MC5

I lived in Detroit during the MC5's heyday, and I am grateful in that we had many teen clubs that had no age limits; this allowed me to witness local bands like the 5, Bob Seger The Rationals and the Stooges perform their brand of major chord guitar insanity against a complacent culture of hippiedom. Detroit was an uptight, racially tense factory town that had little truck with those either coastline who wanted to ease through the 60s and beyond in a stoned either. The MC5 were, as John Sinclair wrote, a "whole thing", and their task, for art, for music, for the Revolution everyone with sideburns and wire frame glasses claimed to support, was to drive people out of their homes, out of their workplaces, out of their clothes and into each other's arms. There was love in Detroit rock and roll, but it was hard, brutal, arrogant in a fashion that mirrored the worst undertakings of The Man. It was a kick in the nuts to a privileged  Bohemia.

This was the Politics of Ecstasy with a tangible, violent edge, and the 5 wanted to put us in touch with the most primal and alive parts of our animal selves There is nothing particularly revolutionary about this thinking, as there of been an endless line of bright thinkers and florid writers , from Rousseau, DH Lawrence to Norman Mailer who've foretold, in varying degrees and levels of conviction and practice, that if we embraced our instinctual side and did away with the intellectual superstructure that has cauterized our lives and potential, all falseness would cease and only then can we realize joy, creativity, the results of a good toss in the hay. To many, the 5 seemed an antidote to the groovy and lazy vibe that had robbed rock and roll of vitality,  but it bears saying that many considered their cure to be nearly as awful as the malaise it was meant to cure.

The 5, though, were punks, unhampered by book learning; their counter culture was composed of absolutes, black and white extremes, and almost comically effective resistance to new ideas.  They were opportunists under it all, like the punks who harassed us during lunch period, and they embraced this extreme ideology chiefly as a means of getting their drugs, their money, their groupies. As punks who basically became the standard from which punk bands that emerged in the late 70s were judged, the MC5 dumped John Sinclair and his White Panthers when they had the chance. Sinclair wanted them to be bigger than Chairman Mao. The MC5 wanted to be bigger than the Beatles.

the other Motown

Somewhere I have the original 45 released on A Square records (if I remember). That was made available on the Babes in Arms compilation. Either way, it is a killer jam, a guitar assault on a young man's power of speech as he tries to get across something primal, sexual,something beyond all that book learning. This version is bitchen because the guitars are shaved back to a growling raunch, with the solos being the distillation of piercing precision. The earlier version , though, is Motor City all the way: one imagines this young man, so stumped by his swelling desires, standing in the middle of a demolition derby or a police raid professing his same said desires to a reluctant Juliet who is hesitant to step from the cratered depths of a broken city.

Ted Nugent is a conservative asshole who's politics are more head line hungry than thought provoking; he's been emphasizing his gun toting , quasi-libertarian survivalist side for so long that virtually everyone has forgotten what a good and unique rock and roll guitarist he is. This video, from an Ambouy Dukes reunion of a kind, demonstrates that he can still play that angular, pointilistic style of his with the same back stabbing swagger that he had in the Sixties and the 70s, when he shut his mouth long enough to remind people that he used to be taken seriously as a musician. Here, the hatted one, still smirking like someone who just came back to the party after boinking your girl friend behind the garage in the dank tool shed, next to the rusted lawnmower, unleashes some major E chord damage and continues with a ridiculous flurry and fury of notes that it is like nothing else other than a busy intersection when the traffic lights fail and every piece of metal gets twisted and every driver gets a headache, if they're lucky.

It's amazing that some of the stuff that I used to call lame, ie Grand Funk, starts to sound good to me now that I am a mere year from turning seventy. They were a tedious grind in large part when they first started, and they were no great shakes when I saw their world debut at the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival at the State Fair Grounds in either 67 or 68, but they had that working class grit and conviction going for them, kids from the factory culture who liked their rock and roll hard, distorted, and sincere. All things being what they are, they share a lot in temperament with one of my heroes, Bob Seger. Grand Funk, though, were on the Right Side of Stupid, not an autodidact among the the three of them, cranking out steady neo-metal guitar riffs that , at their best, had the lumbering grace of a giant robot who just took a nuke in the scrotum and was short circuiting hard sparks and gargantuan gears as the collapsed through several empty skyscrapers . In slow, fuzz-tony motion , of course.

David Foster Wallace

It was only a matter of time, I guess, before a trend emerged  critiquing the  late  David  Foster Wallace's prose style as wanting . Maud Newton takes him apart in a recent New York Times  dis-assembly,  stating that Wallace's  diffuse approach to the paragraph was  "...  mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade." Newton goes to lengths to connect Wallace to the decline in properly arranged prose on the internet, quite an accomplishment anyway you look at it.     Matt Kiebus in Death and Taxes comes to DFW's defense with equal force, opining that "Wallace’s slangy style somehow made cluttered passages filled with a rather pedestrian amount of “likes,” “ums,” “sort ofs,” “reallys” and “pretty muches” look beautiful. The sprinkling of such ordinary words by an extraordinary writer was extremely uncommon at the time. His style reflected his personality and humanized a man whose mind didn’t operate on our playing field. Wallace’s colloquialisms made him likeable. His talent made him revered."


Wallace's worst sin as a writer wasn't the slangy quality of his style or even the I-might-be-wrong qualifiers that dot his long paragraphs, but that his sentences lacked emphasis. Where other great writers specializing in long sentences achieve their ends with having a point they are unambiguously headed for, which is to say that they have direction and and drive, Wallace has only spread much of the time. In his shorter efforts, like his non fiction collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", the approach works best ; his thinking and digressions are limited to what is actually in front of him . 


The fact that he cannot   transform something materially objective from his imagination is motivation for him, perhaps, to keep matters moving along. It works as well in his book of short fictions, "Oblivion". where is a bit more off-the-leash in his musing. But overall, you weary of his tone, his ambivalence, his diversions from a subject and realize that reading both his fiction and essays leaves the effect of trying to read a book while the pages are being flipped rapidly. Wallace has the dual characteristics of having a short attention span and being perpetually chatty.  What fans might think to be a masterful unraveling of the invisible links between unrelated subjects I find to be a rudderless drift. 

