Bland Panther

It's advisable to not read film reviews beyond the headlines if even that, prior to buying a ticket and waiting for the lights to dim; being delighted or disappointed with a film after walking into the theater with merely reasonable expectations--rather than desires jacked up and exceeding sanity with big media hype. Like a film, hate it, or give a slight, impassive shrug. the experience doesn't feel like you've been manipulated, pavloved so to speak, into craving a sweet and worthless piece of pop culture hype. And if you loathe the thing you've viewed, you are at least allowed to walk away from the theater feeling only disappointed and not betrayed by a noxious cabal of scheming film critics. And so, let me say that Black Panther, a new Marvel release presently annihilating competing films at the box office and the recipient of ludicrous amounts of praiseworthy hyperbole, gets a shrug of the shoulders, a rock solid "meh", a half-nod, a quick exit to the dustbin of memory. So much is read into this film being a harbinger of a new social movement, a religious event, an event signaling the movement of history's tectonic plates that it would seem apparent that what we have, among other undisclosed symptoms, is the jargon-ated babble of movie critics desiring to effective social agents and diagnosticians of the dialectic.

 They don't want to be movie critics, they want to be public intellectuals, they want to be taken seriously. A couple of things at work here, the first being that I, comic reader and superhero movie fan among many other high and low culture obsessions, have become a bit bored with the formula Marvel is putting forth. While the movie, as with all their product, is a technical marvel and moves along gracefully, the narrative, the emotional connections, the dramatized philosophies argued herein, do not rise above what's come before in Marvel's increasingly crowded gallery. Yes, they do try to address matters of race and privilege, but the context here is too ridiculous and "safe" for any urgency to get across besides obvious points for the plot to turn. DCU got it right in Man of Steel in which the catastrophic release of unchecked superpower destroys the city where the combat took place, all in the name of two causes that had well-articulated, if too convenient rationales. The cardboard patriotism of Captain America, in the MCU, is transferred to the amazingly un-charismatic nationalism of Prince T'Challa /Black Panther. And so, it goes.

Quite despite the claims that BP is a game changer or brings things to the next level so far as their connected universe goes, I found it a bit tedious, albeit a bright, shiny, noisy kind of tedium. For whatever reason, there is a herd mentality among film critics when it comes to certain motion pictures, and what has been written and said about Black Panther so far regarding judging its value as a distinct, different and arguably inspired bit of filmmaking loses intellectual rigor and floats too easily to the helium heights of hyperbole. It begins to resemble Resurrection theology more than anything else; that it's being argued that a fantasy epic re-frames, redirects and clarifies the discussion of and policy decisions about what seems intractable evils in our society underscores how pathetic we've become. A Marvel motion fantasy gets credit for clarifying and grounding our discussion of racial injustice and violence while Kathy Bigelow’s fact-based Detroit, an unflinching recreation of the causes and conditions behind the worst race riot in American history, is given a brief flurry of positive reviews and then quickly shuffled out of the spotlight. That ought to have been the movie, of all movies, that would have sparked a brutally frank discussion of the pathetic state of race relations in this country. But it wasn't.  This is pathetic, grimly pathetic. We cannot even pretend that we're going to talk about race in this country unless it's framed by a glitzy and shallow fantasy. With appropriate respect to Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, who ably moves the movie through a script that suffers from attention deficit--the story hopscotches around locations in real- time parallel developments and an over-reliance on flashbacks, this project waddles when it should run, races at times when it needs to resonate, overstays in expository scenes that cry out for more efficient writing. 

TRUE BUS RIDE (a sketch)

This a goddamned fact, Jack: 

This fellow was on the bus every morning when I was working five days a week, morning rush hour when the vehicle was a sardine can of the unbathed and over perfumed , a combination of cell phone yammers and psychotic silences. 

This fellow's shtick was to find someone who was new on the daily journey, may be a visitor, and he would start talking about himself and what a cool door prize he happens to be.

 The stupidest thing he uttered was that he could sing opera in 5 languages, Italian, French, Russian,et al. His victim looked at him and asked, naturally if he could actually speak those languages. He said,but he could sing opera roles in the alien tongues. 

So you sing phonetically, the visitor asserted.
 No, he said, I sing opera in five languages. 
Do you understand the dialogue you're singinG? was the passenger's next question. 

