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Stephen Paul Miller Damage 1. Everything inside me insists, resists, and goes under. Dreamy against a moment’s skin, like a building upside-down, Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin meet and the Great American Songbook opens. I tell you this class is going nowhere and you say that’s what you like about it. Sometimes Joplin drops in, but the connections are loose. Suddenly everything feels left to right sliding sideways making me forget all the chest pains settling in. Captive roses with their blooms cut, we swing on each severed downbeat. Chopin keeps his notes tight and Brahms bubbles up Through the milky Sergio Leone film. shaping us. Where we are is what we do. I’m just blazing it. No one in this class knows how or when Franklin Roosevelt was elected but I feel warm spring air. Do you want to say something with my pen because all I do is take attendance. To me that means putting more quarters in the washing machine, setting different cycles, rinsing and drying, softening and folding. I don’t invent fine distinctions in order to make some better than others. When I’m wild, the class controls me. This is such a good class— so calm and controlled— they don’t notice the teacher is sleeping. 2. Bach volunteers in a free clinic playing late Joplin that’s more like jazz, then segueing into a very proper 1890s Joplin waltz much like the two Chopin mazurkas nine-year old Tchaikovsky plays on a water piano. A spotlight on Tchaikovsky completes the effect. |
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