Ape shit

I just took an extended gander at "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and this reaffirms that 2011 has been the tamest and lamest of Summers for action, science fiction and fantasy films. It's not that there was anything wrong with this newest version of the Apes franchise--a prequel that goes to lengths to furnish background drama on how those Damn Dirty Apes got so smart and how they could speak in stilted, theatrical English-- but just how bloodless this enterprise is. I would assign the blame to length, as this film tends to linger on the admittedly wonderful special effects to make the ur-Simian, Caesar, into a convincingly expressive animation.

 All told, though, there is not much room for the non-disguised actors to do here, given the kind of Exit Stage Left dialogue that is sounds like hurried rewrites of various signifying cliches.The cast never really  commit themselves to the eviscerated exchanges provided them , a shame, since there have been a number of action films  with  rickety chit chat that still managed to give a number of quality thrills, accomplished , I think, with a one two punch of a cast going for the gold as they mine whatever worthwhile emotion they can from the silliness of their set speeches, and direction, where a good director with an instinct for set ups, surprises, pacing and editing can create a verve the script doesn't  originally contain.

Pacing goes a long way, and this film drags fatally in the middle ; it makes you long for the days of leaner action movies, like Die Hard  or Alien.  An action movie cannot decide to take a rest in the center of it's unfolding. The actors, as a result, appear to have nothing else to do except trudge from one scene the next. The shoes and their boots  appear uncommonly heavy.James Franco in the lead has fewer expressions than headless mannikin; worry, concern, inner turmoil, anxiety, dread, dread, dread, the man appears to be nursing an ulcer rather than overseeing a scientific breakthrough.

Let the magic happen

After lunch I turned off the computer and noticed that there was a tickle in the back of my throat, the sort of irritation that makes you think of wet sandpaper being the universal standard for raw flesh and blues hysteria. My throat felt the way Tom Waits sounds, amplified aggravation in the center of the soft tissue, red and familiar like a bully's smirk before he knees in the nuts and bitch slaps you more time when you try to sneak out of school via the custodian's entrance. There was nothing I could do about the damn condition at the moment, but I did have a half bottle of Tussin , some generic syrup for the alleviation of sore throat, cough and yet manly enough to expel the grubbily greased mucus from the deepest of chest resonating chambers. I drank it one gulp, a semi sweetened version of the cruel cures your grandmother used to force down your throat with a funnel and the business end of a high heel shoe. It was awful, and all at once the store room started doing jumping jacks, my stomach declared itself a sovereign nation, my eyes saw through the thickest walls of the building and could the lips of cops writing crime novels behind billboards when they weren't getting hummers from bums who need one more dime for some Blue Nun. I was stoned on something, and suddenly the phone rang, or I thought I did. All I remember, really, was that I answered something.

"Gewekeekek" I said into the receiver.
"Hi, I need a  red rubber octopus..."
I paused.
"Don't we all" I answered.
And then the sun exploded.

Recollection at lunch time

I was reading an  piece by Peter Whitmer about Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro"  while on the bus coming to work this morning and noticed that the day so far had the hue of a dingy wash rag. I lifted my eyes from the twitching pages I was trying to read to see someone standing at the bus stop where the bus had paused to pick up new passengers, spying a guy in a grey hoodie standing on the side walk  looking into the bus, straight at me where I was seated.


Alien twelve tone gangster movie theme songs emerged from my pocket just then, my cell phone was ringing. I answered, staring into nothing but an interface crowded with blurred icons. "This is me" I answered, "Who are  you?"

The voice didn't bother with an explanation  or an introduction or a confession of any kind, Rather , he issued a command,

"Let me talk to the other guy" he said. There was a burst of static, a high whistling shriek. And then the phone became very hot in my hand.

Later this morning

Later this morning there is a mood of subdued insanity as each of  us smile tightly, the corners of our mouths jagged like upended hangers, boomer rang creases pushing the eyes and eyebrows into the leering slant of a deranged carnival clown. Everything is fine and all of are going to heaven in a white boat with Black sails, that seems to be what we are dreaming while awake, a promise of deliverance tempered with an omen for perpetual disaster. Free floating anxiety that wakes up ten minutes before you do and starts pressing the proverbial buttons on the control center that constitutes your dreaming self. Oh dear, oh my, the worst has already happened, although neither the West nor the East coasts have slithered into an angry, boiling ocean. That boiling sound is more of a gurgle, the coffee maker that has stopped working, producing scratchy gurgling noises ; it gave me half a cup this morning and did nothing else other than engage that death rattle. Another fine day to begin the day, especially on a Sunday. And now here I am , wondering,

what? What am I wondering?

This morning

There is little else but ill will circulating through the tubes of the internet this morning, general grousing, gripes and jeremiads about little of consequence, although I would have to lend credence to the notion that alot of anger is generated by site specific fears of losing one's financial security. This means that a good number of us in the work force, from upper management, mid management and the guys who wash out the the trash dumpsters in the back of the stores we can't afford to walk into are worried that they might be invited into the boss's office and asked to close the door behind them. Not a fun way to start the morning, so I force myself to think only happy thoughts.  La la la la la la is what I sing to myself, and I imagine pink ponies with ribbons and rainbows and smiley faces all over the landscape. Next I turn to my  Facebook page where one of my friends posted a video of Brit punk band The Exploited doing the least ambiguous song I will hear all month: FUCK THE USA.

The rainbows evaporate,the pink ponies eat some tox ragweed and fall over and die. Red robins drop from the sky. The smiley faces are now flipping me off.

Great.

