I have never written a CV in my life, you hear me, never! …People wana know where do I come from and what do I think I am doing here. All right, I’ll tell this story myself, and will do my best to make it short… well, you know what? The hell with short. You predigested-food lovers go back to the toilets, I gona cook this so we all could enjoy passing gas all night long.
So, Hum hum…
People will probably wana know about:
Kerner, the outlaw
Kerner, bum and hermit
Kerner in jail
Kerner, the poet
Kerner, boxer, fighter
Kerner, lover
Kerner, script consultant and screenwriter
Kerner, music creator and performer
I will here only develop Kerner music creator and performer. This is business. For the rest, like anybody I had my heart broken hundred times, and have scar tissue on my soul. So we are all the same.
I was born in Jerusalem, from a mother and a father who did what they could to let me grow in peace. My life then consisted in being hugged and kissed and pet by the Arabic shepherds and the Jew Kiboutznics who there lived together under the blessing sun… what? You people fed with media fairy tales think that this is already unrealistic?! He he! Like if you were real!
Where was I… Showing up under the name of Antifada, Destiny trashed me while I was still cheeky in Paris, France… where I would be safer, my mom would say. Strange, cause I found there so many more angry Arabs than in the most dangerous pit hole of fired up Israel that I didn’t know where to hide anymore.
As for the French of whom I had heard about in literature and movies, you know the ones with the beret, the baguette and the camembert whose national hymn is all about their enemy’s blood covering their flag and their enemy’s guts spread all over the floor, well it’s the strangest thing cause anytime a pretty woman would be raped, or a boy molested, those Frenchies would systematically seem to be so concentrated at analyzing the shape of their feet.
…Later, I discovered there exists another France that cannot be seen by the passer-by. It is called “Aristocratie”, and if I would ever wish to leave the street and undertake something in any field existing or not existing in this country, I would have to subdue to one of those families of power, and stay forever in the position that I would be allowed in the social ladder… but this, of course, only if everybody could make sure that I was a real French like them and not a meteque, a pseudo-French, like the Arabs or the Chinese or the Bangladeshis or the Israelis… So you got it: I had one only sensed solution: leave this very hilarious land ASAAAAAAAAAP.
And so… what do I do? I get settle up in Paris! Like a lowlife, mediocre evil worshiper! Why? I guess there was no way I would listen to my heart, at this time.
So now that I was staying there, how could I do something with myself in this country specialized in rejection? Because no warrior could fight the French vibe of conformism and immobility, I became a boxer-fighter and fought, on the ring, everyday, with the rejected, the non-French, the Arabs and the Blacks; at least those people were real, and that was the only way I would survive and express myself.
Two years of sweating, training, fighting, aside from the French-with-attitude. And when my nose went hanging all over my face, and my body got too damaged to keep boxing, well, that was it. I had a last surgery, and went for a long, sad, lonely hike.
For months, I spin my way all over Europe.
Spreading slowly the dust of my heart in the squares, the streets, I became a minstrel. You know, playing music in the streets for spare coins.
You are asking yourself: HOW IS IT THAT HE PLAYS AN INSTRUMENT NOW? Yep, I reckon I have a gift. I play the transversal flute, and I play beautifully. For years, I had to hide cause those people in France, they hate beauty… Oh no, please don’t get me started! … No, enough with those French already... ah, what the heck! Knock yourself out Kerner! So those French, hum, they don’t want beauty, they want “intelligent” stuff: they would teach me how to play the flute ugly and school-like, the way it “has to be played”. We don’t want passion, or rage, or love, we don’t want you! we want boring and school-like, and more than anything, we want all the same.
“Kerner, when are you gona calm down. They are some truly nice people there too, like anywhere else, you know it…”
- yes, I know. I feel so sad for them, poor doomed good French condemned to hate their own selves!!
“what?”
- I mean, any normal human being hates the French, no?
“… mmh, yes, you‘re right. Poor doomed good French taking a bite of their Camembert with a melancholically long sigh…”
- and a group of ghetto-Arabic-French aggressing them suddenly… just for fun cause those guys don’t really like Camembert.
“ they prefer Donner…”
- Donner kebab, of course.
“Ok! lets think of something else!”
- yeah, something peaceful…
“…Bach flute sonatas”
- mm…
“ …of course, if you get a CD played by a French!!”
- oh please, lets take a breath!
“Yeah, lets close our eyes…”
“…but already, if you wana listen to a French flutist, pick the most famous of them: legendary French flute player monsieur Jean Pierre Rampal!
