Too Many "Bad Vibrations."

The film "Memento" starring Guy Pierce is a stone's throw from how I feel.  Everything once that was familiar to me now is lost.  For a time I groveled in familiarity selfishly indulging in small sentiments that came and went.  Then I realized there was no point. I have absolutely no one with which to share any of them.  Almost each and every sentiment which moves my emotions is vacuous. Absolutely I have no one around me that seems to even acknowledge there could be a small thread of connectivity between them and me.  I have rationalized that this is what America has become, or rather this is what America always has been.  We are capitalist.  Capitalism is a socioeconomic system, but once in American history it coexisted with morality.  Capitalism could not possibly teach morality, so our morality in America comes from another place.  Once it came from church and family.  Organized religion like other American ideals has faltered.  At the hands of immoral people, the constructs that created our American morality became themselves examples of immorality.  We have spiraled downward into evil, and the one Thing that offers us salvation also has become an example of contempt and hypocrisy.  Who could believe in God?  What Being possibly could do what the Bible says God does?  Is not man the omnipotent with our money and technology?  It is a shite state of affairs, and I have found myself surrounded by absolute and complete anarchy.  The philosophies I have learned that have kept me honest and pure are no longer.  Truly it is like being Leonard Shelby each day when I wake.  The comfort of multiple college degrees and study no longer are relevant.  I have grown too old to remember how I once perceived my own vocation.  I could not care less about music.  We went to see "Ain't Misbehavin," the Fats Waller musical on Thursday evening.  While I had seen it before in downtown Charleston at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, seeing this again in my current environment only increased the anxiety I feel from my unfamiliar surroundings.  I enjoyed the show, but I only could ask myself how anyone today could relate to such a story.  A musical Renaissance in Harlem in the l920's?  Let me assure you I have studied the recorded lineage of jazz music.  I am quite familiar with most of the jazz styles, and ironically the pianist and entertainer Fats Waller is once of my favorite so-called jazz artists.  I am learning new things.  I have learned to things in the last week from seeing theatre offerings locally.  I learned that "jazz" or black music really was African-Americans trying their best at living in America.  I also learned that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was living in the wrong city for his own prosperity.  Watching actors Jitterbug and Lindy Hop across the stage while singing jazz music was startling to me, because rarely would we ever see such an image in modern day America.  While I personally have researched some of the short films of the jazz age and enjoy them immensely because of their dance education, I cannot fathom how Americans today would react to seeing such a thing.  Slowly the distance I have grown from the jazz age is becoming synonymous with the distance I have lived from the Classical Era.  It does not connect, because our socioeconomic system does not recognize it.  America does not recognize or support her own cultural heritage.  I feel much more comfortable listening to Bluegrass music.  With fifty percent Scotch-Irish blood in my veins, the sentiment in Bluegrass is familiar.  Oh my God.  I have discovered something.  Bluegrass is familiar to me, although I never have studied or performed it.  I understand its social message and it still is relevant in America today.  Is the message of jazz still relevant?  What was unfamiliar to me in "Ain't Misbehavin" was the concept of heterosexual romance.  For some reason in my years of study of American jazz music, never have I felt a connection of it to romance.  Wynton Marsalis has said that if you are not dealing with the love of a woman or God in your music, then it won't mean much.  Is this true?  Certainly the Great America Songbook is an example of this. I have come to love the biographical film "It's Delovely" depicting the life and musical career of Cole Porter and his wife.  Truly I feel whether true or not that through his eyes alone is how you come to understand his music.  I like many other college students have played jazz tunes from chord changes written in the "Real Book," the most common and readily available fake book for jazz music.  Starkly thirty years later I have learned that I have been shit off the mark.  I have been miseducated.  All of the courses and ensemble in which I have played jazz music do not scratch the surface of the real meaning of America's jazz.  "It's DeLovely" does.  It is a monument to American music, and each and every music student in the world today should be required to watch this film.  What is so telling about it?  It is telling, because it is one of the few treatises the world has today exemplifying the art of song composition.  Song writing is a natural organic process that accomplishes many  goals.  It should be said to all of the anti-God naysayers that song writing is the attempt of the human being to express themselves through music.  A person must have "something to say" in order to write a song.  Why is it that personal expression has become taboo in America today?  In fact most of the tried and true cultural constructs by which we have lived and thrived now are defunct.  We are a shell of a nation.  Only it can be at the evil hand of right wing extremists.  Extreme Muslims ranting at America's former privilege and artisty must be responsible for the quelling of our once creative voice.  I know that I do not feel comfortable playing jazz music anymore, because the sole purpose of it was personal expression of a positive nature.  I as the soloist I possessed the  right and privilege to speak my mind, voice my thoughts, and bare my emotional soul in music.  I do not feel comfortable doing this today, because this faction of the world has made art the enemy.  The things once that provided enlightenment and evolution to the human race now are evil.  It has happened before.  Ray Bradbury, in his film Fahrenheit 451, predicted a dystopian society of the future who saw books as a threat to the well being of human beings.  Dystopian is the perfect world, because dystopian is how I see America today.  There is little good.  Conversely when I was working on cruise ships, I saw little of this in any of the places we visited.  All of the destinations were positive artistic populaces of progressive people.  What has happened to America?  I always have lived in such a way as to embrace reality.  One must live currently, because how else can we survive?  One cannot live in a dream.  One cannot live in a storybook, and yet that that is the dilemma with which I am faced each day when I wake.  I know there is is absolutely no way any adolescent of today would understand the music of Fats Waller.  I know even further that the majority of Americans today as adults cannot understand or appreciate jazz music.  Often it has been said that intellect is not necessary when enjoying jazz music. There is a simple reason for that, but one that has become disguised also with the right wing assault on America's cultural heritage.  It best can be conveyed also with a film.  Recently I had the pleasure of watching Jamie Foxx's performance as Ray Charles in the movie "Ray."  While I have respected this legend with my knowledge of jazz music, it was not until seeing this film that it made sense.  Ray Charles's major offering to American music was with feeling.  His brand of Rhythm and Blues literally made you feel good.  Not only were you hearing polished expressive songs, they possessed an emotional feeling which overtly was pleasurable.  Is this possible today?  Do we in modern American even realize or recognize what a "good vibe" is?  It used to be the sole determinent of success in the entertainment industry.  Today it is lost.  Americans scurry to smoke marijuana to create this once readily available anodyne.  What happened?  It is simple.  Vibration whether electrical or emotional comes in waves of varying frequencies.  They can travel through the air passing between physical bodies and infecting others.  These waves often can be considered instincts, because they often are triggered subconsciously.  This "mojo" has been the secret of human pleasure since the beginning of time, and it is gone.  Modern industry has shit a major dump on the pristine canvas of American life, and they never looked back.  Whether it is coal ash, infrasound, or microwave radiation believe me that those running the world have not one ounce of sympathy or help for our flailing existence.  Effectively they have eradicated God from our consciousness and they have let evil proliferate beyond measure.  It is in this construct we are doomed to live the rest of our lives.