DYNAMITE  BOUQUET - Guy  Grogan

Guy Grogan is an established presence on the alt-rock terrain, someone who confesses his sins without fashioning a persona of being either saint or sinner. For all the hurt , malice, lurid joy and occasional bits of humanity and kindness this fellow chooses to write songs about with his hook-driven genius, Grogan is the common guy, the everyman, the guy in the bar you see at the daily happy hour, or the dude you espy daily at the bus stop at the same time each instance, going somewhere, with things to do. His music conveys the stories of a regular Joe with tunes that are simple but melodic, guitars that rock but don’t bludgeon, lyrics that let it all hang out without creating earache .”My Own Way Out”, a medium rocker from his new album Dynamite Bouquet, commences with a killer power chords, is the testament of a man giving voice to a feeling that he’s trapped in a conspiracy he is only vaguely aware of:

hey you come down from there when you feel like you’ve made despair come true sometimes I don’t much care for me sometimes I decide to leave me be

Their pronouns change, from “you” to “I”, and there is the mystery of who Grogan’s is talking about; I’m in favor of thinking that he keeps his practice to everyday speech and uses the altering references as interchangeable ways of the narrator talking about himself. It feels natural, it feels un-strained, confused but not cluttered, startling in its brevity. With a voice residing somewhere between the nasal croon of Elvis Costello and the soulful braying of Tom Petty, his tunes are not guitar bashes alone, revealed in “River Like a Cry”, a ballad surmising the end of an affair that has gone deep to the bone, the moment of realization that any chance of reconciliation is passed , that all that remains for the parting couple is to

let it go with the river let it go like a cry you tell me when we will wither i tell you when we will die.

This does approach the bittersweet pleasures Costello composes, but where Costello lyrically extends beyond his established talent at poeticizing miserable experiences and giving listeners a collision of competing metaphors and similes(some brilliant, some not so good), Grogan’s spare evocations make the telling more vivid, more heartfelt, and there is the feeling this serves to create the underlying idea that life goes on, one pushes on , one is not done experiencing the joy and heartache that is their birthright.An intriguing songsmith, Grogan is providing an album’s worth of tunes in a variety of styles that sweetly and succinctly reveals his weaknesses and strengths and the hard-won humor a songwriter who remains in the trenches with the rest of us. Dynamite Bouquet stands apart from most others in the genre that is full of songwriters who make their music unlistenable, in large measure, by theatricality they bring to their emotions. Grogan is more in the Hemingway school, a man with the knack for the terse summation, the toughness of getting on with it. The feelings go deep and still, life goes on and still, Guy Grogan continues to rock it as hard as he needs to. He makes his  awkward  phrasing and his mulling equivocation over emotional hot    buttons whose loathsome pangs    don't abate into something endearing; this is the unique combination of a songwriter who tersely combines a worldview of permanent ambivalence with  a guitar rock that contrarily makes you feel that he'll  get over his agonies and conundrums stronger but wiser. Waiting for that too happen has often enough a sore point with artists who begin intriguingly as poets of post-college emotional shapelessness but, over time, evidence arrested development thematically as they grow older and release. 

For the time being, Groder's situation lures you in because of the compelling grind of his brand of guitar rock. Will he age into a new Neil Young, who has used his advanced age to bring out a subtler worldview while still producing some of the grungiest electric guitar of this and the last century,  or will Grogan be the newest 60-year-old teenager still moping about lost love decades after it happened? Stay tuned, and in the meantime enjoy this spikey set of condensed, 4/4 mood pieces.

Pause for the Cause of Writing Something that is Greater than What Your Ego Imagines

Imitating pretentious writers makes you, in turn, pretentious. An additional quality of ranting foolish eventually turns you into a fool. Some of you are thinking the obvious following that last sentence, "Well it's too late for you, jack," but hear me out,. That was the case today when I happened across a post on Medium from a fellow who insisted, more or less, that one must emulate the habits of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and never stop!  This would-be Beat is one of those scribblers who have the idea that one can create (and sustain) beauty with speed, sheer acceleration. Below is my response to him, less an effort to change his mind that it is an effort to allow air into the room. All that rapid perception can make things funky. This scribe, I should note, responded to a lengthy anti- Kerouac diatribe I posted. Diatribe it was, but I made an actual argument against the turning of JK into a paragon of anything concerning real literature. Our fellow here responded with this non-response "u mad bro?" So yes, I was a little irritated. 

