Unspooled

 I thought Jackson Brown and Jane Fonda were insufferable when they trotted their famous selves in the service of anti nuke and antiwar causes, but the on going meltdowns of Lindsay Lohan,  Spears, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards among many in the unblinking public eye at least made one realize that Brown, Fonda enlisted themselves in crusades that at least sought justice; whether one agreed or disagreed with their positions was a different matter, because when one overcame their automatic resentment of their celebrity, the merits of their positions were what had to be debated, not their fame. With Lohan, one greets her fame and her actions with bemusement and comes away stupefied by the attention she warrants. She is, shall we say, a pen without ink.What I find despairing is that we seem to  be developing a species of D-List celebrities who aren't merely famous for being famous, but rather are famous for being consistent screw ups, malcontents, kooks , assholes and creeps. We seem to be producing them faster and more bountifully than we ever have. Or it could be that with the advance of media-focused technology and twenty four hour news and gossip venues, those minor celebs who normally would have been forgotten while they got other jobs and otherwise remain obscure now have a second act in the limelight. This says little for the quality of mass audience that seems happy to consume the skankiest details. Lohan, though, will suffer the ironic fate of being merely famous as a result of her antics, fuck ups and spotlight-seeking partying. As with Spears, she can no longer make the specious claim that she's an artist, an actress, someone who makes a living creating entertainments for an audience willing to pay for the privilege. She is a Professional Celebrity, a loathsome distinction. Might we be seeing the emergence of a female Danny Bonaducci? I hope not, 'though there's a reality TV show producer chomping at the bit at the prospect of having Lindsay Lohan drag her increasingly trivial self through a succession of whiny episodes. 

SHORT ORDER

Little Denny kept sliding off the lunch counter stool. The waitress poured his mom another cup of coffee. The waitress laughed, a snorting giggle.

“That’s cute” she said, turning to look at Mom, a young woman in her mid twenties who’d been peering at a magazine as she poked her food. She dropped her sandwich to her plate and grabbed Denny’s arm.
Her voice was an irritated hiss. “Shit” she said, “he’s doing this on purpose, the little weasely rat—“
AS“OwwwwwwwwwwwwWWWWWWW” yelled Denny when she yanked him upright on the stool, forcing into an impossible posture. His face met the edge of the counter half way, where he could see a history of dried and chipped gum wads gum that marked the trim like mountain ranges on molded globes. The hamburger Mom ordered for him sat on its plate in front of him, a mountain of meat and sesame seed buns.
“Now eat” his mother demanded. Her long finger that had been leafing through the magazine pointed to the plate, looking crooked, shaking, with a long, twisting fingernail curling toward the charred patty as if to drop something from a claw. Denny cringed again.

“Eat” she said again “eat and quit fucking around.” Her voice was a hoarse bark.

The waitress, whose smile shrank to a chastised ‘o’ from its cheeky glory, turned to her tasks , minding her own business. She pulled half empty ketchup bottles from a shelf under the counter as Denny reached over the chasm between he and the counter and grabbed the hamburger from the plate. It was the size of a football in both his hands. Squeezing it tight, he raised it to his mouth and then turned his eyes to Mom in order to see if she could see him doing exactly what he was told, a mature boy of 4 and a half!

Mom was sipping her coffee, the sandwich on the plate with two bites out of it, staring at the waitress who was pouring the remains of the ketchup bottles into a single vessel, so to waste not a drop. 

Denny squeezed the burger so tight that the patty slid from between the buns and hit the floor with a wet slap that sounded like a kiss heard in rowdy cartoons. The phone rang, and when the waitress reached over to grab the line, her arm swept into the bottles and knocked them to the floor. The bottles shattered into a hundred red, bloodless shards. Startled, Mom spilled her coffee.

Little Denny fell off the stool.

It comes down to whether you appreciate the conflations Ashbery artfully manages as he penetrates the psychic membrane between Steven's Supreme Fiction, that perfect of Ideal Types and their arrangements, with the material sphere that won't follow expectation, nor take direction. I happen to think that much of the interstices he investigates are results of artful wandering; Ashbery is a flâneur of his musings, and the Proustian inspection provides their idiosyncratic, insular joys. Had I thought Ashbery overrated and a bore, I'd have turned my back on critical praise of him and left him cold; I have a habit of keeping my consul regarding reading preferences, as I'm sure all of us do. But continue to read him I do, over several decades.  

