Monday, September 7, 2009

The art of the cracking yourself up


Cody Walker is a joker, it seems, given to giggles, giddiness and guffaws in the pursuit of cracking himself up on jokes perhaps only he and select coterie of friends and fellow travelers would get. His poem "Update",is an exercise in a man chortling loudly in the back row.And even if a reader was fortunate to "get" Walker's interior monologue of skipping rhymes and cross-referenced literary forms, it's my modest guess the number finding this bit humorous would be lesser still. No matter, since I am as well in the habit of cracking myself up, imagining lines of dialogue among unlikely characters and personalities in improbable circumstance, chewing the fat on absurd and discreetly vulgar subjects.

It would be something like a three year old playing with his toy cars, conjuring one automotive disaster after another on a strip of wood paneled floor quickly imagined to be a ten lane interstate, or a six year old, when the young mind grows out the crashing spectacle of accidents and now imagines characters, recognizably humanoid, with distinct personalities, representing abstract, if two dimensional virtues, with attending voices. All this fills a mind with busy talk and scenarios, in the casual preparation for engaging the real life imagination will help them , with prayers, survive and thrive in.

Later still, in the far throws of adulthood, there come the private totems, the hallowed reference points, the memorized conventions of morning cartoons, biographies of great poets and advertising jingles, conflated to essential absurdities one tears down and reconstructs and tears down again as the surging mood to distance oneself from the drudgery of work and obligations; one takes flight, throws water balloons at the canon, paints the icons in garish colors, makes unlikely partners of dissimilar virtues in order to reveal some space in one's consciousness where logic and hard rationale haven't invaded and tamed. Then comes the "eureka" laugh, that fast, hard snort of being elevated above the physical place where you stand, momentarily transcendent, untouchable. I do this often enough alone, at home, whether writing or reading a book, and too often, perhaps, at work, where such outbursts are evidence of a mind being on other things other than the bottom line, and it is for those seconds when all things are reduced in stature, made equal in size. It doesn't last, of course, and soon enough the euphoria evaporates into the hard facts in front of you. But it is nice when it happens.

I should also make it a point to relate that I just about never try to relate what it was I found so funny to anyone I'm around; the description defy anecdotal reiteration, most times seeming sketchy and bizarre when I do try. The punch lines are too private, the references mired in that roiling swamp of a consciousness that cannot be brought to public view without the mediation of
thoughtful consideration and editing. And even then it would be dubious whether an audience would find the reason for my fleeting giggle worth the effort to listen to me bray on.

Cody Walker has decided to bray on.Walker's poem isn't a great one by any means, and is such that you wonder once again what Pinsky's attraction to it was. The rhymes are trite, the subject attempting to lane change across style barriers with the worst kind of ham-handed self-referential readily found in the most grating post-modern poetry, and there is what can be a smug -knowingness that saturates this brief operation. We have a scenario where a bright boy , trying to regain his equilibrium after the departure of his girlfriend/wife/significant other, invests himself with the powers and abilities of his great heroes from comic books and the scant readings of top shelf authors. He becomes Star Trek:The Next Generation's Data
("I've also rerouted... my neural pathways..." and Superman , with a mention that he has also re-routed "fjords", an oblique reference to the opening of the fifties TV program where the Man of Steel is said to be able to "...change the course of mighty rivers..."

And so it goes through this short poem, a desperate playfulness abounds, a growing hysteria mounts, a breakdown threatens, all this stewing while the narrator seeks the blessing of the over-cited Nietzsche guarantee , to paraphrase a paraphrase, that what what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What Walker intends is unclear--that the social constructions that result from our innate need to have life have purpose and meaning are finally inadequate? That mistaking experience as merely the means with which we test the veracity of our philosophical models is to lose sight of actual value?-- but what there is here is minor, indeed, worth a laugh, perhaps, but worth a laugh in the sense that what's funny is a reader's belief this
tightly packed box of a poem merits a close textual reading.

