Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Flicks about licks

 (This appeared originally in the February, 2016 of  The San Diego Troubadour. 
 Reposted here with kind permission).

Fans of Hollywood movies concerning the trials and troublesome turns in the lives of gifted musicians, real and imagined, will doubtlessly note a curious habit among many of the movies attempting a cogent blend of music and moving image. What I’m thinking of in particular are those portraits of a singularly brilliant musician, a jazz improviser, who struggles to rise to the top of his game, a savant obsessed by his art at the sacrifice of all other things. Not especially well-read; insecure; socially awkward; manic depressive to a degree; and perhaps bedeviled by drug addiction, alcoholism, or some other inescapable self-destructive impulse, it becomes a story that you can anticipate the progress and resolution of before the second reel.

The musician has a series of good breaks, achieves success in finance and romance, and then, through an unlucky series of bad breaks that result, as often as not, from bad decisions and sheer selfishness, our genius player hits the skids and descends to the gruesome and grimy depths of incomprehensible demoralization. Hitting bottom, perhaps, whatever the reason, but this being the product of Hollywood myth-making, recovery and reconciliation is on the way. Our brilliant player climbs up the mountain a changed man, with humility and gratitude, returned to his art with a greater purpose. A happy ending, a Hollywood ending.
Against my better judgments I’ve watched and re-watched movies concerning daring musicians, both real and fictional, attracted by the assumption that a story about someone capable of making music that forces you to suspend your disbelief and spend time in that enticing sphere of pure joy and elation might be just as exciting as the sounds themselves. But where the music was often the hallowed “sound of surprise” that kept your attention, the tale of the musicians depicted on screen lack any such spontaneity. They were a clichéd hodgepodge rarely rising above the level of a soap opera. Where the music was lively, the fictionalized biographies were two-dimensional, utterly flat, and unconvincing in their attempts to move us. Music, something that we consider the invisible but persistent essence that gave life a pulse, a verve, a general massage of the senses, had become something akin to drab and irrelevant wallpaper to a string of clichés, mere cues for ham-faced depictions of convenient emoting. I doubted I was the only one who felt cheated by how Hollywood was treating the creators of vital music.

Young Man with a Horn, a 1951 film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring an unlikely combination of Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Danny Thomas gives us a tale of a deadbeat ne’er-do-well whose life is on a rudderless cruise, unmotivated until the main character, performed by Douglas, discovers that he has a knack for producing wild sounds with a trumpet. As such, he attracts attention, becomes popular, achieves fame and fortune and much acclaim, but he becomes a victim of his own success. Becoming insufferably self-centered and coming under the lash of vicious alcoholism, the young man falls apart. A particular scene highlights the young man, in a wildly melodramatic performance by Douglas, hitting bottom after he tries to play his trumpet and is unable to hit the high notes, producing only a muffled gargle of a sound. He tries several times again to get that golden high note—that piercing, clear sound at the highest end of the register that had been his trademark—but again there’s nothing but glottal choking.

Kirk Douglas, who always seemed to me to be on the verge of nervous collapse, is especially overheated in this sequence, collapsing in a slew of tears and whimpers, a man utterly defeated and hitting bottom. It comes down to the convenient solution of a good woman’s love and dedication and a humbling of oneself to the source of true happiness, the sharing of a musical gift for the joy of others rather than his own personal gain, which retrieves this sorry musician from the trash can of life. It is a cozy, comforting resolution to a life’s dilemma and utterly unsatisfying. The glory of improvisation was reduced to an analog for the young man’s egotism and self-seeking. I watched the film a number times for matters of pure style and to appreciate how splendidly unreal Kirk Douglas’ vein-popping histrionics were, but it was not about the music, it was merely an excuse for a morality tale whose insights were, at heart, pedestrian.