Not a rebel, not a polemicist, hardly a rabble -rouser who makes speeches and writes incendiary essays against injustice, Ashbery is an aesthete, a daydreaming  intelligence of infinite patience exploring the spaces between what consciousness sees, the language it develops to register and comprehend experience, and the restlessness of memory stirred and released into streaming associations. Ashbery's are hard to “get” in the sense that one understands a note to get milk at the store or a cop's command to keep one's hand above their head, in plain sight. Ashbery's poems have everything the eye can put a shape to in plain sight, clouded, however, by thoughts, the cloud bank of memory. He wrestles with the still-engaging problems of Aristotle's metaphysics, that the things in the world are only the expression of an Idea of that thing, which exists before manifestation. It's a slippery metaphysics, a guarantor of headaches, but Ashbery wears the difficulty loosely; he pokes, prods, wonders, defers judgment, and is enthralled by the process of his wondering. 

Reaching a conclusion for him seems to mean that he is done writing, and no poet wants to think that they've used up their vocabulary. One might think that the mtvU audience might be more attracted to arch romantic and decidedly urban poet Frank O'Hara, whose emphatic musings and extrapolations had equal parts rage and incontestable joy which gave a smile or a snarl to his frequent spells of didactic erudition. He was in love with popular culture, with advertising, movies, the movies, he had an appreciation of modern art, he loved jazz and ballads, and he loved being a City Poet. He was more the walker than Ashbery, I suppose, or at least he wrote more about the going to and coming from of his strolls. Unlike Ashbery, O'Hara loved being an obvious tourist in his environment, and didn't want for a minute for his poetry to leave the streets, cafés, and galleries where he treads. Ashbery is more the stroller who gets lost in his associations triggered by what he beheld. Ever more the aesthete than his fellow New York Poets, he was interested in things a little more metaphysical, that being that the reality that exists in the interrelations being the act of perception and the thoughts that are linked to it, which branch off from the perception and link again with another set of ideas, themselves connected to material things observed and remembered. O'Hara was immediate, like the city he loved, while Ashbery allowed his senses the authority to enlarge his perception, to explore the simultaneity of sight and introspection. In a strange way, Ashbery is the more sensual of the two, willing to examine that even the sacrifice of immediate coherence. I’m not a fan of difficulty for being difficult, but I do think it's unreasonable to expect poets to be always unambiguous or easily grasped.

 Not every dense piece of writing is worthy by default, of course, and the burden falls on the individual talent. Ashbery's writing, for me, has sufficient allure, resonance and tangible bits of the recognizable world he sees to make the effort to maneuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work. Poetry is the written form where ambiguity of meaning and multiplicity of possible readings thrives more than others, and the tradition is not a parsimonious use of language, but rather a deliberate expansion of what words pieced can do, what meanings they can evoke, and what sensations they're able to create. Prose is the form that is, by default, is required to have the discourse it carries be clear and has precise as possible. Poetry and poets are interesting because they are not addressing their experiences or their ideas as linear matters subject to the usual linguistic cause and effect; poetry is interesting because it's a form that gives the inclined writer to interrogate their perceptions in unexpected ways. The poetic styles and approaches and aesthetics one may use vary widely in relative degrees of clarity, difficulty, and tone, but the unifying element is that poetry isn't prose, and serves a purpose besides the mere message delivering that is, at heart, the basic function of competent prose composition.

Getting old with Lolita

It's odd to imagine that Vladimir Nabokov's novel of sexual obsession Lolita is over fifty years old this, and it's a little more unnerving to realize that I am the approximate age of that tale's cringe-causing protagonist, Hubert Humbert, that sad, grey character who wooed the twelve year old title figure with such a beautiful and odiously applied poetry. David Gates waxed elegant in an old Newsweek essay on the Lolita effect in American Life five decades after it’s publication, and sure enough on finds in his views that the gamy combination of arousal and repugnance remain the novel’s notable effect; Nabokov, never one to have faith in human motive rising above the blinkered self-seeking, enjoyed having his characters go through their obsessed paces, almost as if they were subjects in a behavioral modification experiment, and I’ve little doubt that he wanted the audience to squirm a little as well, much as Hitchcock would have done with his films. The readership and the film audience are made to feel like voyeurs, and the artfulness of both the novelist and the film maker is creating narratives one can’t turn from easily, unnerving though they may be. Re-reading it, I feel Humbert's physical aches and pains and even some measure of his longings for the touch of a women's skin against mine--I remain a romantic sensualist when all my protesting about the course of the world are said and done with--and yet there is a horror, trepidation in a minor key as Humbert's fanciful seduction of the girl proceeds. I remember reading this in my early twenties thinking it erotic and wonderfully alive with what it made my young soul yearn for, but thirty seven years hence the same novel is a little unnerving. I have lived long enough to have experienced a bit of the adult obsession that our author put to page in 1955, and it's not nostalgia or another manner of euphoric recall. Lolita is Nabokov's peculiar masterpiece that indicts us along with Humbert in the foul pursuit of young Lolita's virtue.

