Essays I Haven't Written

Poetry is about saying it as it seems. Saying it "like it is" assumes the Romantic trap of thinking that the final state of things can be deigned by the poet’s sense of what cannot be accurately or concisely phrased. The permanent significance some poets attempt to capture is an illusion: word meanings change, cultural habits change, reading habits change, world views change, the meanings of what was formally thought to be a settled affair changes as well. Or rather our attitudes change to the subject changes. The object is inert, bereft of meaning. The poet, attempting a verse that reaches years , decades beyond it's time, is better served getting his her own properly and artfully qualified perception of events and ideas right. One might not trust met narratives anymore, but brilliant individual responses are always illuminating.
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Barry Alfonso, noted essayist and Traveling Man, had this to say in a note regarding the manufacturing of Hip Consensus:

It seems to me that the heyday of rock criticism almost precisely followed the arc of the counter culture of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, when the exalted arrogance of The Young (or at least the “hip” segment of it) believed in a unified code of ideals and ethics, built around misty notions of revolution, self-liberation and hirsute hedonism. There was a cleanly-drawn line between Cool and Uncool in those days and the leading rock critics of the time fell in line with the prevailing ethos. The rise of the underground press rewarded the music scribes with small change, psychic cachet and innumerable promo albums, creating an ambiguous symbiotic relationship with a music business that didn’t want to change the world so much as make lots and lots of $$$. It became something of a Ponzi scheme of the collective mind, crashing somewhere between the rise of Jimmy Carter and the fall of disco. The rhetoric of Marsh, Nelson, etc. did get seriously inflated and hyperbolic, straining to pump up a few hirsute entertainers into the reincarnations of Byron and Keats. The work of too many of these critics seems myopic, jejune and often pretentious by current standards, the detritus of a time when the economy was booming and youngsters could afford to imagine something as unsustainable as a Woodstock Nation. Still, there are moments of colorful, cogent writing to be found as well. The golden era of rock criticism was more than a make-work project or a sustained act of wankery – in fact, I think the first Rolling Stone Record Review anthology is just as good a read as your typical WPA Guide.

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I’d agree that Costello has spread himself too thin in his efforts to become the most versatile rock songwriter of his generation, but what has diluted his later work isn’t variety so much as ambition. His work was already diverse in the styles it employed—Motown, gospel, Brill building power-sob-ballading, folk traditions, guitar-centered rock power chording, effortlessly melodic and melancholy ballads—a habit gained from his other principle influence, the Beatles, and as the wide swath of approaches has given him to write an amazingly solid set of poetic/obscure/ brilliantly hard nosed lyrics that could accommodate several themes and subterranean intellection  in the space of a compelling song. Doubtless the dips, curves and marvelously detailed turns of the songs forced him to work a mite harder with a lyric. Some of it was, of course, a grueling strangeness that was more alienating than alienated, but the records he produced from My Aim is True through Imperial Bedroom were overall a dazzling array of stanzas and catchy choruses that would seduce the sensibility in a masterful variety of styles. Costello, though, is a pop songwriter for all the subtlety his music contains, and he been seduced by the notion that he should be an artiste— as the pieces got longer, the styles taken from a broader sample, the variety more dress-up make believe than convinced of its own primacy, the good man reveals himself a talented musician in a hurry for a more impressive reputation. What I think Dylan would have benefited from is the sort of range the earlier work of Costello shared; his lyrics would have been sharper more often.

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Most popular music is theme songs for losers and their moron cousins, dreamers. Dreamers just haven't yet received the memo. Who would listen to it if it were a winner's game. A room full of Bud Collier clones in Groucho glasses.
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The basic flaw in the auteur theory is that it preferred hero worship over art, which was a convenient way to overlook the wooden set ups otherwise hack directors presented audiences. There was the misconception that just because someone would film situations similar from film to film , it constituted an aesthetic and constituted a style; some were artful in their familiar scenes and scenarios, but far more were merely fashioning a way to work quick and under budget.

Vowel Movement

“Movement”, a poem by Wyn Cooper, is that frustrating species of a poem that starts off well enough, full of promise and intrigue, that chokes to a close. It begins as a smooth ride with effortless transitions between speeds suddenly becomes a lurching, jerking collapse. We are to make note of all the movement that occurs in this narrative, the countryside the narrator speaks of to his unknown companion. The tone is nostalgic, the recounting of annoyances fondly recalled. But time goes on, life advances from one neighborhood to another, one terrain for another completely unlike it. One moves and attempts to be quickly assimilated by something more urban, bustling, impatient, impolite, a city that the narrator doesn't want to discuss, not for long.

