Daan Vandewalle ALVIN CURRAN Inner Cities

Inner Cities are where you go to get debriefed, to dance a tarantella with Gurdjieff; to see Italo Calvino greet Giordano Bruno in Campo De’ Fiori; to play low C 78 times and low D-flat once for Giacinto Scelsi’s 79th birthday; to hear Louis Armstrong fuse time and space in Providence, and Ella, Peanuts Hucko, and Brubeck fill a Newport stadium unamplified; to watch Cage and Braxton play chess in Washington Square Park; to roll around in a pile of rags with Pistoletto and Simone Forti; to listen to Ezra Pound’s silence by the Grand Canal; to hear Julian Beck say "Paradise Nooow....." and years later on film say "I wuz bawn in a garbage can"; to become a composer in the Coolidges’ apple tree; to hear Miles and Coltrane blow minds at Storyville (price, one coca-cola); to listen to Cy Twombly just back from the Gobi desert; to meet Diana in her temple on Lake Nemi; to hear Art Tatum play the whole world from memory; to record, for Perlini’s "Otello", a tin can rolling through a Venetian church; to give an impromtu ram’s-horn concert for Palestinian shopkeepers; to ride with a New York cabbie nuts about Gubaidulina; to sit at Patience Gray’s table; to plant a Magnetic Garden in the Beat 72 theater; to make love with a Jewish Rhein-maiden; to help Giuseppe Chiari remix Palazzo Strozzi and Robert Ashley collect dust from the union-floor of Local 802; to hear fog-horns with the Narragansett Indians; to cook funghi porcini for Luigi Nono in Berlin-Friedenau; to meet Morty Feldman on Eighth Street; to make the Ligurian coast into watercolormusic with Edith Schloss; to hang with the Carrara anarchists and the Bertolucci’s in Tellaro where DH Lawrence had his piano delivered by mules; to get booed off the floor staging Korean folk songs in Darmstadt; to listen for Messaien in Birdland; to hear Evan Parker play the Festa dell'Unita and George Lewis play the Tower of Pisa; to see and hear Annea Lockwood’s astounding glass concert at the Middle Earth; to be sitting in a room with Alvin Lucier; to hear Thelonius Monk detune time at the Five-Spot; to observe Sartre and Beauvoir drinking Campari from a window on Piazza Navona; to accompany ventriloquists, hypnotists, sirtos dancers, and bouzouki players in the Catskills; to watch Lenny Michaels dance the mambo at Susan’s Piano-Bar and Grill; to see Steve Lacy play his soprano sax with his left leg; to blow shofar to Judith Malina’s Shelley; to split the MEV door at the Obitorio; to copy for Cardew while he rolled the revolution on the banks of the Tiber; to play on a Holland American Ocean Liner which later catches fire and sinks; to wish that Meredith Monk, Diamanda Galas, Joan La Barbara, Billie Holiday would sing from the minarets five times a day; to play Dixieland in the Brussels World’s Fair across from Varese and Xenakis’ Phillips Pavillion; to play "An American in Paris" in Dahomey with John Sebastian Sr. on harmonica; to witness real Balinese dance in trance; to accidentally step on Dietrich Fischer Dieskau's foot backstage at the Akademie der Kunste; to record an interview with King Hussein of Jordan; to watch Trisha Brown levitate on Bach in San Francisco; to help Cage squeeze lemons into his fresh taboule on 18th Street and watch David Tudor mix chili peppers and lasers at the Grand Hotel des Palmes; to play the Sydney Harbour like a bandoneon; to teach advanced-orchestration in the Greek Theater at Mills College with Pauline Oliveros and the ghost of Harry Partch; to shake Stravinsky's hand in the American Sector-Berlin and Varese’s in New Haven; to watch Kosugi dance his electric violin around Marcus Aurelius; to get thrown off stage in London as a warmup act for the Pink Floyd; to meet Stockhausen at a strobe-light show in Düsseldorf; to open windows on Cage’s cue for adding real cold air to his Winter Music; to camp out with Teitelbaum and Rzewski for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point; to hear Terry and LaMonte’s landmark concerts at the Attico in Rome; to help Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik get an introduction to the Pope; to nearly get sequestered along with Arnold Dreyblatt’s instruments at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof; to play the "Tennessee Waltz" with a banjo-band in Florence; to hear Maryanne Amacher make sound circle your head in her Boston harbor basement; to have tea and guffaws with Helen and Elliott; to play "Drumming" with Steve Reich in Pamplona; to bury 80 loudspeakers under Melissa’s Floor Plan in Linz and feed hay to a Diskklavier in Donaueschingen; to play with the original Scratch Orchestra; to make 300 people in 6 countries who cannot see or hear one another play together on the radio; to drink a Turka-Cola at the foot of Mt. Ararat; to hear Scelsi’s piano sonata on the car radio in central Anatolia; to make a concert of shiphorns in the "Golf of Poets"; to be 5 years old in Central Falls, Rhode Island, sitting next to my father in the trombone section at the Sunday afternoon Vaudeville show. (Alvin Curran 14.8.04)