William F.Buckley, RIP

I am loathed to say anything nice about conservative commentators, at least the mangy generation that arose with the death of the Fairness Doctrine and who have, in turn, been anything but fair in their remarks regarding Democrats or anyone else who isn't in lockstep with RNC or Religious Right talking points. This odious crew, spearheaded by the absurd existence of Rush Limbaugh and followed, in various degrees of venomous deceit, hate mongering and the subjugation of honesty, ethics, and principles in favor of fat book contracts, political wonkery on cable television, and the well-rewarded obligation to be apologists for an unjustified war that has put America in increased peril and made our lot in the world community that much more difficult, is a sleazy bunch of propagandists. We speak of Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, the clustered fools at the Weekly Standard. Not their concern are the virtues of debate, tolerance, or truth. Political discussion in this country has gotten coarser, dumber, louder, meaner in the last twenty years, and the scales have been tipped toward what we call wingnuts in terms of who was allowed to have the loudest megaphone. The networks were bullied and badgered to have more conservative pundits on their programs than those who would be off the extreme message or even the least bit left of center. As Eric Alterman asked in the title of his fine book, we ask again, "What Liberal Media"?All that said, I am saddened that conservative gadfly and National Review founder William F.Buckley has passed away at the age of 82. I've always been a liberal Democrat and have found myself on the other side of issues with the late Buckley, but I watched his show Firing Line each week and admired the man for his intellect, his wit, and his dedication to keeping his program a civil forum where actual differences in political philosophy and contrasting views on public policy could be discussed. The difference between William F.Buckley and the current spoiled crop of right-wing hacks is that Mr.Buckley was a true intellectual who listened to his guests and posed hard questions to them respectively, artfully. It was part of Mr.Buckley's style that he would skewer his opponents with their own words, or catch them in contradictions they couldn't readily respond to, but the method with which he stood his ground and defended his conservative faith was masterful, brilliant, admirably civil. It's worth noting that Buckley maintained good relations with many liberals and progressives, including long-standing friendships with John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr . He had a shrewd wit, and I always enjoyed the story that when a new collection of his essays was published, he mailed off a host of free, autographed copies to a good number of his literary friends. As Buckley told it, he didn't sign Norman Mailer's copy on the title page, as is custom, but rather in the book's index. There, written in the margins next to Mailer's name, Buckley had written "Hello Norman! Regards, William F. Buckley."

Harmonica fun

There Will Be Blood: the cult of the over rated

Tonight it's Oscar time, and the conventional wisdom has it that Daniel Day Lewis has a lock on the Best Actor award for his oxygen-hogging performance in There Will Be Blood, a film I was not thrilled with. Director and screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil wants to do something very epic and very different from what one expects from Hollywood, but the film's pace is glacial, nearly static, with it's visual scenes of wide open rocky terrains populated by goat farms, oil derricks and rusting tools arranged in such a way that we have the effect of the world's longest Flickr slide show.

It's obvious, to me at least, that Anderson's influence here was Terrence Malick's grand Days of Heaven, set in a similiar time and location; Malick achieved the feeling of an epic with his long takes without torturing the audience with his extended adulation of the imagery; the film was a mere 97 minutes in length, and the director still dealt with the character's within those huge vistas. The texture of the historical every day wasn't lost in gauzed recollection.Anderson settles for caricature leaving it to Lewis's overly studied performance as the Plainview character, who in Blood's disconnected scan, is losing his mind and humanity as he barks out stilted and exclaimed lines remindful of John Huston. One sees the rehearsing , not the seamlessness of performance that would have been a wonder indeed. It's almost as though he performed Plainview in this way so that he could have the line of the movie year, "I'll drink your milkshake!" If that was Lewis's intent, it is the only place where the film achieves an intended end.

More than a voice of war

Sandra Beasley’s poem The World War Speaks is an intriguing set of broad strokes, hard details that give way to streaks and blurs at the edges as they merge and conflate with other images; this seems a matter of normally unrelated incidents, each enacted for separate reasons, find themselves united in the forming cosmology and metaphysical sensibilities of a child. Coherence of how one thing leads to another, of the logical progression of cause and effect is hardly what this poem seems to be getting at; instead it is about a child entering a world that gives it an atmosphere of fear, violence, warnings and laborious measures to acquire the daily needs that instructs one that this reality is hostile and in a state of siege one must always be on guard against and be prepared, in turn, to battle.

