SWANS AT THE LAKE--a poem

He was in the front seat
Of every car he took to
The other side of the city
Where there were swans
In the park lake, graceful as
Show horses bowing to a crowd .

Half of what you buy

Is who you buy it from.
There you are
With a bag of coffee grounds
In the back seat of the
Car you took back to suburbs
Crowded with the unpaid bills
The city couldn’t set on fire.
There were school girls whistling

Past the graveyard , skirts askew
In uptakes of wind.
Men with shovels loved their work
Because it was deep and grounded.
At dusk, the lake water darkens

And there is only a large, black surface
With a dark so deep that even a bright moon
On a cloudless could shine in the
Mystery of what lies beneath what
The world thinks it is we’re out here

In a boat playing harmonicas and guitars
To odd felines and bovines themselves playing
Along the ash coronas that ring  the stars

Music after music: a wandering in prose

Just tell the band to strike up a song that blends well with the color of a crowd whose faces blur in swirls across a whirling ballroom floor, high hats and tom-tom drums and cowbells filling the city blocks with locomotion that doesn’t stop until the clock hits the last minute of the last hour.

Everyone stops swirling to get their coats and then their cars to return to their homes and apartments that stopped seeming so extraordinarily alive with the things they brought to the rooms and hung up on the walls.
The music stops at midnight and the only thing you can think of now is how your feet hurt, how many hours to sunrise and the start of your term on the clock and in the customer’s face with service you know you wouldn’t hand your dog after the biggest mess he could produce on the rug you brought home from an enclosed mall.
But it’s late on the road, rain falls with an even temper, small fists bang the roof since the start of history, there are fields of applause your going through in the city on this drive, you drum the steering wheel as she leans against the glass, humming lightly, racing drums and quicksilver trumpets grow winged feet and chase one another from station to station to station on the AM dial.

She starts to sing something you don’t understand as the wheels seem to hydroplane over the asphalt, saxophone blasts a whole in the clouds and the moon is on you as you slow down the car coming to the apartment house. Love seems to lasts forever in ash-silver light, you think, coming to the garage, the music cutting out and static going off like firecrackers on a string under the stars of a night full of train wheels singing along the rails with steel wheels.

Clouds meander over the moon once more, the light is gone, there is only a garage full of tools and dirty boxes of unpacked stuff you never want to find. Her eyes are closed, her head against the door, oh, to dance across the city in top hats, long sideburns, and long white gloves like we used to dream it would be always, this is what you’re thinking.She sings a song without the words, nonsense syllables filling in spaces where lyrics used to be crooned,

“Do you know the words”, she asks, “do you know the name of the song?”
“Sure do” you said, switching off the ignition and tapping your forehead, “it’s up here somewhere, lost forever.” 

On long windedness

I don't mind long sentences as long as their is some kind of mastery of the voice a writer might attempt at length; I am fond of Whitman, Henry James, Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace and Joyce Carole Oates, writers who manage poetry in their long winded ways. That is to say, they didn't sound phony and the rhythms sounded like genuine expressions of personalities given to subtle word choice. Kerouac, though, struck me as tone deaf. After all these years of complaining about his style, or his attempts at style, the issue may be no more than a matter of taste. Jack Kerouac is nearly in our American Canon, and one must remember that the sort of idiom that constitutes literary language constantly changes over the centuries; language is a living thing, as it must be for literature to remain relevant as a practice and preference generation to generation.

Left over props

Carl Phillips is blessed with a light touch when it comes to arranging slight phrases to get across an inspiration that is soon to evaporate; "Silverchest" is like the decaying strains of music that one hears coming from a a neighbor's window on a hot day, an undertone you detect under the gasoline cough of leaf blowers and the louder commotion of what passes on the street. But was it music at all? Melodic tones , connected in fractions of a larger, fuller musical drama, somewhat heard and then wiped from memory; all that remains is the sensation trying to remember what the song might have been. It is not an experience that creates a string of associations a writer or a reader can turn into material that will eventually suggest something profound about the folly of our ideas of what our experience mean.  