It wasn’t just a habit confined to jazz musicians, of course, as we can witness in the classic Elvis Presley movie Jailhouse Rock, released in 1957. This Richard Thorpe-directed effort is one of Elvis’ first films and is something of a guilty pleasure. Released from prison after serving an inexplicably short sentence for manslaughter, Vince Everett, an uneducated hick but oozing with a certain kind of slicked-haired sexuality, comes to the attention of a record promoter due to his knack for singing a tune and strumming a guitar. Fast forward, he gets a contract, has success, and is the heartthrob of a nation of bobby soxers. Vince, though, is uneducated and fantastically insecure, a man who knows not the world nor books but only his sense of not fitting in.

Early in the story line, a female record promoter takes him to a party filled with effete intellectuals smoking pipes and wearing owl frame glasses, drinking high balls, and listening to modern jazz. Introduced as a musician, Vince is asked what he thinks of the discordant, post-bebop jazz that’s been coming from the stereo. Here is Presley’s best bit of acting or of acting naturally; Vince stares at the woman who had asked him the question, baffled by the inscrutable jargon he’d been listening to, his eyes half cast and empty. He feels threatened that he’s being mocked. His response: “Lady, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Ashamed, Vince Everett leaves the party abruptly, his head slumped between his shoulder blades.Jailhouse Rock repeats this theme throughout its playing time. With each humiliation and success Vince becomes more self-centered, autocratic, and a real dick. This goes on until such time that at the peak of his success, after reneging on a bargain he made with a cellmate prior to his success, he gets punched in the throat. He cannot breathe, he cannot sing, everything looks like it’s going to hell in a handbasket until—wait for it—Vince realizes that he’s been a bastard and that those around him care for him and want to help him and that he needs to appreciate them and conduct himself as a man among men, not a king among subjects. His voice comes back, his career continues; everyone is happy. Fade to black, cue the commercial.
Jailhouse Rock has its naive virtues despite the hokey incidents that enable the dangerous carnality of rock ‘n’ roll is conquered by the civilizing effects of good manners and right living, as it contains a terrific sequence of Presley performing the title song. Presley is seen less like an intelligent being than as a force of nature. The sequence remains a joy to behold—Elvis on screen before his persona was lobotomized to be something safe, cuddly, cute, and ineffectual. It's worth noting that the sequence was choreographed by Presley, which makes us ponder how diverse a career the singer might have had if the unfortunate Col. Parker had been elsewhere. The film, though, follows the conventional thinking of how a musician’s story ought to be conveyed to the screen: the struggle from humble beginnings and hardships, the rise to the top from hard work, the fall from grace due to character defects or bad habits that reverse a hero’s fortunes, the recovery commencing when the artist admits his faults and is able again to pursue his life and provide the audience with a greeting-card bit of philosophy.

We can go to great lengths to list Hollywood films that show the lives of musicians as tawdry tragedies whereby the gifts that the players have been matched with the character’s genius for getting in their own way. Self-destruction is a default position. A Man Called Adam was released in 1966 and directed by Leo Penn. This brief précis on the IMDb website states: “A famous jazz trumpeter finds he is unable to cope with the problems of everyday life.” 1959’s The Gene Krupa Story from director Don Weiss is based on the true story of the jazz drummer and concentrates on the musician’s career decline from a marijuana bust. Unable to get work because of his drug arrest, he gets the chance to be a guest drummer at another band’s concert. Introduced to the unsuspecting audience, Krupa is mocked by the cynical crowd. Nervous, he flubs the opening of his solo, which draws more jeers and boos. Krupa, though, starts again at the urging of another drummer on the stage, and soon enough Krupa is wailing and flailing in full fury, getting the crowd on his side. Reputation restored, the miracle cure applies again. To say that this was a formula that Hollywood producers stuck to for decades is an understatement; the soap-operafication of musician-themed films influenced the collective opinion of what a performer’s lot is—that of quick riches and sudden tragedy resulting in occasional redemption but, more often, death. It was something akin to a strain of poetry criticism, which implied that poets of the confessional variety, those poets who wrote about embarrassingly personal issues and disorders, had to commit suicide or die in a loathsome manner in order to confirm a person’s bona fides as a poet.

