Thirty-six stories above Sixth Avenue the place was all chrome and glass, windows staring flat-out at another scraper, which from that view looked like a vertical runway shooting heaven-ward to obscure every last smear of sky. I suppose people with thirty-six story window offices get used to this kind of stimuli, but to me the whole world seemed to shift step-by-step as I walked the windowside hallway—a megacity optical illusion. These windows gave a new perspective. The screen in the lobby flashed a video loop over the scene, reflecting in the windows and glass and gleaming surfaces. I sat in the lobby watching multi-mirrored images of Paul Stanley in full starchild black-and-white face paint, the hirsute chest and pouting—oh, baby, do me—lips. Ah, yes, we are in Rock Land, 2014-style. And, I do not lie, within a minute a new face was reflected from the giant lobby screen and it was the face of none other than Jon Bon Jovi. Of course, I know these faces. Everyone does. But do we enjoy them? Get your face out of my face. Building security had escorted me on the elevator ride up, as was procedure when dealing with visitors who aren’t in possession of a photo ID.

Dave Marsh, it turns out, is every bit the veteran rock and roll lover you’d imagine a glory-day’s Creem and Rolling Stone journalist would be, just riffing on Detroit and Iggy and Mitch Ryder within twenty seconds of making my acquaintance. He sat down beside me on the lobby couch and shot right into a conversation, whatever the hell he and I felt like talking about then and there: Detroit Unions, civil rights heroes who’d mentored him out of a hicksville upbringing on the outskirts of Pontiac. As a twenty-year old he’d lived in a house with Lester Bangs, their wild man energies banging around the premises and on one occasion combusting during a living room wrestling match incited by their disagreeing views on the merits of the first Black Sabbath record.

This stuff pours out of Dave. He tells a great yarn.

He talked on our way into the studio, and as the engineer was getting the levels, and as his intro music was playing, and when he got the cue—1, 2, 3, you’re on—he talked right into the first sentence of the radio show, and it was all interesting. It went like that, talking about the book and mostly about whatever crossed Dave’s mind, because the guy just rolls with it and it’s uniquely fun to be around. Much gratitude that Dave liked the book and invited me into his radio zone. Tuesday night, NYC.

Grande Ballroom

Wednesday, early evening, I came aground to the digital flash and corporate shockwaves of Times Square. Stood there at the foot of the subway entrance blinking at a billboard picturing Anderson Cooper in dimensions ten-times that of the average New York living space—house-sized earnest newsman face—adorned with the all-caps caption: Go There! Just how I like my journalism: boasting god-sized before my eyes, throwing down exclamation points. I was there!—and how easily I forget that I live three miles from this phenomenon, a spiritually obliterated acre or two casting forth our nightmare of a techno-bank future overseen by cheap-thrills stimuli and sub-literate commerce-consciousness. More screens, more noise. No cynicism here, just mystification—who has brainspace for this horror anymore? Who needs more gigantic M&Ms, because Hershey’s is here to rot your jaws and funnel chocolatey pennies to the GOP; it’s all true, check the sources. While all in the visible distance is neon panties and fructose and has much to do with big dollars and expendables assembled in China. Without knowing why, I found myself standing beside a family taking pictures of a grown fellow who’d stuffed himself into a rubber Batman costume, an outfit not at all custom-fit, especially about his hindquarters and nether regions. While I was trying to get a look at his eyes, hoping to perceive what kind of human lived behind the mask, an aspiring rapper came at me fast with the best come-on I’d heard in years, possibly ever: “Hey man, you like black people?” A true American, more so than myself. He stuck one of his home-burned CDs into my hand and said, “Ten bucks, it’s the shit.” Taxis honking, a man screaming laughter at his phone, and way off someone smacking out rudiments on a tuned-too-high snare drum, or a plastic bucket, or whatever they had. Avenue of the Americas.