This fellow's jaunty cap suddenly resembled a brick that had been thrown at him and was wedged by a dent in his thick skull. No, he said, and I don't have to . So you sing phonetically without knowing what you're singing about, the passenger summarized. No, that is not at all , said the fellow, annoyed and flustered, it's something else all together. 

For you,perhaps, said the passenger, but no matter, this is my stop. Bye bye. 

The fellow looked off into the distance , as far he could through the bus windshield. Nothing but dark clouds, power lines and traffic lights greeted his vision,

HOW TO GLOW , a poem by Dean Young

"How to Glow",a poem by Dean Young, seems willfully chaotic  at first reading, but it does have a rhythm and vibrant sense of starting off with one proposition and concluding with an end , a result, that one did not expect. The chaos were are getting  are an overload of the senses, some quirky half sleep where the unfiltered merging of audiol, visual and tactile sensations bark at one another for the attention of the affected consciousness; it makes for for ugly music and crude ,loud theater.  Each of the concrete things that poet Dean Young mentions seem find a connection with death ; all things lead to demise here, peaceful, painful, glorious, infamous, mundane. That which we busy ourselves with in order to adhere to a convenient existentialist tenet that our lives have meaning drawn from only the decisions we make and our commitment to live by the results of our projects has , as well, a parallel function, to distract us from obsessing from that which we know is inevitable. 

Young, who I understand was once in need of a heart transplant and was fortunate enough to receive one, is fatalistic in this poem, but not without being playful as he inspects the dead ends of the propositions and ideas that are initially championed. One might despair and declare that the poem means to tell us that what we do and dream and build is all for nought  Each endeavor results in a metaphorical dustbin ; I sense something else, hinted at in the title; if you want to glow, to seem holy and spiritual, shine at what you do, aspire and achieve. Go forth and do good works. Appreciate the abyss, step away from it and return to the business of being alive, in this moment.

A fine harmonica solo from John Popper

The velocity of Jon Popper's quicksilver harmonica bluster remains, for me, just that, harmonica bluster, a machine gun's impression of someone trying to spit up a hairball. This is not to say that Popper and his   band Blues Traveler haven't distracted and surprised me with energy and innovation in their capacity as a "jam band." Or that Popper himself hasn't been able to control his conspicuous ability to step on the gas at will on that small instrument and performed turns in the spotlight that made me envious of his moment and how well he used it. But sum total, Popper is not my favorite harmonica player, and he isn't likely to ascend in my estimation. Often, harmonica improvisations resemble not so many extensions of what you can do with diatonic instruments as it does someone revving their engine after midnight to get a charge in their battery. You would swear some city noise abatement ordinances were being violated. Jon Popper is a unique harmonica player with impressive speed and verve, but he is not a good blues player. He garbles the low end, sounding more asthmatic than bracing. Predictably, he only says comfortable on the high notes, where his accuracy and intonation improve dramatically. 

Even there, he does really bring the low, middle, and high registers together; these are some sorry transitions. He is, on the other hand, an excellent blues singer, based on this sample. To be fair, though, this video is some years old, and it seems that Popper has learned something about blues phrasing, as in his recording of "Last Night" with Johnny Winter. He allows space to sculpt his solo. His fleet runs on the high end are not as frantic; they are shot, sharp bursts, and dead on target. It is a wonderfully chilling sound. Popper's low-end execution is not the best - when he plays blues, he often sounds like he's unsure where the second, third or fourth notes are. He doesn't come to them with the intuitive ease he shows with his high register riffing. Even so, his high-end escapades don't connect with anything going around him, or just barely, if at all. The solo is a mess. But he does great stuff on the Johnny Winter track--there are years between the recordings, and what Popper does throughout the improvisation is show us that he figured out how to play blues in his own style, with his signature runs, and still have it be blues. Toward the end of the solo, he gives us a masterful flurry of notes that speed by yet maintains a blues cadence. He knows what he has to do. So there is hope for this man to get his share of blues credibility.

The withering rascal

Elvis Costello did some fine work after  the triumph of  Imperial Bedroom,  most notably with  Spike and especially with When I was Cruel.  The songwriter was nearly as strong as anything he’s done before ,although it wouldn’t be a long wait for what we could call the decline of Costello’s quality,  both in his craft and his conviction toward the material. It merits saying that Costello's best writing spell came early on in that marvelous string of albums he had, an extended, multipart set of rants of genuine anger, rage, self-pity. Murderous self-centeredness was his main concern, and he had a peculiar genius for making it profound, or at least evocative, vaguely, of one's own set of unmentionable quantities of explosive self-regard.

