For twenty-three years, Konrad had been explaining musicians to people. This was how he described his occupation. Technically he was a music journalist. He had written for magazines that no longer existed and newspapers that had eliminated their arts sections. There had been a period when Konrad mattered. Publicists returned his calls. Record companies flew him to significant cities. Musicians who had ignored him before their first album suddenly remembered his name after their second. Konrad interviewed Lou Reed in a hotel room in Toronto. Reed disliked one of his questions and stared at him silently for almost a minute. Konrad subsequently told this story for twenty-five years. Depending upon the audience, the silence lasted anywhere between forty seconds and three minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Konrad was now in his fifties. He lived alone in an apartment containing eleven thousand records and one fork. His wife left a few years earlier. Konrad said she had left because she couldn’t tolerate his intensity. She said she left because Konrad became fat and drank too much and screamed at the toaster. Both versions were true. Every morning Konrad woke late and assessed the injustice of his situation. There was plenty. His editor hadn’t answered his email. A younger critic had been invited to moderate a festival panel. Someone with nine thousand Instagram followers had interviewed Brian Eno. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was perhaps the central catastrophe of his life: he possessed a magnificent memory of his own importance. He could remember entering clubs and seeing people recognize him. He remembered musicians approaching his table. He remembered being handed advance cassettes. He remembered guest lists. The world had once contained a small invisible door through which Konrad passed without paying. Now he bought tickets. He found this humiliating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Konrad had been diagnosed with depression after the divorce. He dutifully swallowed the medication for eleven days before deciding it was interfering with his ability to distinguish between depression and legitimate cultural despair. He preferred legitimate cultural despair. It gave him something to do. His particular obsession was a new generation of experimental musicians who had appeared in the city over the previous decade. They played improvised music in galleries, laundromats, churches and basements. They built instruments from bicycle wheels and broken radios. One woman performed forty-minute pieces by placing contact microphones on melting blocks of ice. Konrad adored them. This was the problem. He didn’t merely want to write about them. He wanted them to understand that he belonged with them. He wanted friendship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One musician in particular fascinated him: a pianist named Clara Moon. Clara played concerts Konrad couldn’t explain. Sometimes she played extraordinarily fast. Sometimes she sat without touching the piano while recordings of her grandmother speaking Korean emerged from underneath it. Once she performed wearing gardening gloves. Konrad wrote three thousand words about her. He called the article The Necessary Failure of Clara Moon<\/em>. He considered it extremely complimentary. Clara did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Konrad encountered her afterward at a concert, he opened his arms. “There’s my genius.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clara smiled cautiously. “Hi, Konrad.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Did you read it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I did.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “And?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It was interesting.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Konrad hated the word interesting<\/em>. Interesting was what people said about things they wished would disappear without confrontation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I compared you to Cecil Taylor.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I saw that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “And Meredith Monk.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Yes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “And my father.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clara nodded. There was a silence. Konrad recognized silences. He had interviewed Lou Reed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We should have dinner,” Konrad said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clara looked toward the stage. “Yeah. Maybe sometime.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Konrad understood immediately that she had rejected him. For three days he was furious. He composed emails to Clara and deleted them. He wrote one called A SMALL CLARIFICATION. It was 2,700 words. Then he wrote a Facebook post: One of the tragedies of contemporary culture is that younger artists crave historical context while simultaneously rejecting the people who actually possess it.<\/em> Fourteen people liked it. One was his cousin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Konrad began keeping a mental inventory. Clara never called. Saxophonist Blom Oswald never called. Electronic composer Michael Monihan stopped inviting him to parties. Drummer Blake Cornel blocked him on Instagram, although Konrad maintained that this was probably accidental. These were the musicians he considered most interesting. Why didn’t they want him around? He could not solve it. He had helped them. He had written about them. He had attended their concerts when there were twelve people in the room. He had introduced Blom to a festival programmer. He had told Michael that his second record was much better than her first. Friendship, in Konrad’s private accounting system, had accumulated like airline points. Surely he had enough for a free flight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Clara released an album. Konrad wasn’t asked to write the liner notes. A twenty-eight-year-old poet wrote them. Konrad read the booklet standing in a record store. The poet’s essay was only six hundred words. Six hundred. Konrad felt something physically detach inside him. He bought the record, went home and listened to it three times. It was magnificent. This made everything worse. At 1:17 in the morning, he emailed Clara. The subject was Congratulations. He began graciously. By paragraph four he mentioned the liner notes. By paragraph seven he mentioned Cecil Taylor. By paragraph eleven he mentioned that he had supported her “before virtually anyone in the mainstream press understood what you were doing.” He pressed SEND. Immediately he felt better. Then worse. Then better again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clara answered the next afternoon. Her email contained four sentences. The third one said: For twenty-three years, Konrad had been explaining musicians to people. This was how he described his occupation. Technically he was a music journalist. He had written for magazines that no […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Konrad, sometimes being written about by someone doesn’t mean you become responsible for that person’s loneliness. He read the sentence seventeen times. The cursor blinked. Konrad looked around his apartment. Eleven thousand records. One fork. He suddenly laughed, not because anything was funny. For a moment Konrad thought of Lou Reed. The famous silence. His story. His possession. Except now Konrad wondered whether he had misunderstood that silence for twenty-five years. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"