This is the pun contained in the title, an obvious ploy from the get-go; the irony, I suppose, would be that the weather, the relative stillness, the lack urgency in the bucolic ruins of fading America are not, in fact, cursed with inertia, as the speaker addresses the particulars with telling, nearly idealized detail. An implied sigh accompanies the pause between first and second stanza; this is the part of the conversation where the speaker is lost in thought and averts his eyes, falls into a melancholy that dares him to speak what he is not able to find words for. The poem goes from being fairly specific to vague and euphemistic. The effect is spoiled by Wyn Cooper's need, to sum up, the inchoate morass seething under the surface of these well-mannered images;

 "...before we

settled in a city of other movements,

found new rhythms that suit us better,

we tell ourselves over and over. "

The poem is a nice if other unremarkable presentation of the low-level anxiety that haunts the suburbia of John Cheever, who was a master short story writer and novelist who explored a generation of the white middle class that had to distract themselves with drugs, adultery, and workaholism. The aim of those who lived in Cheever's New York's outer communities was a continual effort to dull a collective suspicion that the lifestyle and manicured neighborhoods they chose for themselves are lifeless results of preferring Bad Faith over singular authenticity. Cheever, though, was much subtler and more lyrical as he wrote of his characters attempts to fill an emptiness that will not be healed. Cooper had some more writing to do to make this idea work; the poem just quits suddenly and the screen one imagines this monologue being played against goes blank. The last sentence reveals an unwillingness to see this thing through. The poet is unsure how he wants to talk about this string of related icons.

Nolan Finley is a big fat meanie

Nolan Finley is editorial page editor for my home town newspaper, The Detroit News, and he writes an opinion column that reflects the terse bluntness of someone who does not give a righteous rat's ass about the welfare of others. He is a seriously constipated White Guy who prefers his anger to facts, compassion. His Bible, it seems, are the numbers appearing the Bottom Line. Today he equates "Obamacare" with an historically unprecedented attack on the rights and liberties of American citizens.  He only seems content when is in a foaming lather. 

Finley seems to think that the capacity of the American people to contract catastrophic diseases with no medical resources is a Constitutional right and that Obama is being a bully in seeking to make sure that the great number of the uninsured have coverage they can afford. This upsets Finley no end and writes himself into a perfectly illogical snit: what's really being argued for here isn't anything like Liberty, Freedom or Individual Rights, but rather a thinly disguised rant for the sick, the injured, the poor and the homeless to die off faster than they already are. This is just mean, in plain fact, the reactionary , paranoid ravings of someone who is afraid that he is going to have his toys taken away. Rather than discuss what needs to be done about health care, Finley drapes himself in the flag and red-baits the issue. That is cowardly, it is cheap, it is disgusting and self centered.

Pound Cake

While discussing the aching , seemingly inexpressible pain and confusion that profound states of love and infatuation  can create within a soul, poet Robert Pinsky brings up the touchy subject of Ezra Pound. Pinsky, to be sure, qualifies his praise for the late bard appropriately, stating emphatically that his  treasonous broadcasts against the American war effort in WW2  and his racial theories are gross perversions. One had to concede his gift, though, the ear he had, his seemingly flawless ability to join t high falutin' , archaic and colloquial language into a new poetry that could touch the deepest , most inaccessible cords within the human soul. 

This is Pinsky's belief, and he makes a good argument, but I don't hear the same music he does. I willI concede , though, that Pound was Modernism's premiere talent scout; problematic as T.S.Eliot's own anti-scepticism and conservatism are, his genius as a poet and critic make him Pound's principle gift to 20th century culture. Otherwise, I find Pound's own work, in large parts, to be an unsatisfying , lumpy mash up of styles, ideas and techniques that are finally doomed, despite bits of real brilliance, to a nostalgic ambivalence preventing his work from truly catching fire, as the work of Eliot, Blake and Yeats had done. 

There is, too often, a sage tone that is emulation, constructed, not actually inspired, created perhaps in ironic parody of the older forms Pound sought to separate modern poetry from. The effect, though, is that he seems tethered to the past, as he spent a lifetime trying to create something of equal genius on the terms of past masters. This , I think, contributes to the blow hard I hear in is writing, a smart man , not a brilliant one, who cannot distinguish between his good ideas and his bad ones.

