Don’t short yourself I can’t help thinking after Rocket casually, in a gauzy gaze of preteen ennui, suggests YouTube shorts. It’s what my friends and I do, we watch shorts. Just make those.
K.
It’s a strange thing, but the kid is right. 600 views overnight, 1200 by nightfall the next day. 8 seconds and not even a full musical phrase. 11,000 after a week. 35 years of work shrunk down almost to the inaudible. Honey I shrunk the phrase; a fly (or a bee) in flypaper in the doom scroll and a huge success; I’m glued to YouTube now, wholly given over to a micro episodic world, epistles of ever shortening exchange. The grey sound proof refrigerator practice room doors of the conservatories I attended, where I toiled endlessly with varying direction and against tremendous distractions, can’t muffle me now; I’m heard everywhere, tinny and soft from phones still warm from our pockets and warmed further by incredibly short shorts. Isn’t the world harsh enough, isn’t it sprung with flypaper traps and the sharp corners of life already? Now what I play isn’t even as longs an elevator pitch, just a small collection of pitches. I could continue complaining, the artist that toils softly, like soft winter feet scrabbing down the driveway to smell the purple lilacs tentatively flowering in the cool spring morning, ouch ouch, but yes, after a long wait, spring is here, digital media in spate. So you too, YouTube? Brutal, yes, and here to stay.
It was two taps of a button to make the Short but I pleased the algorithm, which appears to be the bloodless patron prince of the modern age. Cold milklight lit Hapsburgs, machined Medicis. Eyes like bearings tunnelled into a metal head it looks onto the human masses, huddled, pleading, it indifferent, calculate.
Swipe next, my dear distracted. More views.
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One of my concert instruments named Ouma (after Ali’s paramour in Le Chercheur d’or) fits perfectly in its case which fits perfectly off the back and on the kids’ seat of the long tail bike, Es-cargot. The case is black, lashed to the back of the bike with two emergency orange bungee cords. Listo I think to myself.
Ok.
(K.)
Will it come unleashed caroming over pavé ? Will it stay as I wend those goosebump streets of my neighborhood of El Born, luged, the stones like frozen wash-water bubbles, or thousands of breaching whales convened to mate or feed in reticulated, narrow streets, thin spidered veins on Google Maps, like the fine lines on printed money, the buildings like riverbanks, stooped with age, worn and given great credence for none other than their great patience.
Will it stay lashed fast out of the neighborhood and up the hill to the wide, roaring boulevards of Eixample? Up past Gran Via des Corts de Catalans, the bike lanes worn towpaths for the poor or the eco centric or the visiting. The traffic lights don’t change by the season but they mark time; there are only so many times they will change and for so many people.
It’s almost fall now, the smell of castañas roasting at the corner kiosks hangs heavy in the still warm air and I remember X saying it never gets cold here anymore. But the light is drawing long and yellow, the sidewalks bruised heavy in the shade, the ground tepid. The tourist girls, dressed for lightly whorish adventure and maybe the beach, tug their short white skirts down against still tanned skin. Instagram in hand, the pickpockets leer at them doubly. The brahs still have their sunglasses on, no helmet, beach sandals on the bike rental program Bici, la vie garçonnière. It is as it has always been for me, a young city casually careening towards something, what, I don’t know.
I meet my better JT at a quiet café 25 meters from the elevator of his building. He’s reserved and kind, at our first meeting he wasn’t even sure what I did, O had put us in touch. But he was willing to help and I learn of his music and buy some scores, instantiations of his long career. For this second meeting, this return trip, with Ouma lashed to the back like Ulysses through the sirens and roar of Eixample, we play for each other in his apartment, adorned with scores, pianos, instruments and lined with books hushing the the street below. The air is close and the windows give out onto Carrer Granados, though north of Carrer Diagonal it is renamed to something else, but not to me. This street is still Granados, important past Catalan composer, important living composer above.
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It will take time I think to myself, il faut te patienter, I keep saying. Like D reminded me under the North Carolina sky that night, the fire sawing in the wind, he reciting Robert W. Service, the star agleam to guide us, it will guide me too, though it will punch through the dark less clearly at times. But there is still light behind that darkness and the pinprick of the stars are no less there, no less bright now than they were then, the wind soughing up and wrapping around K’s cedar shake house seated in the saddle of a mountain, roofline like the prow of a ship in the obfuscating night.
I’m reminded of this as X&S invited us to pica pica and to watch the parade of Correfoc, or Fire Run, specifically Colles de diables, where hundreds gather dressed as devils and brandish huge spinning sparklers to primordial drums in parade. The spinners gashing away at the night, and the brave throw up their hoodies, though too warm for our climate change nights, they keep the pinching singe at bay while they go dancing into the sparks. I’d go but Pink and Bounce are coward, uncertain, grabbing ever tighter and steering us away from the crowd. I try to tell them the sparks are but the stars that are guiding us showering down, impressive arcs, millions of them over a drumming ostinato, slashing into the night. That these are but short bursts in the dark to guide us, not unlike a YouTube. These short bursts are not unlike us.