Dig your tunes or get buried by them

Talent in any form will trump attitude day of the week with me, but first I have to ask what the the talent is for. "Bad attitude" can be a talent by way of a trait some might think cool and alluring from afar, "chronic depression" seems to go a long way for other listeners to ignore the calculable merits of melodies, vocals and lyrics and wallow in the sepia-toned aura of guitaring cave dwellers whose talent inhabits a dampened set of neurons. Likewise, a punk with a torn black t-shirt, crud-encrusted jeans and a spoke through an upper lip doesn't require a discourse in harmony or theory to justify the inherent value of his or her choice of belligerent tone warping. What it represents is the value, the noisy symbolism of rage, which means the niceties of song construction don't even enter the discussion. Attitude and persona only get you so far, though, and many are left scratching whatever body part that itches, wondering what the hell? So I go back to the songs themselves and weigh their characteristics--no mystery here, it's melody, vocal, lyrics again, along with musicianship, production, and a host of other niggling details--and make a judgement based on an floating scale as to how the ingredients succeed or fail in doing what songs are supposed to do, which is to kick ass, make me sad, make me rage, rant, pant, behave or go crazy in the head, or, in worst case scenario, turn off the damn noise off. Standards and demands on good songwriting are in constant flux, of course, and you need to have the proverbial big ears to assess material's worth against not just the history of pop music in general, but also within the genre the artist writes within. Standards within standards can make this a no win proposition for someone trying to create an objective criteria, but we're all aware of the most rigorous test: does the music grab you , make you bob your head with your eyes closed, cause your hands to beat time with the flat of your palm, force you to improvise solos composed of   non words and advanced variations of clearing the throat, all of while enthralled with melody , a snappy drumbeat, a sweeping crescendo, some manner of melody that has sneaked under the barriers around your sense of propriety and seduced you beyond this moment's repair? The first reaction is one that can't be faked with faux theory and revisionist contextualization along sociological rather than musical lines. You are either moved in a visceral , immediate way, or you are left there formulating a more intellectualized response. Considered, thoughtful, critical responses are legitimate too, in their place, but there's a lot of fakery going about the net and print media. But that riff, that drum beat, that whoop of aggression that gets your legs moving, fist pumping, jaw jutting? Priceless commentary on the music coming forth, without the vocabulary to obscure, cloud and confuse the experience. It's not a necessarily an accurate gauge of a song's value and worth in the scheme of recorded music , but its value lies elsewhere, in a rare moment in the week where you're responding to something that needn't , for the moment, be classified, catalogued and critiqued like it were a virus that science is trying to destroy

REMARKS ARE NOT LITERATURE, NOR ARE THEY CRITICISM

There is an amusing story in Slate where the editors queried numerous noted critics about what they individually considered the most overrated novels they had the misfortune to struggle with. The responses from a group including Amy Bloom, Stephen Burt, Tom Perrotta among others presented some dour words over a fine selection of iconic texts. The idea, it seems, was similar to that of the collection edited by rock critic Jim DeRogatis, Kill Your Idols, where he asked a significantly younger generation of pop music critics to write devastating reviews of what was basically the Rolling Stone Magazine canon of the Greatest Rock and Roll Albums ever made.

Without going into detail, I will say that the anthology was a great idea that landed on the sharp rocks by one negative review after another. Virtually no musician or band was as good as older scribes had claimed, a conclusion you expected given the title of the collection, but the sensibility was put down and sarcasm, cheap insults, a strained irreverence that , with the repetition of one review after the other, sounded practiced, more inauthentic than the alleged phoniness of the albums under review. It was a bad writing contest, the contestants vying to produce the most wretched Lester Bangs impersonation. Bangs, though, would have none of this; he bared his soul, he argued his reasons, absurd or irrational they might have been. He was a great writer. The point is that the Slate article is merely a chance for some payback: tired of the praise Joyce receives, have you had it with Salinger’s name sucking the air from the room, do you think Pynchon is all sizzle and no steak? Here is your chance to put these elevated middlebrows in their place. What we get are smart people, good critics, staying in the shallow end of the pool. It’s interesting that virtually any touted book that does not hold my attention beyond the first 200 pages instantly gets reassigned to the 'overrated" section of my book table, that stack of tomes I will give away, donate, sell as the opportunities arise. “Overrated”, though, is as overused a term as , say , “brilliant”, “masterpiece” or “groundbreaking”; hasty dismissals and instant praise without a cant-free discussion about why these judgments were rendered exposes the opinions as being as inflated as the book one seeks to bury . Or to raise. Time was when book reviews, even the reviews available in middlebrow magazines like Time, made you believe, even feel, the sluggish pacing and torpor a bad stretch of prose could have on a writer. These days the field is dominated by wisecracks that are suitable for photo captions.

Remarks of this kind are fine for the chit chat that comes with book group debates about the relative merits of emerging authors or the swan songs of authors who have died or seem about to; to disguise a selection of rhythmic grumbling as an article is something else. Our critical discourse is cheapened and reduced to something you can read while going to the refrigerator for another O’Doul’s. It’s not that I’m against subjecting a work to critical examination, it’s just that we seem to live in a time of instant opinions. Much of what passes for a critical debate these days sounds like a gaggle of disenfranchised booksellers vying to see who can produce the most quotable sound bite, negative or positive. It saddens me that we haven’t another John Leonard on the horizon, someone who could dig deep and give a complex reading of a book , yay or nay, and not leave the personality and heart out of the whole thing. It used to be 200 pages before I continued on with a book or put it down; these days I am in the same 50-75 page ratio of test driving a text. It’s simply that there are too many pleasurable writers to read to waste time trudging through something out of fool’s sense of duty. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that “remarks are not literature”, and to that end I agree: literature is writing at length and writing that seeks to achieve something more remarkable than what the water cooler/coffee pot/ Good Reads cabal of laconic pedants offer as commentary. Even criticism that takes literature apart and inspects the workings of fevered personality taken to extreme graphomania ought to aspire to the level of the best books it takes under consideration. As it goes, though, remarks and not essays are the preferred method of judging new books, old and older. Remarks are not literature, nor are they criticism, but it is what people seem to read as the computers become repulsively more portable. It’s a bad cafe drink: just a rumor of coffee, lots of cream, heaping spoonfuls of white sugar

Received message. I can help you with correcting spelling and grammatical errors. Here is the improved version of your text: There is an amusing story in Slate where the editors queried a number of noted critics about what they individually considered the most overrated novels they had the misfortune to struggle with. The responses from a group including Amy Bloom, Stephen Burt, Tom Perrotta among others presented some dour words over a fine selection of iconic texts. The idea, it seems, was similar to that of the collection edited by rock critic Jim DeRogatis, Kill Your Idols, where he asked a significantly younger generation of pop music critics to write devastating reviews of what was basically the Rolling Stone magazine canon of the Greatest Rock and Roll Albums ever made. Without going into detail, I will say that the anthology was a great idea that landed on the sharp rocks by one negative review after another. Virtually no musician or band was as good as older scribes had claimed, a conclusion you expected given the title of the collection, but the sensibility was put down and sarcasm, cheap insults, a strained irreverence that , with the repetition of one review after the other, sounded practiced, more inauthentic than the alleged phoniness of the albums under review. It was a bad writing contest, the contestants vying to produce the most wretched Lester Bangs impersonation. Bangs, though, would have none of this; he bared his soul, he argued his reasons, absurd or irrational they might have been. He was a great writer. The point is that the Slate article is merely a chance for some payback: tired of the praise Joyce receives, have you had it with Salinger’s name sucking the air from the room, do you think Pynchon is all sizzle and no steak? Here is your chance to put these elevated middlebrows in their place. 

