Trump

Donald Trump, a rich man by any means but  one who cannot (and will not) give a factual accounting of how much money he actually has, has been the sort of news gift that comedians like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, David Letterman love. That is, he is  the embodiment of lumbering, bullying  Bluto who's every interview, tweet, quip and crack is the stuff of satire gold. Again, this cartoon figure wants to be President of the United States, a situation that makes for hilarious responses from the better-read electorate . What chance might this buffoon have? We are in denial , perhaps, thinking to ourselves that such a conspicuous example of  unchained, publicity-prone Id would talk himself into a early demise, but I do have a sinking feeling that many of those who choose to excerise their right to vote really as gullible as he'd like them to be. Trump likely has fantastically less money than he claims, but this man has , all the same, made a decent living being the gauche, gross and grimy goon the news media and public cannot ignore. 

He has the talent of keeping his name in the papers, so to speak, and there little doubt he has made a tidy profit in doing so. Millions rather billions, let us guess. but still, that's not chump change. He has the capacity to say anything , no matter how moronic, sophomoric or shameless, and lately he claims that John McCain, decorated war hero and U.S. Senator from Arizona, is not a real war hero because he was shot down captured by the North Vietnamese. That McCain was a prisoner of war and subjected to torture between 1967 to 1973 doesn't count in the blurting Trump's estimation. Trump is running as Republican and one wonders how good a President he might be if he makes political enemies with important players in his own party. And it's awful to think that this blustering oaf would, more or less, be the one ultimately responsible for the economy, given that he has filed for bankruptcy several times and cannot give a straight answer as regards his own wealth. He was a rich kid , born into money, who is little more than a glorified carnival huckster, a one man freak show.

"Kiss Me Deadly": Crisp and Cruelly Stylish

I had the good fortune to stumble across Kiss Me Deadly while channel surfing last night, director Robert Aldrich's crisp and cruelly stylish film black and white 1955 film adaptation of novelist Micky Spillane's brutish detective novel . Spillane's antagonist (as opposed to hero) is a lug named Mike Hammer, a thuggish sociopath with a private investigator's license.  Hammer was a decisive and deliberate break from the fictional private eyes that preceded him in American pulp culture; unlike the creations of Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler, who created characters who had wit, instinct in search of a slim set of facts, Hammer was pretty much an early version of the Hulk, someone who would smash first and then try to figure out what it was he destroyed. The glory of the Mike Hammer novels, though, was Spillane's style which was, despite what misgivings and protests one has against the lack of an articulate moral center, swift and stinging and paced at a tempo that made it easy to forget how venal and ludicrous the plots might happen to me. The prose was blunt and to the point, but it made you abandon your reservations and give yourself over to the sequence of rage and revenge that was to follow.

Hammer is a duncey baboon in the film, portrayed with a detached, tightly wrapped asshole elan by Ralph Meeker. That's the appeal. He knows a gun in the gut, and a good back of the hand gets results faster than reasoned discussion. Notable, too, is that the fact that Hammer's character seems to particularly relish the opportunity decidedly non-masculine men, like the piggy, squealing fellow who gets his hand slammed hard in a drawer or the priggish, likely closeted clerk at the athletic club who gets slapped around by Hammer in a humiliating fashion. In any case, this bullying gets a few things straight: he is in command. I laughed when Hammer, who is not a cop and didn't identify himself as a private eye, barks orders at the clerk, who sheepishly acquiesces. This film is beautiful not just stylistically, but because Aldrich plays it straight with how he presents the whole thing. The paranoia here, cutting to the bone and radiating like so many of the garish lights from the angular, heavily contrasted black and white frames, acts as an x-ray. Everyone's business is exposed, everyone's agenda, or lack of one, is revealed, no matter how much they assert their innocence or intentions.

"Harmless Poem"

By Stuart Dischell

Forgive the web without its spider

The houseplant with few or many flowers

And the stars for hiding in the daytime,

Forgive astronauts for distance

And surgeons for proximity,

Forgive the heart for the way it looks

Like something a dog eats from a pan,

Forgive goat-gods and wine-gods

And the goddess bathing in her pond,

Forgive the sea for being moody,

The air for its turbulence, the stomach

For its vomit, forgive the insistence

Of sperm, the greeting of the ovum,

Forgive orgasms for their intensity

And the faces they make in people's faces,

Forgive the music of liars, forgive autumn

And winter and the departure of lovers.

