The Doors on Ed Sullivan, 1967: "Light My Fire"

The Doors on Ed Sullivan, 1967: "Light My Fire":

Greil Marcus is an erratic rock and roll and pop culture critic, a survivor of the early days of the counter culture who,through a combination of obsessed observation of the rapidly changing terrain of American life and outright careerism, has made himself into The Grey Presence of The Big Beat. I have always imagined him looking into the mirror trying to imagine himself as gnarly combination of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, thinking his duty is to rise the discussion of rock music and the other arts that follow in its wake from a mere cataloging of guitar riffs and hidden messages of baroque ,obscure lyrics to a concentrated hermeneutics aimed at clarifying the historical forces that inform the spirit, direction and sheer force of the new arts. 

In  his books "Lipstick Traces" and "Invisible Republic", Marcus has argued that the formerly divided parts of America, the separate strands of it's immigrant population, here by choice, persecution or brute force, were now merging over a long , arduous period, occurring less, he implies, as a decisions of individuals who would like a more interesting , varied, dynamic democracy in which to flourish and be creative, but as an inevitable consequence of processes engineered in the Heavens; History was going toward a long term destination, each period's style , innovations breakthroughs building upon the stale, innovations and breakthroughs of the period that came before it. You get the idea, I think. Marcus writes enthusiastically like a smart undergraduate who had done exceptionally well during a course sequence where freshman and sophomores were required to read and discuss the Great Books in comparatively short order who then sought to apply every basic concept he'd absorbed to every pop culture artifact that happened upon his radar.

'via Blog this'

The reviewer at the All Music website opines that premiere genius Duke Ellington rose to the occasion when he had the chance to compose a total movie score for Otto Preminger's film "Anatomy of a Murder." This was not a case of saying that Ellington sustains his brilliance as a composer solely already established criteria, the implication that Ellington not just rose to the challenge of writing music for the moves, but showed himself to be the equal of forthcoming film composing giants, bumping shoulders with Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman. Insert your favorite composer and trust that the music Ellington wrote or laid around does not further the story. 

What bothered me especially was the claim that Ellington composed his music that served the scene. It was discreet, unobtrusive, intuitively supportive of the narrative and the emotional dynamics under view. I disagree; I consider Ellington to be America's greatest musical gift to the world in the  20th Century and consider him an American Master of his art. The sound maestro doesn't seem to have had any idea of composing something that was meant to augment a filmed story. All the classic touches, color, impressionistic sweeps, and slyly insinuated improvisations are here--as an album, this is a fine work of ensemble concert jazz composition--but they don't just intrude on the scenes and sequences; they stomp on them. There is a struggle for attention. 

The final effect is being in a crappy hotel room where the neighbors are playing the radio too loud for too long. It would be nice if this resourceful innovator could claim with pride that he had artistic success in the movies besides all the other forms he greeted and seduced into becoming his very own expression. Some shoulders remain could to the seduction. Remember that the name of his memoir is "Music is My Mistress." In the movies, Mistresses have minds of their own and will keep their own counsel.

Now that National Poetry Month Fever has broken...

Poetry is about saying it as it seems. Saying it "like it is" assumes the Romantic trap of thinking that the final state of things can be deigned by the poet's imagination. The permanent significance some poets attempt to capture is an illusion: word meanings change, cultural habits change, reading habits change, world views change, the meanings of what was formally thought to be a settled affair changes as well. Or rather our attitudes change to the subject changes, which means the object itself is inert, bereft of meaning. The poet, attempting a verse that reaches years , decades beyond it's time, is better served getting his her own properly and artfully qualified perception of events and ideas right. One might not trust meta narratives anymore, but brilliant individual responses are always illuminating.

Fish in the driveway

One of my favorite photographs, a snap I took one night in La Jolla on  a muggy July night on a residential street behind a popular Chinese restaurant . From appearances it looked as if some one were painting some fish-shaped  figurines on their driveway, leaving behind these ethereal traces of what they did. The objects that were painted were, I suspect, the kind of kind of bric a brac one observes in suburban enclaves, waiting rooms and dead gardens, which is to say , tacky. This ghost school, forever in place and swimming against grainy, cracked cement tide,  justifies the probable kitsch from which this resulted.  It made a pleasant summer evening a minor adventure.

Something's happening here...

It's often argued that  Americans are afraid of poetry; a dramatic overstatement, one things, but not without credible residue. Rather it's a matter of not many Americans, comparatively, think of poetry as a resource since we, as a culture, are not an introspective culture, but instead one that continuously looks forward to a future to be created.

Poetry, so far as the general reader is concerned, is a matter of one being alone with their thoughts and structuring their experience in a narrative form, a narrative that not only chronicles events along a time line, but also the nuance of experience, the fleeting sensation of something changing in their psyche. This requires making the language do extraordinary things to accommodate an uncommon interpretation of experience, and Americans, a people reared on the ideology of what can be done in the face of adversity, have no expansive desire to do something so impractical. Language is a thing meant to help us solve material problems, to achieve material goals, and poetry, a strange extension of linguistic twists and shadings, does nothing to put food on the table, put money in the bank, to further the quest to cure an endless variety of incurable diseases.

