Monday, May 21, 2007
Writers and their books which pleased me
Bear v Shark
a novel by Chris Bachelder
First time novelist Chris Bachelder scores big with his debut novel, and has produced the kind of post-modern satire that the over-praised and under-edited Jonathan Franzen strains for in his "Corrections" leviathan.
In the future, the televisions have no off switch, nor do they have remote controls, because technology has gotten to the point that television no longer influences the culture, but IS the culture. Reality and simulation melt together seamlessly, without a trace of resistance from the archetypal family whose path we follow as they prepare themselves for a Las Vegas vacation to witness the much hyped Media Event of Bear v. Shark. Bachelder keeps a straight face through out most of this short but punchy novel, and displays an ear for the way television cant infiltrates our daily speech, and invades our dream life. Scattered through out the book are a heap of fast and savage rips on Mass Mediated news, sports call-in shows, flouncy entertainment under which nothing substantial resides. In this world, experts in the guise of pundits, jocks, philosophers, and academics all feed a an uncountably intrusive technology that renders every distraction and disturbance into an entertainment value, to be used until a new contrived sequence of illusion can be set in place. Bachelder, demonstrating a brevity and incisive wit that trashes the claims made for the word-gorged "genius" of D.F. Wallace, writes surely, sharply, with his eye never off his target. Though he does, at times, resort to the sort of post-modernism stylistics and cliches, such as having the author step out from the story to deliver some self-aware discourse on the limits of narrative's capacity to represent the external world fully, completely -- he has a novel or two to go before the lit.critese is pounded out of him -- our author finally reveals a humane side underneath the smart language, and issues forth a funny yet serious warning about our habit of relinquishing our thinking and our capacity to live imaginatively over to the hands of data-drunk programmers.
Jim the Boy
by Tony Earley
Earle’s' rendering of a Perfect Past has it's attractions and charms, and is in many ways endearing, as long as the reader remembers that there was never a time in either their life or the life of anyone they know when such earnest happiness and satisfyingly extended good- will ruled the day. Suspension of disbelief is the best advice before perusing these pages. Early evokes the simple tale of a boy being raised by his mother and four uncles in such a poetically sustained way--sure language, spare cadences, a sharp ear for knowing when stop a description-- that you forgive the over ripe sentimentality that is at the heart of this book.
The success, I think, is in the author's ability to describe Jim's point of view in a straight forward manner, free of seeming authorial intrusion: Jim and the others, particularly the Uncles, emerge as credible characters, each with their particular character ticks and quirks. This set of relationships, balanced and relatively sober, almost makes up for the sheer mysticism that Earley wants to cast on rural South Carolina during the 30s. There is something subtly fake about this beguilingly transparent coming-of-age story, a Disney tale for the postmodern period, a reverse Alice Walker, a past that is re-assembled into a more perfect union. Needless to say, I'm ambivalent about the tale and the telling, but it is a tribute to Earley's art that his debut novel resonates as well as it does.
Gunslinger
Poem by Ed Dorn
The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's' narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.
Civil Noir
Poems by Melanie Neilson
Melanie Neilson has a genius for tearing apart the suggested givens of an image, and then reassembling the details in ways that confound meaning. She gives a long look behind the set designs of our social construction, and inserts a heated zaniness into our negotiations with the normal. Her sense is visual, her language--exploded, elongated, twisted, resolutely reshaped---sensual and snaking with percolating pleasures.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
a novel by Norman Mailer
Mailer had said that he wanted to write something fast, nasty and fun after the time and energy he lavished on two of brilliant and more ambitious projects, Ancient Evenings and Executioner's Song. Tough Guys Don't Dance is that book, in the tradition of Chandler, Hammett, Ross Macdonald. Tim Madden wakes up after a long life of wasting away as a binging alcoholic and finds his bed drenched in blood; later he finds his wife's severed head in a secret pot stash. He, however remembers none of it, and this provides Mailer ample room to ruminate about the metaphysics of hangovers and black outs and the perversions one finds themselves willing to commit when wealth and power are at stake. The cast of characters are unruly, pinched in the nerve and casting a faint whiff of what one imagines the store room where Dorian Gray's portrait was held in sick secrecy. Madden, hardly an innocent himself, stumbles and routs about trying to piece together the events of his last binge, terrified in the possibility that he might well be his wife's killer. Mailer's prose is breathtaking and poetic, and creates a tension with the gamy undertakings of the plot. This is not one of Mailer's masterworks, not be a long shot, but it has verve and drive and a splendidly sick wit, and it reminds us that Mailer can construct an odd tale and twist it in any direction he pleases.