- ah! Perfect example! Anyone who is a bit connected with himself…
“ …and not brainwashed by the intellectuals…”
- … will realize that even when the dude is playing the most graceful tunes of Bach, his vibe SUCKS so much that you poor listeners become pissed and uncomfortable you don’t even know why!
“…Hehehehe! Do you hear them? We got some French officials here : monsieur s’il vous plait! We recognize your music…
- …now that everyone else does.
“ …ca suffit, monsieur!!! a little bit of modesty quand meme! Who do you think you are! If Rampal’s vibe sucks that much, it maybe is because that the sound of his flute is never natural. EXACTEMENT MONSIEUR, cause we always make the sound of our flutes drawn into an effect called “reverb”, you know, this effect that hides technical flaws and complete lack of sonority?!!”
- my sweeeeet educated French musicians, you could be so adorable and hilarious, if only your face looks didn’t look like my butt!
“not talking about their heart, hehe!”
- … and you still don’t understand why I never accepted to have a NICE SOPHISTICATED LITTLE CONVERSATION WITH YAAAAAARRRGGGHHHHH!!!
“… hew, not that they ever cared, I just remind you”.
… Hum, ok now, everybody go back to the darkness and let me talk. I must apologize to the reader for all those different Kerner's talking in the same time. I told you not to get me started, though.
BUT!!! But! …But! believe it or not, I found a real treasure in France. A treasure beyond anything I could dream of. This treasure, I grabbed it, I made it mine, and I went to bring it to people all around the world: the songs of a man called Georges Brassens who died in 1981. For all those years that I was in the prison of Paris, his art nourished me with the rarest beauty. Can you believe that this dude survived there by recoiling into his hole, untouchable by anyone but his close friends and all his cats?
Can you believe that through him, I discovered Victor Hugo, Paul Fort and so many others… disappeared with their time, leaving an edifice of beauty left to soiling.
So, back to Mr. Kerner’s story: I knew how to play the flute, and I hid it. But now that I was out of there, I had no reason to think that the people of Naples, Vienna or Copenhagen, would spit on my given love to them, my music; so I sorted my instrument out of its closed dusty box with no fear. And that’s how I survived in Europe: playing my favorites songs of Brassens for some street cash.
I lost myself somewhere around Roma… and woke up months later, pissed and pasta-fat as hell, surrounded by humans rousing hysterically on a high speed sidewalk: I was in this city called New York, I was 27, and completely out of fuel.
“WHAT THE HECK IS MR KERNER SUDDENLY DOING IN NY NOW??!!”. Here you go, dear reader: I somehow ended up realizing that all those famous cities that I was visiting in Europe were in fact gigantic zoos entirely organized for the locals hyenas to rip off the tourists… who are mostly charming, fatty-fatty, American in short pants and sneakers (but the real locals who try to survive there see them more like a bunch of Sumo wrestlers visiting a concentration camp, I never completely figured out why).
Anyway, some cities, like Venice, were just some enormous obese whore, mouth wide open, sucking vigorously all the money that is possible to be sucked out of the visitor, and then, going to sleep without shower, stinking and sweating, waiting for the next season to begin... So I said to myself: since the rare people who would actually drop a coin in the box of my flute were my favorite Americans, and since only 10 percent of the actual Americans have a passport, why not play for the 90 percent of virgin Americanos who haven’t gone stingy after enduring Europe’s joke on them?
So, here I am finally reaching NY… where I realize that there are no Americans here but refugees from all over the planet!
What a disappointment. No Americans in NY. The rich ones are in Europe, the less rich in Vegas, and the rest are in front of TV, somewhere in an unreachable republican state where there are no pedestrians nor sidewalks anyway, and where everybody is trembling from fear, when its not of going to hell or being bombed, its of an alien like me showing up and taking their job!
And what kind of a welcoming do I get? Opening my first New York Post of my life, it’s to read in gigantic letters: ILLEGALS OUT, THE CHASING BEGINS!!! That was a mister called Mr. Bush speaking. The same Mr. Bush whom I would every night address my fervent prayers: “W, I see that you are doing very well with taking care of the world. Could you please whack France too? Pleaaaaase, W, do you think that you could maybe bomb those transparent frog eaters someday?”, and I would go to sleep with the sweetest dreams… And here is what I get for my loving believes and prayers: a miserable threat spoken like a petit bourgeois!
What am I going to do now?!! And where the hecks are my favorite fatty-fatty waspy flappy happy Americanos with my easy greasy cash in their pockets?! Look at those multicolor New Yorkers! They seem so hurry and busy, why play for them, they won’t even notice me! And this smell of oil and refined sugar that consistently enfolds the city!