The novel endures because Humbert's interior-designed arousal has not been mitigated by the art of the writing nor a change over time about what is allowable between the sexes. The novel is a joy to read for the rare genius of Nabokov's writing, and the grime-crusted salaciousness of Humbert's game is still revolting. This is the novel's great achievement, a comedy that indicts the reader as being likewise culpable in the seduction of a seeming innocent. I think it's more a matter that Lolita has aged well because the subject of a middle aged man's infatuation with a very young girl continues to give us the creeps fifty years since publication, and that Nabokov's writing remains musical, full of light, and wonderfully seductive in it's conveying of sensation.Nabokov was not an optimist in thinking that his characters would rise above their instincts and desires and do something selfless and noble, and with Lolita he hands us a masterpiece that is ageless because it retains the capacity to corrupt the reader and leave them feeling less certain in their moral stance for the pleasure they've just taken from the author's artful description of gamy undertakings.

The tension is purposeful, I think, to the end that Nabokov's comic pessimism was directed not to instruct a moral lesson, but rather to show that our personalities are problematic things in that we acknowledge what is wrong and what is bad for us and yet pursue our worst inclinations with sweetly rationalized zeal. We are entranced with Humbert's poetics as he waxes about the authority of his senses , and it is there we find ourselves seduced, willingly surrendered to beauty created to describe what is morally unsettling. This is Nabokov saying "Gotcha"!

Where Nabokov got his inspiration for his "gotcha", but all the twists and turns in his relationship (or lack of relationship) with his wife Vera is academic in the most anemic sense, since what we continue to have finely diced ambivalence toward is what he finally imagined in the novel Lolita, as alluring fiction. It remains the job of the indexer and the hagiographer to draw the precise and mathematical formulations as to the relations between the author's failings as a human being and the deceitful decorum of his elegant and untrustworthy narratives; for the reader seeking a distraction and an amusement the important matter is the complexity of our response to Lolita's seamless pulling from two directions.

This isn't the only fiction where he's artfully drawn situations and casts whose multiple duplicities all create mischief of varying degrees of transgression in the erstwhile pursuit of a mutating Ideal. Pnin, Pale Fire,Ada, Look at the Harlequins are all wonderful deliberations on bad faith. I am willing to accept that Nabokov was a personal bastard himself to be able to write so richly and so well of so many spoiled, privileged and vainly deluded creatures; his moral lesson , if there was one he presented, was that one ought not assume that there are firms moral lessons or insights to deep seated truths from the exposure to beauty and elegance; beauty is only a condition of our need for pleasure, and in itself does not make the gamier stuff in this life--the lying, the cheating, the ill will and violence we do toward one another-- sympathetic or defensible merely because it happens to be filtered through an attractive lens. Humbert is a man of self-made pathologies and lacks anything of the Tragic Hero, a great man who, despite great deeds and good works, offends the Universe with exclusionist pride.

He is perhaps a Pathetic Figure, someone objectively without redeeming virtues or qualities who willfully and blissfully contrives a habit of thinking to make their pursuit of gratification seamless and undisturbed by an intervening conscious. Tragic Heroes who started out as individuals who have the potential to make the world a better and more just place, but who have a fatal flaw that will ensure their demise. Humbert is all Fatal Flaw, a ruinous example of errant humanity. The novel is an unrelenting study in sheer pathology, made more disturbing by Nabokov's willingness to grace certain thinking with.