What we get are smart people, good critics, staying in the shallow end of the pool. It's interesting that virtually any touted book that does not hold my attention beyond the first 200 pages instantly gets reassigned to the 'overrated" section of my book table, that stack of tomes I will give away, donate, sell as the opportunities arise. "Overrated", though, is as overused a term as , say , "brilliant", "masterpiece" or "groundbreaking"; hasty dismissals and instant praise without a cant-free discussion about why these judgments were rendered exposes the opinions as being as inflated as the book one seeks to bury . Or to raise. Time was when book reviews, even the reviews available in middlebrow magazines like Time, made you believe, even feel, the sluggardly pacing and torpor a bad stretch of prose could have on a writer. These days the field is dominated by wisecracks that are suitable for photo captions. Remarks of this kind are fine for the chit chat that comes with book group debates about the relative merits of emerging authors or the swan songs of authors who have died or seem about to; to disguise a selection of rhythmic grumbling as an article is something else. Our critical discourse is cheapened and reduced to something you can read while going to the refrigerator for another O’Doul’s. It's not that I'm against subjecting a work to critical examination, it's just that we seem to live in a time of instant opinions. Much of what passes for a critical debate these days sounds like a gaggle of disenfranchised booksellers vying to see who can produce the most quotable sound bite, negative or positive. 

It saddens me that we haven't another John Leonard on the horizon, someone who could dig deep and give a complex reading of a book , yay or nay, and not leave the personality and heart out of the whole thing. It used to be 200 pages before I continued on with a book or put it down; these days I am in the same 50-75 page ratio of test driving a text. It's simply that there are too many pleasurable writers to read to waste time trudging through something out of fool's sense of duty. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that "remarks are not literature", and to that end I agree: literature is writing at length and writing that seeks to achieve something more remarkable than what the water cooler/coffee pot/ Good Reads cabal of laconic pedants offer as commentary. Even criticism that takes literature apart and inspects the workings of fevered personality taken to extreme graphomania ought to aspire to the level of the best books it takes under consideration. As it goes, though, remarks and not essays are the preferred method of judging new books, old and older. Remarks are not literature, nor are they criticism, but it is what people seem to read as the computers become repulsively more portable. It's a bad cafe drink: just a rumor of coffee, lots of cream, heaping spoonfuls of white sugar.

6 ways of looking at a grouchy old man

Wallace Stevens found 13 ways of looking at a blackbird; Ishmael Reed's poem "Scrub Jays" imagines the birds looking back   at the man glaring at them, finding six stanzas of taunts. This is , in essence, a poem about aging, the gaining of some simple knowledge that was formerly obscured by ego and youthful exuberance. Where a younger man could sustain a good battle in protecting what he perceives to be rightfully and exclusively his, his apple trees and the fruit they bare,  running to and from his house with all manner of pesticide, rakes, air horns , convinced that he can make short order of this ordeal and restore the principle of property rights to his personal piece of earth, the body with time grows slower, muscles go soft, bones ache, the awareness arises that no amount of assertion of will can make settle anything permanently. The bird is the old man's inner voice, speaking in mocking tones under remains of the rhetorical veneer that refuses to acknowledge inevitability. It is not this bird, nor even birds in particular that will win this battle.

What good are apples
To old men, anyway
You have lost your bite
You have run out of
 Ladders to climb
Your ultrasonic solar-powered
Animal repellent
The Honda among dissuaders
Might rid your garden of
The capo cats, but
 The bandit raccoons
Within 48 hours  

What good are apples, indeed what good are things that one attaches one's name to and changes their essential nature from being something useful and with a function , or purpose, in a large and infinitely complex system of things and makes them mere trophies, souveneers of a conquest? With the ache of the limbs and the fading of light from eyes that no longer see things crisply, clearly, without ambiguity, the possession of things is an error, a mistake in perception.  Nature, in any event, turns out to be not a particular thing one does battle against, not a personality, a thing, a personality one defines the terms of their existence against. Nature merely is, that condition of existence within which all things exist and , more or less, abide by. This includes the deflating ego of many a strong willed man and woman who assumed their could change the terms of the condition . The tragedy, voiced by Reed in the voice of birds who mock him for his erring presumptions about his cosmology, isn't that we all become bitter old men yelling at kids and critters to get off their lawn, but that we might never realize that we didn't own the lawn in the first place.

Summer reading 3

The Women
by T.C. Boyle

We enter the world of Frank Lloyd Wright and the cult of personality that surrounded him at his compound Taliesin and find the iconic and inconsistently brilliant architect as the center who spent much of his time managing his reputation, manipulating his followers, student architects and engineers, into doing the grungy and tedious work of preparing his various projects, attempting to borrow money or extend his exhausted credit lines and, as the title suggests, wooing women and then betraying them. 

The upshot is that Wright is less than the Frank Lloyd Wright cult would have us believe, that he was without flaws; T.C.Boyle relishes the chance to exhibit the man as a self-creating blowhard, more persona than center, who was by historical accounts not the most thorough of architects. It wouldn't unfair to say that as an architect he may have been a splendid designer--his buildings have a majesty and grace only the truly touched seem to render with ease--but in technical aspects he was resoundingly incompetent, given to short cuts , half measures, and shoddy workmanship on the smaller , essential things, like safe and certified electrical work. 

To this day his buildings are crumbling, and the novel shows us the grandness that is his home, Taliesen, burning to the ground because the Maestro couldn't be bothered with a thorough inspection of the work that bore his signature. This is a fine comic novel, the latest in Boyle's ongoing series of historical fictions revealing the fun and folly of scorched earth originality. Imperfect humans are the creators of otherwise beautiful and useful things. 

One does wish that Boyle would finesse his sentences and paragraphs a bit more--he is a good prose stylist when he chooses to be, but too often and for too long his writing sounds rushed, which is ironic, really , considering that a main point of this novel, a group portrait of the lovers and sycophants surrounding Wright, is that Wright was a splendid and artful draftsman who didn't see to the smaller details of his designs. So to Boyle does not lift his passages from the mere , pleasurable hum they are and lift them to a richer music.

flag

Unmanageable

He wouldn't change his mind

so I mailed him a brick and a rose

postage due, of course,

because the wind had gone from my sails

and I was stranded at the bus stop

with no token, after dark,

falling asleep to the barking of dogs

behind a fence.