Meet Me in the Parking Lot
stories by Alexandra Leggat
Flannery O'Connor, Russell Banks and Jersey Kozinzky meet for coffee , hash browns and small talk about psychic exile and the best sort of knife edge to hack through a bothersome bit of bone. Odd, disturbing, violent material here--violence either explicit or always at the edge of the crystallized situations here--all of which are made more jarring with Alexandra Leggat's taste for terse sentences and abrupt endings.
It works, for the most part,and the arc through the stories, life inside cars, on dark streets, side roads, parking lots behind anonymous bars, presents us with any number of dazed, abused and high strung women and rattled, crazed, raging men enacting any number of strange movements and quirks. At best, these stories are an adrenaline jolt, speaking truly to the sort of flash that gives one the urge to leap in front of traffic, to challenge immensity of grave and
Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S.
A novel by Jeremy Leven
No one has ever done a subtler or a more devastating send up of the psychiatric/psychology industry, nor have many been able to insinuate sly philosophical digressions into a frothing satiric text with such grace and pacing. This satan, faceless, locking himself inside a computer in a public gallery, has the charm to coax a snake out of new skin. The complications are wonderfully wild and orchestrated, and Kassler's travails as a single dad trying to rekindle a relationship with his children are heart breaking as they are potently hilarious. I am in the league that lent his copy out, and I've been trying to replace it for years. This book needs to come back into print. Author Leven has given us one of the best structured, best written American comic novels, and its a disservice to the reading public to keep it out of print.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Jargonized Murk
Some nuggets regarding the subject of postmodernism and writing, surely a blast from the distant nineties when anyone could sound like a language philosopher around the time clock . It's my vanity to think that this is writing of some heft other than the volume of words; honestly, what I like was learning the art of conversation drift, that is, starting at one point with one idea, maybe two, and then letting the words drive through whatever neighborhood they felt like. It's my vanity here, but then again, it's my blog. Sometimes I just like to "hear myself write", as Duncan Shepard has remarked of Quintin Tarentino's dialogue.
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"Isn’t ‘deconstruction’ an attempt to apply scientific principles to the analysis of language and what it implies? There is a lot of science-envy among the critics in the arts and humanities, and they’ve seemed to have latched on to the extrapolated language of anthropology and linguistics in order to keep their jobs. There is an effort, in the mission of literature departments, to continue to prove that there is stuff of quantifiable worth to be extracted from the study of novels and poems, and that they are in some way adding to the body of knowledge. Post-modernism, as a style, as an artistic impulse, as a habit of mind and gesture inevitable in an image-saturated time has cut-up, bricolage, pastiche, parody, and other sorts of archival hooliganism at its heart, and that the artist (writer) should use the images at hand, whatever their source, and give them free play and transgress boundaries, the notion remains that the impulse is, in fact, pre-modern, about ritual and mystery. The universe shrunk down to symbolic particulars that have a power to establish order in things that ultimately are not quantifiable by science or argument. Writing and literature are all veils, I would think: if anyone could get ‘IT’ with a piece of work, we would have to assume the writer and his audience are satisfied, sated, and are disinclined to hear the story again. But there is always another wrinkle to relate, another nuance to discover, another veil to be taken away.
This echoes Barthes’ idea of writing/writing as being an erotic function; that the end that one gets to at the end of the tale is not the point of the quest but the quest itself. The unveiling of language; the constant reassimilation that names for things are made to undergo as the nature of the material world defies literary form; it is the imagination that needs to work within the waking sphere, not the world that needs to fit within its contours. We find with reading that writers we care about themselves could care less about what kind they are supposed to be according to literary archivists; thus they will have stylistic extremes that venture into another camp away from what common knowledge dictates is their ‘native’ style or manner. Is Gravity’s Rainbow any less a work of ‘Magical Realism’ than what we’ve seen in Garcia Marquez or Borges? Is Nabokov’s work Pale Fire less postmodern than say Mulligan Stew?