When I was born, two incisors
had already come through the gum.
They gave me a silver bell to chew on,
brought me home in a wicker basket,
and kept me by the stove's coal heat.
What strikes me is the connection less between the emerging teeth that causes pain in the infant’s gums with what becomes a metaphor of the uncompromising hardness defining the life the child is introduced to; the bell is not the signal of onset of joy and promise of future hope, but rather an acknowledgement of the struggle that waits. Bite down hard, do not scream, and do not cry. Even the warmth the child is exposed to, “the stove’s coal heat”, is emotionally neuter, perfunctory more than life sustaining, cold in the way that only the absence of human touch can be.

Every morning my mother boiled
a huge vat of mustard greens,
steam drifting over to my crib and
after a few hours, souring into a gas

Even the food is noxious, described with words that also give a real sense of chemical warfare, mustard….gas…sour… Beasley’s narrator isn’t describing the wonders of being young and becoming genteel and nostalgic with the fuzzy and indiscernibly cozy sensations from pre-verbal infancy; this plays against the expected route these revelations would tend to take , as in a moment of recollection where it seems the world is going to perform in some expected and friendly way, only for the reminiscing author to later realize something quite different from more blunt expense and hence garner an ironic lesson suitable for a poem. There is the strong suggestion that Beasely had been paying attention to Jerzy Kosinksi’s brutal and terribly beautiful novel The Painted Bird, concerning the plight of a dark skinned young boy living in a middle class family at the outbreak of WW2 who finds himself subjected to many degrees of abuse and harassment in the name of several blind belief systems, political and religious, who finally comes to identify with the a totalitarian force who’s strength offered him safety and purpose in an ordered life. The results between the novel and Beasley’s poem diverge, of course, as it’s not clear that her narrator finally swears allegiance to, but what does happen here is a close observation of how a world view comes to be formed. Even with more experience in later life, the early sensations remain and mark the growth of the young person.


I began to walk
so they fitted me with braces.
I began to run, so they fitted me
with books: Mars, hydrogen, Mongolia.
I learned to dig a deeper kind of ditch.
I learned to start a fire in three minutes.
I learned to sharpen a pencil into
a bayonet.

It’s not a psychology that was going to be grown out of; rather, it would be a mindset through which all forthcoming experience and their interpretation would be filtered and colored by as a result. This is a world view that places the results of one’s existence on huge and ill defined “they” who intervene at crucial points when it seems the young person might discover an independent path and follow through with some untarnished alternatives to the governing tone of existence. Intervention continues apace, and the sour paradigm this person has to contend with as he (or she) tries to conduct themselves in contiguous and congruent order, but the desire for more than what they’ve been allowed lingers still. There remains the desire to look behind the veil.


Sometimes at night
I'd sneak into the house of our neighbors,
into the hall outside their bedroom,
and watch as they moved over each
other like slow, moonlit fish.
Sometimes my mother would comb
my father's hair with her fingertips,
but that was it. They wanted an only
child: the child to end all children.

The voice in the poem sounds too personal and intimate with the things mentioned to be merely "a voice of war" in a sweeping DosPassos sense. I see how one can make a credible case for that interpretation, but what settles it for me for the speaker being an actual person sorting through their memories is the final set of lines about sneaking into to the neighbors house to,by implication, discover something that is not in his or her own home. This is a detail that though the war is outside and the home is the sanctuary one would find refuge and safety, the conflict has none the less affected the most insulated part of humanity, the very act of intimacy. Voices of war are sweeping, abstract, and given to describing the temper of the period in broad, epoch changing terms; this poem is small, intimate, and dicusses the effects of the war on smaller , though less devastated terrain, the consciousness.

Witnessing the neighbors make love, willingly touching each other inside and out, of making their bodies merge in ways suggesting a life force greater than themselves separately, and then making note of her parent’s reticence to touch one another isolates this poor child’s state. An only child who’s tactile relationship with the world she (or he) grew up in associates the sensations as evidence that life is cold and hostile and discovers that it’s not only the love of the parents he (or she) is denied, but also the love of the parents for one another. This is a cold world powerfully rendered by Beasley's poem.

A Miscellany on Old Guitar Rock

:Blues --Jimi Hendrix

A typical gathering of Hendrix loose threads, centered his outstanding blues guitar work: some tracks are better than others, the band is not always in tune , and sometimes drags terribly, but this is more than archival stuff for completist. "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 obstinate, 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. Not a bad blues guitar disc at all, essential for this Hendrix fan.