Walker wrote this as a knock off, I suspect, something to be put deep inside a collection as an off key note, a character-giving bit of dissonance.
The insanity it suggests is disturbing, and it makes my case that mental anguish does not necessarily result in good poetry.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

"Odalisque" by Mark Salerno


Odalisque
Mark Salerno
(Salt Publishing)

Mark Salerno offers a selection of noir-inspired sonnets that tell a tale of cop and a hooker who start up a relationship that takes us on a tour of a mythical, distant, black and white Los Angeles of contemporary time. Shifting voices, locations, presenting the city as an amorphous spread of contradictions--a site where generations have settled, started anew and quite completed the paradises they tried to construct for themselves--Salerno offers up a terse diction that works splendidly in the sonnet form.
Like the champion scribes of The Big Orange Raymond Chandler and John Fante, Salerno has created his texture and tone as he writes of the places and things his erstwhile lovers encounter and pass through; a squandered chance, an exhausted idealism, a world view made directionless by relentless short term pragmatism. This is the poet's ear for the language we all speak that has continually denies and embraces the cluttered and conflicted urban chaos that distracts and drives them at the same time.

Finale

To be without believing or just forget the dream
as when a former odalisque too late to get lucky
settles on a set table in a dingy outlying suburb
she told her soul to leave her alone and it did so
chastened by the memory of true life in the far west
and a little roughed up in consequence of feeling
when giving up becomes one way of staying alive
I was M. dilatory in my wanderings and a lost man
hustled by a cutie girl and drenched in flop sweat
for my anxiety to know the really real or breathe air
between seeming and being of the way she said couple-y
along with all the other beauty school graduates
cooped up and portioned out running gags and shtick
to save a fairy tale as I have scrupled to aver.
There is a particular punch and power to Mark Salerno's sonnet style, at first reading as if it were an incoherent clash of radio stations competing on the AM dial. But as one reads, as one absorbs the terrain, the local businesses and street names, the voices emerge, masculine and feminine identities switching sensibilities, the monologues revealing all the moods, every defense, every method of inoculating oneself against the prevailing truth that greets many a visitor , many a person who has come to stake their claim on a terrain that absorbs emotion, kills desire, and makes one a slave in life that sustains itself on trying to recreate a vague notion of an unrealized ideal.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Inglorious Basterds: Scalped


Quentin Tarantino makes me think increasingly of the bright musician of generous technique and dexterity who fors
akes sheet music, or even head arrangements and insists instead of improvising, from a cold start. Keith Jarrett comes to mind, superb pianist in group contexts who, somewhere in the Seventies, elevated himself to a concert soloist, literally, with a series of multi-disc live releases highlighting his ability to extemporize melody and development. Tension and release is the key to keeping any soloing alive, an element that requires pacing; the problem with Jarrett's elongated improvisations, it seemed to me, that he too often went frameworks that supported his configurations and offered up, at extended rates, a form of noodling, riffing, a repetitive set of rills and streaming, gutless variations that lacked adventure, daring. Jarrett, unknown to him and ignored by his fans, had turned into a New Age pianist, a verbose George Winston. I couldn't wait for the man to ease himself back into band situations, which he has, and good for him, and good for us. Inglorious Basterds, writer-director's Tarantino's homage and ramping up of the Men On a Mission war drama, is a flashy, occasionally gripping bit of now dated mannerisms characteristic of the filmmaker who, as Duncan Shepard has remarked, loves to hear his voice emerge from the mouths of characters he creates. The characters, though, are no more than sock puppets, and what used to pass for style in this man's work has become a shtick. One gets the feeling through the movie that the generic plot points Tarantino writes over are not notes to a melody he would lovingly embellish, but are considered as little more than a chord progression over which he has another excuse to blitzkrieg us with dazzling technique.