Eddie Van Halen Shreds

I realize that I am just a few months away from turning 60, but here I am anyway, listening to Eddie Van Halen take his spectacular solo on the song "China Town" from  the new Van Halen record  A Different Kind of Truth . The supposed requirement that I was to grow up finally at a certain time and act my age with more "age appropriate" music ( what? My parents Big Band collection? My Mom liked to listen to X) is a lie I told myself. I am acting my age and this shredding fete on the fret is age appropriate appropriate  The riffs are fluid, flowing with the liquid clarity of an rapidly moving stream, a fluency accented with odd classical formations and post modern blues bends, sub-dominant notes pitched to the heavens. Speed, style, an instinct for getting to the essence of the implied emotional narrative an instrumental should have. This is exciting stuff. There are rock guitarists aplenty who have emerged in the wake of the revolution in technique Eddie VanHalen introduced in the mid seventies who are,maybe, maybe consistently faster, involve themselves in more complicated (as opposed to complex) expositions, but very few of them have EDV's freshness, his flawless instinct fills and suitably choked chords. He has the gift of knowing when to start a solo, and when to end it. He is the man to beat. So far, undefeated.Roth does not have the range he had from back in the day, but his tone, cadence and talk-belting rasp and attitude for the outrageous accents EVH saturates this hook-happy tunes with. What impressed me the most was that this was a great album all the way through. The riffs are hooky, to say the least, the bridges go to places you wouldn't expect, the choruses are splendidly hummable. And Alex VanHalen and Wofgang VH are a perfect rhythm section. Most of all, though, Eddie plays with an energy and ingenuity we haven't heard in years.It's his guitar work that attracts me to this band, the nasty, sexy, whammy bar -delineated solos that rise up in the full glory and quick witted elan of post-blues rock virtuosity.

A goddamned shame

To be sure, after the shock of Whitney Houston's death wanes a bit and we can again feel the chill in the air and the heat emanating from the desk lamp, a professional sourpuss or two will attempt a cultural post-mortem on the event, excoriating media commentaries and fan reaction alike for reducing the singer's abrupt finale as "a tragedy" and "a shame" or ". There but for the grace of God go I..." The upshot of the objection will be that the gadfly (or two) loathes clichés and platitudes and that it's pathetic all we can do is mutter "ain't it a shame”, tsk-tsking instead of DOING SOMETHING!! Fuck those guys.

The irrefutable fact is that Houston's death is a shame and it is a tragedy. Let's be more emphatic: it's a goddamned shame and a goddamned tragedy. There is nothing else you can call the early death, brought on, no doubt, by a long-term addiction to crack cocaine and other chronic party favors, of someone as gifted as the suddenly deceased Whitney Houston. Hers was a voice that was, when all is said and the note cards are shuffled and rubber banded together, an instrument that was singular in her heyday, a voice that remains singular years after that day has passed, and will likely be one of those voices fans, old and new, and writers will refer to in glowing terms no less than what's happened to Frank Sinatra's reputation as a vocalist. Sinatra was a punk and a sociopath much of his life, but his voice and his songs made the stream of personal offenses forgivable ; Whitney was a train wreck for years who couldn't hide the effects of a drug habit, but her voice and her material will be enough, I suspect, for the lot of us to turn up the volume on her tunes when they play. Everything else that happened will be as if nothing happened at all.

The best one can do is hope that her talent, amply represented on her albums and hits, will outlive the infamy of her last decade or so, a time of stupid, inane, inexplicably moronic behavior driven by drugs, a period where the brilliant and beautiful Whitney was turned one of the least appealing people to make the gossip programs; she became less appealing than chewed pizza crust. Her death is a shame and the horror of it all is that there is NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT! Those who obsessed with celebrity culture and those obsessed with grousing the masses lack of more profound reaction have the momentary wish that they, whoever "they" happen to be, should pass laws against these terrible things, that being brilliant people dying "before their time”, and the banality of the collective opinion about celebrities that unbelievably few of us have met, let alone know anything about besides what's allowed on a press release.

My wish would be for us to turn off our television and computers for a day and instead take a walk along the beach, with a book, a pair of sunglasses, a nice box lunch, grateful that this day, this hour, this minute that we are alive with the full of our senses are working just fine, that we are engaged with a world that is phenomenal even without the metaphors we try to assign it, that we are not this day, this hour, this minute dropping dead from whatever is waiting for us and which we'll meet eventually, date and time undisclosed.