"Poetry makes nothing happen" is what W.H.Auden wrote as of way of saying that verse is a means of expression that resists attempts to use in the the gaining of power, wealth, prestige. It's use is more intangible and essential and yet it resists the conventional definitions of use. The poem from which the quote is derived reads thusly, partially :

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

This is a war poem, of a kind, and was written at time when much of the avant gard, left and right, were obsessed with how art in all mediums could be used to forcefully change the world and how powerfully, how rapidly we could change the way populations can have the way they see and think and act in the world change permanently. But Auden declares that the poet and his work survives the agendas and the manifestos and that it while it makes nothing happen, it is something that happens, as an inevitable event of nature.Poetry is immaterial to purpose, function, policy; the absence of larger audiences for poetry isn't about fear from a perception that it's a mode of expression that is the least useful among several the lot of us might select on a given day. There are those of us who would argue that poetry's lack of identifiable utility is exactly what attracts us to the form--I happen to think that , like Wilde, that all art is quite useless in practical application (save for the fact that I believe humans crave beauty in form and in expression) and adhere to Harold Bloom's running definition of what literature , in general, avails the reader : to paraphrase, literature (poetry) helps us think about ourselves. Americans , I think it's safe to say in the broadest sense, have no real desire to reside individually and psychically work their way to an "aha" experience with poetry as a conduit. We do think about ourselves, but more in terms of accumulation rather than an inner equilibrium. The measure of a man is his wallet, not the subtlety of his thoughts, and this a form of fearlessness that borders on insanity.

I remain, humbly, a jerk

The "I am a jerk" trope is one I've been using for years , the intention being to remind me that lurking under my heavily worded pronouncements is an otherwise sensibly guy who can indeed take himself too seriously. It's my way , I suppose, of interpreting the admonishments of the 12 Step program I'm a member of that I ought to exhibit a genuine humility. It's a grounding principal, I suppose. I am a writer/bookseller living in San Diego. 

I was a literature major at the University of California, San Diego where I met, took classes from with a good number of poets and writers, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Davidson, Paul Dresman and Rae Armantrout among them. I had the stupid good fortune of collaborating with some of them, and fell into a great fellowship and larger community of  writers that included Steve Farmer, Shelley White, Richard Astle, Melanie Nielson, David Sternbach, Tom Marshall, the list is long and filled with  amazingly diverse and brillant men and women. Butterfield Blues Band (featuring Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, Mark Natfalin and Sam Lay) at the Chessmate folk and blues club in Detroit , Michigan sometime in the late sixties. 

The club had no age limit, and I consider that one of the luckiest breaks I've ever had.Personally, I think I'm an affable sort, with a clear head most of the time, a good heart, not entirely modest, with a good sense of my talents and my deficiencies. My on going project is to continue to learn how to write and to become a better harmonica player. Over all, I would like to remain engaged with the world I am blessed to be alive in. I wrote music reviews for a number of years for the San Diego Reader, The Door, Revolt in Style, Kicks , I was the arts editor for the UCSD Daily Guardian, I've been active in various poetry and prose projects locally, and I have worked as a bookseller around the San Diego area for the last thirty three years. I have written reviews, short stories and poetry since making the decision to be a writer of some sort in high school and I have, I think, managed to compose a few decent pages since those fateful days of 1969. I am also a musician,a blues harmonica player of forty years experience, having been inspired by the original Paul

Some of my favorite poets were assholes

Ezra Pound,  was a politically reprehensible and one of the worst major poets of the 20th century. Traitor, reactionary, race-baiter, I have no sympathy for a man who's ambition had more to do with having power and influence over whole populations rather than poetry itself.

 He was, though, an idea man about the craft and art of the poem, and some of his criticism remains relevant. The way we discuss the quality and function of the image and the modifiers that do and do not attend it in context draw heavily from his notions about ridding ourselves of the weight of literary history and devising a poetics that can can help the reader perceive the world in new ways.  Pound didn't wan to stop there, of course, he desired to rule the world and aspired to be The Boss. Bully and self-aggrandizing creep he may have been (and traitor) but some of ideas, at least, had value. He wanted poets to have the trifecta of  prestige items with power, the pen, the scepter, the   sword.

 Eliot , Thomas Stearnes, was  in league with Pound as anti-semite and race baiting neurotic who disguised his bigotry in a tradition of genteel Classicism, but I will defend him as a poet; too much of his images, his cadences, his drifting allusions hit the mark ; he is one of those writers who had an especially strong gift for getting the elusive essence of alienation , dread, spiritual desolation in a dehumanizing culture in his poems without turning them into padded, freighted dissertations. It is one of the tragedies of contemporary literature that Eliot, whom I think is one of the strongest poets of the last century, should happen to be, politically,a callous and malicious monster. Even dried up white guys who are lousy with non whites and are barely able to conceal their frothing anti-antisemitism can, at times, describe a mood or provide nuance to  circumstances that transcend their repulsive politics and personalities.