by Paul Klemperer

In our materialistic, post-industrial capitalist culture, philosophical ideas tend to be reduced to snappy catch phrases, and life struggles to "sexy"soundbites. Maybe we are victims of too much technology, too much information, too much history. Maybe we are just bloated pigs, filled with corporate fried meat products until our inner child resembles Jabba the Hut.

In such a milieu, the inner passionate energies that squirm and wriggle through our souls find few truly liberating forms of expression. Of course sex still remains the best, but there are time-tested routes of libidinal sublimation that can result in emotionally and culturally rewarding acts. The arts, the sciences, late night ramblings with boho girls in smoky espresso joints. All of these are not without value. I seem to favor music. Perhaps I just fell backwards into it.

As a young lad standing on the shoreline of the murky sea of pubescence, I was naturally taken aback by the roiling waves and mysterious currents which are modern womanhood. There I was, a mere pup, with a few scraggly strands of hair sprouting from the genital area, and yet I had a massive, turgid, throbbing sense of wonderment. How to proceed?

The sirens and muses of popular culture surrounded and enticed me. Diana Rigg in zipper-strewn leather bodysuits, Raquel Welch daintily dodging dinosaurs in her clinging cavegirl bikini, Barbara Eden bobbing her head and chirping "Yes, Master!" Ginger, Mary Ann, and all the rest, not too mention the honeyed tones of Dusty Springfield and Astrud Gilberto, and Herb Alpert's album cover to Whipped Cream & Other Delights. What was a poor boy to do?

Luckily I was learning to play the clarinet and I soon found that while unfurling and exerci- sing one's manhood in public was generally frowned upon (especially in stodgy New Eng- land where I came of age), assembling and noodling on a 2-foot phallic vibrating tube of wood was considered not only acceptable but even a mark of nascent talent.

With such social encouragement my future was all but assured. The only problem, I soon realized, was that girls didn't seem to find my big ebony tune stick as magnetically charged as say, an electric guitar or bass. Maybe it was the music I played. Maybe my hair wasn't big enough. By the time I realized that my licorice stick was not as sensuous to hear as it was to play, it was too late. I had become hooked on jazz.

And so it went. I crooned and moaned from the stage on my wooden phallus, while guys danced with girls and electric guitarists drowned me out with their high-decibel technosex toys (stomp boxes with names like "crushverb." "death distortion" and "chamber echo"). I couldn't compete. I became a musical voyeur, watching enticing females dance before me as if through the thick walls of an aquarium tank. I withdrew into esoteric scales, and superhip jazz licks.

I found a brotherhood of jazz monks (and a few jazz nuns). We traded arcane knowledge like trekkies, wrote quirky jazz tunes with obscure puns for titles, and generally sublimated our sexual energies as fast as our horny little fingers could play. Then something wonderful happened.

I learned a life lesson: If you put your soul and body into something, you can create a worthwhile and meaningful product. And someone out there will appreciate it.

I was playing a gig somewhere (now I was an adult, just barely, and a quasi-professional musician), when a beautiful woman approached the stage. During the break she came up to me and said, "I can really hear your passion in your music." True, she didn't throw me down on the beer encrusted floor and have her way with me right then and there. In fact she disappeared and I had to go back onstage for the next set, but still, I was moved.

The passion in the music is still what moves me. It is there in a lot of music,though unfortunately what passes for passion a lot of the time feels more like posing and they are, in the words of the bard, sound and fury signifying nothing. There's a lot of it you have to weed through, but there is passion out there too.

I am reminded often of a turn of phrase brought to the table by the sociologist Herbert Marcuse: "repressive desublimation." More on that another time, but it does bring me back to that inner Jabba, stuffing his face with empty calories, looking vainly for love in a supersized sack of greasy french fries. I do it too; I give in to the pseudosexual products of this fast-paced neurotic sexual economy, when what I really want is the full meal, the truly passionate release.

Until then, there is still jazz.