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A memoir and manifesto by a pivotal figure at the junction of rock, the avant-garde, and an ever-widening spiral of art, theater, film, and dance.For over five decades, Elliott Sharp has been engaged in a quest at once quixotic and down to earth: to take the music he hears in his inner ear and bring it to life in the real world. In this vivid memoir and manifesto, Sharp takes us along on that quest, through some of the most rugged, anarchically fertile cultural terrain of our time. Sharp, a mainstay of the New York Downtown scene beginning in the 1980s, has been a pivotal figure at the junction of rock, experimental music, and an ever-widening spiral of art, theater, film, and dance. Rooted in blues, rock, jazz, and the twentieth-century avant-garde, Sharp's innovative music has encompassed fractal geometry, chaos theory, algorithms, genetic metaphors, and new strategies for graphic notation.