Muddy Water Blues --Paul Rodgers

Rodgers, ex of Free and Bad Company, is as good as blue-eyed blues/rock belting has ever gotten--he can rasp and croon, belt and banter with equal measures of savvy and snap when all cans are firing. Sadly, he sings better than he writes, as just about all his post-Free efforts show. On this album, he digs into the bullet-proof songs of Muddy Waters, and has a hoot doing them: refreshingly, this is not a purist effort. Instead, it’s a throw back to British blues rock, which was louder, faster, flashier. Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Brian Setzer and Trevor Rabin and Neal Schon all lend their fingers here, flash and feeling , and Rodgers applies the vocal chords for the best singing he'd done in easily ten years. "She Sends Me", "Born Under a Bad Sign", 'She's Alright" and "Rolling Stone" help me, for a moment, remember why I used to think he was the best singer on the planet.

Guitar player notes:

Stevie Ray Vaughn is no more a wanker on the blues than are/were Albert King, Guitar Shorty, Buddy Guy or Vernon Reid, Blood Ulmer, Michael Hill or Sonny Sharrock, nor was he any less inspired by the pitched, aggravated dynamics the style demanded. He could keep a solo going, he could extended the sheer reams of bent notes, shadings and feedback into reams of pure, sustained rapture, a pain that does not subside--he was easily continuing the work Hendrix started, by bringing the blues into something that was as emotionally relevant to the times he surveyed, and he kept his guitar heroics honest--one can listen to Gary Moore, for example, and be impressed and overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity and speed of his technique, yet not be moved by it, but with Vaughn, the heart of his feelings found their way to his finger tips and their calluses and managed a voice out of some dark night of the soul that exclaims, in high notes and low, rolling rumbles along the bass e string, that he has survived another midnight, another patch of bad luck, another bad fuck and worse drunk to see the sun of the following day again just to live the next twenty four hours on the promise of more blues, the one thing that doesn't lie, the one set of notes in any scale and key you please that renews itself endlessly as long as there remains some capacity to feel deeply and longingly in that arena that is the province of being human alone, to find another reason to live another day. Stevie found his reason, a day at a time, with his guitar

Jeff Beck is easily the best of his generation: he has made more than a few awful records, but his guitar work was always with out equal. He is the only one of the original British blues-rock pioneers who’s learned how to blend his style musical situations than strict-rock: at his best, he is riveting as no other guitarist can be. The shame of his career is his inability to keep a band together for any real length of time. Had he found the right folks, his recorded output might have been more consistent than it is.

Ritchie Blackmore: a case of great guitar talent wasted in a bad band, Deep Purple. His solos on "Smoke on the Water”, "Highway Star' and many others are classics, little gems of perfection, but you had to put with macho-posturing to get to it. Blackmore, to my knowledge, never really did the electric work that showed unencumbered by lame vocals and moronic lyrics; though I understand he has a Celtic - themed acoustic project that might be worthwhile.

Remember Eric Anderson?

"Thirsty Boots" , an old folk tune written by "new Dylan" Eric Anderson came on the radio the other day and at once I was taken back to the Sixties, the decade that born the song; flower power, bell bottoms, brave new sideburns and peach fuzz beards made my skin itch all over again.





Thirsty Boots
By Eric Andersen


You've long been on the open road,
You've been sleeping in the rain,
From dirty words and muddy cells
Your clothes are smeared and stained,
But the dirty words and muddy cells
Will soon be hid in shame
So only stop to rest yourself
Till you are off again

Chorus:

So take off your thirsty boots
and stay for a while,
Your feet are hot and weary,
from a dusty mile,
And maybe I can make you laugh,
maybe I can try,
I'm just looking for the evening,
the morning in your eye.

So tell me of the ones you saw
As far as you could see
Across the plain from field to town
A-marching to be free
And of the rusted prison gates
That tumbled by degree
Like laughing children, one by one,
They look like you and me

Chorus.

I know you are no stranger down
The crooked rainbow trails
From dancing cliff-edged shattered sills
Of slandered, shackled jails
For the voices drift up from below
As the walls they're being scaled
Yes, all of this, and more, my friend,
Your song shall not be failed.

Chorus.