The shiny lights of the season

It was a room full of things  like broken radios, wood furniture, rusted patio chairs, paintings of paper boats on Central Park ponds, newspaper stacks and boxes full of cleaning supplies and parts of battered reed instruments. It was a room full of thing she was interested in, as the years that have gathered behind her took with them a large share of the sum of her interests in the life she passed through as though she were a mist settling on the hours and minutes in the lives of other people. She looked out the window at the neighborhood that sprawled street by street , perfect blocks of homes, drive ways and detached garages, each doubtlessly hiding mute dramas behind the line of trash cans and compost heaps. This is where all the bottles are buried, she thought, this is where he daughter learned about boys and the zip less seduction, this is where her husband gave her secret names under supermarket signs, this is where decals with insane eyes gave the corroding silver trim of American cars a signal that age comes to any set of machines and animal limbs, that things pile up and become nothing at all when memory flickers or is distracted by strings of fire crackers or  the shiny lights of the season

Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas, and the genius of his lyrics. - Slate Magazine

Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas, and the genius of his lyrics. - Slate Magazine:

Jan Swafford essentially argues in her Slate article that Leonard Cohen is a better lyricist than Bob Dylan, or anyone else for that matter who has bothered to compose rhyme to melody. A broad premise , typical for Slate and internet magazines where deadlines often drive good argument. Still, the story has a point I think Swafford tip toes around; Bob Dylan is, in essence and in fact, a song lyricist who has a particularly strong gift for the poetic effect, while Cohen is a poet in the most coherent sense; he had published several volumes of poetry and published two novels prior to his taking up the guitar. Dylan's style is definitely the definition of the postmodern jam session, a splendid mash up of Little Richard, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry and a long line of obscure or anonymous folk singers who's music he heard and absorbed. His lyrics, however arcane and tempered with Surreal and Symbolist trappings--although the trappings , in themselves, were frequently artful and inspired--he labored to the pulse of the chord progression, the tight couplets, the strict obedience to a rock and roll beat. This is the particular reason he is so much more quotable than Cohen has turned out to be; the songwriter's instinct is to get your attention and keep it and to have you humming the refrain and singing the chorus as you walk away from the music player to attend to other task. Chances are that you are likely to continue humming along with the music while you work, on your break, on the drive home, for the remains of the day. This is not to insist that Cohen is not quotable or of equal worth--I am in agreement that Cohen , in general, is the superior writer to Dylan, and is more expert at presenting a persona that is believably engaged with the heartaches, pains and dread-festooned pleasures his songs take place. His lyrics are more measured, balanced, less exclamatory and time wasting, and exhibit a superior sense of irony. Cohen is the literary figure, the genuine article, who comes to songwriting with both his limitations and his considerable gifts. All is to say that Dylan has Tin Pan Alley throwing a large shadow over his work. Cohen, in turn, is next to a very large bottle of ink and a quill.

'via Blog this'

Chair

I was told to have a seat while the managers finished their discussion in the other room, but I looked hard and long at the chair they offered me, a kitchen chair with a vinyl covered cushion that was tan colored and creased in an inept machine tooled method to make the surface appear like leather. The lights in the room dimmed somewhat and it seemed as if the entire floor of the building had become one large elevator car; I could feel myself sinking to the depths below the stomach to where nausea was a brew always waiting at the table you walked away from in a hope that you could learn new ways to slake a thirst. You return to where you were continually ill, you return to the place where disasters occur like the arrival of mail and small teeming insect colonies when the weather gets warmer. Strange how I got tired of a life that made made sense without explanation, a life where every decision was followed by appropriate response , with the results being an equilibrium not unlike a placid like dreamed of in a passing Idyll, smooth surface, calm waters, perfectly diffused sunlight . I got tired of that and wanted to lurk around the basement again, to wallow among the empty boxes and bottles behind the figurative water heater; life should be a series of pipes that leaked contentedly. So here I was, on the third floor staring at a kitchen chair's cheap vinyl covering, waiting for the managers to finish their discussion in the other room.

There

There is nothing else to do. All you get in return is a bag full of candy wrappers and wads of chewing gum scraped from under school desks. Neither one of us thought of saying a prayer should the elevator cord snap suddenly and send us to a horrible, flattening death, but there we were anyway, staring forward at the doors, waiting fro them to open to a floor that resembled the one we just left, exactly the same but three floors closer to the parking lot.