=============================================
   Review and Notes: "Broken Music", Sting
=============================================

:Id: 47405e49-c95b-4162-9694-12cc64b40e3e
:Author: Martin Blais <blais@furius.ca>
:Date: 2005-05-07

Quotations
----------

  In the middle of the table is a large glass container full of brown, sludgy
  liquid.  I assume that this is the legendary sacrament I have read so much
  about, ayahuasca. 

  The mestre indicates that we should join the orderly queue that is formin gin
  the aisle and snaking to the back of the room.  We seem to be the only novices
  present and are guided politely to the front of the queue, then handed white
  plastic coffee cups.  The mestre fills these reverently from the glass
  container, which has a metal spigot at its base.

  Despite the reverence of the ceremony, the sacramental liquid looks like
  something you would drain from the sump outlet of an old engine; a furtove
  twotchtwitch of the nostrils confirms my apprehension that it semlls as bas as
  it looks.  "Are we really going to swallow this much?" I think to myself.  "We
  must be crazy."

  Still apprehensive about the difficulties we may encounter, I try to forget
  that we could be carousing right now in the comfort nof the hotel bar on the
  Copacabana, quaffing sweet caipirinhas and swaying to the gentle rhythm of the
  samba.  But it is too late to turn back now.  My wife and I look at each other
  like tragic lovers on a cliff top.  The room begins to reverberate with a
  chanted prayer in Portuguese.  Unable to join in, I mutter, "God help us,"
  under my breath, only half ironically.  Then everyone drinks.

  "Well, bottoms up," says Trudie, with her usual gallows humor.  "Here goes."
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.5

  What I can't play immediately will yield its secret eventually.  I will
  reapply the needle of the record player again and again to th ebards ot music,
  that seem beyond my analysis, like a safecracker picking a lock, until the
  prize is mine.  No school subject ever occupies as much of my time or energy.
  I'm not claiming that any kind of prescience about the future is at work here,
  but there is something in the driven and cumpulsive nature of this obsession
  that is unusual, something is the unconscious saying, *This is how you
  escape. This is how you escape.*
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.81

  I begin to fantasize that I will no longer seek my father's attention, and yet
  a lot of my life has been nothing but a vain attempt to find approval, to find
  acceptance.  And no matter how full my belly, I wonder, will I always feel
  hungry?
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.87


  I'm standing in a vocal booth with Miles Davis, one of kmy boyhood heroes, I'm
  about to scream the Miranda rights at him in French while a driving funk track
  is playing in the phones.  Miles nods at me.  Here goes: "VOUS ETES EN ETAT
  D'ARRESTATION, VOUS AVEZ LE DROIT DE GARDE LE SILENCE< TOUT CE QUE VOUS DIREZ
  POURRA ETRE RETENU CONTRE VOUS. ALORS TAIS-TOI!"

  Miles responds, pointing to his crotch, "YEAH? TAIS-TOI SOME OF THIS,
  MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!"

  Minutes later I'm out on the street.  I feel like I've been mugged, but I'm
  gloriously happy and proud. I'm on a Miles Davis album.  It's called "You're
  Under Arrest".
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.106

  This is, after all, what I've been training to do for four years, to take over
  a class and tecah them everything from basic math to soccer.  I do have to
  remind myself that this is still part of a long-term strategy to make it in
  the music business, even though from the outside it probably looks as if I've
  caved in, buckling under the weight of confirmity.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.148

  My life at this point seems to have many different strangs to it, like an
  improvised musical composition with the weaving and independent lines of a
  chaotic fugue.  The ground bass of the fugue is my progress as a musician,
  slow but steady like a pulse; the line above it is the more complex progress
  of the band and the interrelationships that both weld us together and threaten
  to separate us. Then there is the central triad of my teaching job, my work
  with the Phoenix Jazzmen and the Newcastle Big Band, and the wilder flights of
  fancy that are my dreams of fame and fortune.  These in turn are increasingly
  woven with the airy romantic descant introduced by Frances.  Sonner or later
  the strains and tensions between all these disparate elements will bein to
  tell, and then I am going to have to make some radical, life-changing
  decisions.  At the time, I don't have the emotional maturity to know ehther I
  am falling in love with an idea rather than a person, and even if the
  distinction had been pointed out to me, I wouldn't have recognized it.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.162

  My courage as a performer begins to look like something close to arrogance and
  my tentative vocal experiments begin to resonate with certainty.  Whether or
  not I am jyustified is moot, but I being to see myself as a favored nation
  within the democracy of the band.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.165


  Playing as a trio with Last Exit would prepare me for my subsequent role in
  the Police.  By playing as a trio I would learn the value of space and clarity
  between musical frequencies, which larger bands can't help but fill.  Being
  limited to just three instruments helps this learning process, where each has
  more work to do and more responsibility.  It also helps to remember those who
  have gone before you, trios like Hendrix's and Cream.  Because to do that is
  to be reminded of the principle, the central act of faith in the catechism of
  small bands, that "less is more".
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.179

  I'm singing because I've learned from experience that when I sing I become
  fearless, as if there is something in the act of giving voice to a song that
  makes me feel invincible.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.209

  [Sting, about Stewart Copeland] Even at this very early moment of our
  relationship, it is clear that there is something going on, some chemistry,
  some understanding, some recognition, a rapport and a tension between the
  amphetamine pulse of his kick drum and the shifting, rolling ground of the
  bass.  It is like two dancers finding a sudden and unexpected harmony in the
  glide of their steps, or the sexual rhythms of natural lovers, or the
  synchronized strokes of a rowing team in the flow of a fast river. Such
  rapport is not common, and I realize very quickly that this guy is the most
  exciting drummer I've ever worked with, almost too exciting.  I also realize
  that temps will be abandoned as easily as loose baggage on that runaway train,
  and whatever music I shall manage to make with this whirlwind, it will not be
  gentle or easy, it will be a wild ride to hell and back.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.233

  William Blake said that "a man who persists in his folly will become wise,"
  but at this time I am blindly unaware, even at such a remove, that I have
  become addicted to the notion that everfything will be solved in the afterglow
  of success, and I am being drawn inexorably toward its center, deeper and
  deeper.  How dangerous thisi addiction is, I do not yet know.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.238


  In later life I would hvae a problem with the virgin birth, wondering, I hope
  not blasphemously, why having created the miraculous and sacred mechanism of
  sex, God would see fit to bypass it in order to send Christ into the world
  untainted by his own invention.  It just seems like one miracle too many.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.253

  The Police set begins at ten to eleven and is finished on the stroke of the
  hour.  It blisters along at such a pace-- no gaps between the songs, defying
  the audience to be critical or appreciative, as if we don't give a fuck either
  way, and then we're off before they know what's hit them. When we burst into
  the dressing room we're all laughing as if we've just pulled off a successful
  bank raid.
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.255

  And yet these small adjustments to the compass of my life have somehow led me
  to a momentous responsibility.  I try to trace the pattern of my life back
  from this moment like an amnesiac attempting to remember how he could have
  arrived in such a place . I ponder that one small alteration, one tiny
  deviatino in the course ,would have set an entirely different set of wheels in
  motion in this complex machinery of fate.  I'm a husband and a father, i live
  in a city far from my home, I am following a dream, and yet a girl I had
  loved, a girl that I easily could have married and led quite another life
  with, is now dead.a
                              ---Sting, Broken Music, p.265