It becomes a definitively moot point; irresolvable and subject to an unending detour that circles around the precise meaning of finally inconsequential terms. Imagination is a trait that will use any manner or style suitable for a writer’s project at hand and it ought not be surprising or upsetting that many writers assigned roles by career-making PhD candidates simply do what they need to do in order to get their work done. This gives us fascinating paradoxes: Norman Mailer by temperament a romantic existentialist who might have been in the late 19th century is one who took postmodern strategies to render his work. The range of his assumed styles and experimentation creates specific problems with literary historians who might be eager to be done with his books and his name. Somewhere so far as criticism has gone in the last half-century, a link was made with other discourses which made much of literary study something of a gawky laughing stock: not historians not scientists not psychologists not philosophers. The gamiest of theory wonks could prate on and onward on fields not their own keeping tenuous connections between their specialty fictional accounts of experience and real-time bathos and tragedy obscured with an ever-deepening reservoir of jargonized murk.
Last Night on DVD: "Road to Perdition", "Changing Lanes"
into it.
In the same sitting--a long sitting--I also caught up with Changing Lanes, thought it was a decent enough Hollywood "message" film, though it had the dopiest premise imaginable. It's not that I object to happy endings -- in this case, each of the characters played by Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck realize the exact nature of their wrongs and wind up doing the right thing by the world and themselves -- it's that I want the fictional solutions to seem fictionally plausible. The concentration of the events into one day snaps credulity, and while you're wondering whether this is an alternative universe where there are 76 hours to a day, the film drags way too much in key areas. Jackson and Affleck are both quite good here, but in the crush of the events that are eating our protagonists up, there is too much reflection, too much self examination, too much fortuitous circumstance for the characters to redeem themselves. Irony is fine, but Affleck's pragmatic do-gooding at the end is too much of stretch, theatrical without being dramatic. Like the film as a whole.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
More old music from my CD collection
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Writers and the Books they Wrote that Irritated Me
Writing well is the best revenge
I've no use for care-and-share poetry myself, and have made myself obnoxious in these parts for voicing the opinion more than once. I don't think, however, it's useful or even correct to assume that most people people you meet "... live in a sort of daze, content to live empty and meaningless lives."
There was a time when I thought living intensely and passionately was goal number one and that all else would just have to go by the sidelines while I fulfilled the requirements of my holy assignation, but finally, surviving the deaths of intimates, getting fired from jobs, sobering up, and cleaning up wholesale wreckage humbled me somewhat. Living at the edge of experience was over rated, I came to believe, and more often than not inspired a kind of redundantly exclamatory writing about awakening the senses, or an equally repetitive series of morose dwellings on addictions, tragic pasts, unending sadness. Glaring exhibitionism and constant melancholy didn't seem a desirable way to conduct my affairs, and certainly, in retrospect, made the poetry I was writing at the time, during the seventies and through the mid eighties, incoherent, choppy, self-pitying. The normal life, whatever that was, became more attractive, if only that I needed a relief from the burden of self and wanted to get involved in those matters that just baffled the shit out of me. Over time I found that there was an endless variety of life's condition in between the limited extremes I first held as constant and non-negotiable. What I found was that there were people among the dullards, the pretentious, pompous and just plain phony who had very interesting lives, who were doing good and creative things in their world, who had a nuanced view on what life had them. They were having infinitely more interesting experiences than I was as a gloomy Gus. The onus was on me, the poet, to "wake up" and become a witness to what was actually out there, beyond my opinions and set pieces.