A dry well gets all the attention

Books by Fran Lebowitz, Steve Allen, and Shirley Jackson—one of which I didn’t throw away! - Slate Magazine:

Dan Kois has a blog entry in Slate where he sings the light praises of mass market books for their disposability; if a writer you've selected for your beach reading isn't keeping you enthralled, simply toss the offending book and go on to the next. He cites Fran Lebowitz, fabled New York humorist , and her collection of old magazine columns "Metropolitan Life" as example number one in paperbacks that wore out their welcome. I've watched Fran Lebowitz on a variety of talk  shows for near twenty years and thought she was witty and quotable and all that--she was refreshing in that she was genuinely funny and had no new book, movie or movie to plug--but I thought  she was above her pay grade as a writer. She was a joke teller who seemed to have been bullied by well meaning fans and reviewers into thinking that she was in the higher reaches of the American Pantheon of Funny Scribes. "Metropolitan Life", as described here, was a let down, of course, not enough laughs to justify all the words that came between the punchlines.

 I empathize with the columnists plight of having to write a certain number of words against a deadline pressure with the requirement of being literate, funny, easily editable by  pressed upon copy readers, but my sympathies are reserved for those who have by lines appearing two   or three times a week, plus feature stories, when required. Journalism and not literature you say, and fine, but this does fit my definition of a working writer.

 All those phone calls, all those notes, all those Google searches,  all  that research has to be constantly culled , updated, revised , vetted and finally written up in a timely manner, and be readable as well. Lebowitz had a monthly column, however, and though it's understandable that she may be one of these folks who can verbally sling choice bon mots, insults, quips and curses without the onset of migraines but found it difficult to face keyboard and produce, at will, a stream of words as a writer's job requires, she had very long lead times to develop a topic and create an interesting context for her punchlines; her prose need not have been merely a chatty delivery system for jokes of  inconsistent quality. 

Her reputation endures , which is fine, although I wonder if we are now able to refer to authors who no longer publish as being former-writers. "Write" is a verb, which connotes action , and for clarity's sake we would not be harmed by letting readers now what some celebrity authors used to for a living. A former boxer has no shame being referred to as an "ex-fighter". Why shouldn't writers be just as adult about the matter?

George Duke

George Duke, a dynamic , versatile and wonderfully imaginative jazz keyboardist, has died. I was fortunate enough to have seen him three separate times with Frank Zappa's various virtuoso ensembles, and with the extraordinarily gifted jazz drummer drummer Billy Cobham in the Billy Cobham-George Duke Band. There wasn't any style or technique that Duke couldn't master and merge effortlessly with his own proclivities as an improviser and composer. He could master any of the ruthlessly complex pieces and arrangements Zappa could toss at him, and he could improvise with lyric grace, funk and deft alacrity over, under and between whatever chord and key changes happened to be in the mix. He was an amazing, under appreciated musician who gave me much pleasure in my concert going days. We've lost a major talent.

The Comings and Goings of Every Tide

Oh, I had thought of getting my thesaurus a good dusting off and making some of you readers work for your clarity, but the truth is that I've nothing critical or insightful to say after two weeks with a summer cold that would not abate, beginning shortly after my simultaneous celebrations of age, my 61st birthday and my  26th year of sobriety, my mind is rusty, crusty and mushy all at once. What is thought of isn't fresh, quick or crisp, in any case, and a quite a bit of air let of the tire that is my metaphorical ego; what I would be a sweet rant or a rapid essay outlining the contradictions inherent in some insanely trivial pop cultural matter is instead just a murmur of words, a rattle of syllables before the   brain begins to shut down again, for the night, delving into the dreams of tinfoil nostalgia and the kind of dread only the snoring and inert can experience. In stead of the rant, here is bit of prose wandering, a poem maybe, or maybe not, but certainly a kind of writing the demonstrates the quality of this flu ravaged stew we bemusedly refer to as a mature mind and personality to boot. Hope you find something to appreciate.-tb

______________________________

THE COMINGS AND GOINGS OF EVERY TIDE

Picture if you will,  full lips wrapped around a pipe denying it's smoky plume, 

Shredded dresses priced as high gear, the possibilities of  wide ties  and thick lapels

and belt buckles the size of home base coming together in an historical turn,

a sartorial demand.

It frightens me to think of these things, nervousness inhabits the veins the blood attempt to pulse through with something resembling a life. Better to be attending an elevated Mass, a refuge from in some hamlet where there are only phone books and want ads, admonishing the earth of slow down, to stay in place, to give a break on the gravity which costs nothing at all and costs us everything to defy as we ease ourselves between mountain ranges \and large bodies of water.