Shtick, though, can still be fun if deployed in a lively way, and there are moments when the predilection of long monologues or convoluted stretches of dialogue that lead, at snail pace, to an expected burst of violence grabs you by scruff and bangs you around some, the obvious example being the performance of Christoph Waltz as the charming, effete, well mannered and murderous S.S. officer Col. Lada. Waltz is inspired as he embodies the self-aware elegance of a man who likes nothing better than to exterminate Jews for the Nazi command. He cannot, though, balance Waltz's performance with an effective counterweight; Brad Pitt, of late the most interesting Hollywood actor with the roles he's taken --Burn After Reading, The Assassination of Jessie James by The Coward Robert Ford-- but in Basterds he's only on screen less than half the screen time, and he is impaired beyond belief by a cartoonish Arkansas accent. Pitt has the appealing skill of vanishing inside the character's skin and letting his physicality become inhabited by another personality, full of ticks and twitches. Unlike Al Pacino, say, who battles to conquer a writer's character with his trademark rages and rasping, ranting style, Pitt's portrayals strike you as people you wouldn't look at twice; this is the talent to seem insignificant until a series of gestures and reactions reveal an unannounced agenda. Except here, significantly; Pitt looks like he's practicing his accent in a mirror while he studies the smooth curves of his face. It never becomes a comfortable fit.

The Lada speeches go on for extended lengths, reprising feints, indirections and nuanced deceits of past Tarantino movies. Tarantino hadn't an outline for this film, a structure to hang his best ideas on; rather, he improvised from the outset, the result that his worst tendencies show up as often as his best virtues. Which made Inglorious Basterds a dull, grinding, unpaced endurance contest.He reached his saturation point with steroidizing movie genres with his two-part masterpiece Kill Bill, with all it's seamless and bravura conflations of different action film styles, but he has based his reputation on this one knack, or, more accurately, this habit. Death Proof was a chatty, grinding bore, with the fabled Tarantino dialogue sounding like leftover material that didn't make into Pulp Fiction or True Lies. Inglorious Basterds continues the downward spiral despite the generous reviews from critics eager to crown him an auteur, continues the downward spiral.

His sleights of hand, his postmodern conflations, his promiscuous homages to film styles that drag down his narrative momentum--hard rock guitar riffing in a WW2 movie? Whoa, cutting edge stuff-- fail to lift this bit of labored pandemonium. Eccentric liberties with formula plot structures made items like Pulp Fiction and the pair of Kill Bill movies fun things to sit through, a superb blend of filmmaking panache and a young man's energy to jack up the action; even his incessant references to other movies were endearing because you sensed the director had shoved two generations of film theory to the side and resolved that movies were fun; aesthetics were a matter of making the entertainment more intense.What hasn't happened the maturation of the approach; fun can still be a value in itself, but there is the expectation that an artist has developed a finer sense of what that entails; themes ought to transform over time. The aging wunderkind remains on the same playground, though. As with Death Proof, Basterds isn't an improvement on an original idea, but rather someone of limited ideas determined to tell the same jokes over and over. It would be one thing if he were developing his themes, but Tarantino loves his riffs and mulled-over mannerisms too much to alter them, to play with them. He loves them way a thief loves his stolen booty. No matter how lovingly he polishes and resets these things, you are aware that they don't belong to him.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

GUITAR BARN

A shot full of grace
Blesses the side a barn
With a rock salt baptism
That’s just a slip of the tires
On loose, slimy gravel
By the time that
No matter how far we got from the city
To set up our amps
For 2000 of our friends,
A police helicopter will always
hover the gathered yearning
during the guitar solo
that I learned
note-for-note
from Robin Trower's second album,
after the singer
stepped away from the mike
and every note is the
last thing the coolest cat heard
that night as the sun rose
or this helicopter blared through
a PA that
there are free meals and
no consequences waiting
if everyone just leaves
right now,
but they are wandering
in and around the barn
making fun of the animals
and ignoring my solo, shit man,
even a wah-wah pedal couldn't
get them to listen.

Smoking Sucks. And it Blows


It came up in a conversation with another ex-problem drinker about the relative demoralization and levels of unmanageability caused by addiction to alcohol and cigarettes. I had championed that those new to sobriety perhaps ought to stop smoking as well as cease their intake of booze and sundry narcotics. My friend maintained a traditional line, let the newcomer smoke until they're ready to quit. He said

They don't make you steal from your family, abandon your family and destroy marriages.