 He was close to how we understand the world punk to mean as a personality type, not a musical style one dons as if it were an overcoat or comfy pajamas. Rather, he was a punk in bang never satisfied, feeling continually and universally betrayed. What made him seductive to an audience, seemingly equal parts men and women, was his ability to manage and modulate the degrees of bile he'd wish to spill; clever with craft, he could switch up points of view, confuse gender for more complex readings, be scathingly satiric , become lyrical and soft-hearted. This element, this mastery of many pop music styles, from rockabilly right up to punk rock itself, made his foul cosmology attractive, artful. And he could convey feeling, genuine emotion, or at least seem as if he was doing so. Costello could sell it. 

Trust, however, was pretty much irredeemable--after a good run, the songs sounded second string, discards, unmemorable B sides. Worse, his vaunted lyric writing lapsed into the incoherent. Imaginative associative leaps--succeeding stanzas that seem to address things and places unrelated to the verse before it but still provide a poetic sense of something only slightly obscured by simile and allusion--became references so private, images, and codes so private that it seemed not the testament of a poet bringing the senses together for an enlarged perception of things gone sideways than it did a species of private jokes that made their way from the notebook to the printed lyric sheet. And melodically, little on this disc is memorable. Trust was an album by rote construction, a listless, unconvincing make work project. EC did, of course, make two additional albums after Imperial Bedroom that rank, in my view, with this best work, Spike and When I Was Cruel. But the writing was on the wall, as the more styles EC took on, from New Orleans jazz and funk, country and western, classical, an assortment of avant gard noise construction and Bacharach inspired pop, the less convincing, which is to say less compelling he became. 

Even Painted from Memory, his collaboration with Bert Bacharach, which should b supercharged with EC's adroitness as a lyricist and Bacharach's demonstrated genius for sprite pop with sophisticated turns and fresh, oddball hooks, was mostly studies in mid-tempo amorphousness, broad, off center piano chords, achingly swallowed word salad, and Costello continually hitting for that thin, adenoidal high note that wears out its formerly effective existence. Both men seemingly forgot, or at least stayed away from the very strengths that might have made that record compelling; these two gents, but Costello especially, set out to make art music, serious stuff. Costello is the artist who has changed over his career, a man who has expanded his range of expression. Said another way, Costello has expanded , not grown, added to his musical palette without seeming to understand or display a feel for the styles he has assumed album to album.

Slam your head against the skyline, why dontcha

Thick, enjambed, a clustering of obscure terms and slangular dissonances that reflect and echo the languages that have taken turns being the lingua franca of the neighborhood, Spencer Short offers up a poem that reminds one of     
a home video , rickety and nervously caffeinated, shown against a dingy white wall, narrated by several voices ; farewell, says our narrator, farewell til we meet again at the end of the day,this building, this block, this neighborhood that is only valued as highly as the amount of money it might yield to interested and transient developers. What works here, really, is the noisy bustle and toe=stomping pace of the poem, similiar in pacing to crossing downtown street against a horde of angry taxis and delivery trucks with drivers resentful they have to pause for pedestrians to make their way. 

The language is combative yet friendly, an elbow in the ribs, chop busting kind of stuff, this is the language of someone for whom familiarity has bred contempt and yet there is nothing but affection underneath the vocal affectations of elegant phrasing and sarcasm. The word play we have here is not dissimilar from the evolution of New York neighborhoods themselves, the mind puns and new meanings are suggested, built upon, a new development comes in , designs resembling the smaller constructions that were erected decades before, but the new formations are larger, taller, accomplishing more , the advertising says, by being more.  This chase through low, mid and high vernaculars, where different bits of short hand, slang and coded signifiers make for a spectacular 12-tone impression of a neighborhood as it transforms almost imperceptibly . This has the wobbling, woozy verbal gyrations that gave Whitman, Lindsay and O'Hara their power as city poets, that slippery genius of a drunk who talks long enough and deep enough to find all his resources of experience and reading coalescing into extended lucidity. It's not as if the speaker will recall the particular word stream he created nor be enlightened by it; it is likely that he would forget the verbal tangle he worked his way through. But it is a marvel for those who hear it, who listen, who catch a texture and nuance of place in the way the words morph much like the buildings being described.