Well, you have to stop sometimes so you can appreciate what the senses have given you as you go your way through the world . You have to stop in order to write about the need to pursue the seductive logic of never stopping . But you have to stop before you go forward, as the brain absorbs only so much ; you stop , you breathe, you think, you connect what has happened recently with the narrative of a life already recorded.This engages you with the world, truly, this is where the poetry comes from, not gushing hot lava adjectives and verbs while writing that the world is made more real by moving forward, with out apology, without pause or reflection, following the string where ever it leads. But this is not poetry and it is not lyricism. The writer in those times they stop agitating the gravel and take pause to reflect, meditate, consider the thingness of the world they’ve blazed through a little too quickly, there arises the sense that one forgets that they are a writer, the self-appointed priest of making things happen on the fly; the writing becomes about the world , the people, the places, the things that occupy the same space as you, the same patch of land your visiting. It becomes less about the writer, the seeker of knowledge attempting to gain knowledge through velocity , the impatient explorer more concerned with inflaming their senses rather than being genuinely curious about and teachable within the world. You have to stop , take a breath, create a language, a poetry, a prose style that convinces the reader that they’ve actually encountered something extraordinary in their travels through hill and dale, river and inlet, village and burg, that they’ve actually learned something they didn’t know before. Otherwise , I believe, nothing is revealed because nothing was learned and, despite all manner of ranting and such protests defending one’s unique view, that view is forgotten and another opportunity is lost to move a reader in ways you might not have expected.

The return of muscle tone

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON--Robert Nix

There was a time when it seemed that every other single musician and band coming over the radio and over the transom had pretty much scuttled guitars as the centerpiece of pop music , preferring cascading and eliding keyboards, pianos and synthesizers both, as the preferred means to make listeners that music was no longer about Chuck Berry or Bachman Turner Overdrive. Welcome to the mid seventies, when matters of melody became serious, grandiose, bands like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Kansas and even the power trio likes of Rush committing their resources to tricky time signatures,abrupt changes of tone and style, obligatory faux-orchestral atmospherics courtesy of the Moog and mini Moog synthesizers, and certainly, a surfeit of excessively earnest lyrics obsessed with sci fi themes or else wallowing in the shallow end of the pool of deep thought. Pretentious in other words. Not that pleasures were absent, though, as I had my share of record review rants proclaiming that rock and roll had grown up,matured, had become a “legitimate” art form, ready for the concert hall and the canon.Nothing stings like 20–20 hindsight, of course, and let us say that the music of many an art rocker had not traveled well into the 21st century, sunk by their own pretensions and, most damningly, by producing music that was all parts with no sum to add up to. Save for Zappa , King Crimson, and the blessedly wonderful song-emphasis of Peter Gabriel era Genesis, so much of the era’s classically -slanted music was a disorganized , bloated mess, all arrangements and no music you’d care to pay attention to.Robert Nix,  a multi-instrumentalist and composer besides, isn’t about to let the genre fade into pop music history with a reputation for grand-scale naivete . He brings impressive musical muscle, which is to say musical ideas to his new album Once in a Blue Moon ; Nix as composer has a superb grasp of the dissonant, the quarter phrase, the angular progression, the means where melody approaches the atonal to emphasize a lyrics message or mood, dense chords from guitars and a crucially compact compression of keyboard textures to heighten the mood of the lyrical ruminations. There is a sense of disruption in Nix’s music, the pacing is tricky and sufficiently abstracted, but there is a strong evidence here that the artist has studied contemporary theatrical musicals along the lines of Sweeney Todd ; Nix is not thematic , or as thematic, as the narratives that make their way to the proscenium , as his songs are stand-alone testimonials, but there is form and integration in his outlay, where his vocals, a bit thin and reedy but effectively talk -sung and multi-tracked, clash and reconcile with the contraction and release of the ever-active arrangements. The album moves forward, the music spirals, recoils and continually renews itself.  There is no lack of buzzing activity , there is not a moment when you get a sense of the composer offering up a bit of gussied up mood music so he might have a seat and congratulate himself for being serious. Nix keeps it hopping, as in a masterfully calculated track “I Will Not Go With The Flow”;cooly detached one moment that then evolves to matters suggesting a musical variation of cubism, a kind of sound that seems to unfold and reshape itself so the many sorts of nuances and attitudes of the tunes are exposed simultaneously, a personality arguing with itself.

Sometimes crazy is merely crazy

Too many books are called "unfilmable" as a matter of habit; each of us, I bet, can offer an example of a novel that" could not be adopted" that found a splendid movie interpreter. "An American Dream," though, is one of those books that truly does not lend itself well to what we regard as good moving making source material. This version was so redacted as something resembling a Saturday Night Live sketch rather than a vision of one's breakdown and journey into the psychic wilds. 