The whole thing sinks, against better judgment, my clenched and shaking fist, acres and acres of  prime land  boast the late bloom of architectural tyranny, coyotes, rodents, families  that have crossed the border seeking work flee the drying cement and are  crushed halfway across  the Interstate as police and

Television station helicopters chase one car full of guys who might or might]   not have done something someone a hundred years ago didn't like when the music

became too much like sex and men and women couldn't help but notice what there was to see beyond the archeology of clothes.  Meanwhile, meanwhile, in all the mean time

that never lightens up to what each hour means it's time for,  whole populations huddle in corners and vote amongst themselves for better dreams, visions from windows overlooking a coast line  where they can live with the comings and goings of every tide and slap of wave against  a white pier.

FENCE

(a love poem)

A fence runs between

the houses whose rooms

are stacked with boxes of things

that collected over the decade,

ephemera of years that started

when love was love and duty

was a man in a tank watching

Aral mountain ranges on the

other side of a Cold War border,

hands ready for the pistol

and radio at his reach

lest any hoards tried

to dilute the United States of America

in storage,

I slept like a bone in

an airless vault.

But everything

was turned inside out

by the time I woke up,

the fence remains

but everything

I live next to is three stories high,

even TV antennas snatching images

from the sky are  gone from my view,

chimneys are rare

as  honesty at retirement parties,

satellite dishes sneak

the world to

my house of boxes.

And love became duty

to remain on the border

of the bed

my limbs stayed in,

too late realizing that

the line of death was

my breath heavy with scotch and mouthwash

and pithy  perfumes for the tongue

when all my speech became poetry

about duty and honor   while she nodded and brushed her daughters' hair, she takes a loose strand

from her shoulder, she examines the end, the hair is split,

voiceless, she speaks

This where it ends,

I cannot breath,

there are fences running all over the world going somewhere

and all

we do is put the past away

in boxes until the corners of rooms

crowd me

and speaks to me in loops of your language

that's liquid and lost in attention to

details that are about why

you become invisible

even in bed,

which is more like a mining camp

than the place where

dreams slip across the darkness

when we've stopped talking, when our eyes are closed,

when our breathing should be the same,

not a race to the sunrise.

Everything is inside out

and I'm stupid enough

to believe that the man in the tank

loves the world even as bombs go off

around the limits of our fences,

But now I love a room

with high ceilings,

empty corners,

rooms big to swing

a cat by the tail,

where my voice  rises high

and loud and rings against

the pipes and then dies

away like notes plunked

from a fine-tuned piano,

I love the discovery shoes,

sober talk, doors without locks,

windows left open

with every racket of car alarm

and leaf blower

and weekend carpenter

speaking to me in sounds

that bustle

in phonics that flash a language

that words trail

like a dog after its master

where back yards yield to one another

like lovers wearing blindfolds in abandoned parks

horrified that they might

be passing each other as

both their reaches miss their

objects of desire

and both of them walk sightless in the other direction,

around corners

and into busy traffic

before one, and then the other

takes off the blindfolds

to discover that they are

in a different city

than where they started the day,

every one is in another part of

the map, fenced in with invisible lines

that is the borders armies

make whole populations extinct for,

the world

might learn to do something

with fences that run up and down the

avenues and right into the living rooms

so that the couches and beds have

politics in every position you assume

running from stress, I say,

unwind my string

and kiss me, please,

you are a moon I want to have orbit me,

I am a gravity you cannot deny,

you make my fences sway in

your bluster and flower print dresses,

I regret fences I set up the day

you left town,

the last thing to be seen

were you on the other side of the fence

getting into your red Volvo

just before you drove away

with my heart in your trunk.

There is no noise with out silence

Truthfully, I like noise, dissonance, blistering beats and bangs, cacophony of all sorts, screaming guitar solos, atonal saxophone pirouettes, collision prone drum work, pianistics imposing order onto uncontainable randomness. The scrape and scratch is the cadence of the urban life, due to either traffic congestion, jackhammers on every corner, crimes in progress, or downtown music’s ranging from industrial grate to loft jazz to post-vinyl hip hop; abrupt, big shouldered, bullying, the Futurist dream (or nightmare) of jettisoning the Present and blasting a tunnel through the mountain of complacency towards an unknown future. Or maybe even destroying the mountain altogether; what we can surmise, though, is that it

isn’t the future that is the matter of concern for anyone making this kind of noise, but the noise itself, the badgering, persistent barrage that will not give you a minute of quiet time. There is no room for reflection or  regret, there is only the task of making this    existence so unlivable that we will all eventually rise and demand Eden now, or at least aid in the destruction of those  technologies, customs and accumulated culture that makes the question concerning the quality of life a Moot Point.