The warm stalk-sweet smell from the hooded crews  
who keep us failsafe for commerce; men of stature,  
or near enough, their gauzy, smoke-strung copse  
dissolves, lets me pass, nods assent. I mouth  
"morning," eye the candied, cardamom gloss of my shoes,  
shrug against the cold. Everything, as the nomenclature  
goes, 4 Sale: this Smithean forge this Stereoscope—  
by which I mean, of course, the wan illusion of depth  
we milk from nil; the pinch-penny nickel They lose  
for Us to find. As if—as if red-toothed nature  
begot benevolence begot itself this hands-free trope  
of clasp & claw, of gross & price, of precipice.  
8am. The day spreads before me like, what?  
 

This is a neighborhood in chronic flux and there is a suggestion in the racing associations of the narrators mind that he had better say farewell to the grind of this place, its very material abrasiveness , while it exists because it will be changed and much of what he has come to know will eventually be cleared like some forest .

The Guitar Snarl of Tweed Deluxe

ITTY BITTY KING--Tweed Deluxe

A confession, an admission, a sliver of honesty, whatever you want to call it: I am a blues harmonica player, 50 years in the practice. Some think what I do is hip, slick, and cool. What I’d say is that I’m not bad at all and that my love is inspired by Paul Butterfield, Charlie Musselwhite, Little Walter, and others who pushed the diatonic harmonica to unexplored terrains. These were the guys who, gripping their small instrument in their hand, vowed with a clenched fist to never take a backseat by a spotlight-hogging lead guitarist again. The goal seemed to be to keep the spotlight on themselves and tell all the other musicians to go start their own bands if they wanted more time out front, recycling their chops at brisker tempos. 

The confession is that I play along to records while they play, and especially albums I’m supposed to review. It's a compliment, though that does sound like saying you love and appreciate the information someone is giving to you as you continually interrupt them. But it is, as I like to think that my fingers twitch and my lips pucker to blow some riffs when the music provokes it, motivates it, inspires both muse and nerve endings to fire synaptic rhythms and compel me to engage in the audio commotion, making all the sour notes hit the sweet spots.

This is the case with Tweed Deluxe’s debut album, Itty Bitty King. Formed in 2010 the trio has been playing blues and blues-rock style material in San Diego for seven years and now come forward with a disc of original and surprisingly diverse songs, all written by lead guitarist and singer Michael Oleata. This man, you may gather, is a live-wire guitarist, alternately loose and snappy in his phrases, insistent but relaxed, teasing with half-phrases and short runs, making superb use of space to create anticipation for the next blitz. And blitz Oleata does, stepping up the pace and letting loose with achingly sweet cascades of notes. With the steady and able assist of Lyle Koonts on bass and Robert Sheehan on drums and percussion, Oleata works out, digging deep into the E string for an earthy, grunge straight from the Delta blues tradition, switches his tone and integrates gold-toned country inflections, and makes unusually elegant and tasty use of the wah-wah pedal. 

This the kind of playing you hear walking past a club on a Friday night, near the last call, when the musicians leave the chord progressions they’ve rehearsed and expressed a soulful elegance you don’t get during prime time. Something grabs you by the shoulder and makes you poke your head through the door, take a seat, order a drink, and soak in the flow from the bandstand. Oleata is a developing songwriter, making use of different styles with confidence, particularly in the title song, a skipping swing tune that gives tribute to a love interest that has knocked the narrator off his feet. There is strong promise in his vocals as well, which are expressive and expansive, although missing a pitch point. He sings widely, sometimes too wide. But there are times he relies on his the grit of his lower register and makes one think of the husky talk-sing of the late Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy. Oleata’s singing has verve and experience, but he’s on track to honing his voice to a sharp instrument of expression no less commanding than his guitar playing. Tweed Deluxe is a strong band, extending what one can do with a song-based guitar trio. Itty Bitty King intrigues and thrills with confident guitar improvisations against a sure-footed rhythm section. The songwriting is under construction, but there are ideas here that jive, jolt and catch you off guard often enough to warrant further attention. Wouldn't it be a grand thing if there were another blues-inspired album as exceedingly brilliant as Johnny Winter And's self-titled debut album from 1979?  Oletta, Koonts and Sheehan are a crew that could bring that off.

(This appeared in slightly different form in THE SAN DIEGO TROUBADOUR. 

Used with kind permission).