I wouldn't apologize

so she sold my books

and record collection

to a man who specialized

in another decade's glory,

I cried under her window,

I sang her a song

written in schemes that rhymed

and plots that didn't,

I cannot be sorry

for invisible gestures

committed while I spoke on the phone, I explained,

hooking my thumb on a belt loop

when I mentioned nothing

what you thought it might

when I mentioned

"cake" and "bombast" in the same sentence,

but you gather my hats all the same

and toss them to the oak tree

that hangs over your roof,

one hat per limb,

one duck bill spinning toward the gutter

where leaves burn, as if on cue,

or my, what shall I do?

The government wouldn't straighten its spine

and walk a straight line

nor speak something without qualification,

so we held our breath

and took on horrible lovers

who would take our money from our wallets and purse

after we are asleep ,

we buy things we don't want

on the basis of a cute photos of grand kids on cell phone galleries,

we get in the car we stole

and drive to the edge of the map

after which there is only the tile of the floor below us,

checkerboard pattern and spread out newspapers

where the cat takes his craps,

this world

gets so much larger

the more we complain,

the biggest box

Distinct purposes

There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've been sober for twenty four years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

Summer reading 2

 THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
by Norman Mailer

Anyone who has had difficulty with Norman Mailer's militant ego-- or just plain irritated with the prospect of a writer declaring himself the best scribe in the land simply because he was the only one with the temerity to reach for the crown vacated by Hemingway--won't find relief here in his award winning book 'The Armies of the Night'. Too bad for them, I say, because even though Mailer's self regard is legendary and obnoxious without redemption in lesser pundits, Mailer shrewdly uses the persona, the third person referenced 'Mailer', to engage the the collision of forces that made up the political sensibility of the 60s ; the counter culture, anti-war activist, avowed Marxist revolutionaries, feminists, black nationalists , yippees, hippees, crazies of all sorts converged on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam and what was seen by many alternative life stylers as the fatally erring trajectory America had taken; all the sins of capitalism, white racism, imperialism and the like were now returning to the soil from which they came, demanding the bill be paid and the interest collected in full.

Mailer, someone who had announced early in his career, in his introduction to 'Advertisements for Myself', that he was obsessed with radically transforming the way his country came to see itself in the strange and terrifying world that was emerging in the post war period, comes off as the smartest guy in the room, someone conducting a running commentary on the tensions and contradictions that were coming from the estranged forces that composed the American Left. Much of the fun, though, certainly has to be the adventures of the swaggering, blustery, drinking and drunk Mailer as he wades through the issues and the worries that accompany movements that want to seize the future. There is an apt awareness of his own absurdity and celebrity, there is a realization that even his imagination cannot single handedly stop an a congery of policy evils already in place and being executed. What he could do, though, was maintain his sublime sense of irony and report, comment, opine and theorize with the quick witted verve that only the best stylists maintain.

This is a worthy read, an important document from a period of American which to this day refuses to be understood in retrospect. The

Summer reading

AMERICAN PSYCHO
by Brett Easton Ellis
I would be willing to accept the defense that Ellis’s quickie squib is in fact a satire of consumerism, a literary bit of photo realism if there was compelling art here. There isn't, however, and the defense falls apart. Ellis writes as if he had to submit this against a deadline, and he'd wasted his considerable lead time by living off his hefty advance. Ellis does a good job of diagnosing the narcissism of the eighties, but that by itself does nothing for either our understanding or empathy.
The emotionally neutered stretches of hacking, slicing, stabbing and bashing , juxtaposed against descriptions of material things that may as well have been photocopied from catalogues, is an interesting effect and achieves an ironic value soon on, but just as soon the effect is spent. And yet the detail goes on, as does the singularly flat line narration. Even the gross out factor wears thin and grows tedious; as with pornography, the power Ellis brings to the subject of hyper-violence isn't aesthetic, certainly. This reminds you of nothing else so much as someone taking pointlessly large doses of drugs in the vain hope of finding the rush and thrill of their first encounter. What Ellis has done is written a bad book who's only distinguishing element is that is all symptom. It does not deaden the reader to the horrors of psychotic violence, as most readers I encounter are sufficently offended and aghast at the amount of disheartening imagination Ellis can cast. Perhaps the ideal readership was supposed to folks like him, already deadened.


 THE DIAGNOSIS
by Alan Lightman

Out of the DeLillo playbook, a business commuter gradually loses the use of his limbs, and his confronted with medical experts who disguise their inability to treat him and render a diagnosis by having him submit to yet more tests. A novel full of comic moments and sleights of hand-- the father's relationship with his son is sad stuff, two-hankie time-- but there is strong feeling of what the world would be like if all the things that we plug into stopped giving us the illusion of information and clarity and instead added to our anxiety, increased oh-so-slowly another ten or twenty degrees. Lightman isn't the most graceful writer, but this novel works rather well. One will note the shared concern with DeLillo, who wrote a kind blurb for this novel: nominally intelligent citizens who realize too late their trust in the priesthoods of specialists and jargon masters have not only not aided them in their real or imagined crisis, but in fact made their lives worse.

1987

Behind a garage someone is sleeping with the candy wrappers and empty cans. I try and think of the earth finally giving up its secrets in moments when there's nothing on the mind except panic.
In a kitchen a girl drops the coffee pot while her father reaches for a belt, whether one to take or one to strap on she doesn't know. I have slept in a dumpster on a night when none of the coffee worked
and I was wearing the legacy  of dirt that are any man's bed to make.

Any man's bed to sleep in when it's a house that's been burning because pet food is historically cheaper than grub shaped to your tastes and because  the price of laundry is the erasure of the past that's
looking over the back yard fence when you're looking at the contorted swing set  and its uneven lengths of chain, dreaming of a higher class of bad luck, rotten wood decks, sliding swimming pools, gardens that get baked under desert winds,  wife swapping in the Seventies.

I crack my knuckles in a rustle of joints and light another Camel in the dark of another August afternoon. There is only traffic going to bars and homes and somewhere a cat is yowling at an empty dish,

somewhere dog scratches at a screen door, some times instinct is all I know and that's not even thinking, it's hunger on the naked face. The culture of the beach buries itself in the foam caused by Asian Freighters.