Phillips' poem is slight the extent that what we witness are not items that trigger something in our own experience, a poem that draws out the memories and compels us to deal with them, contextualize them, find the ironic counterpart. our assumption slammed against the actual fact. The poem's phrases merely lie there, obvious in their slant and sleights. This is not a revelation, not a simple melody revealing a larger emotional complex that defies the dimensions of a free verse poem; I take it as a collection of signifiers or props left lying around. One asks if this a poem at all, like that suggestion of music previously mentioned. The experience here is more of searching for a poem, the hard, flinty part of metaphor that might ignite the associative string of fire crackers. There are no explosions, however, only a window display. All this is more a practice run than a journey, a rehearsal rather than performance.

Deliver This From Evil

Sometimes I wonder if I was born or merely set aside in another dimension of newspaper grey and was launched into this world because what ever the case was running low on the premium designs. 

It's a habitual thought, a shudder of doubt when staking hands or crossing streets or visiting people who and which are so familiar, 
so complete in intimate nuances and shared knowledge that they seem alien and strange, like specimens under glass in a museum I keep visiting for a lesson that just keeps turning the corner to the next gallery when my hard shoes hit the tile. Everything I look for is just out of focus, short of the designs I see and have drawn. 

Believing the world is seeing beyond the box scores and trusting what it says on the certificate; the biography has already been started, a page of facts that have gotten absurdly complicated, in love their own inventory of details that are pressed now in their uniqueness, creased and pleated, ready for rough waters I imagine await at the end of the map, where boats fall off and drift with sails full of solar wind until I wake up and yawn and scan the items on the table, the newspaper, the dirty bowls, someone else's pack of Marlboro 100s. The universe is reassembled, seamless as death itself. 

Years ago I wondered if there was life on other planets precisely at the time when she left me, or asked me to leave, I wondered who else in this darkness knows this hurt as well as I?, and I stared for hours at her apartment as if trying to make the walls fly away, to lift her off the sofa, away from her meal , and bring her into my arms where I stood in the dark, next to a payphone, with out change to call out far enough to the wilderness where there is only wind and tall grass, maybe houses at the bottom of canyons that you see from jets leaving your home town before you enter the clouds that will drag on the wingspan, I would stare and the walls would stay where the carpenters intended them to remain, there was nothing to see, but I stared harder, right through the building, to the stars I knew were there, receiving radio waves, TV shows, thoughts of strong desire translatable only by action, hear me, hear me, who else shivers in a dark corner in unique misery, genius of articulated regret, who else speaks when no language gets the purity of the idea right, just right, thus forcing one to live in craziness, at the end of the alley, drinking from bottles I've pealed the labels from? 
As usual, the stars don't answer, they don't say a word.

Tron Legacy

Tron Legacy was better than I thought it might be; the film makers follow up the original film with a plot that is as just as  sketchy as the  first film's, and offer up an atmosphere and special effects that are, to be sure,  better than before, but also in a tolerable scale. One is relieved that no one decided to pause, linger or dwell on a multitude of thyroidal spectacle and one appreciates the smartness to have the action move on,  without a hitch or a distraction. The shallow characterizations are not to be sniffed at--this is a fantasy  and pretensions of Siddartha would have sank this project, just as it did the last two films in the  Matrix  trilogy, both of which sounded like nothing so much as the most jargon-choked undergraduate papers from a class in post modern theory as enacted by kitchen appliances.

Was I the only one who was overwhelmed with the feeling of someone who'd been sitting in the same room for hours suffering the unceasing prate of  a handful of dull and dulling monologists who haven't a worthy anecdote for all their volumes of talk who had to resort to some sort of violent act in order to feel something again?  Boredom is a major cause of revolutions and and riots; ennui is the ultimate social injustice, and mindless , jacked-up , effects-glutted spasms in other wise very talky, snail-paced , portentous narratives is a bad way to make a series of action thrillers.The old joke that Kenau Reeves was safely in his expressive range as his cast members, who were robots.

