As soon as I started practicing law, I “lost the thread” and
it remained hidden to me for a long time after that. I
believe I saw it swimming away, looking like a silvery ribbon-fish racing fast submerging beyond surface sight.
Law school was creepy and deadening, with nothing but
boring reading, bad writing, one-note/one-topic (legal billing) professor “humor,” and the ever-present terror of being
called on in class and found unprepared and uninspired.
But the actual job of doing law, once I found a job, was
like hitting a solid, flat, featureless wall hard in the dark. It took a long time for my eyes to begin to adjust
and see shapes, forms, and the outlines of doors and doorknobs, doorknobs I found eventually I could turn to enter communicating
rooms and spaces.
I wasn’t crazy about what I found myself doing, but I chose law deliberately and for rational reasons I could easily
explain to you today in exactly the same way I often re-explained them to
myself during dark moments back then, when
I despaired of (I have to say it) Kafka-esque contradictions and the utter chaos of gritty New York City criminal
and civil litigation practice. It’s
impossible to be sufficiently rigorous in your daily preparation and zealous in your
client advocacy when you’re overwhelmed with confusion and
indifference.
Eventually I broke out of my trapped space and landed an excellent, prestigious job doing approximately what I wanted.
I was surprised then (less so now) to find that my previous trapped life
taught me some valuable lessons I could build on as I developed my new practice.
When you are mentally and sensually dead to the world as I
was then -- essentially turned completely
inward -- not a lot gets through, but those things that do are significant. I had basically abandoned my previous museum, gallery-going, art magazine and art history-reading life because I find it difficult handling multiple serious subjects simultaneously, and I knew I
needed to learn to be a good lawyer, which requires concentration and sacrifice. I still listened to music, of course (my wife
was in the music business and our life together was the great consolation the
period offered me – and I don’t mean just the free records and concerts), and
for a long while reggae became my consuming passion. Jamaican music taught me more about rhythm, melody, harmony
and the multiple levels great art plumbs than anything else had for a long
time. It also made me a better, more
tolerant and thoughtful person than I would otherwise have been during Manhattan’s
terrible and terrifying Bernie Goetz era.
One non-Jamaican song that really got through to me back then, which I hadn’t thought about until recently, was "Too Many Creeps" by The Bush Tetras. I first heard it when the company I worked for rented a hip downtown dance/music club called Tier 3 and threw a party to reward the marketing, sales and creative services teams for good work and excellent results on some challenging projects during the early days of home video “sell-through.” I was surprised and proud to find myself the only member of the legal department invited to attend. My colleagues concluded that I was a good counselor, facilitator, advocate and friend, and that I broke through the traditional corporate “lawyer impediment” role, so they decided to include me in their festivities, which was uplifting.
One non-Jamaican song that really got through to me back then, which I hadn’t thought about until recently, was "Too Many Creeps" by The Bush Tetras. I first heard it when the company I worked for rented a hip downtown dance/music club called Tier 3 and threw a party to reward the marketing, sales and creative services teams for good work and excellent results on some challenging projects during the early days of home video “sell-through.” I was surprised and proud to find myself the only member of the legal department invited to attend. My colleagues concluded that I was a good counselor, facilitator, advocate and friend, and that I broke through the traditional corporate “lawyer impediment” role, so they decided to include me in their festivities, which was uplifting.
The Bush Tetras often played Tier 3 and “Too Many
Creeps” is one of the really great downtown-but-everywhere-in-New York City
songs. Actually, I think it applies to
the whole world.
Do you know the song?
It’s funny, very direct and as true today as it was then.
Eventually years later, after many changes, I found the thread again.
I just don’t wanna go
Out in the streets no more
I just don’t wanna go
Out in the streets no more
Because these people they give me
They give me the creeps
Anymore
Because these people they give me
They give me the creeps
Anymore
I don’t wanna
Too many Creeps
Too many Creeps
Too many Creeps
Too many Creeps
Too many Creeps
Too many Creeps
Eventually years later, after many changes, I found the thread again.
Note: "Too Many Creeps", Bush Tetras and Tier 3 links in paragraph 7. Polka-dot ribbon-fish immediately above.
Curtis,
ReplyDeleteYes, definitely, the BT's song is one of those artistic fore-echoes, that get truer and truer... unfortunately.
Your great consolation graph flips my flipped top back to sitting on a firehouse floor with my then young family watching The Harder They Fall, projected on a blank wall, sometime in the early 1970s. In those years we avoided the city like the plague zone it always was/is, so seeing any movie at all, in any setting, seemed a remarkable event.
Anyhow that was fun. And then was then. But now is now.
Still... One Love.
Could that too be a concept waiting for its time to come?
I'm so glad this connected with you and agree (to a degree I never, ever expected) about the plague zone description. I was in Manhattan yesterday and had some stimulating and productive meetings with some people I already knew and liked and some very agreeable new people also. But the time I spent by myself in the car (first traversing the city west to east to get to my first uptown meeting and then driving downtown to SoHo for the second one) were actually chilling, both in terms of seeing what the city looked like now (essentially it's on real slide that’s readily apparent if you’re not living and/or working there) and becoming conscious of my feelings about it. I was, after all, a lifelong New Yorker until several years ago, but everything I saw yesterday gave me the creeps. Listening to the news on the radio and seeing the protestors on the East Side near the UN didn't help, except in the sense that NYC, being the "melting pot" that it is, seeing every kind of group protesting the existence of every other kind was sort of funny in an early Woody Allen, “Bananas” way.
ReplyDeleteCaroline was working for EMI Records at the time I wrote about and one interesting thing about this period was that we got to know Peter Tosh pretty well because he was a label artist and spent a lot of time hanging out at the EMI offices. (He lived in Manhattan, rather than in Jamaica, most of the time.) Peter was a pleasant and interesting person and totally musical all the time with a very broad, international frame of reference. Like many other Jamaicans we got to know, he combined a strong sense of national pride with a shyness and slight sense of tentativeness about being Jamaican also, which was probably only in evidence when was “off-island.” As a souvenir of the era (which ended, obviously, with Peter’s ghastly murder in Kingston), we own the portable Casio electric keyboard he used to carry around with him all the time to noodle around with. Caroline mentioned to him that we also had one (they were fairly new on the market then) and when she brought it in for him to see , he gave us his because it irritated him that ours better, so he needed immediately to upgrade. The opportunity to spend time with one of The Wailers (and, of course, to hear him fooling around on melodies) was an incredible gift. The rest of his incredible band and his entourage were all very pleasant and his road manager – the guy who got all the Jamaicans to the airport and on stage on time every day – was a kind of military genius who worked for all the Wailers-family bands. The last time I saw Peter was on Centre Street near the Civil Court. He had just won a lawsuit giving him the right to buy his apartment at the “insider price” and he was exultant in triumph, as you might expect a Wailer to be. His manner of dress was extreme, beautiful and unforgettable. A real star. One of my favorite records of his is Brand New Second Hand where, unusually, you hear Bob, rather than Bunny, handling the backing vocal. One Love, indeed. Curtis