Beech River Books

Color Wheel Journal, Volume 7, Number 2, The Music Issue

Editors: Fred Moe and Brad Marion
Color Wheel, The Music Issue

A journal celebrating literary and fine arts in a metaphysical world.

This issue is dedicated to the theme of music and sound, interior and exterior, that transports us through time and space as we embark on our metaphysical journey.

The cover art is a painting of avant-garde composer and musician Moondog, (Louis Hardin, 1916-1999), whose unique life inspired many outsiders to connect with music on the streets, in the concert halls, and in the tonal colors of their minds and hearts. (Original cover concept by NanSea Griggs, realized and created by Dawn Marion).

Jessica Handler writes about her obsession with listening to "The Wall of Death" by Richard Thompson and a brief, chance encounter with the artist. Music is passion and "our hearts belonged to jangly guitars and anything else we could harmonize to."

David Brown presents a classical retrospective on the George Lloyd, his life, symphonies and operatic pieces. He tunes us in to the Eighth Symphony, which "May not be George Lloyd’s greatest work, but its beauty and exhilaration made it the perfect choice to finally open the door on his melodic and enriching legacy…"

Louis E. Bourgeois recalls his discovery, as a nine year old, of a hardcover edition of "The Doors Complete" in a rural library. It was a book, he says, that "didn’t belong here at all" with its uncensored lines, pictures of the band, sheet music and lyrics to all the songs the group ever recorded. He takes it out so often that eventually he is confronted by the librarian as to what it is he likes so much about the book.

Robert Vivian asks "Where is the lost bell, the one I heard in childhood at summer twilight, the one I heard yesterday walking across fields of snow?" in a soulful piece about the sounds that join our inner and outer world.

J. J. Seinfeld has a piece absorbed with Dylan, Derrida, and deconstuctivism titled "A Crooked Flower." Academia is not the place where such flora flourish, but the power of beauty, poetry and music still have their effect and the author leaves class contemplating an "uncertain life and the pathways to immortality."

In another piece by Louis Bourgeois, he recalls being haunted by Rush’s "Tom Sawyer" and linking it in his mind, (as sometimes happens with music), to a fascination with "Spontaneous Generation" and an aversion to Scientific Logic.

Billie Aul mourns the loss of the personal in this modern world where the intimacy of decades of personal correspondence in the form of letters passes on to the mass correspondence form of a blog.

In "Woven Wheat Whispers" Fred Moe turns us on to a connection through the Internet to a wide array of music to appeal to the most esoteric interests, such as his own captivation with "the resurgence of folk merged with psychedelic twinges."

In a Color Wheel exclusive, we present a pre-publication version of Peter Damian Bellis’s story, "The Miracle of the Butterflies," with eight illustration by Shawni Tucker. Bellis has announced that this story will appear as an illustrated book to be published by River Boat Books in late 2007. There are four more illustrations planned by Shawni Tucker in addition to those included here. The story describes a cellist whose performances mixed with wonders.

Plus...

Wonderful sheet music and lyrics by Dan Berggren.

Poetry by Doug Arnold, Lana Hechtman Ayers, David Brown, Robert Cooperman, William Dauenhauer, Robert Demaree, David B. McCoy, Laura McCullough, Stephen Mead, Kristine Ong Muslim, William Orem, Sankar Roy, Marybeth Rua-Larsen, Jay Rubin, J. J. Seinfeld, G. A. Scheinoha, Marian Kaplun Shapiro, Lucille Gang Shulklapper, Judith Strasser, Jane Stuart, Laura D. Weeks, and Ernest Williamson...all in that special voice that you've come to recognize and expect in Color Wheel.

We hope you enjoy our cover design, titled "Moondog" by Dawn Marion, paintings and artwork by Ann Calandro, Dawn Marion, Stephen Mead and Shawni Tucker.

$12.00 / paperback / 96 pages / Beech River Books / 2006 / ISBN 0-9776514-3-6.

Color Wheel has been in publication since 1990, including occassional periods of hiatus and restructuring. We seek to present the most creative work of fine literary and artistic quality, especially pieces that provoke deeper reflections on our personal condition and the physical and metaphysical world in which we live.

 

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