There's a table full of  friends  every winter night who blow smoke rings at the moon that makes its hesitant escape.  There are days you can't give away in laundry mats when there's a homeless man leaning against the spin cycle who won't explain why there the cut across his forehead but does reveal hours of banter as he deconstructs the meanings of the lives he says he's been because there are no year books for the liars club.

All our agendas are face down in the dirt; we see the surface of the soil, ants carrying ten times their weight, too much free time~ on loose change in our lives. A young girl leaves her kitchen to talk to her brother in the living room where he watches literature curl up and die as the screen writhes in a spasm of images from all over the globe to seduce the vision of one pair of eyes that hasn't learned to imagine the face of God or blue coat  calvary and their horses in the banks of clouds that are over him every day of his life.

THE SADNESS THAT REMAINS AMY WINEHOUSE

This is too sad for words, all the talent that Amy Winehouse had  now silenced because she couldn't muster up the strength to confront what was killing her.  Her song "Rehab"  showed she had an ironic awareness of her drug use , but this shows, again, that self-knowledge unaccompanied by action is inadequate . The insidious thing about being an addict is that the thought of stopping what you know will silence you forever abate quickly after the craving takes over and the first FIX of the day becomes all that matters at the moment. Self awareness vaporizes and you forget or ignore the truth of the matter and wallow in the nod and the eventual panic to get still more drugs. As talented and smart, even brilliant, as Winehouse was, she seemed more or less without a clue to the severity of her situation. Drugs make you stupid, they reduce your life to a banal statistic despite whatever genius potential you began life with, they kill you and make you another deceased cipher. The real tragedy is less that a brilliant artist is silenced too young in her career, but that we are bound to keep reading variations of this sad scenario for the rest of our natural collective lives.

The moral of this tale is simple: Save your own life.
This is a nicely written tribute by NY Times culture monger Guy Trebay on how the recently deceased Amy Winehouse will last, but it presents what I think will be the article that will dominate the flux of Winewhouse postmortems to come: more concern with what she looked like rather than how she sounded. It's a paradox that on the one hand the host of articles are yet to come will praise what were he conspicuous gifts, that unique voice (a combination of Billie Holiday and Diana Ross) and a surreal grit as a lyricist, and yet have the conversation drift, as if directed by gravity, to the matter of her appearance. I sympathize with Trebay, who was required to write so many snappy column inches with so little actual Amy Winehouse music to refer to. It's not as if there was something to surmount in her art as there was in Sinatra's skill set when his voice deepened and grew coarser, darker; he changed the way he sang and selected different songwriters to write for him, to brilliant effect. It's not like she's had an evolution as a lyricist, like Joni Mitchell or Elvis Costello, both of whom started out as an awesomely gifted who, with time, transcended their skills and became pretentious and pedantic. No, there is only a very slight bit of studio work in her brief stay with us, enjoyable , full of promise and , alas, she's dead.  This isn't unusual for an icon who didn't release many studio albums during her lifetime. It was a mere two for Winehouse, and basing a discussion of her work solely goes static before long. The valid conclusion is for us to ponder what might have been and then give a sigh, but since we're not yet finished wringing our hands over her passing, we have pundits applying a slipshod semiotics... to her sense of style , dealing in tortuously strained metaphors to wrench more cultural significance from her departed presence. It strains credulity, and it insults her fans and it insults her.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

Traffic's" Low Spark of High Heeled Boys", the title track of  what is arguably their best album, is one of those tracks that starts so evocatively, with mystery, hesitation, a  suggestion of paranoia as one progresses into an imagined unknown that goes sour quickly. I have long admired the songwriting and vocal skills of Traffic, Winwood especially, but cringed mightily when they attempted long improvisations. There was the idea in the Sixties that rock music had come into it's own as having an extensive enough technique to support extensive soloing, an idea that, save for the emblematic albums of a select few bands, was more conceit than fact. The hunt-and-peck soloing by Winwood on piano and the generally rasping attempts by saxophonist Chris Wood to emulate Wayne Shorter does a serious disfavor to this genuinely haunting melody and lyric (and Winwood's soulfully restrained vocal). The hesitant meandering makes you wish they had called in some guest stars for the solos, perhaps Keith Emerson for the piano and Dick Heckstall-Smith for the saxophone .

 What the lyrics suggest, sorrowful consequences resulting from a character entering into a  problematic relationship without an idea of  what he or she wants, is diffused along with the  sluggish improvisation; while the middle section scrapes along without a change in tempo, and the pace is reduced to foot dragging, you imagine what this melody and lyric would have sounded like had their been sensible virtuosos at the ready, musicians who could dig deeper into their technique and opened up tonal moods and create textures of conflicting harmony and counter rhythms that might could have created true feelings of the senses released, made transcendent from mere gravity.  Miles Davis , Phillip Glass tand  the never-dying Pink Floyd  (among many others)show us that how to use a minimal amount of notes and not sound empty. The band on this track, I think, is playing at their peak. I wish they'd done better with such an amazing tune.

Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino, like Brian De Palma, likes to dress up in the old clothes of directors he admires; unlike De Palma, this cut and paste style has for Tarantino, resulted in occasional brilliance and one legitimate masterpiece, Pulp Fiction. The energy and playfulness, however, has become wearisome as this fellow repeats and reiterates his moves, stylistically and intellectually. "Death Proof", his contribution to the "Grind House" collaboration with Richard Rodriguez, was something of a "Pulp Fiction" knock off, overly stylized dialogue about not much in particular slowing down the narrative momentum like a big thumb on an old turntable, and "Inglorious Basterds" was this film maker at his most hollowed-out, glib, verbose, lazily constructed, scenes drawn out and shocks and surprises twists slipped in along the way as a means to distract us from the fact that Tarantino's bag of tricks was a small one to begin with. The irony about the matter of Tarantino is that while he maintains the loves, admires and discusses eloquently the elegant leanness and clean procedural logic of genre films, he cannot make films near their perfection because of his verbosity; as Duncan Shepherd wrote, he likes to hear himself write. It's not that action genre films cannot have compelling or compelling dialogue; the problem lies in Tarantino's reluctance to have a tighter grasp on where his plots and subplots wind up. What he thinks are layers of ironic misdirection,where absolute monsters or amoral reprobates are given reams of well -honed speeches to recite between spasms of bad-doings are, in fact, padding and time wasting. Even  dialogue virtuoso Elmore Leonard, knows to trim his exchanges to advance the action and the surprises. Leonard  has sage advice to those younger writers who desire to have readers finish the books they write or the movies they author:"Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Indoor Fireworks

This fan video of Elvis Costello's beautiful song "Indoor Fireworks"  was posted on Facebook the other day, and there came along a dissenting voice in the comment stream that Costello was anti-women. Not an atypical response to Costello's work, his early albums especially, and none too subtle either. The conversation got to the point where the Costello critic remarked that the intensity and persistence of songs about anger, rage and hatred revealed a homoerotic tension.