Many earnest conversations about the art and the artist over several decades convinced me that otherwise intelligent people with impressive tastes in writers and music were of the opinion that being creative was nearly the same thing as a death wish. The artist, successful or not, had their narrative already mapped out. It was the fate of the artist, the poet, the bluesman, and the jazz innovator to have their creativity stunted earlier on. This wasn’t, though, a deranged view that floated only among those with high IQs and fancied that they had a grasp of the metaphysical dynamics of tragedy. Rather, the flawed concept spread into the popular culture. What had been a perversion of the romantic view of the gifted artist had become an easy means with which to get a reality TV show on the air.

Case in point: the loathsome example of the VH1 cable channel’s show Behind the Music, a reality program that tells the stories of pop and rock musicians, managing to concentrate the artists’ stories into 60 to 90 minutes, featuring the highlights and the low blows, the success, the ego battles, divorces, deaths, lawsuits, renewed success, or the continued lingering in pop culture limbo. The criteria, of course, was to expose the musician’s clay feet and how easily they could be shattered. Old footage, interviews with band members, producers, divorced spouses, and high school friends who wanted something first-hand to report about marginal pop music acts decades beyond their five minutes in the sun pushed the idea that music, above all else, mattered most of all to the background, even out the back and into the alley of anyone’s concern.
Behind the Music spotlighted has-beens from across the pop spectrum, whether it was Madonna, Usher, DMX, Ricky Martin, Donnie and Marie, REM, and KC and the Sunshine Band, the idea being that style of music, choice of dress, sexual preference, and the sort of drugs of you did or didn’t do had no sway over the quality of life you’d have as a musician lucky enough to experience financial success and popularity. It was implied that dark things were going to happen; they were unavoidable. The same demons that visited the fictional young man with a horn pestered the insecure Vince Everett and added a drug charge to Gene Krupa’s resume will indeed visit them with a custom-made batch of tough luck and bad breaks. I sometimes wish that this notion of the genius musician being fated for awful things would have evaporated long ago and that we could henceforth do justice to the artists and the music they create. This is not the case, though; I was just a bit despairing to learn that Behind the Music, which first aired in 1997 and is still on the air, is making a mess of the stories and earning a profit while doing so.

Was there a way around what seemed like an intractable impulse to sensationalize the lives of musicians, real and imagined, when they are brought to the screen, theatre, or television? What if an acclaimed director noted for his counterintuitive approach to assembling a narrative arc in films were to take interest in an actual self-destructive music genius? Wondering how a filmmaker would take on the assignment of making a compelling film of someone whose biography appears to fulfill the clichéd formula and avoid the easy way out of the plot complications is a question worth asking. This is where Clint Eastwood meets Charlie “Bird” Parker.

Much of the inspiration that helped elevate Eastwood’s 1988 Parker biopic, Bird, comes from smart choices in the treatment of the material, with a good amount of the credit going to the Joel Oliansky’s circumspect script. The screenplay doesn’t sensationalize Parker’s weakness for alcohol and heroin. What emerges instead is a fuller picture of a man wrestling with both his virtues and his vices. Eastwood’s direction maintains equipoise, walking the line between the sensational and the sentimental with impressive agility. The final result is both a fitting tribute to and power of Charlie Parker’s talent and a compelling portrait of a gifted man creating something beautiful despite great personal and social hardships. The basic story of Parker is well known: a young black jazz saxophone player makes the rounds and pays dues in myriad jazz circles and societies, finds himself impatient with the way the music had been played from a generation before his, and is eager to find other musicians with whom he can explore new ideas and techniques of improvising, thus creating different kinds of harmony and reconfiguring old song structures to provide a basis for increasingly complex and accelerated methods of soloing. 