It's presumptuous to assume that you have an accurate read on the inner life of each and every person you meet during the day, and it's best to back off this kind of thinking. It gets in the way of your ability to be a witness to experience.The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop.In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled savant garde has completely overtaken the conversation.Good poets must be concerned with language,I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a Imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us. This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non sequiters , fragments, clichés, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as there is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
AJ Soprano, mob boss
The Sopranos is now down to four remaining episodes yet unseen, and the speculation about the cognoscenti , given the pending demise of Tony Soprano's reign as Boss, is who might come after him, continue the business, so to speak. It's a slippery slope,
but one wonders if this New Jersey enterprise will stay a Soprano-helmed concern. What about Anthony Jr.?We've already had a taste of AJ acting like a made man a couple of seasons back when he was organizer enormous parties for under aged drinkers; in one scene he and an associate told some guys who got into a party without paying to pay up, and when told to buzz off, kicked the collective of the deadbeats. AJ seems like a young man who only really gets motivated when he's excited about something, whether that means being in love or punishing those who owe him money. Given how unsatisfactory straight life has been for him, he'll find it easy enough to continue the sins of his father as his father continued the sins of his pater familias. It's a big apple tree with very short branches. If AJ became the next boss, after various time spent in the earner's trenches, he would likely find that would inherit more than a business from his Dad; a generation of conniving and resentment comes with the job description.
What Tony has had to contend with since he became boss, more about protecting his position as Boss against various challenges and less about extending the mob's clutches into other scams. But then his is not a business as anyone understands capitalist instinct, that profit and the bottom line matter more than strong senses of entitlement. In the real business life, ventures run on a third of the collective, mendacious vanity of mob culture would go out of business(sans the violence). for all the talk among the bosses and the captains and various members of the crew about being better "earners", grotesquely distorted feelings of entitlement , envy, resentment and a general lack of seeing beyond the demands of their primal wants undermines all efforts to conduct this enterprise like it had a rational purpose. It's fitting, perhaps, since what they make money on are the libidinous appetites of a those willing to pay for access to illegal vices and wares--gambling, prostitution, drugs, boosted dry goods-- and that the disinterested stance needed by a merchant who refrains from sampling their product is not Tony's nor his crew's quality to posess. Dispite a hundred forms of denial,rationalization and excuse making about themselves and what they're doing in The Life, they fall victims to their own wares, gambling, drugs, whoring and the lot, and exist in a perpetual state of impulsive action. What I find riveting here is that the truth of The Life and the unvarnished facts of Tony Soprano's realm is being bluntly exposed. His years of trying to live on both sides of the fence are taking their toll, and it's the truth that he will find unacceptable on any terms other than in madness and death, like Lear.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Carey Bell, Blues Harp Master, RIP
Carey Bell, a Chicago blues harp master who's snappy phrases and soulful tone were among the influences that kept me playing the harmonica, has passed on. A mere seventy years of age, one is grateful that he's well represented by quality studio work. More than anyone else I listened to when I was woodshedding, Bell's rhythm and blues flavored style taught me the importance of "punching it" on the microphone; each note had to land like a fist and be light as a dollar caught in a Michigan Avenue wind. Seek out this man's harmonica work. He was amazing.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Would you throw another slab of crap at me, Erica?
Sometimes you read things that rub you the wrong way, the way wet clay clumps in the hair.I think both the cows and the old woman with the goiter should take turns slapping Erica Levy McAlpine's for defaming them by inclusion in a dumfoundingly tacky poem. McAlpine perhaps wanted to see fast she could over extend the equpoised parts of a what should be a brief comparsion, or perhaps she wanted to parody a bad writer's habit of trying to write himself out of a bad idea by getting prolix and posied, but the result all the same instills nausea, as peering too close and long at something is prone to do. This is not a compliment. The title is fitting; this is not a poem, it's a growth.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Tony Soprano Becomes King Lear?
There are substantial differences between Tony and Shakespeare's delusional Majesty, the key one being that Lear relinquishes his power once he foolishly assumes that he has secured his version of reality , with all avowed loyalties and relations in tact, and that he may indulge his whims to be free of responsibility and merely be revered and adored.Betrayal and calumny are his results, and the cause of disasters, his vanity and failure to realize he's been grossly flattered in the efforts of a daugher and uscrupulous supplicants to rest power from him. The truth is what drives him past the brink and into the rain. Tony does not relinquish power to anyone in contrast, but he wearies of the weight of what he must to do maintain his position, and his refusal to change his behavior in order to change himself is costing him dearly. An old axiom comes to mind, that one cannot think their way into good living, but one can live there way into good thinking.Tony's problem is that he thought he could make his anxieties vanish on the basis of self-knowledge alone.The gathered revelations have gotten thick for him.