Indoor Fireworks

We play these parlour games
We play at make believe
When we get to the part where I say that I'm going to leave
Everybody loves a happy ending but we don't even try
We go straight past pretending
To the part where everybody loves to cry
(chorus)
Indoor fireworks
Can still burn your fingers
Indoor fireworks
We swore we were safe as houses
They're not so spectacular
They don't burn up in the sky
But they can dazzle or delight
Or bring a tear
When the smoke gets in your eyes
You were the spice of life
The gin in my vermouth
And though the sparks would fly
I thought our love was fireproof
Sometimes we'd fight in public darling
With very little cause
But different kinds of sparks would fly
When we got on our own behind closed doors
(chorus)
It's time to tell the truth
These things have to be faced
My fuse is burning out
And all that powder's gone to waste
Don't think for a moment dear that we'll ever be through
I'll build a bonfire of my dreams
And burn a broken effigy of me and you

Elvis Costello is not anti-woman, as any number of love ballads from his prolific pen attest; one might as well say that Dylan is anti woman, or John Lennon  (for "Run for Your Life") for that matter. People seem to have a hard time when a lyricist goes beyond the usual ABC's of love songs and explore the darker issues, the sources of anger, the true sting of friction between two people. The point is not to make the listener comfortable with some warmed over platitudes about true love and the heartbreak of it all, but to have the listener recognizes the conflicting passions in themselves and to grapple with their own demons. His aim is true. You are ignoring huge swaths of Costello's work which, although noted for its anger and recrimination of failed relationships, has also shown a plentitude of emotional perspectives. I don't know about homoerotic tensions as it applies to his work--it is a reach (and not a reach around) to say that his aggressively male viewpoint in his early tunes hints at a gross case of denial and submersion. It is more accurate and more coherent and less obfuscating to say that his anger is the product of a young man who nursed his hurts , as young males are won't to do.

I would offer up that Costello doesn't sugar coat the emotions that most of us are prey to with the contrived resolutions that make discussing this things acceptable in mixed company. This is not Ricky Nelson's neighborhood; Costello, following no less an example than Dylan (and Lennon) creates another metaphorical system over the ache and anger, something closer to the truth. Art is meant to create catharsis, to raise the first thing we garner from an introductory aesthetics lecture, and catharsis is something that Costello creates more often than not.

But we have to examine the work further in light of an accusation that Costello is a misogynist by default. He, or his narrators, indicts himself/ themselves in a good many of the songs from the period, and as his career progressed and he got older, his lyric stances in terms of relationships became broader, more nuanced. The song in question, "Indoor Fireworks", shows this, as he speaks in terms of "we", "us", et al. Costello's narrative concept of problematic relationships became much more subtle, centering on the notion that relationships/unions/marri​ages work out or fail on the energies, talents, expectations and willingness (or lack of willingness) on the part of two people.

De Palma

Brian De Palma is a filmmaker who obviously covets the genius of other filmmakers, so much so that he reflexively duplicates their trademark signature gestures as his own. This occasionally results in exciting film work, such as the staircase scene from "Battleship Potemkin" artfully crafted into De Palma's "Untouchables." More often, though, the unending of one homage after another homage, tributes, plagiarisms is not unlike a three-year-old's version of peanut butter and jelly sandwich; they are virtually unwatchable, dripping with references, abrupt and illogical in their construction. De Palma, in fact, seems far too often to contrive a story just to insert his neurotic virtuoso camera tricks.

He desperately wants to be taken seriously and considered an artist, .and yet the best he can do is occasionally approximate the contours of another filmmaker's inspiration. No one can really watch "Blow Out" and not think of the two superior films that inspired it, "Blow-Up" and Francis Coppola's ingenious Americanization of the film, "The Conversation"; both those filmmakers had an idea of what they trying to do. The Untouchables and Casualties of War succeed as film narratives because De Palma had good scripts he hadn't the chance to alter, "improve" on, nor had the liberty to ignore. He is a director whose body of work would be more impressive if he could reign in his desire to short-cut his way to genius.

 De Palma seems to select what scenes he would like to plagiarize and then fashion a movie around them; that would be an exciting technique if it had better results, but it doesn't. Saying that De Palma's style is "post-modern pastiche" is an excellent way of saying that this director hasn't an interesting idea of his own. The tradition has been, and stubbornly remains, that younger artists are influenced and inspired by older artists; the younger artists, those few who will rise as being notable on their own terms, will imitate and then mold their influences with their own experience and sensibility. It's a compelling dialectic. De Palma's work is an excellent example of what is fatally wrong with the post-modern method: take various scenes from other filmmakers and then do a puppet show.

 Carrie, Casualties of War, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way, a few are indeed fine movies, but one can say that they are the least "De Palma-like" in the body of work. He does a good job when he sticks pieces in service to a good script; he had the potential of being a perfect "Hollywood hack," an underappreciated designation to those directors who take assignments and produce influential movies that resist fashion and politics. Perhaps he should have aspired to be Robert Aldrich rather than Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma revealed technical virtuosity, yes, but unlike those he admires, he could translate his personal quirks and issues into compelling art. Scarface is a classic merely because it is glutted burrito of excess; faithful to a post-modern nature, one cannot decide if it is intended as parody or critique. I doubt De Palma knew either, as the increasing extremes of debauched sex, violence, and vulgarity achieves not catharsis but rather the opposite, apathy. The last few minutes, the climactic shoot out with Sonny's invitation to "say hello to his little friend," is terrific, but it is the only thing in the film worth talking about these decades later. It is a simple lousy movie made memorable solely because it was so expensive and garnished.