Yes, you've long been on the open road
You've been sleeping in the rain
From dirty words and muddy cells
Your clothes are smeared and stained
But the dirty words, the muddy cells,
They'll soon be judged insane
So only stop to rest yourself
'til you are off again.


I was greatly enamored of this song when I was fifteen, when I was discovering folk music, modern poetry and the like, and it seemed at the time to be both wonderful and mysterious. It was too long to wait to be old enough to get out and ramble and jangle and experience "dues paying" in an effort to have things to commit to precious language. I still enjoy the song and have fond memories of Anderson, but this lyric seems precious after all this time, which is to say that it reads (and sounds) artfully contrived.
The affectation of dropping the g's that spoils what other wise would be a lovely (if unreal) scenario. As with Dylan and other pioneers of the singer-songwriter form, there was a compulsion for city kids to try to sound rural and unschooled, oddly combined with the need to show off the influences of the poets they've read. Sometimes the contradictions resulted in extended genius, the case with Dylan, but many other tunes have travelled much less well through the years; "Thirsty Boots" is one of those tunes that haven’t surmounted its naïveté. The gauge I use is that the lyrics no longer evoke something greater than what the mere words are getting at. What they do instead is make me nostalgic, at best.

All Heart? No Heart?

I used to insist that poems that didn't have "dirt under the fingernails" were without value, insisting that live as it's lived by working men and women in America were more interesting , more complex and more important than the dense, academic poems one was made to read in contemporary poetry anthologies. In full disclosure, I was an undergraduate at the time, in the mid to late seventies, an earnest poet trying to be relevant who, incidentally, was having problems in literature courses requiring same said anthologies. There might have been a worthwhile insight somewhere in my whining for a polemic I could write if I cared to take the time, but it suffices to say that I was lazy, too lazy to read the poems, too stoned to go to class, far, far too stoned to read the secondary sources to be prepared for class discussions or for the papers I had to write. I did what anyone genuine undergraduate poet/radical/alkie would do; I blamed the system. So there.

It took a bit of doing--sobering up, bad grades, failed relationships--for me to get wise(r) and actually read the work I thought unworthy, and the remarks of critics who've done their own work considering the aesthetics at length, and I've since backed away from trying to shoe horn all poetry into a tight fitting tuxedo. What was learned was relatively small, a revelation for the truely dense; poetry works in many ways, and the task of the critical reader cannot be merely to attack and opine but to make an effort to weigh a poem's elements on their own merits , studying how effects are accomplished, and then, finally, lastly, to offer a judgement whether the poem works . Not that I adhere to this prolix method--I shoot from the hip and often miss the whole darn target--but I try. Now the issue, from Slate's Poems Frame, is whether a poem can work if it lacks the glorious thing called "heart".

Anyone seriously maintaining that a work of art, be it poem, novel or painting is doomed to failure because it lacks this vague quality called "heart" has rocks in their head. Artists are creative people, on that most of us can agree, and by definition artists of narrative arts make stuff up from the resources at hand. Whether the source is actual experience, anecdotal bits from friends or family, novels, biographies, sciences, all these are mere furniture that go into the creation of the poem. The poet's purpose in writing is to produce a text according to some loosely arranged guide lines that distinguish the form from the more discursive prose form and create a poem that arouses any number of responses, IE feelings, from the reader. "Heart", I suppose , would be one of them, but it's ill defined and too vaguely accounted for to be useful in discussing aesthetics. Confessional poetry and the use of poetry books and poetry readings as dump sites for a writer's unresolved issues with their life doesn't impress me generally, as in the ones who do the confessing never seem to acquire the healing they seek and instead stay sick and miserable and keep on confessing the same sins and complains over and over. Journaling would be one practice I would banish from a poetry workshop I might teach. We are writing poems, not an autobiography .

I would say, actually, that one should suspect that poet who claims that every word of their verse is true, based on facts of their lives. I cannot trust the poet who hasn't the willingness to fictionlize or otherwise objectify their subject matter in the service of making their poems more provocative, worth the extra digging and interpreting. Poems and poets come in all shapes and sounds, with varied rationales as to why each of them write the way they do, and it's absurd and not to say dishonest that "heart", by which I mean unfiltered emotionalism, is the determining element as to whether a poem works or not. My goal in reading poems isn't to just feel the full brunt of some one's soggy bag of grief or splendid basket of joy, but to also to think about things differently.