All the lies told to him and the lies he told himself are laid bare, and all that awaits is the last brick to fall from the last wall from this shoddily bolstered construction of self delusion. What producer David Chase and his writers come up with by the series is one of the few things to look forward to in this season of dim news and dimmer celebrity hi jinks.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Awarding genius for the right reasons
hot streak the saxophonist and music theorist has been for the last decade. The Pulitzer Prize folks have been seeking to make their awards for best music composition less Eurocentric, and here picked an outsider genius who, fate of fates, might now have to make peace with the cultural mainstream.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Hip Hop's Intransigent Vulgarity
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
"In Flight Couplets": by Alfred Corn
Alfred Corn's mentions of Mandelshtam in this week's poem ought not be made too much of, since it's name dropping vanity to mention the great Russian poet in a poem that he, Corn, is writing about his own fears of being forgotten as an artist
in the event of a catastrophe that would eradicate his name and the words he wrote. It would one thing for a poet to compare himself to another writer if that nervous one-to-one resulted in work that surpassed the fragility of the author's self-image and touched on matters that involved a readership larger than those who are entertained by the poet's version of mirror-gazing. Norman Mailer is notoriously obsessed with his fame, influence and his position among the writers of his generation and the generation before him, but he hasn't be disingenuous about his craving for influence and praise, and has worked hard to make that liability into a problematic asset.
Fraught with peril, the self-advertising resulted all the same with memorable books that transcended the neurotic center of Mailer's ego and got him to engage events larger than himself, whether massive antiwar marches, political conventions, Moon landings. The scheme was simple, effective more often than not; there were Mailer's expectations of how he would change things when he wrote about personalities and events, and then the realization of what was actually underway; Mailer got beyond to best DosPossos and Hemingway and Faulkner at their own games and became, instead, a voice unlike any other of his generation. Not well liked by many folks, yes, but undeniably the author of several brilliant books that flourished despite his worst habits. The secret was that Mailer knew when to get out of the way of the story.Corn does not know when to step aside, though, and the constrictions of the sonnet make his subject a swim in the muck that comprises a writer's vanity that cannot transcend itself. His poem "Windows on the World", nominally about 9-11, was a distanced recollection of cranky ironies that were whimsical rather than resonant with the solemn associations we would term "poetic". Horrible attacks were reduced to being mere finger exercises for the poet to limber up the writing muscle. This week's poem again works a similar airplane/bomb equation, and there is poor Alfred Corn, prisoner of text, scribbling away the words of his own epitaph , as if this page would be discovered, identified and applied to posthumous notices if the worst that happen indeed took place. The silliest thing of this whole poem is that Corn wants the audience that would read him after he's nothing but splattered body parts that he read Mandeshtam. It's comical; if one cannot be remembered for their work, they can at least be remembered for their good taste.
Monday, April 23, 2007
I get a kick out of Jesus
Because I didn't think my sins were interesting enough, being anemic , venal transgressions on the more minor points of God's limitless conditions of existence under His grace, I used to make stuff up when I went to confession because I was unclear on what confession was, didn't want to reveal the impure thoughts coursing through my twelve year old, and because I thought the whole idea of going into a black box with a man in a black dress creeped me out.
I was creeped even more hearing him breath through the screen, deep, grating rasps of a man who smoked and drank hard, amber alcohol. I was sorting through my contrived sins , trying to remember how many times I had done each imagined offense and attempting to calculate as well the penance I might receive (there was an element of trying to get a "high score") when I heard the priest mutter under his breath c'mon, hurry it up, c'mon... I told the priest to go fuck himself and ran out of the confessional and out of the church to get on my bike, riding off down Livernoise Avenue with a faint,tired yelling of "hey" behind me.