And two streets West: Broadway between 45^th and 50^th is a strip I don’t think about until I’m walking it, always with the purpose of finding something I can’t find anywhere else, but never something as spookily lucid as Dream of the Red Chamber, a flickering, dreamland drama in which time cycles through various impressions of round-the-psyche linearity, a live-art specter churning in the basement of Midtown, New York, while the audience—who come and go as they like; who sleep or wake as they like—lie on small beds, in various stages of immersion, so distantly other from the civilization above. I’d walked in off Broadway, following a red carpet lined with static-channel tube televisions, leading you to the stairs, down into the thing, the chamber, the performance. Oblique white curtains partition various sections, forming cloudlike quarters throughout the room but you can see through everything. You move through it, into it, in search of a bed, and there’s more than enough, all dressed in red linen. Some are just crimson hazes, lying feet away but somewhere else entirely, and others are right out in the open. Your bed chooses you, really, based on several incidentals you can’t make sense of. Maybe you lie right down and look outward: Beautiful, sad, vacant, scared women stare out from screens glowing, rippling with light cast by a golden orb machine propelled by a phonograph record player, at which two audience members might sit meditating, glaring into the twirling mind machine as its strobes turn their thoughts into shapes they’ve never taken before—a totally new experience. Sense those around you as dreamily as you ever will; their nearness feels instantly like shadows. Sense some drifting off on the red beds, some curling up fetal, gone completely into their dream. A few others sit perfectly erect and swallowing the whole atmosphere with their face, telling themselves stories about what all these illusions mean. Lulling every inch of space is a nicely amplified tide of melodic bass drones, rich with subsonic properties that radiate underneath the beds; and, listening upward, you hear soaring above an opera-turned-soundscape singing down so many wonderful sorrows.

The beds are there with good purpose, essential to the dark comfort. You lean back, rest your head. Faces and flickers and melodies begin connecting; the actresses seem to be activating some pattern in one another’s responses, their gestures cycling amongst them; each inhabiting the others’ emotional states, they click in and out of expressions on a twilight schedule, but it all happens with elongated, smeary force that makes you wonder if you’re transcribing your own story, dreaming what you want to dream. But it seems so evident that the women, the actresses, are dreaming out a process that has to do with creation and destruction and possession, or is this my process? Am I acting out my own cycle here, dream-style. You have weird ideas on the red bed, good ones. And then you realize the audience members sitting at the phonograph and staring into the light cylinder are also being filmed, projected onto the great rippling sheets of translucent white. And now they’ve become the chimera, they’re real and illusory, same as all of this.

I’d been tipped off about this occasion by Jeff Jackson, author of the very fine, very brilliant meta-mindmelter Mira Corpora, a book of rare aesthetic ambition—a work of art. Jeff was co-writer and conceiver of Dream of the Red Chamber, along with its director, Jim Findlay. The work is based on Cao Xueqin’s 18th century Chinese novel. The hour I spent within was the best of my week, yet I only glimpsed a fragment of this multi-day, multi-dream, multi-sequence experience. This Saturday, one may enter into an overnight performance: [May 17. 5p to 6a]. A slumber like no other.

It wasn’t so much a journey home—new ghosts merging with old—but a completion of “goodbye.” So few points of reference along the trail, no one to ask: Hey, soul, how was it for you, waving your memories of darkness-now-passed before the faces you’d once longed to be invisible in the presence of? So much big love, though, also. The huge-hearted ones appear when you need them. They know to set you free, even if they don’t understand why you must ramble. Someday you won’t look back—that’s the aim of circling around now, one more time, convincing yourself its all over. Leaving what’s no longer home with a smile.

N’T

Mid-reading last night at KGB, NY—I notice a typo in the first chapter of Songs. A “was” where there was supposed to be a “wasn’t,” degrading the entire, important sentence. I made it through, anyhow, read right over it. My own error, symptomatic of a last-minute change. Far worse befalls the average person on a daily basis, but, still, the selfish mind goes around and around that word, the missing “n’t,” saying: how could you?

Anyway, the sun can be felt lately, the light that does not glare outward from a screen.