"Song", a poem by Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara is a major poet for many reasons that can be and are in fact argued when poetry lovers of different loyalties get together to dispute reality and slice up their share of the muse's lavishly set table. What that last sentence means exactly, especially the last flourish, is unknown even to me, and this is not the place to speculate  or suggest subtext or subversion. Frank O'Hara is a favorite of mine because he is , after all, A MAJOR POET   who wrote masterfully about the momentary thrills and  anxieties of being a nervous, fretful, art loving man in love with the city who, like wise, could make his discomfort in unavoidable urban annoyances--traffic jams, bad waiters, boring posers--into occasions to elevate himself with the joys he knows he , in fact, possesses, As in song,a moan is turned into music, the idea of being stuck and uncertain turns into succinct, near haiku meditations on eroticism, companionship, the nearness of another'. 

SONG
I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life
mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves
must lovers of Eros end up with Venus
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you
how I hate disease, it’s like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen
in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

 O'Hara did this constantly--hundreds of short lyrics, or half lyrics, as it were, Sapphoesque scraps . The flush of dread   over the nervous system becomes the rush of anticipated delight in friends, talk, drink, love. This, we may judge, is not the best O'Hara could do as a writer,  but that is exactly the point for its composition; much can be made too much of an artist's process as it relates to a larger body of work and the community it resides, but the charm here, the beauty itself, is what I'd call a fine attempt to express a sensation that defies anyone's ability to capture . O'Hara's poem, simply called "Song" with no other words of grandiose teasing, falls short as well,  ultimately. But it is a terrific near miss, succesful enough to get one thinking about why one keeps reading again after  thirty years since one first sat down with the Collected Poems of this modern master. 

SONG

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves
must lovers of Eros end up with Venus
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you

how I hate disease, it’s like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen

in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

3 Book Reviews

The Locusts Have No King --by Dawn Powell

A New York comedy of manners set in the Forties, it concerns a married couple comprised of a famous playwright and her husband, an academic who labors at his specialty in obscurity. Powell is one of the better comic writers we've had --a spikier Edith Wharton, shall we say--who provides momentum, atmosphere and rich, crackling dialogue in this many -charactered satire. This would be the sort of novel Tom Wolfe has been trying to write for years. We have here a situation where the fortunes of famous wife and unknown husband are suddenly and realistically reversed, a turn that reveals the shallow relations and loyalties, tied as they are to one's fortunes. Or lack of them. Fittingly, there are no actual heroes in this satire--even those who achieve much after a time of ironic and unfair adversity remain wholly human and subject to the fallible instincts of an egocentric world view. Dawn Powell is a joy t read.



The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock -- by David Weigel
I was not entirely a progressive rock fan during the 70s when the genre was at its peak and the music of the bands in this volume was at it's...busiest. I loathed the singers for the most part, thinking that while the frontman had decent enough voices, suitably trained to negotiate the usually overheated song structures, I could stand them rarely a whit. Save for Peter Gabriel of Genesis (and later as a solo artist) , the lot of them sounded over-earnest, wide-eyed with wonder, strangulated high notes offering the would be the wisdom of righteously and insanely stupid lyrics.

 I always had a wager with anyone who knew Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery well enough, or The Bard for that matter would feel compelled to harm themselves as a means to relieve the disgust that overwhelms them. On the other side of this genre, though, was a generally good musician and an honest desire to extend rock's instrumental bearings toward more complexity. Yes, ELP, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Genesis all moved in this direction, at best being brilliant wit the snap and zip of odd time signatures, odd keys and ensemble stretch consisting of many moving parts. 


It was delirious, and much of the stuff remains good cranky fun. David Weigel, a politics writer by reputation, is also a huge fan of progressive rock, and here expands on a series of fascinating articles he did for Slate some years ago on the history of this odd and painfully dated brand of music making. He interviews many of the musicians, he investigates the places from which they rose, and comes to consider how it was that a good many British musicians, seemingly at the same time, came to employ classical music complexity in the service of a bigger and busier kind of rock and roll. His conclusion, though not explicitly stated, is that it seems a case of the young musicians "getting back to their musical roots", of rediscovering the European classical heritage and making it their own. The book is especially fun and fascinating for the music fan who's been wanting more to be published about this under considered music. Weigel, to his Weigel, does not rate the bands--re realizes that he is a reporter, not a critic--and does his subject justice by sticking with the absorbing story laid out before 


Crackpots--by Sara Pritchard


Brief, lyrically written novella about an awkward young girl being raised by an eccentric family. Note that there is no child abuse or other hot-button stuff engineered in to make the book appeal to the Oprah book clubs, just a humorous and bittersweet novel of a girl, beset with any number of glum circumstances and embarrassments, maturing to a resilient adult with soft irony that gets her through the day. Pritchard is especially fine as prose stylist who displays a sure and intuitive sense of to change tone, shift perspectives, to blend the rush of poetic effusion and the dirty fingernail reality that faces these characters and this young woman; Pritchard is about understated nuance and working against reader expectations.