The next day at school some older boys were leaning against a fence by a parking lot adjoining the Catholic School."You told Father Martin to go fuck himself" said the biggest kid, one of the altar boys who helped the parish priests perform Mass during the week days, " You got yourself a fist full of trouble, punk."
He pushed me off the bike, and after I fell to the asphalt, each of the older boys kicked me something fierce; my books were strewn over the parking lot, my bike was thrown into the middle of the street, my nose was swollen and bloody. "Eat shit, punk" said the biggest kid."Jesus loves you" I wise cracked. He turned around and kicked me again, right where it counts
Kill Your TV
When there is nothing more to report, talking heads present some other "authority" from some hereto-for unheard of blog site, specialty magazine or perhaps a former aid to a senator that once sat on a committee loosely related to the spotlight controversy , who would then be peppered with a series of inane questions he or she didn't have a real answer to. Airtime filled with supposition, best guesses, speculation, old fashioned rumor mongering, all in the name of the public's right to know what is or is not happening to the over famous, the overpaid whose hyper image is out of bounds with anything one recognizes when they finally leave the house, start the car and attempt to navigate traffic as one makes their way to work. I have a job to pay for this seamless and seamy stream of irrelevance? It's possible to watch cable news programming for a whole day and learn nothing at all for the time spent. He twitches. The shirt is stiff and scratchy like a trucker's scabbed fingertips. The tv keeps making the yammering drone of nonsense, and the roof suddenly seems be lowering upon him; is this what a sardine feels like?
Thursday, April 19, 2007
"Civil Twilight": muttering small talk at the wall
Someone needs to offer the featured poets of Slate's poem of the week some lessons for reading their work over the phone; case in point is Terri Witek's
reading of her selected poem "Civil Twilight",published online in Slate. Her rendition, as is , was lugubrious, ponderous and downright slow, like clogged dial up connections to early Internet fare, but the slight ringing of feedback, the hollow ambiance of someone speaking too closely into a phone receiver proved irritating. One felt as if an oaf was trying to be intimate with you by breathing into your ear. Can the Microsoft engineers devise a better sounding result from the software at their disposal?
Not that it would help Witke's poem much, since it is stationary abstraction that in turn cannot move a single reader's grey matter to cogitate an empathetic response. There's an attraction to writing a poem loosely based on an arcane or mysterious phrase taken from an old text, but one would think the resulting verse would strive to make some sense of the cryptic words by positing coherent questions and underlining ironies that might arise when old instructions--whether technical, moral, or hygienic (or spiritual)
are considered in more recent contexts.
Witke only produces more distance, which would fine if there was a sense of an inward inquiry in play one takes to be occurring in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop or John Ashbery. But that isn't happening.
The poem seems more like lifeless conundrums
uttered as passing sighs in the night, exasperation expressed in groans and half phrases that can't even give clear color to their interior state.
Who arched the bridge to this island of flare-ups?
Which is the key to the hotel of dismay?
Nests blunt the junctions between river and ocean.
I suppose we have done with our mutual heat.
We are meant to consider this in light of the sublime disgust and resignation Eliot gave us with "Ash Wednesday" and "The Waste Land", but Witke hasn't the gift for the pithy phrase making that was Eliot's supreme gift. "Hotel of dismay??"
The poet wants to telegraph the mood, but wooden and trite phrases like that will not suffice.The poem is about one's discontent with a world that does not measure up to private paradigms,but it remains an awkward grumbling at best. Another poet falls victim to their weakest work being highlighted in these pages.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Don DeLillo, Cell Phones, The Destruction of Irony
Monday, April 16, 2007
A poem by Joyce Carol Oates
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Joe Scarborough's failure to make distinctions
background information is required. It is a food fight, yes, and many things get said in heat over an event that is being spoken off in comically exaggerated terms.
It's been good for Joe Scarborough because it's let him reassert his conservative credentials ; his point , of course , is expected, but a valid one, which is why are rap artists getting off so freely for more offensive language than Imus ever uttered?