It's an odd loop here; addicts steal to buy drugs, which are very expensive because they are illegal. If cigarettes were illegal, I have no doubt they'd be a major contributor to smokers entering committing crimes and destroying relationships in order to support their habit. Cigarettes, however, do take control of a portion of your brain, if not steal it whole; like it or not a smoker becomes addicted and their use has programmed them to ingest cigarette smoke at regular intervals, whether the smoker wants to or not.

It was once postulated that I had bigger fish to fry when I sobered up twenty two years ago; let the man smoke was the conventional wisdom. Truth be told, though, I would have quit had the nicotine gum been available in 1987, the year I took the drinking cure. I figure I would have saved myself several thousand dollars in cash I would have spent to support my pack and a half a day habit, and I would have avoided, I think, several bad colds and not have missed so much work because I was compelled to smoke outdoors, in the rain in winter, when I had the need to excuse myself and fire up a Marlboro. I might have had my self esteem lift somewhat as well and felt more in the mainstream of life had I quit; as it went, I was one of those people you see on cold, rainy days standing in the service entrances of where they work, smoking away, sequestered and ghettoized , conspicuous drug addicts getting their fix. The allure of the outlaw faded quickly.

Seeing the death and sickness and misery and financial burden of medical bills ruin the lives of friends and family, I can't think of many health decisions more important than to quit smoking. To diminish the severity of the destruction these odious products bring to people is, in my less than humble opinion, to really deal with the cold facts of the matter.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Long Winded Extract from an On Line Discussion About Poetry


A New Yorker cartoon shows two dogs in a den, one on chair, in front of a computer monitor , talking to another dog seated on the floor. The dog in the chair tells his friend "No one knows you're a dog on the Internet."

Exactly, and I suppose that's the appeal of forums and blogs; one is at liberty to represent themselves as having some competence and insight on a subject. One might even convince readers, or some of them at least, that one has professional expertise;one might even have something interesting to say. I don't know if the words that following are interesting beyond coffeehouse chatter--I think the points are sound enough--but here they are. Judge them as you will, and call me a jerk if you think I'm a deluded dealer in obvious asides.-tb
___________________________________________




He was typing furiously to get a response to me before I shut off the computer, and sure enough, after refreshing the computer monitor, there was his nickname on a new post, attempting a counter argument in a protracted discussion (or competing rants, if you will) about the uses and role of art and poetry in this world. He wrote “ART used to create a response in LIFE. “


It's the other way around, replied, and continued; Art is a response TO life, a creative way for us to find new ways of experiencing what otherwise an incoherent flux of activity that only bullied us about with out any of us having the vaguest idea of how to better our lot. Life, as sheer process and force of nature, cannot be swayed by pure acts of will or bold imagination; art, besides leaving civilization with personal expressions of who we are and how we felt while we were alive, is also a engagement of our senses and skills that empower us to solve problems, to maintain a sense of humor, faith in something greater than our lone human selves, and provide with a means to live better lives. Art is a means for us to bring our imagination to bear on this planet, to create something for our selves that make this existence bearable, and at times joyous.

One discussion I had recently was interesting in that the person I was spoke with insisted that technique was over rated and that “…form is immaterial... so long as it creates the desired effect”. I scratched my chin and offered that one can usually have an effect of any sort only if the form is effective in getting across the intangible things you want your poems to address. One may effuse and rhapsodize all they want, but beyond a certain readership already inclined toward sentimental barbarity (the breathless pursuit of trite expression and banal conclusion, a defense mechanism, I believe, that shields the nervous from thinking bolder, or at least clearer about the larger implications of their actions in a world beyond themselves), the larger readership, small though it may be, will gain nothing, remember nothing from odd lines that exclaim obvious annoyances and joys. War is bad. Love hurts. Babies area cute. Mean people suck.

Millions of poems written by thousands of furious scribblers don’t get much further than these belated realizations, and it is understandable while yet millions more walk away from poems that are uniformly unmemorable, with hardly a quotable line or pithy adage to be drawn from them. This is all very sad because what comes forth in these untidy ossifications are notions that are revelatory and previously unrevealed to the writers themselves but which otherwise rest on the bottom of the fish tank like so much glass seashells.