He meets like-minded visionaries and, to be sure, a new music—bebop—comes from the combined talents of Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Red Rodney. Quite unlike the host of other jazz-themed movie narratives, Eastwood focuses on Bird with the music in the forefront. This allows the camera to linger a bit on a live performance and present the preternatural fluidity and pace of Parker’s spontaneous compositions to command the audience’s focus. The legendary problems with drug addiction and the consequential inconsistency of Parker’s personal life—missed gigs, infidelities, shirking of obligations to business arrangements and to those closest to him—handily avoid the kind of countdown effect of past biopics that signify the artist’s deteriorating state. Rather, the personal disasters are less a device to forward the plot than they are simply a part of the loosely woven fabric of Charlie Parker’s convoluted life. Parker was a literate man who has blessed a large talent and cursed with large appetites. Forest Whittaker’s performance is a subtle, understanding interpretation of an amiable musician who an intriguing web of contradictions that come undone; charismatic, exasperating, brilliant, and unreliable. What is compelling about Whittaker’s performance and the way Eastwood handled the story is that Parker reminds you of someone most of us know from our own lives, a real person who has the best of intentions but who cannot be depended upon due to problems of drugs or other mental quirks. This Bird is not a cartoon depiction of a smack-crazed hepcat looking for crazy kicks; he is a complex, fully realized character, more human than we’ve ever seen him before. That makes Charlie Parker more relatable and, I think, makes the audience feel the tragedy and loss of drug addiction even more deeply.

Eastwood has shown a genius for the ways the events in his films are paced and how the narrative events are layered over one another with the emphasis, stylistically, is the textures and tone of a story as it’s revealed, not the otherwise pedestrian approach of cause and effect. Mostly, though, it is not a matter for Eastwood to hit all the marks, to land exactly, to mix the parlance and all the chord changes with a metronome’s exactitude. A jazz lover and pianist himself (Eastwood composed the soundtrack for his 2008 film Grand Torino), there is a jazz-time feel to the way the film unfolds. Strategic points of narrative and editing strongly create the sense of a jazz soloist being in the moment, anticipating being on the beat, behind the beat, in front of the beat, and alternating among the three aspects of time-keeping, which reveals what’s occurring in a fuller, richer context. Instead of being just about the skill of the soloist in a clinical display of riffs, we have instead spaces, color, and suggestions of emotions more varied and subtler than mere virtuosity can give us.

Bird, though, is not a perfect film. It contains transitional devices that seem contrived—a flying cymbal somehow became the repeated image that mechanically cued the flashback sequences—but it is a revelation in what good a good filmmaker if there are sufficient levels of empathy with the subject matter and the music that was made. I had hoped in 1988 that Eastwood’s film would raise the bar on future musician-centered movies and that the old way of telling these stories would be cast aside. Audiences love tragedy, though, and the musician-as-fallen-angel paradigm remains with us in force. There is hope, however, a glimmer that the treatment of real musician’s stories can change at least some things.

Ray, the 2004 tour-de-force telling of the story of Ray Charles, deftly directed by Taylor Hackford, highlights a singular performance by Jamie Fox as the blind singer/pianist. Charles, we know, was a man who overcame his adversity—racism, blindness, anxiety, and the like—who went on to have a long and brilliant career. It was a hit, a big one. Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for best actor. It seems to me that moviegoers are up for musical heroes on the screen who don’t kill themselves.

Saturday, February 6, 2016

BOWIE: genius as thief



I remember a caffeine-fueled bull session in the Mesa College Cafeteria in the early to mid-Seventies when I offered to Steve Esmedina, a Bowie partisan, that the future Thin White Duke hadn't had an original musical idea so far in his career. Blubbo, his preferred endearment, didn't argue the point, stating smartly that what's fascinating , exciting , worth talking about in hipster circles and beyond was his particular genius as a synthesizer of genres and emerging trends and taking command of the materials like any true artist would, deconstructing, reshaping, fusing styles and sensibilities together into new kinds of sounds, the influences intact and vital-- Broadway musicals, hard rock, funk and disco grooves, experimental electronics, William Burroughs and Bertolt Brecht--while having Bowie's characteristic imprint on it all. My smart ass assertion was false from the start, since what David Bowie was creating fusion music in the truest sense of what "fusion" is, taking different elements together and coming up with something new, previously unseen or unheard. I could go for the obvious Miles Davis comparison that's lurking in the wings of this career praise, but instead I'll stay with the deservedly much-discussed element of style and fashion in the late artist's work and say that he was one of those creatures radiating the personality that could try on any outlandish article of fashion from any designer's rack and wind up owning the style, making it his; something of great value was added when he liked a style and wanted to work with it. 

