Walt, Gus, & the Shimmering Black Elephant

A beautiful article

Voices from the Borderlands

          An essay by Mark Sebastian Jordan.

Fuck me.

Not in a bad way. In a just-got-laid-out-flat by the energy of the universe way.

Every once in a great, rare while, you hear exactly the right piece of music in exactly the right performance at exactly the right time in your life. And it will shake you.

For me, it happened tonight, October 5, 2017, in Severance Hall, when I heard the Cleveland Orchestra and conductor Franz Welser-Möst own Mahler’s Sixth. It immediately lept to my short list of greatest concert experiences, ever.

Why the piece matters and why this concert matters goes back a ways. It’s not performed all that often, glittering black beast that it is. Not only is this symphony fiendishly difficult, it’s also long—about 80 minutes—and ends darkly after tumultuous struggle. Not exactly a crowd-pleaser, it would seem, yet the piece is…

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Wondered into Oblivion (A Journal) (written by the confused)

July 3, 2010 at 11:00pm

I wandered for weeks on end, going from town to berg, in and out of cow pastures and bars, (cows listen better and are more sympathetic then bar tenders). As I wandered I met the most interesting of characters and some people too. There was the guy who smoked some odd herbs and believed there was a city built underground. There was this circus performer who had a Ph.D. in literary theory, there was the flemish farmer who, every night, went out into his field and created crop circles to draw down the moon people. All this I did encounter and more, and yet I wandered, sometimes I ran but mostly I wondered. And then, maybe by chance or fate or a simple act of god, maybe because I lost my way due to cheap booze and a shity map, I wandered (sorta stumbled) into Oblivion. Or did I wonder there? How do I explain this mythical place, kinda like Vegas and the Black Hills, only this was real, not some psychosomatic acid trip. There is probably no explanation, so I won’t try but I can tell you of my stay.