In the heat of debate--Scarborough's show can be a shout fest much of the time--Joe wonders why the New York Times, august institution it is, blesses vile rap language as genius and genuine poetry. Scarborough makes the common mistake of assuming that an individual critic's opinion on a consumer product is an official position of the newspaper. Joe, though, would be hard pressed to find an unsigned editorial on the OP/ED page endorsing gangster rap and everything mythos it indulges in. Joe, 'though, is not a stupid man and is well aware of the difference. It's a clever way for him to bash some liberals and the NY Times to reassert his conservative credentials and
make amends for the compulsive Bush bashing he's taken to in the last year. I don't mind the Bush bashing, nor mind that he's a conservative, but it's annoying when a smart guy plays dumb with simple distinctions to build up his credibility.
"GRINDHOUSE": a real grind, to the nub
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Don Imus Gets Canned
for those pre-dawn excursions on the freeways to the office. His bad karma has gathered against him over all the years that he's been given a pass by bosses and media critics, and his recent fall, having been fired by both MSNBC and CBS in the aftermath of his "nappy headed hos" crack about the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team, strikes me as something he might has well have been asking for. Ideally, we will have seen the last of this frowning scarecrow and the rest of us can get on with things that actually interest us.But no. The story isn't going anywhere, and the experience of OJ, Michael Jackson and the debacle of Anna Nicole Smith staying for ceaseless, seamless, unending periods of time on our broadcast and cable talk shows remind us that American media is addicted to celebrity , obsessing over it as if it
were a religion,a metaphysically fixed certainty. The issue of racism and misogyny and other offenses are no longer the point; everyone wants to get their say in, everyone with half a a foot in the door of Fame wants to be associated with this farce, to the extent that the bad faith is boundless. Al Sharpton's fiasco with the Tawana Brawley and Jessie Jackson's referring to New York as "Hymietown" are not forgotten, but they aren't mentioned as the two of them bray and pontificate about injustice and all manner of foul words and deeds. The injustice, though, is that everyone having their say, even if what's uttered only mirrors that thing they claim to find abhorrent.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
More from my record collection
I've been clearing out old music these days, giving discs away, selling them, and playing a few I haven't heard for awhile. Here some of the one's I've kept:
"Pursuance: The Music of John Coltrane" --Kenny Garrett
Kenny Garrett (alto saxophone), Pat Metheny (guitar), Rodney Whitaker (bass), Brian Blade (drums).
I guess I've been in a straight ahead mood lately, catching up with CDs I haven't played much since I bought them. Garrett acquits himself here on his alto, and allows himself to mess with Coltrane's' sacred phrases: a potent abstractionist when need be, but a man who's outgrown the old clothes and demonstrates an inspired re-tailoring of the material. "Giant Steps" has a swaggering waltz feel, with a sly, side long reading of the head, and Garrett's' improvisations come in deft, spiky explosions. Metheny remains a marvel of jazz guitar here, a continuing revelation since he more or less walked away from his fusion stance some years ago, and the bass and drum interplay between Whitaker and Blade tumbles and rolls nicely through out.
"Remembering Bud Powell" --Chick Corea and Friends
Roy Haynes (drums) Kenny Garrett (alto sax) Joshua Redman (tenor sax),Wallace Roney (trumpet) Christian Mc Bride (bass).
Yes, yes, I am playing a desperate game of catch up, and habits tend toward stellar tributes rather than primary sources, but this Corea Bud Powell collection is notable for, besides dense and cutting improvisations, is the quality of Powells' compositions. Corea resists the temptation to Latinise or fusionize the material and instead plays the charts straight--Powells' sense of harmonic build up and resolution is loopy, easing from sweetness to tart dissonance. All of which is the canvas for some good blowing. Corea reins in his extravaganzas and weaves around with a now untypical sense of swing. The efforts of Garrett and Redman are a reed lovers idea of heaven. Roney has a cool, crystalline tone , and his phrasing is meditative, reserved, nicely so, though one desires a Freddie Hubbardish scorch at odd times. Haynes and McBride are champs.