"Hospital", a poem by Charles Webb

The poem "Hospital" by Charles Webb is delirious magic, an enchanted gathering of roiling syllables and verbs and near  rhymes of a someone finding himself in a hospital when the drugs are wearing off. Or, perhaps, when the body is so wracked with pain and severe and flashing storms of associated agony that thinking  coherently is something mythical and out of  reach. This is a perfected bit of crafted babble, a three note mantra spoken and sung by someone doped up and being wheeled through institution corridors, from one room to the other, meeting employees in variations of the same work clothes running tests, taking samples, adjusting lights and dials on machines, writing items on clipboards and inputting data into computer stations, smiling, whistling pop tunes under their shallow breathing. The subject of the poem, the man being probed, interrogated, moved and otherwise made aware that something is wrong with him and he's not in control of this thinking, let alone his limbs, still attempts to put   everything in context, comparing odor to  odor, material things to other material things they don't resemble. This is not a coherent storyline, not a logical sequence,   it is, instead, a poetics of gathering your wits even as your best qualities of mind and  discernment slipped into the numbness pain killers provide.

Hot spittle, sizzling on pain’s grill. Hopsicle: bouncy, tooth-chilling, bad for you. Hopcycle: a gamboling bike. Opposite of hope’s fiddle. No “Soldier’s Joy.” No “Jolie Blonde.” Hive full of people in white coats (or green, or blue) commanding, “Swallow this,” inflicting tests that punish if you pass or fail—people hump- backed with sacks of doom they throw down on my bed, and bolt. Losspital: place where losers meet. Hospice: little. (How big do death-rooms have to be?) Hiss bottle, has pickle. Ass brittle—like the rest of me!
 “Have you ever,” a clipboard-man demands, “been hospitalized?” Been ossified? Alphabetized?
 Fossilized? Caramelized? I won’t leave here the same, or possibly, alive. Hot tickle. I’m not giggling. House pistol. If I get my hands on one . . . Horse drizzle, swizzle, sizzle—let me ride away!
 Some guy is fishing, on TV, for river-monsters toothier than tiger sharks. How can I rest with all these teeth gnawing at me? Cords yank out every time I turn. My monitor pings. “Sorry,” I tell the nurse who runs in. “Still not dead.” “That’s good,” she chirps, and jabs a needle into me. Hiss piddle. Hose poodle. Hat riddle: How’s a 10-gallon like a barbershop? Cop fizzle, sop griddle, lop pizzle, lot pedal, toss stipple. Glass house-pitiful you shouldn’t throw up in, stoned or not. Hostile

hostel, I won’t come back, I swear! Hose pustule, top tickle, Oz puddle. “Thank you,” I tell each doc,

meaning, “Fuck you for being well.”
Bop middle, slop griddle, rot victuals,
Hope’s diddle. The Grand Hotel

Oh-Well-To-Hell-With-Me.
You enter immortal, and exit disposable
as snot.

It is a delirium and the mind, of course, is not out to lunch but aware of and making note of everything that is going on--the curse of it all is that the mind cannot finish a sentence, complete a thought, find a frame or a metaphor to contextualize an experience that is sufficiently unreal and dreamlike. The mind, though, can sustain a rhyming, punning set of extrapolations on what the deeper mind registers and finds dreadful.

Charles Webb manages to maintain that balance between an indecipherable cleverness, nearly falling with great weight and speed into resolute incoherence, but this, as I take it, being the record of a drugged up mind or perhaps a mind suffering an organic derangement, this is the struggle to remain at or near the surface of consciousness.This made me think of those many times I had in the hospital while younger, about to go under the knife, after the needles and the ether had been applied--the world was recast as one fish eyed lens and the soundtrack was such that it reminded me of slowing down a turntable and then increasing the speed again quickly. “ Hospital “ as a swaying, visceral rhythm that is not always pleasant--panic, giddiness, elation, more panic follow one another quickly, seamlessly, without pause or explanation. This poem is an achievement, a successful evocation of sensory overload.