"You are not your circumstances" is how a twelve step adage goes, in response to someone who might have shared that their life is out of control, seeming to be determined by external forces and events of the past. You are not your circumstances if you've come to this moment of dissatisfaction with the way things have turned out so far; now is the time to learn what can be of use in one's upbringing and background, now is the time to discard what only stalls, stymies and stultifies. Now is the time to come fully into one's own.


Jeff Skinner, gets that struggle with his poem Self-Made; the endless struggle of any awake citizen to rise above the chains of biologically inscribed instinct and habits formed as a consequence of a succession of cross-generation decisions. The urge he gets to address is the memory from before birth--to borrow Poe's phrase--to suss through the particular instances that have formed key elements of one's profile. There are so many things that have made up the essentials of where we come from--the question after the analysis, the inventory of origins and likely expressions in current time is where one goes when they've exhausted the examination. The inspection, one hopes, is a preparation for the next level , the next set of results and consequences that are truly one's own, not the outcome of forces outside one's grasp. It's the classic existential dilemma--the goal of one's life being not to live successfully , but rather to live authentically, solely responsible for the content of one's life.

Before puberty I knew the I: Mowgli, Maris,
Boy shadowing Tarzan; Ethnographer of dirt kingdoms;
Scientist of worm and dandelion blow;
Impresario of The Ant & Beetle Circus; witness to twisting deaths
of caterpillar and moth (placed gently in the web
by hand). After puberty I no longer knew who came
and went within this I but knew a woman
was somehow implicated; somehow a woman carried,
beneath her clothes, a major clue.
Everything I had I gave to seeing through that fabric.
I never believed in the social me—loath to speak,
to intrude—though he did what he could.
On clear nights, frost entered my definition, as did
the language I learned at work with men.
When my father died, his self exploded
invisibly.

It's a heady task, and Skinner's dizzying litany of the powerful influences that dog his heels and define each gesture , turn of phrase and slumping posture makes it seem that there is nothing one can do to upset the lineage and emerge as a stand alone sort of guy. He never believed in the "social me"--given the circumstances of the company he kept, he could take on numerous voices, tones, expressions, talk fluently on many different subjects while having interest in none of them--there is a only the urge to get through the hour and return to some private space where one isn't obliged to maintain to maintain a presentation of self to the social world that cannot be avoided.

But I felt particles streak through my body.
I am accumulation, lust, barrels of Seagram's,
memory, a few grains only of selflessness. My children
were made, not begotten. They carry my letter
of recommendation in and beneath the skin–proteins, enzymes,
electrolytes. I have offered it all up for renovation
many times with a smirk and crossed fingers, once in earnest.
Every day I am forgotten, a new man.

The tragedy , the irony is that Skinner's narrator, a Prufrock for the 21st century, is precisely the circumstances he passes through, past and present; the only thing to do is change the definitions of a situation that haven't changed , even with the benefit of education and experience. He is an accumulation of traits, a pastiche of attitudes, a juke box of poses and personalities that can be drawn up and modified and fitted to the situations he finds himself in. Repetitive that these situations are, as intimately as his boredom with the contents have become, it becomes a matter of play, of finding a nuanced way to play the role he finds himself in, a new way to read the script.

I have offered it all up for renovation
many times with a smirk and crossed fingers, once in earnest.
Every day I am forgotten, a new man

.


He resembles a jazz master looking over the sheet music of an old chestnut--"Autumn Leaves", "Misty", "You Stepped Out of a Dream"-- and considers how he might yet revive the same old notes of the melody , where to build tension, where to release it, when to rush the improvisation ahead of the tempo and when to slow it down. It's about creating a performance that is singular , unique, using familiar material to create and sustain a coherent stream of mood and emotion. Skinner's character finds different ways and motivations to make his paces more inspired and spontaneous, and declares in doing so that he is a new man each day, a self-invented voyager constructed from borrowed parts. It's an intriguing compromise--the desire to be the Ayn Randian superman raising above the petty and false moral structure and instead become an artist, of sorts, working splendidly, proudly with the materials at hand.

Sheetrock

Sheetrock
Sophie Cabot Black

As if almost too late we ripped into each other
With whatever we had: mouth, feet, fingers,
Teeth. The resolute tools of two

Lowly carpenters who wandered
In and decided to change what they saw
As longing. The contract was full

Of how we were not to look up as we tore down
To the impossible. To begin again
Is to have no idea where this will go

As we climb around each other
Raising dust. Whole sections in our hands.
To dismantle is not about surrender; the way

In is the way out. As long as
We are here, to do something. Everything.

We give into things all the time, like age, taxes, obnoxious passengers we share our bus seats with:  a life sometimes seems like a series of proclamations announcing a sequence of lines-of-death , principles one will not betray, only to surrender willingly, without a fight. It's less interesting to consider why one abandoned non negotiable positions --firm moral standards in contemporary discussions are fictions we cling to and gauge our success at adhering to them as if we were coaches judging their team's point averages through the season--than the intensity of the abandonment.

Exposing posing is the key here; there is a mania in the groping and tearing, the fingering and gripping, there is the urgent thrust of lust in the rather primal need to remove any pretense of ordering particulars and to make everything and everyone in the room at that moment supine, compliant, equal in a tangle of parts , wires and segments of hard surfaces.  Black works the metaphor with exceptional grace and punch; she does not belabor the image, nor does she make as if this a sort  of dialectic that will offer up a newer, fresher,  wiser synthesis of older ideas after they come into violent conflation; 

 Black here gives us a poem where , rather suddenly, intensely, convincingly the lovers are carpenters, tradesman of a sort digging into the structure that housed the prohibitions against their coming together. Some new will be built, no doubt, something will take the place of the rickety construction that had been there before, but nothing can be built until something else is removed, bluntly, abruptly; the rules of attraction are a plan of action  that denies the grip of the past and ignores the consequences that may come to visit in the future. What matters is the desire to transgress the boundaries, tear out what was useless and explore with each limb and digit what was hidden by the layers of wire, sheet-rock, plaster and nail studs.

to dismantle is not about surrender; the way .In is the way out. As long as
We are here, to do something. Everything.

The prospect of making love, of making something new, both relationship and the likelihood of creating new life, goes only after one becomes willing, in the allure of a desired end, to rid his or her self of things , ideas,  friends and family that they've outgrown. One is in a place to do something, anything, to give themselves to the natural habit of wrecking what was in place, scratching their head sabout what to do now, and then to build frantically. 

tT