Inadvertantly posted on another blog.

I'm having an interesting but somewhat anxious and formless weekend, not like last weekend's bustle of activity. All actual plans have been cancelled or lazied out of or whatever you want. The writing that has gotten done has been in vague notes, and I'm afraid if I actually tried to develop them, they'd break like old leaves. So I'm going to leave you, one of my 5 or 6 readers with a quote from Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, which I'm reading now at the Brick Cafe and will write more about once I'm finished, but right now I just owe a big favor to the people who reccomended it to me:

Jazz presumes that it would nice if the four of us—simpatico dudes that we are—while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically this never quite works out. At best we can only be free one or two at a time—while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have and sometimes it works—but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectalicm beyond our social concerns.
Rock-and-roll on the other hand, presumes that the four of us—as damaged and anti-social as we are—might possibly get it to-fucking-gether and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigee of delicate distinctions.

I don't agree with this, particularly about jazz, the joy of listening to Ornette Coleman's free jazz, which Hickey lumps with synthesized drumming is the joy of how four musicians can feel so tightly linked and in sync about such formless music that they give it form. But it's a great read.