AAD was Mailer's best use of Lawrence's influences and his unique ideas about religious existentialism. It was a brooding, baroque and sensationalistic embrace of the irrational, the madness poet Allan Ginsberg declared that we must not hide, the intensely focused idea that the impulses beyond the Norm can actually deliver us, individually and collectively, from greater insanity that erodes our humanity, and worse, our masculinity by the repulsive inch. Crackpot theories of all sorts proposing extreme and unsubstantiated cures for the ailing psyche were resonating in Mailer's mind at the time he took on the endeavor to write An American Dream on deadline, a chapter a month for Esquire magazine, the goal is to write quickly for equally quick cash. Mailer took the challenge and never looked back, the result being what would be an utterly ridiculous novel saved only by the sublime and frenetic flights of language the author's fevered pace produced as each deadlined reared. It isn't surprising that Mailer had a few of his own, a spikey concoction took from Marx, Wilhelm Reich, Lawrence. It was a crime novel, a novel of metaphysical mulling, a tale of a spiritual quest, a black comedy, a confession, a serial about the dysfunctions of the wealthy.  The things that irritated readers in the novel--murder, sodomy, a battle with a black musician with a definite hoodlum style--are nonetheless presented with the frenetic brilliance of Mailer's prose, a rushing stream of continuous simile, metaphor, and allegory of a man in the throes of a breakdown that leaves a good amount of wreckage in his wake. At the same time, he pursues the impulse to learn how to be brave and love genuinely by extraordinary measures. 

The film, the skeletal and deadpan rendition of the admittedly lurid plot, gets none of Mailer's tone, nuance, or inclination precisely. This was Mailer's testing his theories about violence and transformation from "The White Negro" and what it revealed to Mailer, I believe, was that the kind of spiritual transformation through an embrace of an anti-social and psychotic definition of "courage" resulted in Mailer didn't expect, which caused Mailer to re-think his notions about the curative properties of his imagined road to genuine masculinity. It seems that the gulf between Saint and Psychotic was larger than he first thought, that the psychotic is in a state in which they remain psychotic and become a threat to themselves and the communities in which they live. 

Do the pure products of America go insane, as WC Williams has remarked? In any event, his next novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam," a cannily refurbished telling of Faulkner's short tale "The Bear," puts to men in the woods hunting pray with far too much firepower and reveals characters trying to make nature bow to their will and weapons, with a narrator, DJ, telling the tale in a surreal mix of idioms--disc jockey, black hipster, a southern baptist preacher, literary scholar--ranting on about God and men and penises and caca with no direct connection to anything outside nature if only to insist in a diffuse ramble that all returns to earth as waste. And the question in the title is answered only on the last page, but with no direct answer but this ."Hot damn! Vietnam". Do the pure products of America go insane? Mailer answered by imagining his notions of achieving masculinity through blood rites: as pure American products, we were in Vietnam because we had to be. We end up being the things we choose to become, with results that run afoul of our ideas of resulting benefits.

Samuel Beckett's Crackling Static

Playwright, novelist and poet Samuel Beckett , better than any other 20th century writer I've read, best expressed the pervasiveness of what one can refer to as the " existential stall". That is say that is the  the state at which one realizes precisely the redundant nature of their existence, the stuff of the everyday being reduced to activities that have gone beyond habit or ritual and slipped into the anonymous functions of organisms maneuvering out of organic necessity, without the philosophical solace of free will. Combined with that is the awareness his narrators have of the small set of rooms their biographies and emotional reservoirs inhabit, but yet even with such acute awareness, done so in fractured, cryptic, half coherent remarks and complaints against a scenery and set of responses that repeat themselves , reliable as brief train schedules, there is not the will, the imagination, the energy to break the chains and do something else all together.

  These elements combined, churning, burning, roiling with their unchanging content , results in a paralysis, the inability to transcend one's despair and ennui and create something new and dynamic for themselves. An old saw of existentialist thought, a notion detectable in even the more abstruse and gratingly opaque writings of Kierkegaard, Tillich, Sartre, and the lot, religious and atheist alike, is that life gains meaning through one's acceptance of the fact that purpose is not given to our breathing and ambulatory ways metaphysically, but only by an act  of creative commitment to a way of living, and and the taking responsibility for the consequences of choosing to live in such a self defined fashion.
 The discussions are lengthier than that in each and all existential authors worth discussing,but the essential notion is that there is an ethical dimension one must achieve with complete awareness of what the world is like, in situ. Achieving this requires work, though, and such work is the sort of thing that causes the proverbial realization of everything you thought you knew about yourself and the life that contains your existence is wrong. Beckett's characters only get half way there and prefer, it seems,the persecution of the hallow echo of their meaningless , repetitive acts than the true freedom that is the adventure of wandering into the truly unknown.