And the young dead and the persistence

Of the old, forgive the last tooth and hair.

There are days that start that with a bad mood, a sour disposition, a curse on the breath as you leave the house to make your living, and most of us are lucky, most of the time, that these bad starts abate and a lighter view comes over us as we interact and engage our encounters on their own terms, not how we wished they were.

There are those days that start bad and stay bad, when each and every small thing that hits a sour note on what we demand be a perfectly tuned keyboard just  grates at us, sends a falling current down the spine. The day becomes a down escalator down a bottomless shaft for the rest of the day and into the night , and the litany of those who have sinned against us, the material things that impeded our path, slowed our advance toward a short sighted goal-- the stop lights , the traffic signs, the intruding phone calls of people who need help, the cigarette smoke and the barking dogs-- all become a conspiracy to lower our spirit, to distract us from grasping whatever it is that is just beyond our reach.

It's a bad situation and I am glad they don't haunt me as long as they did when my certainty about how the planet ought really to spin caused me nothing but arrogant exasperation.  In my experience, the especially dispiriting part of these bad-mood binges, these black holes of being, was that there was nothing tangible I could name , no incident nor reciept of bad news, that would have triggered a unified field of gloomy perception; the senses that a mysterious God had given me to learn about and get by and be creative in the world were now the source of an unlimited number of soul-killing annoyances. How things, looked,sounded, felt, smelled were my sources of torment.

My mood was such that each person and thing by simply and dutifully existing as they were, unmindful of my presence (and certainly unaware of my unease). You guessed it, I was full of my own presumptions, nothing seemed worth doing, there was no point in going on. This was nothing to laugh at because I had no sense of humor. To those in the know, these were the symptoms of forgetting Rule 62.

What appeals to me about Stuart Dischell's poems is that it contains the sort of rolling,  incantational serve of a powerful prayer that beseeches something greater than the speaker's wits can muster on their own for a relief the bondage of self to have a sense of  humility and the attending sense of humor restored.

a note on why I never liked Janis Joplin's singing.

I don't deny Janis Joplin's real emotion and the pulverizing power of her performances, but I have almost always found nearly  unlistenable."Piece of My Heart" with Brother and the Holding Company was at the time (and remains) an explosive declaration of a person willing to degrade themselves to satisfy the man (or woman) she loves, a gargoyle's grate of yearning, and "Move Over", with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, was a classic riff rock that matched an intemperate vocalist to an one dimensional expression of need. On too many other of her recordings, her singing, at best, makes me think of an abused chew toy nearing the last squeaks and squeals that could be squeezed from it. Granted, her singing was explosive, but that does not suffice as an aesthetic, nor does it provide context that makes what Joplin was doing more comprehensible. It was clear enough: she never truly learned how to sing. Explosions do better than evoke emotions, they create them, and crying two years olds past their nap time are giving those around them a demonstration of powerful tsunami lie tantrums can be, but neither is art, nor are the experiences one cares to have again if they can help it. Joplin mode of operation was the 60s counterculture anti-aesthetic to "let it all hang out", because, after all, refinement, style, a knowledge of technique was for squares.

First thought, best thought, no restraint, it is forbidden to forbid, all the convenient bromides that made the dismissal of forms and structure a revolutionary act, something much more than a gesture that would have some sweeping Butterfly Effect and transform the culture and steer history towards a Higher Synthesis of meaning. Underlying that thinking was a larger critique against the post-war culture of 50s America, with brilliant, poetic, not so brilliant and less poetic arguments made by Marcuse, Theodore Roszak, Allen Ginsberg among other notables in favor of abandoning the enslaving tonnage of dead culture that had brought to the precipice of the Sixties. But with regards to Joplin and her approach to the blues, a musical form that is, in my view, the foundation of every note of musical genius America has produced, hers is a misconception that the melismatic, gospel-informed style of black American singers was about being primal, loud, raspy, unrestrained.