The famous quote attributed to Ritchie Blackmore about accusations that he stole guitar riffs from black American blues artists that "the amateur borrows, the professional steals" is instructive. The amateur treats what they've borrowed with too much gentleness and respect, as though they might drop the expensive China they've dared lay a finger on. The results are a species of gutless pretentiousness that glutted an awful lot of art rock in the post -Sgt.Pepper years, music by those who hadn't an idea what they were doing nor the imagination (or nerve)  to pretends they did. The thief likes something and just takes it without permission, absorbs into his or her being until it becomes part of their nervous system , adding their own licks, reshuffling the influx of music styles heard , assimilated, until there is a sound where constituent parts of rock drums, jazz keyboards, atonal guitar skronk, horn funk and Euro serial music emerges, a sound that hadn't roamed over the airwaves or blasted the clubs and concert halls of until the moment when the Thief, the absconder of musical forms, decides that he or she is finished in the creation and releases into the world, fresh, loud, moving as no music before it.

This is what Bowie had done, loving art enough to abuse the formalisms that defined the length and limitations of a genre and make them do more than most had assumed possible. We are living in a world of music that has been formed in large measure by Bowie's decades-long search for new music he wanted to work with. This what David Bowie did. His contribution was immense, and his loss is irreplaceable.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

"HAIL CAESAR! ", a movie about Hollywood Endings




The Brothers Coen, writer/ directors Joel and Ethan, are smart guys in love with Hollywood movies, the people who make them, actors, directors and studio executives and assortment of tradesmen, call girls, corrupt cops, sycophants, idiots , fools and intellectual flyweights who inhabit this world of eccentric denizens. These are creatures managing to create the magic and myth making that has kept American enthralled sitting in dark theaters for decades, excited and inspired by images and tales that taught generations how to know right from wrong, how to love, how to be brave, when to love, when to cry, how to pick yourself up and face the new day with a smile and humming spry song as they walk with great purpose into an endless series of serene sunsets and hopeful sunrises. We know this as "The Hollywood Ending".

Hollywood producers required  endings encouraging  audiences to wallow in the fantasy of easy Happiness at the end of every critical moment , to return again, buy more tickets, eat more popcorn , and invest  further on a collective consciousness embedded by lights and shadows flashing across a silver -grey screen. Joe and Ethan Coen are all about Hollywood endings, but what in a turn in a career noted for quirk, screwball antics, unexpected departures from developed themes and genre expectations, they've made a splendid new film about Hollywood endings, Hail Caesar! Eddie Mannix, a studio executive for Capitol Pictures who heads a department that names him the head of "Physical Production", a position that essentially makes a him the studio's "fixer" who keeps the potentially embarrassing details of the lives of their stars out of the newspapers.

The movies are successful because of the fantasies they contain, and the actors are part of that concoction as well. Only the names the studio has given them and the back stories publicists concocted for them are allowed for public consumption, and it's Mannix's task to keep quirks, unacceptable politics and sexual preferences, alcoholism , drug addiction, religious deviation, safely sequestered far from the public view. You get the idea; in this period, set in the late forties-early fifties in the waning years of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Movies Are American , and the Actors Are Americans. One loose thread can make this whole garment fall apart.Eddie Mannix's job is to keep things stashed where they need to be, to make problems go away, to keep the production line humming right along.

Sometimes it seems too much even for his broad shoulders, starting when the star of this religious epic in production "Hail Caesar! The Story of the Christ" is kidnapped . Mannix gets on the case of finding the missing star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), whom he suspects of going off on a bender. Whitlock, still in his Roman soldier costume, awakes from a drugged stupor , finding himself secreted in a regal beach house in Malibu perched on a rocky crag on the shore line, where he shortly meets a room full of chain smoking Marxists, actually screen writers disillusioned with Hollywood when they didn't get rich from the successful movies they wrote, seduce the shallow Whitlock with the rudiments of Dialectical Materialism and how he, a victim of The System no less than the common man on the street , can participate in his own taking and help turn the Studio's energies against itself and cause the whole enterprise to collapse. Whitlock is the not the most critical of thinkers and soaks up the Marxist cant easily. Would you like to help free the common man on the street he's asked. Baird pronounces that he's all for the little guy and that he'll ago along. Moments after he becomes a freshly anointed Communists committed to world revolution, Whitlock goes for what he knows, asserting that he ought to get a cut of the ransom from his own kidnapping.