If nothing else, the viewer  of  TL gets to relish Jeff Bridges reprising his persona as Dude from Big Lebowski   as he allows his computer program embedded hippie to emerge in the high contrast, glow in the dark worked that his Tron Legacy's terrain: "you're messing with my Zen thing, man."One appreciates as well the elegance that comes through what is an engaging if ultimately forgettable entertainment. It is refreshing when a competent entertainment is willing to let itself be forgotten
.

Pledge Night

I turned on PBS the other night, discovered it was a fund raising night, and witnessed the  creased likes of  Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly performing truncated versions of their respective hits.The judgement of history is that the Vanilla Fudge's hit version of the Supremes standard "You Keep Me Hanging On", with it's  slowed, grinding pace and well selected bits of bombast, holds up after the decades have rolled beyond the band's better days. Their arrangement , it seems, has become the standard, as seen with Rod Stewart's mastering of the song from his otherwise negligible Footloose and Fancy Free album. This was a case where the song found a singer, and hopes arose for a revitalization of Stewart's skills as a singer; a promise deferred.  The verdict on Iron Butterfly's ironically iconic ditty "Inna Gadda Da Vidda" is harsher, a tragic rendition of  a song that was tragic, awful, banal, grinding, monotonous, pretentious, stupid and obnoxious when it was first unveiled. Remember that attention grabbing egocentric in high school who dominated the social scene in class, assemblies, parties, dances and the like but sheer force of an overbearing and under talented personality? Remembering running into that guy in a store or a reunion and experiencing the shock of seeing the fool aged thirty or forty years and yet remaining the same grim slice of unjustified self-confidence? This song is that guy.
 It reminded me why I've come to prefer straight ahead jazz in my later life.-tb
___________

Pledge Night

Let’s remember that 

we’re strangers here ourselves

as we consider the years 

we’ve had the same phone number,

the answering machine

is full of salesmen 

stumbling over their scripts

and toll free exchanges,

get an extra room cleaned

for free and God, do I want a smoke.

None of us

who still have hair

believed our music would age as badly 

as an ice cream flavor

involving spinach and Brussels sprouts, 

all the guitar licks

leave an after taste 

of hashish, a stench of love beads

doused in petuli oil, 

what was sleek and smooth

is now grey and creased

like paper that’s been

folded and unfolded over many years,

yes, I tell my barber,

roll down my ears; 

give me a buzz

the equal of a shot and a beer.

Captain Beefheart, RIP: Absorbine Jr. for President

The good Captain was someone I struggled with for decades, as  his music kept me guessing whether he was putting me on with the trash compactor surrealism of the lyrics, the swooping, howling, icon-smashing bark that constituted his singing, or the time signatures, which seemed a rhythmic approximation of what traffic might like in a universe that had a trillion miles of road , an equal number of cars but no traffic lights or stop signs. or if he was indeed the genius his supporters claimed he was, a self-starting savant who employed every tic, gesture, sound, click, rattle and hum that caught his attention and assembled them in ways that amounted to a careening challenge to a listener expecting something more down home.

 He resembled no one so much as Ornette Coleman, the jazz player, and composer who kept people guessing through his long decades as a music maker, and in the case of both artists, I am leaning toward the side that consider them major musical forces of the 20Th century. What likely confounded the music fans of the time, perhaps, was the lack of obvious virtuosity in the playing--no extended guitar solos, no unpunctuated drum essays--and the lack of straightforward beginning, middle, and structure on which a band's gratuitous catalog of chops can be displayed. His music was about sound, about the layering of tones and textures, sweet blues juxtaposed against inverted jitterbug temps and "free jazz" dissonances ala Albert Ayler and the lithe,  sliding alienation of a single blues note resonating from a cheap amplifier under one of the Captain's (nee Don Van Vliet) aqua-urban night scapes.All ths in service to a man who was truly one of the very few poets to lead a rock band; while the notable likes of contemporaries Joni Mitchell,  Paul Simon, Tim Buckley or even the Beatles never quite transcended the sense that there was some serious contemplation to the words they would employ to render their "poetic" effects, The Captain was a natural word drunk, a cross between Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters and Howlin' Wolf; a prankster, a conjurer of mood, an organically generated under miner of literal meaning.