But there comes the moment when I have to take a breather from being the frontlines of my combative aesthetic and seek tunes, poems, movies that provide respite from the grind; sometimes I wake up and think clearly for a moment that existence is already noisy and that my abrasive taste in tunes accelerates no inevitable dialectic.Fun as it may be, no universal good is being served. In fact, I am only adding to the clutter, in essence, becoming part of the problem. Sanity, for the time being, prevails , balanced on a thin sting, and my premature jitters seek , for a change, succor, not assault. The quiet side appeals to me as well, much as I love abrasive post-bop jazz improvisation ala Cecil Taylor or the raucous cacophony of Charles Ives;  there are those moods when what I need from art—and art is something which is a need—is a short harmonica solo, a small water color in a simple frame, or a lyric poem that dwells comfortably, musically on it’s surface qualities. One loves grit, but that doesn’t exclude finesse. Mark Strand’s poem here won me over with it’s surely played music.

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

by Mark Strand

1.

When the moon appears

and a few wind-stricken barns stand out

in the low-domed hills

and shine with a light

that is veiled and dust-filled

and that floats upon the fields,

my mother, with her hair in a bun,

her face in shadow, and the smoke

from her cigarette coiling close

to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,

stands near the house

and watches the seepage of late light

down through the sedges,

the last gray islands of cloud

taken from view, and the wind

ruffling the moon's ash-colored coat

on the black bay.

2.

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send

small carpets of lampglow

into the haze and the bay

will begin its loud heaving

and the pines, frayed finials

climbing the hill, will seem to graze

the dim cinders of heaven.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,

the endless tunnels of nothing,

and as she gazes,

under the hour's spell,

she will think how we yield each night

to the soundless storms of decay

that tear at the folding flesh,

and she will not know

why she is here

or what she is prisoner of

if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3.

My mother will go indoors

and the fields, the bare stones

will drift in peace, small creatures --

the mouse and the swift -- will sleep

at opposite ends of the house.

Only the cricket will be up,

repeating its one shrill note

to the rotten boards of the porch,

to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,

to the sea that keeps to itself.

Why should my mother awake?

The earth is not yet a garden

about to be turned. The stars

are not yet bells that ring

at night for the lost.

Mark Strand is someone who often works overtime to make the small things he chooses to write about into subjects that are poetically overpowering. Though he wouldn't be guilty of some fever pitched overwriting that makes the work of Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott seem like a riotous thicket of over simile’d  commonplaces--it has been said that the prize winner has never met a qualifier he didn't fall in love with and promise a home to--Strand has always seemed to fall just short of adding an item too many to his verses.

He does have a leaner, more genuinely lyric movement than does Walcott, whom I find more ornate than satisfying. Strand , to his credit , doesn't obscure the emotion nor the place from which is figurative language is inspired, arch as it occasionally reads. Walcott the poet, the world traveler, the cultivated Other in the presence of an Imperial Culture, reads like someone how is trying to have an experience. Strand convinces you that he has had one, indeed, but that he over estimates the measure of words to their finessed narrative.

That said, I like this, in that Strand trusts what his eyes sees, a series of things his mother was doing in a wonderfully framed triptych that might have been conveyed by Andrew Wyeth. It is a little idealized--the lyric spirit is not interested in the precise qualifier, but that adjective or verb , that rather, that both makes the image more musical and reveals some commonly felt impression about the objects in the frame--but Strand here has a relaxed confidence that is very effective. Brush strokes, we could say, both

impressionistic and yet exact.

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send

small carpets of lampglow

into the haze and the bay

will begin its loud heaving

and the pines, frayed finials

climbing the hill, will seem to graze

the dim cinders of heaven.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,

the endless tunnels of nothing,

and as she gazes,

under the hour's spell,

she will think how we yield each night

to the soundless storms of decay

that tear at the folding flesh,

and she will not know

why she is here

or what she is prisoner of

if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

This is the image of someone going about there daily chores and fulfilling their obligations thinking they are out anyone else's view, or better, the agenda of someone who hasn't interest in impressing any set of prying eyes. The mother seems less a figure in solitude than she does to contain solitude itself, comfortable and with intimate knowledge of the grain of the wood the floor is made of, the smell of the changing weather, the different pitches of silence and what the nuances of small sounds forecast for that evening and the following day. Most of all, this is about watching the world, the smallest world , both grow up, grow old, become frail and die, finally, aware of the seamlessness of going about one's tasks and the preparation for the end. This is a poem about preparation, I think; we, like the Mother, come to a point in their life when the gravity of things are finally felt through accumulated experience, as one's responsibilities have been added too over the years, and one develops a sense that what one does isn't so much about setting ourselves up for the rest of our lives, but rather in preparing the ground for what comes next, who comes next.