She let it all go in emulation of the singers she loved and became, in her eagerness to express her need to find love and be strong, came perilously close to being an outright parody of the real thing. Her vocals do nothing for me except to remind me that a singer constantly pitched at the edge of hysteria stops being exciting very quickly and becomes monotonous. As a vocal artist, a would be blues singer, she existed in a state of streaming melodrama, seeming impervious to vocal nuance , incapable, I imagine, of realizing that Bessie Smith , Big Mama Thorton , Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Billie Holiday , Otis Redding , even the every dramatic and hyperactive geniuses of Little Walter and James Brown took time to learn their craft, to take lessons and understand through an acquisition of techniques that they could sing longer, find meanings in words and the spaces between the notes of the songs they sang, that they could tell stories that drew from the entire range of human experience. I remember the youthful rush to be a genius when I was first learning to play the harmonica--lessons, patience and the practicing of scales and the songs they belonged to be damned, I was going off on improvisational sojourns like Butterfield and John Coltrane. I was lucky enough to survive my own foolishness and became teachable to a greater degree, discovering that those big moments I wanted to create, either in my writing or in my playing, were made up smaller things, technical ideas and brief instances in daily life. What I learned was that small things matter.

The past refuses to forget who I was

(My mood hasn't been the best lately, downright awful in fact, bordering on outright depression. Oh, alright, I've been depressed over my current state of mind, no pun intended, that state, ironically, being that my performance has suffered at work due to errors, the same damn errors, occurring over a period of time. It's the old Steve Martin routine in the flesh, the one where he screams "I FORGOT" as an acceptable explanation to the IRS as to why he hadn't filed income tax returns for several years. At work , at least, I am forgetting thing constantly, making mistakes, creating more work for those I work with as they mend the ruin I brought those cash register  cash register disasters.   I had to be given a written warning earlier this week. Not fun, let me say. So I might be having memory problems, it may have an organic origin, I am making doctor's appointments after the holiday to have myself assessed by professionals what my state of mind is, present and future, and then weigh options, medically and professionally. It sucks. But I did get a poem out of it. It's about the contrast to what I was like and what I am like now and the creeping sense that talking about one's past becomes a greater fiction each time one opens his or her mouth. --tb)

 The past 

refuses to
forget who I was
when I  lingered
and lounged
in bars, sleeves rolled up,
awaiting a free drink
and 
a ride home ,
anyone's home but my own.

I don't own a car
and driving's for queers
said I, thirst unslaked
and pants 
angular with lust
and sins
of the father
and his father's great aunt.

Ain't it shame
this hooterville
is all feathers and felonies,
i could show
these
Jeezers a time
to make time
irrelevant
to where you thought
the night was going.

I am in dress shirts now,
ties, pants pressed
and full of old knees
that make velcro noises
when I reach
for something I dropped
to the floor.

You look at me askance
as I speak
and sip your coffee,
you want to ask me a question,
i quit my speech
and take a breath,

"Ted" you ask me,
"why do you
always speak
with your hands?

So Long David Letterman

 
 

It has been remarked that  David Letterman, who last night broadcast the final episode of his long running CBS program Late Night, had become cranky and dour in his last few  years on the air, to  which I say yes, he had been a grouch a time  or a   dozen times when I   stayed up late to  catch his program. 

But that was part of the man's appeal as a talk show host. There was the elusive Everyman quality about  him, liberally laced with a slickly restrained version of the Last Angry Man. Not angry, exactly, but more like fed up with the voluminous ego baiting that passes for notoriety and letting the air from the media's hot air balloon with three decades of sharp, absurdly accurate darts. There a sense in Letterman the way  he managed the helm of the Late Show, someone who kept his smile for the most part, who maintained his formal courtesy as  best he could , and yet we could see the ice  creak, we could witness the calm within get sullied by the winds of celebrity bullshit and the institutionalized idiocy of  those who deign to govern us. Letterman might have been cranky , but so are all of us at the end of the day, but rather than complain bitterly and without end that the bastards are at it again, he applied humor, much of if brilliant, in my view, that let a lot of the hot air from the problem-filled world that goes out of its way to ruin our serenity. 

Letterman, as well, was among the first television host to expose the whole lie of show business and the false fronts millions are spent just so we don't see the facade breaking. The culture of celebrity is odd and odious and it was Letterman, before anyone else on the tube, really, who brought as sense of the absurd, the surreal and the genuinely strange to a medium that created a phony baloney image of reality and poisoned the culture with. Letterman, from his NBC show to his years on CBS, was the remedy to the on going simulacra that passed for entertainment. And, interestingly, he became more human as time went on, being very open about his heart surgery, the birth of his son, his extra marital affair and the attempt to blackmail him. 