Three Months in the Mirror

Three months in the mirror

burning hip

- let's go to the kennel honey

and get one of those cute little moth pups

they flap their little wings

and fly around a light globe

and you can keep 'em in the closet

and feed 'em socks -

six months in the mirror

burning hip

- honey let's go out naked tonight

with our moth puppy

don't forget the socks and the light bulbs

make sure it's not too warm

you don't want to burn his lttle wings -

the lights are soft, streets soft, skies soft,

the mirrors soft

the smell of burnt powder

the moth flies through the mirror

powder falls lightly around around around

and around the sun .

One reads this, finds themselves arguing with the words and the fractured adjectives, the quirky signifiers and surrenders to it, finally, ceasing to ask   "what is he talking about" and asking, instead "what is he saying?". The Captain would answer only in ways that were just as products of inspired c as the poem/lyric he'd just written. As a guess, I would say a momentarily less zany Captain might offer the advice that a listener should take off the headphones, go outside and trust the authority of their senses if they wanted an answer that helped. The beauty of the Captain's music was that he made you figure it out for yourself--these are your senses, build something! Hearing him over time, decades in fact, brought me to one of those low-calorie epiphanies that comes to you while daydreaming at taxi-stand or the bankline in 1976, that what the Captain impresses on my psyche was the sense that I had just  woken up after a long lucid dream during an equally elongated street walk and I  was suddenly, brutally, incomprehensible in a world of familiar things that now seemed alien, detached from the very space they occupied, removed from all function or purpose other than to be played with, reconfigured, reinvented endlessly , constantly evolving in the way that children spontaneously create games and rules and  are away modifying the rules to accompanying new items to add to the play, to accommodate mistakes, to create fairness or give the short shrift to any idea of fairness. To create something and to let those things morph of their own accord by whatever invisible forces brought them to my liberated senses. In a major sense I've to believe Captain Beefheart was a witness to beauty that was fatal to the population's collective sense of pleasure, decorum and social duty; all he could do     was report and to keep us guessing, guessing, one would imagine, until our own sense of a better, achievable reality formed and allowed us to move forward as better citizens without the saber, the gun and the prisonhouse to keep us on the road to deferred bliss.

Barry Alfonso comments:

Like you, I feel a great vacuum-space with the departure of The Captain from this planet. What a rare and exalted being. I had the pleasure of interviewing him back in 1982, when he was hanging out by the La Brea Tar Pits (near his good friends, Smilodon and the Ground Sloth) doing press for his last album, Ice Cream for Crow. There was a lot of wonderful blarney slung by CB that day – I especially treasure his description of the music-consuming public as “fish in a fishbowl eating their own excretum.” But he also said some things that confirm your instincts about what he was up to creatively. Beefheart definitely saw himself as a COMPOSER, akin to Igor Stravinski. In his mind, everything in a song was a part, a movement, not the expression of an individual player – in fact, his guitarist Gary Lucas later told me that after Gary played a part in the studio, Beefheart said to him, “Thanks for the use of your fingers, man.” His musicians were his paintbrushes, his tools. This doesn’t sound very nice or respectful and Beefheart admitted as much. (His musicians – especially those who played during his Trout Mask period – insisted they had more to do with shaping the intricate song-parts than Beefheart gave them credit for. This is probably true. Yet I suspect CB so penetrated their psyches that they didn’t always realize when they were doing his will.) During our interview, Beefheart said that he got his songs whole, in a flash, and that the length of the song was how long it took to describe that single burst. That may account for the odd sense of movement and form in his songs. It also relates to his intense visual sense – CB was a painter and he thought like one when he was creating songs. Everything from “Ella Guru” to “Ice Cream for Crow” can be approached as still-life paintings seen from various angles through the course of the song. You are given a weird scene or portrait and you walk around it, poke at it, sniff it, taste it. As you said, there’s a heavy prankster element in CB. He liked to mess with people’s minds – he gave them a good fluffing, as if he was thwacking a pillow. He re-booted your cerebellum and made the world look cockeyed – or maybe right for the first time.

