Who's Got the Blues?
I do. I have the blues. I have turquoise and aquamarine and cobalt and sapphire and navy. And I'm feeling blue, kind of low, pretty dispirited really. No, my dog didn't run off. Nobody stole the truck. Nope, the blues are generally matters of the heart if you listen to any of the great blues musicians like T Bone Walker, Furry Lewis, or John Lee Hooker:"They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad. You know, Wednesday's worse, and Thursday's oh so sad..." It's a state of being that everybody knows. Listen to "The Sky is Crying." Or not, the title sets it up...
But then there is azure and cerulean, the color of the sky in Colorado. Blue jeans. Indigo. Picasso had a blue period. Lapis lazuli is the blue stone crushed and inlaid with gold in the tombs of the pharaohs to remain fiercely brilliant for millennia. In 2009, chemists in a lab discovered, completely by mistake, a blue pigment made by superheating the elements yttrium, indium and manganese. This new color is arguably the first synthetic blue pigment invented since cobalt blue in 1802 and was subsequently brought to the public by Crayola with a crayon named in an open competition. After 90,000 submissions they settled on Bluetiful. (Haven't we learned by now not to let the public decide things?! Hello, Boaty McBoatface, elections....) This new compound absorbs red and green light waves for a vivid and durable peacock blue.
Speaking of light, and wings, when I was a kid around five, my grandmother had a plate on the wall of the room where my brothers and I slept made of butterfly wings under glass. Aside from the terrifying clown portrait, it was the most amazing thing in her entire house. It was electric blue, almost radiant, lighted magically from within. As an adult, I learned the color of the Blue Morpheus wings was a result of lightwave interference as opposed to an actual pigment in the bug. Check out this link for a bowl I made of anodized titanium around 20 years ago that was exhibited in the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College.
The anodizing process creates a layer of clear oxide on the metal surface that is only millionths of an inch thick. Light bounces off the surface of the metal AND the surface of the oxide to cause wavelength interference, cancelling other colors and letting the blue shine. When one views from the side, the oxide layer is just infinitesimally thicker and hence, purple. The latest science news is about "Quantum Blue," but that is all nano-particles and complicated, and we can deal with it when it makes it into a crayon.
Why does anyone sing the blues, if it's all about misery? How could this art form exist? Books have been written to explain this, but I'm going to use Wile E. Coyote instead. Life, like the Road Runner, is fast, relentless and it never stops. You cannot win the race that makes us worm food.Wile E. Coyote is our existential hero. He never wins. He never, ever, catches that bird. But, regardless, he tries every freaking episode. No matter how bad the blues can be, there is the voice and the guitar, Wile E. with his rockets and springs and anvil, Stevie Ray and Derek Trucks playing their hearts out. Texas Flood, Blak and Blu. Statesboro Blues. The blues is the sound of spirit over odds, defiance over the inevitable. Life is full of tragedy. Even kings die. B. B. King is gone. Floods come. Fires too. Partners leave. The tests are bad.
But midnight blue and the robin's egg blue of morning are not so far apart. Dusk. Deep blues. Dawn. Acoustic blues are good early in the day--Michael Hedges, Tommy Emanuel's version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." "Blues Power," by Eric Clapton told me forty years ago that "I got the boogie woogies in my very soul..." And I have come to believe him. B. B. King is gone, but have a serious listen to a twenty-two year-old Marcus King. He is the real deal. As a singer, as a song writer, he can explain Wile E. Coyote in the context of love and life and a flamethrower guitar solo.The notion that these two blues legends each have the last name King should tell us something. Royal Blues...
John Mayer sings,
"Joni wrote Blue in her house by the sea,
I gotta believe there's another color waiting on me...
To set me free."
"There's no way to delay that trouble coming every day..." sang Baltimore's brilliant son. Sorrow and pain are part of destiny, but we have Miles' "Kind of Blue," and "All Blues." We have "Stella Blue." "Drifting Blues."We have "Blue Sky," which will ALWAYS lift. We have bluebirds. We have blueberries. Yves Klein. Blue eyes, which, by the way, have no actual blue in them. It's all light scattering, like my job. Deep blue sea and the dusty powder blues of the distant Adirondacks at sunset. James Turrell. The sparkle song of a hermit thrush soloing in the woods.And, naturally, light with a dominant wavelength between 450 and 495 nanometers...
That should cheer up anybody.
Peace out all you humans,
Don't be blue, unless you want to. Then be ultramarine...
P.S. Dear friends, and by this I mean those who take the time to read these musings about life and stars and dogs and weeds... I'm not trying to win the day or convert your religion. We are all off the cliff, airborne, waiting to hit the bottom of the canyon with a boulder or anvil following us down. This is precisely why we need love, levity, tricky art and fine music. Without these it's a simple math formula of time, velocity and gravity. "Gravity is working against me, and gravity wants to bring me down..." That's either Sisyphus, Wile E. or John Mayer and the last one has the best voice, I'm sure.
Rock Steady