What follows is a kind of shaggy dog story that only the Coen Brothers seem capable doing consistently well, the tale where one nettlesome situation is compounded by other pitfalls, booby traps, and situational snafus having no apparent end. Mannix, a squared jawed, forthright, dedicated man who wants harmony and and benign order in the manufacture of images, has more than the Whitlock imbroglio to deal. 


The things that go wrong resemble nothing so much as a chain collision, a bunch of small things that add to an oppressive weight: a star of Esther Williams aquatic ballet fantasies stops a scene being shot and off camera has trouble pulling off her mermaid costume because she is pregnant and unmarried. Mannix 's job is to get her married and legitimize the unborn child and have a story the public will accept. Elsewhere, a high society movie under production has no leading man with either acting chops or elegance to fill the a crucial role. Mannix is ordered to bring in an amiable and earnest cowboy star to fill the role. The problem, of course, is that the young man can't act and his drawl, sweet as it sounds, is intractable. The director , a man of high manners and worldly in ways more than could be openly discussed or depicted in the Golden Age films, tries to get the suddenly dark suited hick to enter a party, walk over to a couch when beckoned by a young ingenue and to reply to her with a simple response. This winds up with the director trying to give the uncomfortable cowboy acting lessons, face to face, trying to get the poor man to change the way to become more stylized in facial expression and vocal cadence. Each time the cowboy actor fails , the frustration increasing , the clash of culture and lifestyle providing perfecting comedy tension. The director comes to Mannix to complain, but Eddie lays down the law saying that the decision comes from the studio owners and says the director has to make good with a bad fit for the role. The director acquiesces and leaves, but Mallick wonders whether this will work at all.


The pile up continues through the film, one thing after the other, each threatening to bring down the tent. The Coen Brothers have a sure touch in the way in the way sub plots are introduced, resolved or handled, and the way they use devices to get to ideas that other wise wouldn't fit the main story line quite so neatly. This being a film about a movie about movies being made and the illusions being created, it was an inspiration for them to have a number of scenes that were a review of bits of film being edited, a cogent way to lampoon classic Hollywood genres quickly and surely. In the "Hail Caesar" sequence, there is a glorious shot of clouds back-lit with Maxfield Parrish-style sunlight, everything celestial and heavenly, but suddenly there is a card that appears reading 'CREATOR TO BE SHOT" to single that the image that follows is still pending. It's a wonderful blending of two themes the movie introduces, the first in Mannix, a religious who goes to confession , it seems, at least once a day, who prays the rosary over the problems he has to fix, with that of the apparently atheist Communist cell of screenwriters who fancy they have discovered the Science of History and who dedicate themselves to solving the ills of the world through more drastic means. 

Intriguing as well is a preview of a musical under production, a bar full of sailors who , watching the girls leave at closing time and who are going to sea for eight months, begin to moan and groan that they "won't see no dames" where they will be. This turns into a song and then an athletic dance sequence, male sailors, in full whites, dancing with other male sailors, vaguely hinting as while singing about about everything they can do with each other , but that it will be different because there won't be no dames. It is a fun,well rendered dance number, with barely contained homophobia at the root of it. It's a nice reference and tribute, I suspect, to the legacy of closeted gay writers,directors actors and actresses that worked in Hollywood for decades, adding the brilliantly coded stylistics from the diverse elements of gay culture, a monumental contribution to the art of the Hollywood movie.