:Blues --Jimi Hendrix
A typical gathering of Hendrix loose threads, centered his outstanding blues guitar work: some tracks work better than others, the band is not always in tune , and sometimes drags terribly, but this is more than archival stuff for completest. "Red House" is included, always inspiring, and "Bleeding Heart", a truly mournful show blues work out that has only surfaced once or twice on some imports, has Hendrix digging deep into the frets. A live "Hear My Train A Comin'", originally on the "Rainbow Bridge" album, is a masterpiece of pure, blazing Hendrixism: Everything Hendrix could do right on the guitar is displayed here, the sonic flurries, the screaming ostinatos, the feedback waves that he turns into melodic textures with a snap of the whammy bar: this track ought to the one any Hendrix advocate plays as proof of the genius we speak about.
GO --Dexter Gordon
w/Gordon--tenor sax / Sonny Clark--piano / Butch Warren--bass / Billy Higgins--drums.
A 1961 gathering, a roll-up the sleeves where only the music mattered, from the sounds of things here. Gordon has such an easy gait on the slower, bluesier tunes, and an engulfing sense of swing on the faster tracks. And in between, any number of moods , his phrases whimsical, suggesting , perhaps, what Paul Desmond might have wished he sounded like if he would only dare step out of that glossy, modal style and burn a little. He might have garnered a bit of Gordon's humor. Billy Higgins is wonderful here, and Sonny Clark is a bright star through out: his chord work and harmonic turns brighten up the room.
Barbecue Dog --Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society
Cranky post-Miles fusion, highlighting the tone-dialing bass work of Jackson, and pre-Living Color guitar work from Vernon Reid. Lessons from everywhere--bop and Zappa, Miles and Ornette--some of this does not hang together as well as it might, but some tracks mesh to fantastic results: particularly "Harlem Opera". Quizzical and cubist.
Jazz at the Hi-Hat --Sonny Stitt
w/Stitt--alto and tenor sax/Dean Earl--piano/Bernie Griggs--bass/Marquis Foster--drums.
Whether Stitt came up with this style on his own or did in fact cop from Charlie Parker is moot: this album, a 1954 live date with a strong band whose reputations are unknown to me, shows him playing as if he owned the style solely: the phrasing is fluid and ridiculously rapid, ebullient and melodic all through the melodies. Conventional fair, but pulsing bop, alive and kicking.
Ed Palermo Big Band Plays the Music of Frank Zappa
Superb selection of material--"Peaches and Regalia", "Twenty Small Cigars", "King Kong"--but you feel Palermo labored too hard to transcribe Zappa's music exactly. Still, the compositions stand tall, but the formalist air doesn't lighten. I kept wondering what it would have sounded like for Palermo to have a smaller band that substantially reworked Zappa's works, really messing with the moods, and extending. Maybe some one will see that through some day.
One of A Kind--Bill Bruford
w/Bruford--drums and percussion/ Allan Holdsworth--guitar / Dave Stewart --keyboards / Jeff Berlin-- bass
The King Crimson and sometime Yes drummer had occasional jazz-fusion sessions when he wasn't furnishing beats behind abstruse angst fantasies, and surprisingly, the music holds up well. There is not an amphetamine strain fuzz tone anywhere to be heard. What helps are good tunes, most by Bruford, that mix up funk, Zappa, and Prog-rock stylistics under unmannered conditions, allowing the instrumental work to mesh, mess around, and burn as needed. Holdsworth offers some impressive ultra legato lines, and Jeff Berlin is singular on the bass. Bruford, hardly a Tony Williams-like goliath, fusion monster, lacks some the swing you might like, or even the blunt Bonham-oid pow! to make this rock harder, but he's an able timekeeper who keeps the session forging ahead.
Zygote --John Popper
Curious to see if the Blues Traveller leader might extend his unique harmonica playing to some styles that might render his speedy riffing into something consistently resembling music, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Twice, I count, he lets us know that he's a terribly fast player whose blurring cascades overwhelm you, but even on these tracks he becomes directionless, wheezing, void of an inspiration except perhaps to think that if he plays real fast , all the time, he might live up to the offensive comparisons of to Coltrane that have been made by more than one nitwit reviewer. Sugar Blue is your man, if you need rapid fire harmonica work. The songs? They sound like a man ploughing a field without a horse. Cumbersome at worse. At best, tuneful, but not often enough.
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