HIp album collections and the pecking order therein

The reasons Beatle fans in general (rather than only) "hipsters" prefer Revolver to Sgt.Pepper is for the only reason that really matters when one is alone with their iPOD; the songwriter is consistently better, the production crisper, the lyrics are effectively "poetic"  without the florid excess that capsized about half of Sgt.Pepper's songs. Perhaps most important, though, is that  you could still listen to Revolver and still regard the Beatles as a working band . It might be a better bet that musicologist would be a better choice to pick apart what made the musicianship on this record so alive and cogent, but a big attraction in my life is that these guys still sound like a band showing up for a gig, setting up their own gear, and ready to play . It may be nostalgia, but something was lost when Sgt. Pepper became the standard by which most  Beatles records after it would be judged, two sides of special effects, guest shots and  flailing ambition toward the Art Gesture. Revolver was the band still in work shirts.

It might be compared to Miles Davis when he was performing with his classic bands--John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock,Tony Williams, Ron Carter, et al-- with a long string of releases like Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue (name your favorite here)and when he turned to the jazz rock fusion of Bitch's Brew and On the Corner, which featured the endeavors of Chick Corea, and John McLaughlin . The first mentioned releases are conspicuous examples of bands sensitive to each members nuances, strengths and weaknesses, quirks and signatures, combing with the material to offer adventurous improvisations as part of an ensemble effort, while with Bitch;s Brew Davis and his producers culled performances from hours of taped jam sessions where ideas and motifs were explored to produce albums that are, in effect, mosaics. The general tone of the later releases was less the sparks that occur between musicians confronting each other in performance but rather something more theatrical; thought the musicianship is rather magnificent and often times bracing on the later electric releases,they seem more in service to Davis' cantankerous muse , performing as directed. As much as I admire and respect the accomplishment of both the Beatles and Davis in their late work, studio craft and all, a larger part of me would have preferred if the musicians had found a way to expand their horizons without abandoning their identities as bands. The Rolling Stones sought to produce their own version of Sgt.Pepper with the releases of the bloated and wasted Satanic Requests, and it's a fine thing to appreciate the Stones self critical response to bad notices (and perhaps some sober listening to the record, after the fact); they abandoned their attempts to compete with the Beatles on their new turf and returned  to riffy, R&B inflected rock and roll.

What hasn't been mentioned here is that Frank Zappa released his first Mothers of Invention album Freak Out on June 27, 1966, a full month before the Beatles released Revolver in August of that year. Zappa was an erratic, quizzical, quarrelsome presence, but he achieved things with that album that neither the Beatles nor the Stones came close to; both those bands were more influential in the pop music sphere, where their separate approaches to including cross genre and avant gard gestures made for pleasant and easily appreciated (and imitated)music for a large record buying public. Zappa, though, with his solid chops as composer, producer, guitarist, satirist and multi media maven, was miles further up the road and around the bend with respect to advancing the primitive ways of rock and roll into an art form. A good amount of Zappa's early music remains challenging to comprehend, which is another way of saying that it's hard to sit through and that it's downright ugly. The ugliness, though, wasn't merely my limited aesthetic; Zappa cultivated it, advanced it, gloried in it. Now that's integrity.  But the stuff that sounded ugly decades ago still kills small animals today.