I dropped my but on the floor, crying… when I realized that somebody was hanging a tissue to me… I dried my tears with it, and was about to say thank you, when the man grabbed my shoulder, almost breaking all my bones, enquiring: ARE YOU SAVED??? …I assured the goy that I was not in danger, but he was already yelling: “it’s not your fault if your ancestors killed HIM! It’s not YOU, my friend!”. I really wanted to meditate with him on this matter, but at this very moment, the employee of the TwinDonut was bringing some fresh maple-frosted and old-fashion, so I could not stand it anymore: I had to get them and transform them into a nice smelly liquid excrement with my signature on it.
The high dose of sugar helping me to forget for a second that the picture of my life looked already like the dozen after transit, I was about to enjoy another local specialty called “toasted bagel with butter” when … hey! This is where I suddenly understood: how could I be out of fuel? I never had any!! That’s it! Here you go! I was a miserable looser from the very first day I was born! Pure and simple! A dude with not a single quality, but a dude filled with ridiculous and arrogant ambitions, and that’s why I was suffering so much! What I had to do from now on was to accept and try to take the best of it: I should become a real, true, original Average dude.
I could get a nice 8 to 5 job, a nice suburban house; I would go bowling on Saturday nights, barbecuing on Sunday afternoons, and I would have a dog, and a fridge always loaded with American beer. And I would be a dud’ of a dude. That isn’t duding that dude of an undudable dude goal, dude-it? …dude?!
Well… after getting fired from any single possible job in town, completely burnt in the working world of the East Coast, here I am with nothing else in my hands that this old broken transversal flute.
I still can try to play a little. Maybe, maybe… Where? In the street. Just play, like you did in Europe, man. Play for people. They would sure drop you some survival coins.
Fa sol fa mi re do sib la ! Hello?! People!!! Can you hear this soul in pain? Of course not, you bunch of zombies cheating your nature with chemical coffee and vitamins… oh, wait, strange... somebody is approaching! He’s going to say something…
- ARE YOU SAVED?!!!!
My shoulder!! No!!! I blew into my flute with all the strength of my lungs to make him leave… and suddenly, here they are! Dozens of people, listening!
I blew again, producing a sound similar to the yell of a duck that is being strangled. I don’t believe it. Those freaks love it! They ask for more! They ask me to make an album of my ducking-around for them to enjoy at home! But, wait, how can I be good at what I do, I have no school!!
People here don’t want school! They want life, rage, love, they want people with balls!! And then, I heard that they throw them to the garbage disposal, but that’s another story, I suppose.
Those NY freaks, those refugees from their own America, they didn’t stop only to listen and ask for a CD, it was for them to tell me: your spinning is over, you are at home now, like the rest of us. But there is no time for mourning; you gotta move on, together with all of us, or die. So, action… here, have some chemical coffee.
So did I, zombies brothers. Action. I have become a musician. Not that I have really made it, I mean made it the modern way, you know social power, name dropping, lips engorged by all the years of forced smiles and blah blah blah. I just have recorded some of my music, on my own, and created a little band for people to enjoy live… and as the leach-less savage that I am afraid I will always be, I have taken off again for other destinations, bringing my music to people where they are.
Some maybe think that I have forgotten about you… you the black man from the mean streets who, this night in the deserted subway, stuck 20 bucks in the box of my flute, whispering : “Keep playing, keep fighting, you doing good man”.
And you, the man who came to conquer Broadway, 21 years ago, without having ever hooked on a role, who told me: “You never fail until you stop trying”. You the sweating, Dunkin' Donut exhausted employee who offered me a pack full of fresh Boston Cream this night when I was once again penniless. Again you, the cop supposed to make me stop playing, who helped me over cross the orders… to all of you, strangers, this music that makes me live, my music, exists and is not a cheap combination of notes thrown to the passer-by; it is all the accumulation of what you, barely glimpsed strangers, have deposited for free into my soul.
Out of respect, out of gratitude, I put in this music my hope, my despair, everything that the passing storms have left solid into my existence.
As for the reader who has followed my story so far, you now can help me do what I do and hence feel useful to human society: put your money where your mouth is.
I mean, if already you want to give your salary away, why would you give it to the pirates and rapscallions who have planted their name brand in your courtyard and now feed you with their excrements, assuring you that this is pure caviar?
Yours,
Yanouv Kerner
A man
Just like you.