Hail Caesar! is a shaggy dog story , of course, quirky , elegant, slap stick, stammering, screwball and acidly satiric at various turns of plots and subplots. Joel and Ethan Coen thrive on going against expectation , with an uncanny sense of timing of when to do so. They are adept of getting you hooked on a notions being played out on the screen and then interrupting it with zany intrusions that are their subversive way of telling us that the movie makers are only telling stories that are supported by an audiences willingness to stop arguing long enough with the ill-logic of movie's premise and enjoy the brief respite a good yarn avails us to.

The point of a shaggy dog stories is that there are not points, that once a story begins and proceeds through related incident and complication as new locals and characters of all sorts are introduced over the course of the fictional journey, one expects a great punch line, a profound moral, illustration of life - affirming platitudes, or some horrible, inevitable tragedy; shaggy dog stories aren't like that though. The end of them are usually some small pun for which the build up was more intricate than it needed to be, but that's the point. Everything winds up where it's supposed to be by forces subtler and more incidental than we can imagine. 

What the subtle forces maybe are unknown at any given point , and the Coen Brothers don't speak to that. They make movies, though, that have us laughing and scratching our heads at the same time, evidence of genius in my view. Hail Caesar! is a funny, busy, puzzling and literate screwball comedy, compelling in it's engrossing mixture of sweetness and cynicism. Very fine stuff indeed!

Friday, January 29, 2016

Nothing to say about nothing at all



Elise Partridge’s sparse poem “Chemo Side Effects: Memory” , is a telling verse of someone trying to remember the precise word to describe the slightest detail of the slightest thing and feeling as a result the mild dread that a part of themselves has gone away, vanished as would nameless leaves in a stream rushing toward a storm drain. Her language is crisp, brittle, but there is a power in the skeletal telling that more robust rhetoric would merely have blunted with their compounded comparisons; Partridge has something here akin to an artist sketch pad, getting the essence of a situation, in this case a memory lapse and a growing alarm, in a few confident strokes. It is, perhaps, a skill garnered from years of writing verse with the linguistic cleverness and gusto younger writers feel they need to do, to transfer their book reading into the tight corners of their as yet unexplored lives. Partridge’s poem here reads like someone who knows the world they have defined, formed, created to their satisfaction; the task of this poem is to observe the poet finding her place in the world, to remember the names she had given the animals, the places, the things of her life.What we observe, of course, is something like a comedy, where the protagonist is frustrated in their task and gropes about the clutter, real and recollected, in hopes that the object, the word she wanted appears suddenly, magically, like a bright, shiny coin. It’s a touching sight to imagine, not without humor: Where is the word I want?

Groping.
in the thicket,
about to pinch the
dangling
berry, my fingerpads
close on
air.
I can hear it
scrabbling like a squirrel
on the oak’s far side.
Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean
your singular flare,
blaze
your  topaz in the mind’s blank.
Thinking, remembering, the pleasure of the poet, the reader, the talker of long phone calls and timeless coffee chats, the effortless act of bringing together experience, reading, emotion into new forms and communicating new ways of witnessing the world in the community of one’s imperfect compatriots, is now work, labor, Something that was always at the ready in the notated folds of one’s mind is now missing or renamed, misplaced somehow in the archives of one’s interior life. One’s brain has become an overstuffed closet where all manner of incident, sorrow, joy, growth, frustration has fallen out of their boxes and now overlap one another in an avalanche of obscuring imagery. But there is bravery inspire of this, the sort of reaction to fear we don’t speak of that often, that of making the brain behave as we think it should, however in vain our efforts seem to be. Partridge gropes for that thing she cannot name nor tell you what it means; this is a search for the Golden Fleece, the Gold Urn, the unnamed thing whose connection to a supposed metaphysical order, would reconnect the searcher to their path, the point they were trying to make, the directions they were trying to give, the emotion they were attempting to express. This is Calvinism on the intimate scale, the thinking that if we continue the search and beseech the elements with urgent humility, magic realism will take hold and what is causing pain and anguish is massaged out of countenance.

I could always pull the gift
from the lucky-dip barrel;
scoop the right jewel
from my dragon’s trove….
Now I flail,
the wrong item creaks up
on the mental dumbwaiter.
No use—
it’s turning
out of sight,
a bicycle down a
Venetian alley—
I clatter after, only to find
gondolas bobbing in sunny silence,
a pigeon mumbling something
I just can’t catch.