He was rarely mawkish about any of this, but he was, it seems to me, genuinely sincere in the feelings he expressed about the events. But most of all he was funny, he was smart and better read than even fans thought, and he a good conversationalist. He was the needed at the end of the day. Not a drink, but a good laugh, someone as bemused with the world as you were and who had the wit to say something about it that made an off kilter kind of sense.

Can White People Sing the Blues?

Corey Harris, a fine blues guitarist, songwriter, and singer in a neo-traditionalist blues  style, writes a provocative column on his blog  Blues is Black Music entitled "Can White People Sing the Blues?" Harris, a musician, specializing in a style of blues that's been around much longer than his years on this earth, insists it's an important question. His primary objection of whites playing what is a black art form is this: that while listeners are entertained by technical competence and show business bedazzlement, they do not have legitimacy because the music is robbed of historical context and is, as a result, merely ornamentation, not art that convincingly interprets personal and collective experience in a cruel, problematic existence. There is no culture without the long, collective memory to inform it and keep it honest. 

 " Without culture there is no music.  Music is the voice of a culture.  Separate the two and the music can never be the same.  Of course, it may be in the same style as the original, but the meaning of a song such as Son House's 'My Black Mama' will always be changed with a different performer.  This is especially true if the performer is not from the Black culture that gave birth to the blues." 

I agree that those aspiring to perform blues, jazz, or soul should forever know what they are picking up is black music created by and defined by black artists and the culture, twisted as it may have been, that contained the forces that brought together elements of African and European tradition that otherwise would not have met. Would that the institutions that created the genius of African American music hadn't been the racist and economically determinist demon of Slavery? Harris, though, assumes that culture is static and implies that black culture has remained still. The creation of Black American culture regarding art, education, literature, music, theatre, speech, theology refutes that rather handily, as it arises, through forced circumstances, from a system of oppression; oppressed classes create counter-institutions.

The new black culture gradually arose and developed as the response by black communities to the decimation of the institutional, social and spiritual traditions that had been theirs in their own land. The new culture, in turn, influenced the larger culture, the culture of white people. One can single out exploitation, minstrelsy, racist practices, blatantly bad, and watered-down imitations of popular and emerging black art forms, especially musical idioms. Still, there is the area of the personal, localized, and influence of blues culture on white musicians apart from record companies, promoters, and agents where the younger musician is influenced and, in effect, being mentored by the Black musicians they admired took their cues from.  Harris makes a powerful argument based on a series of cherry-picked conceits to the exclusion of glaring contradictions. He speaks that the metaphysical essence of blues is feeling, emotion, the ability of the human voice to convey true experience, and yet he speaks in racial absolutes, denying the capacity of individual musicians, black and white, to transcend, mature, grow out of the imitative phase and achieve a true feeling, a true vision of the music they love. The case is that while self-righteous revisionist scolds like Harris is articulate will limit the range of blues to exclude all who are not black from having true blues authenticity, art does not sustain itself by remaining in a vacuum. No matter how righteous the music's argument belongs to, without the constant input from musicians attracted to it and performing it according to the narrative of their personal lives, the music ceases to grow. It shrivels up and dies and becomes only a relic, notable mostly for its distant and antiquated sound.

  We will admit without reservation, upfront and unconditionally, that blues and jazz are Black-American creations. It's important to keep that fact in mind. Still, the blues, being music, is something that catches the ear of the blues lover, regardless of race, and speaks to those people in profound ways, giving expression to perceptions, emotions, personal contradictions in ways that mere intellectual endeavor cannot; it is this music these folks come to love, and many aspire to play, to make their own and stamp with their own personality and twists and quirks. That is how art, any art, survives, grows, remains relevant enough for the born-again righteousness of Harris to reshuffle a less interesting set of arguments from LeRoi Jones' book "Blues People." 

There is the aspect that blues is something in which anyone one can play the game, an element that exists in any instance of art one thinks ought to be restricted to particular groups, but what really matters is less how many musicians have gotten in on the game as much as how many are still on the playing field over the years, with great tunes, memorable performances, slick licks, and most importantly, emotions that are real, emphatic, unmistakable. There is no music without real emotion and new inspiration from younger players bringing their own version of the wide and dispersed American narrative to the idiom. There is no art, and it dies, falls into irrelevancy, and is forgotten altogether.