Self awareness in Beckett's world is not the same as free will. Beckett's world is the eternal state of the mind that is too stimulated to sleep and which will not be quieted by lullaby or even the mortal need to rest, shut down, physically and psychically recoup. "I Can't Go On, I Go On" was the title of a superb reader of Beckett's writing , and it crystallizes Beckett's theme of awareness, paralysis. One is weary unto death and wants to surrender and perhaps die , finally, of an exhaustion only the strongest of us can bear, and yet the subject pushes on, repeats the pattern, masters some version of cliche and self assurance to make the reentry into the endless game palatable, but soon enough the protests begin again, the complaints about the trap, the fragments of memory that hint at the happy time when all was whole and fluid, and the trauma that was the fall from grace that removed the salve of hope and purpose from a life and made into a hell of awareness of the sheer futility of pressing on and it's twin state, the futility of abandoning what one is doing over,  and over and over. Beckett's art is the artful display of people in purgatories of their own creating.

Cascando

1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you

This is a poem about being broken entirely, where the light of one's life is removed through death, divorce and the cruel metaphorical walls that comprise estrangement, a situation where the other side of the bed might as well another continent entirely. The implication here is death, an abortion, a miscarriage, strongly suggested by the anguishing yearning  of the first stanza. What I take away is the death of the child that was to be the demonstration of the union between a man and woman, a continuation of themselves into to the world and to extend the essence of the two of them into the future which, like many of us do in younger years, assumed would be endless and without limit. But there is interruption, a death, what had been seen before as the bed where love creates life and so ensures a future with an accompanying purpose now becomes the place where it ends ; hope, love, great pleasures experienced in the seeking of greater gratification and purpose are fragile and are collapsed . There is no reason to continue but one cannot stop, so existence becomes the oblong circle of infinite recollection, rage, regret, resignation, none of the elements illuminating anything in the narrator's life other than the moments leading up the fall.

This a lament that goes on forever in dreams one cannot change, a horror of torched land, trace feelings of now absent embrace, tenderness that grew hard as rock, intimacy that became distance, talk that became slogans, things repeated. There is the imagery of what was fruitful now gone barren, arid, what was full of life now bereft of spirit, animation. There are hints of blood, abortion, of falling in love when the sensation was new and suggestive of possibilities that could be fulfilled and renewed without end or resolution, but love that had cooled to mere affection and familiarity, a love that became habit and redundant rhetoric of convenience that rattled the nerves and deadened an already eviscerated soul with the crushing banality of the expression.

 One half asks and half answers their own questions, repudiate their own protests, stifle the roar of rage with a hard, gulping swallow. One wants to destroy the bounds that keeps this a rotating cycle of dread , one wants to walk away from the argument with oneself, that add space in the psyche where inflated sense of guilt and the wan giddiness of redemption and deliverance alternate in informing the nervous system that the war that rages in the center of one's emotional continuum is harsh,  unforgiving, ongoing,
 Beckett's dramas and his novels and his poems as well are resolutions denied, interrupted, a jabbering of frayed tongues uttering repetitive phrases and variations there of as the characters, the narrators, the damned search through images of the past  attempting to locate the precise moment things went wrong , awry, and life became a sequence of competing monologues that cannot , for all their sound and sharp recounting of people , places and things, stumble upon an idea , an inspiration that might avail them like wisdom and insight, This is Beckett's genius.