There is among other elements a dream quality to Partridge’s poem, a flickering tableau that seems to shake, vibrate and spin the harder the dreamer tries to slow the activity and locate a center of their thoughts. This has the effect of picking up a thick, large format magazine and concentrating on the fleeting images and text while they speed by as you fan through the pages as you would a deck of cards. The poem goes from being a stuttering, hesitating description of stymied intellectualizing and evokes something larger, quietly horrifying as one accepts the fact that everything runs down and everything gets lost and that everything, at the end of their use, are isolated . The last stanza, with its image of things and meanings being just out of reach, the “pigeon mumbling something / I just can’t catch…” is reminiscent of the kinds of dreams, the melancholic fabulation of our lives that takes place after we drift into the thorny wilds of napping, where we are young and searching for answers and yet burdened with several decades of memories and experience; we ask the strangely familiar things in our dream state presence who we are and the name of the place we stand, but the characters, whether family or, in a tip to Lewis Carroll it seems, pigeons who can’t clear their throats and speak clearly, all with hold the information, they are mute. 

The poet’s tone, calm and vaguely bemused, and her language and phrasing, which is elliptical yet precise, musical yet aware of how silence and pauses can mold cadence and provide the power of to the bittersweet nuance of Partridge’s punch lines, work splendidly toward creating a dread just under the calm surface. But she struggles on, soldiers on, and realizes that what she is doing isn’t a destination at all, but a journey; she responds to the blockade by writing a poem that is made of the things that she came across in her determined search for that precise word that would have nailed what she had initially started out to say. She had taken a detour and wrote a narrative, another chapter in a story she is done yet done with.While Partridge’s narrator gropes for the word and, metaphorically, attempts to get her footing, we have a sense of someone climbing a sheer cliff; the suspense becomes less than the original task will be fulfilled than it is by what force of will and ingenuity can this annoying torture be overcome with some kind of grace. There is an anticipation that makes you root for the hero who must suddenly contend with a mountain, of a sort, that keeps from completing a thought.

There’s an understandable desire to have the poem speak to us in full sentences, but there is something to be said for half-sentences and the barely articulated; in a far less grim comparison, the poem reminds me of a police procedural in which we see the detectives looking at a bulletin board full of snap shots of the victims and the suspects, newspaper clippings, Photostats of canceled checks, seemingly random things linked together with circles, arrows and yellow post-it notes giving us bits of a linking narration. What intrigues in that image, as in the poem, are those key items that are missing? In this instance, there what I feel an intensive effort to go back to the moment, the very instance, when her idea, the notion she was about to speak, eludes her ready grasp and she does a quick mental rummage of the memory, rummaging clumsily among the associations that intrude on her path for right term for an idea she has likely already forgotten.

A large part of why this poem appeals to me is because it creates the idea that as she comes across an image of her past , the contexts and sensations associated with it announce them announce themselves like emphasized photo captions. At some point she is off her determined search altogether and finds herself instead following associative string of personal icons and finds herself entranced, perhaps, but the murmur of the descriptive words, presenting themselves in a what it less a stream of conscious than it is a rough, fast ride on the rapids. 

The narrative that forms is piecemeal, seemingly related, people, places, things and the reflexive grasping for parts of the anatomy twirled and twined and otherwise spun together in a rush of sensation that reveals nothing, finally, other than all the compartmentalized detritus we have organized and placed in the mind’s cold storage easily enough becomes chaos and clutter again with the right provocation. Partridge’s intention, I think, is not create meaning or provide a comfortable lesson to be derived, but rather the sensation of an experience that, by definition, defies language’s ability to fully express.There is much here to discuss , I think, but I will say that I am in awe at how sharp a scene Elise Partridge has drawn with such a superb word selection and construction of phrases. There is modern jazz here, Miles Davis/Chet Baker, confident masters of their craft who know when to leave spaces, silences, who know how to build toward surprise.