Form matters because it means that one has learned their lessons about writing—poetry, though expressive of the soul’s yearnings and all, is writing, remember, subject to rules of clarity, precision, diction. One may do what one wants to do with language only after the lessons are learned, which is to say internalized. Form does matter, as in grammar, language skill, syntax, et al. A writer is more or less required to know the mechanics of writing and something about poetry before their efforts reach the level of art of any consideration. One cannot break the rules unless one knows the rules. The poet ought to desire the effect, but the insistence that a work have the "desired effect" is a slippery bit of business. Individual readers will bring their own experience to bear when they read and interpret the work; a bit of themselves will color how they recognize the particular ideas and instances the poet writes of. The poets' task, better said, is to write their material in a way that it elicits a response in the first place. For the most part, the dimensions of response are none of the writers' business.

Poetry... without effect... is meaningless babble.


Too broad a statement, covering as it does too many centuries of poetry, ideas about poetry, cultures in which poetry is written, et al. "Effect" is another slippery word; what one doesn't personally respond to may well be and probably is someone else’s' core moral truth. There is also the reasonable possibility that the reader finding something foul in a style of writing is unaware of the standards and requirements the style needs. What isn’t understood straight away is often condemned out of hand, without inspection, and it’s not unlike many to be willful in their refusing to learn something about writing aesthetics they didn’t know before. This fact doesn’t lessen the quality of the complainer’s preferred bards, periods and dictions; indeed, some of the poets might be embarrassed at the use of their name for cultural intolerance. Still others, like Eliot or Pound, would join a chorus of condemnation in short order, as long as the controversy involved further vilification of Jews.

That said, let us conclude that no one reading this the Ideal Reader, earnestly reading literature without preconceptions as to an art’s need to bolster unchanging certainties, and that we do the best we do to understand how something works on its own terms. It’s the cliché we hear from time to time, the search for similarities among ourselves rather than the concentration on obvious differences. We can reject the similarities if we like, but it helps to have a humane preference as to what one leans toward in the service of creating a life worth living rather than merely wallowing in the bitter juice of sour grapes

My adversary changes the subject, a dig at the universities and their secular relativism: At worst it is pseudo-intellectual drivel indented to impress Academic pundits. Take that!! Have at you!!!

You're writing about a particular KIND of academic poetry, I wrote back, and went off on another riff; this is suspect, and here condemn hundreds of poets and their work without a fair reading. It's hard work, I know, trying to keep abreast of what's available, what's being written, and a lot of it is bad, stale, calcified on the page, but a good amount of it is daring and fresh, contains verve, engages ideas and the real world at the same time, and otherwise performs what has always been the principle mission of the poet, to find new ways of experiencing the world, and inspiring new ways of living within it in a larger sense of community.

Poetry, at core, is about ideas and intellectual concepts as much as it is about feelings, and far less about sentiment. Without the kind of rigor these "intellectual" poets bring to bear on their work, there'd be nothing but a dull gallery of old and brittle styles for us to choose from, a juke box full of scratchy records, rhymes of old dead men that we ceaselessly imitate without a wit about why these old lyrics were written in the first place. I would say these old tunes were first written to bring some NEW IDEAS to our consciousness, some new perceptions to fire our sense of a larger and more interesting life. This is something we can’t afford to stop doing. At best it elevates the spirit or creates deep emotional response. Life, I believe, is something whose final, "fixed" meaning is unknowable, and is, really, something we bring "meaning" to by dint of our actions.What we have done, said, written will speak for us when we aren't able to rant, cajole, seduce and wave our arms as we attempt to persuade others that we're a benefit to the race. This, of course, makes life neither inherently good nor bad, though we do have it in our power to agree on acceptable, workable, flexible definitions of what constitutes the "good life" and what actions make for the ill. Life, though, is more than just "mankind". It is EVERYTHING, and we are just here visiting. The quality of the visit, though, is entirely within our grasps.

He didn’t answer and I was tired, and it was then I noticed the neighbor’s television was on, and loud. David Letterman was barking his quips about Regis Philbin, his voice muffled as it filtered through my radiator. It was time to shut things down and go to sleep/