 This poem is nothing less than a man who has been  figuratively skinned alive by the collapse of his great love; there is moaning to the sky and beyond, a caterwaul to beyond the stars and perhaps to the ear of a God who does not intervene nor offer the intuited clue as to how to achieve closure and to garner the strength to press on with the remains of  one's life once the affair is cruelly concluded. Whether there is God who will do the impossible if he were sought or a God who is sadistic, silent and passive is not the point because all there is is silence and the elements that allow for growth are within, if one, no matter how bereaved and bemoaning , has it within himself to break free of the past they are chained to and dare to imagine a remainder of life that is new, unknown. 

album review: Bryan Deister turns a groove into a rut with "Spines of the Heart"

SPINES OF THE HEART--Bryan Deister

It’s a cinch that Bryan Deister worked hard on his recent release Spines of the Heart, as it seems this one-man wonder provided every sonic wash, each cradled chord, each vocal croon and cry, every earnest word, each dollop of solemn percussion on his own. There is much here to recommend his music to fans of the brooding likes of Radiohead, late-period Pink Floyd, and the post-Velvet Underground graveyard goth of John Cale. There is not much to recommend to consumers who prefer their traffic to move along rather than remain tonally static. Deister has worked hard, yes, but the range isn't as broad nor genre-bending as his publicity materials suggest with its mentions of the musician's classical training and background in jazz, rock and rhythm and blues and trance modes. Some genuine fusion of ideas might have occurred here.Deister feels deeply, or at least the mulling personas who embody the lyrics do, and there is nary a hint of joy or happiness to come away with. His music, clever in some instances, routinely trudging in others where the tone is downcast and which always seems to require the most plodding instrumental backdrop conceivable, is defeated, finally, by a monotony that results in very little in the way of variety. The experience is not unlike that of playing with one of those toys you find in museum gift shops, a flat plastic casing containing sand of different grades and weight and different colors that, when moved around and viewed with wide eyes and unflagging attention, offers a wondrous flow of sediment flowing in fluid motion to new layers, new striations of variously hued granules demonstrating what sedimentation means. Sadly, though, that is all it does, and what Deister, who we are told is trained in the disciplines of classical and jazz, not rising above the sedimentation, amazing as it might be, and revealing what else his musical garden might yield. For ninety minutes one does not feel they’ve ventured very far in the vehicle provided; one understands that the scenery and the narrative haven’t changed.It would have been a grand thing to break up the mood and the approach and give the listener more wrinkles in the otherwise smooth, if dingy blanket of music he created, along the lines of a truly crackerjack tune “Seven Eight” (referring to the song’s time signature), a jerky, Farfisa organ twist of angular cynicism that features a cool , low tech organ solo that collides,bumps and hopscotches over the jaggedly insistent. It’s the one instance where there is a sense that the narrator rises above morbid moping and like states of psychic status and attempts to re-contextualize his ’til then glum perspective. You have a sense of movement through the accursed weight of reflection, where music and words match and transform the world. Tension and release, a chance to breath faster, a moment when the ambient gloom gives away and something momentary occurs that brings us something that pulses like a genuine human response to otherwise overwhelming circumstances. I imagine there is more emotional variety and nuance in Deister’s experience and, indeed, more colors and shades and means to use them in his possession than what he allowed himself here.

CAPTAIN AMERICA:CIVIL WAR

Captain America : Civil Wars is a repetitive bore. Slow to get moving, and then it becomes a long, creaking fandango that alternates between sketchy conveyed expository dialogue and excessively choreographed fights ruined by a combination of MTV editing and a preponderance of seizure inducing camera work that jittered, jostled and in general neared the visual incoherence of a Transformers movie.And, for Christ sake, Tony Stark get even more Bruce Wayne-ish with newly revealed murdered parents issues. What desperate drag this was.Not that it was badly made, to be sure; CA:CW had the Marvel/House style that makes sure that matters of camera angles , cgi effects, fight scenes and editing are executed and presented in seamless fashion. There is a bland professionalism that has taken over Marvel Studios that are making their films stylistically indistinguishable from one another, less so, say, than the sort of factory-assembled cop shows that dominated 70s television.

 This is a shame, of course, because the Captain America tale on film has had a wonderful  arc on screen prior to the latest offering, beginning with the hero's origins in WW2, expanding splendidly in the first Avengers film, and evincing great potential for political intrigue with their plot borrowings from Three Days of the Condor, with the second CA film, Captain America:Winter Soldier. This more closely resembles a Saturday morning cartoon show in the vein of Animaniacs, where there are dozens of recognizable and more obscure pop culture personas running about in a varied states of frenzy and violent upheaval, only to each take a beat to deliver a quip, a joke, an ironic aside. humor blended with accelerated mayhem is Marvel's signature, but the glut of heroes fighting heroes, each with a polished repartee is too much of what used to be a good thing.

 The film seems like watching the last acts at Comedy Store amateur night, and at other times it comes across as characters auditioning for their own franchises. CA:CW seems only in service to set up the future of the Marvel Universe . Under-considered, alternately plodding and manic, hysterically talkative, jittery and jumbled as an action enterprise, this film is a self-distracting mess.