Somewhere in the work , toil , the bothersome details we get to rest and earn an extra couple of hours to keep our eyes close. The change happens slowly, unperceived, but it does happen, and the planet is a constant state of becoming, of change, and what changes too are the metaphors one would use to determine their next indicated jobs.

Why should my mother awake?

The earth is not yet a garden

about to be turned. The stars

are not yet bells that ring

at night for the lost.

It is much too late. 

Tom Jones meets CSN and Y

I saw this when it was first broadcast and thought even then that it was an inspired mismatch of musical sensibilities. Jones is one of the greatest white rhythm and blues singers of all time--range, power, nuance, texture echo Otis Redding, Ray Charles and Solomon Burke with stunning ease and feeling--but he is incapable of just standing still and singing the notes. He over sings this tune--too much melisma on a song requiring a less protective approach is melodramatic, not dramatic, and can seem silly although it  is fun to hear Jones give an overwrought reading of the warning that the listener ought to be ready to cut their hair should things get hairy with the Man.  The swinging, swank,  tight slacks wearing Jones, that guy who has to keep that pelvis in motion regardless of subject matter, mood or prevailing fashion and decor, gets down with The People! Odder things have been aligned, I guess, but not many. Interesting band reactions as well; David Crosby looks amused and looks to be suppressing a snicker, while Stills sounds inspired by Jones' gospel inclinations to be a soul man himself. Neil Young,  the only member of CSN&Y of any kind of brilliance, appears thoroughly unamused.

It used to be that "hero" and "jerk" meant the same thing...

Truthfully, I used to like Aerosmith quite a bit and still get an adrenaline rush when I hear their best tunes. Guitar-centric rock was my preference in the Sports Arena days, but where other bands of the era now bore me and dated themselves badly, AS were pretty much the best at catchy riffs, savage, terse guitar solos and absurdly clever double -signifying lyrics. The words “hero” and “jerk” meant pretty much the same thing, a person, usually male, who lacked social grace and /awareness and would subject the surrounding community to eruptive demonstrations of a personality that  was the breathing variety of spray-can graffiti, bold, smeared, runny, jagged and stupid as a bag of wood chips. Luckily, yes, luckily, I survived the  best I could do in those days and learned that there were more interesting ways to make art, to have a conversation and woo a potential lover, subtler forms of conversation and chatter, smarter ways of making your presence known. But we all have to start somewhere; I was lucky enough to have wanted to aspire to being somewhat more than a farm-league lout.  

The combination of riff -craft and professed cocksmanship was made to order for any frustrated 20-year-old genius yearning to abandon his book learning' and take up the microphone, center stage, instead.  As you know, my tastes have gravitated, gratefully, towards mainstream jazz and blues over the last thirty five years--classic Miles, Coltrane, Mel Lewis, Wayne Shorter, Joe Pass, lots of Blue Note, Atlantic, ECM, Pacific Jazz, Verve, Impulse, Fantasy record releases--and rock and roll no longer interests me in large measure. But I still get a charge when a good AS is played--I rather like Tyler's rusty drain pipe screaming and I believe Joe Perry is one heck of a good chunk-chording guitarist. It helps, I guess, that these guys never got far from some rhythm and blues roots, even if those roots come from the Stones and not Motown or Stax. This may be damning with faint praise, but they were a brilliant expression of a young glandular confusion. 

What makes this art is this band's skill at sounding like they never learned anything fifty feet past the school yard and not much else beyond the age of 25. As we age and suffer the sprains  , creaks and cancer symptoms, inherited and self-inflicted,  our past gets more gloriously delinquent more we talk about it and we find ourselves gravitating to those acts of yore who seemed to maintain a genuine scowl and foul attitude.  Nearly any rock band based on rebellion and extreme bouts of immaturity just seems ridiculous after awhile--Peter Townsend is lucky enough to have had more ambition in his songwriting with Tommy and Who's Next to have lived down the dubious distinction of having written the lyric that exclaimed that he would rather die before he got old.  Aerosmith, in turn, still sounds good and rocking as often as not simply because they have mastered their formula. The sound a generation of us newly minted seniors occasionally pined for  remains the audio clue to an idea of integrity and idealism; what is disheartening, if only for a moment, is that this band's skill at sounding 21 and collectively wasted is a matter of professionalism and not an impulse to smash The State.

