistic/musical act packaged in plastic first of all an object of suspicion, the suspicion of the salesman, whom we just know is trying to pull one over on us.

On the train this morning a little girl was singing, her own made-up song about a dinosaur. I hope no one gets to her, and that nothing makes her lose her private joy.