Rock and roll is all about professionalism , which is to say that some of the alienated and consequently alienating species trying to make their way in the world subsisting on the seeming authenticity of their anger, ire and anxiety has to make sure that they take care of their talent, respect their audiences expectations even as they try to make the curdled masses learn something new, and to makes sure that what they are writing about /singing about/yammering about is framed in choice riffs and frenzied backbeat. It is always about professionalism; the MC5 used to have manager John Sinclair, story goes, turn off the power in middle of one of their teen club gigs in Detroit to make it seem that the Man was trying to shut down their revolutionary oooopha. The 5 would get the crowd into a frenzy, making noise on the dark stage until the crowd was in a sufficient ranting lather. At that point Sinclair would switch the power back on and the band would continue, praising the crowd for sticking it to the Pigs. This was pure show business, not actual revolutionary fervor inspired by acne scars and blue balls; I would dare say that it had its own bizarre integetity, and was legitimate on terms we are too embarrassed to discuss. In a way, one needs to admire bands like the Stones or Aerosmith for remembering what it was that excited them when they were younger , and what kept their fan base loyal .

 All I would say is that it's not a matter of rock and roll ceasing to be an authentic trumpet of the troubled young soul once it became a brand; rather, rock and roll has always been a brand once white producers, record company owners and music publishers got a hold of it early on and geared a greatly tamed version of it to a wide and profitable audience of white teenagers. In any event, whether most of the music being made by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and others was a weaker version of what was done originally by Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters et al is beside the point. It coalesced, all the same, into a style that perfectly framed an attitude of restlessness among mostly middle class white teenagers who were excited by the sheer exotica, daring and the sense of the verboten the music radiated. It got named, it got classified, the conventions of its style were defined, and over time , through both record company hype and the endless stream of Consciousness that most white rock critics produced, rock and roll became a brand.

It was always a brand once it was removed from the the black communities and poor Southern white districts from which it originated. I have no doubt that the artist's intention , in the intervening years, was to produce a revolution in the conscious of their time with the music they wrote and performed, but the decision to be a musician was a career choice at the most rudimentary level, a means to make a living or, better yet , to get rich. It is that rare to non-existent musician who prefers to remain true to whatever vaporous sense of integrity and poor.

Even Chuck Berry, in my opinion the most important singer-songwriter musician to work in rock and roll--Berry, I believe , created the template with which all other rock and rollers made their careers in muisic--has described his songwriting style as geared for young white audiences. Berry was a man raised on the music of Ellington and Louie Jardin, strictly old school stuff, and who considered himself a contemporary of Muddy Waters, but he was also an entrepreneur as well as an artist. He was a working artist who rethought his brand and created a new one; he created something wholly new, a combination of rhythm and blues, country guitar phrasing and narratives that wittily, cleverly , indelibly spoke to a collective experience that had not been previously served. Critics and historians have been correct in callings this music Revolutionary, in that it changed the course of music , but it was also a Career change. All this, though, does not make what the power of Berry's music--or the music of Dylan, Beatles , Stones, MC5, Bruce or The High Fiving White Guys --false , dishonest, sans value altogether. What I concern myself with is how well the musicians are writing, playing, singing on their albums, with whether they are inspired , being fair to middlin', or seem out of ideas, winded; it is a useless and vain activity to judge musicians, or whole genres of music by how well they/it align themselves with a metaphysical standard of genuine , real, vital art making. That standard is unknowable, and those putting themselves of pretending they know what it is are improvising at best. 

What matters are the products--sorry, even art pieces, visual, musical, dramatic, poetic, are "product" in the strictest sense of the word--from the artists successful in what they set out to do. The results are subjective, of course, but art is nothing else than means to provoke a response, gentle or strongly and all grades in between, and critics are useful in that they can make the discussion of artistic efforts interesting. The only criticism that interests are responses from reviewers that are more than consumer guides--criticism , on its own terms in within its limits, can be as brilliant and enthralling as the art itself. And like the art itself , it can also be dull, boring, stupid, pedestrian. The quality of the critics vary; their function relates art, however, is valid. It is a legitimate enterprise. Otherwise we'd be treating artists like they were priests