Bump on a log

Infinite Jest is perhaps the most exasperating novel I've ever read, along with being the most chronically overrated in contemporary fiction. It may be argued that he novel is about the digressions he favors, and that such digressions place him in line as being the latest "systems novelist", taking up where Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth (John) have led the way, to which I'd say fine, and what of it? The AA and recovery material is potential good fun, and the aspect of powerlessness over a movie ought to be enough for a writer to mold a sure satire, but Wallace seems far too eager to surpass "Gravity's Rainbow" and
"The Recognitions" in his long, rhythm less sentences. The aforementioned editor I proposed would have handed the manuscript back with the observation that this set of multi-channeled satires has already been done by the previously mentioned authors whose works are not likely to be matched. Said editor would then advise that over-writing isn't the sure means to break with your influences, but that developing one's own style is.

There is a well argued rationale for the lack of editing in Infinite Jest, that David Foster Wallace was in the tradition of testing the limits of a what a sentence, a paragraph, a page can contain before the onset of the concluding period, the test being that a sentence can drift, digress, take long turns and circuitous routes to the finish a series of ideas,but even digressions have to be pared down to the ones that will have an effect, even a diffuse one that. Wallace really isn't in control of his digressions. Every so-called postmodern writer has to decide , and finally know what effect and point, or drift, they are getting at. 
Even in an style whose hall marks are pastiche, parody and high-minded satire, craft still counts for something, and a sense of the form a book is taking, it's architecture, has to come under control, or else the eventual point of the writing, to study, in an imaginative terrain, some aspects of the human experience, lost entirely. Any working novelist, whether a genre-hack , a royalist, avant-gardes of most any hue, ought to be in control of their materials, where Wallace, with IJ, clearly isn't. 

That control is more instinctual than mechanical, and the ability to know when to stop and allow the fictional incidents resonate in all their overlapping parts. Wallace doesn't trust his instincts, or his readers powers to interpret his material, I guess. There is always one more paragraph, one more digression, one more bit of undigested research for him to add. It's like watching a guy empty his pockets into a plastic tray at an airport metal detector. White Noise is written, of course, in a spare and professorial style that some might find maybe too much so. I didn't have that problem, and thought the style perfect for the comedy he wrote. It's a college satire, and was a remarkable choice on his part to convey the distorted elements of the story line, from the lush descriptions of the sun sets , et al. It's a prose style that is brilliant and alive to idea and incident: DeLillo has the rare genius to combine the abstract elements of a philosophical debate with imagery - rich writing that manages several narrative movements at once. His digressions meet and merge with his descriptions, and the result is a true and brooding fiction that aligns the comic with the horrific in a series of novels where the pure chase for meaning within systems of absolute certainty are chipped away at, eroded with many layers of a dead metaphor , slamming up against an unknowable reality that these systems , including literature itself, have claimed entree into. Heady, compulsively readable, vibrantly poetic.Mao ll, Underworld are among the best American novels written in the 20th century.

The Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is not my favorite writer, but for all the repetition of her themes of fragile women being imperiled by evil masculine forces they masochistically desire, she does occasionally publish something both compelling and well written. I detested Beasts and The Falls since she exercises her familiar dreads in contrasting lengths, the first book a slender novella, the latter a literal brick, both books sounding rushed, fevered, and breathless, as first drafts of novels usually do. Or a finished Oates novel, for that matter. She does hammer that nail effectively and brutally as often as not, however, as she did with  her novels Black Water and  The Tattoo Girl", with the right configuration, her usual wit's end prose style and fascination with fragile psyches and marginally psychotic psychologies get as intense as fiction is ever likely to get. Zombie is a rather potent little psychodrama, and it's the kind of writing Oates excels at. She gets to the heart of the fringe personality better than anyone I can think of. The Tattooed Girl, from 2003, is likewise a well shaped melodrama. She depicts the thinking of women who allow themselves to be beaten and killed with seemingly scary exactitude. Oates can also be a bore, evident in We Were Mulvaneys and The Falls. My fascination with her continues, though, since it's impossible to tell when she publishes another novel that will be gripping and unnerving. I agree with the assessment on Oates. She writes so much that she's almost as undercooked and sometimes awful as she is brilliant. Producing novels at such an assembly line clip seems a compulsion. We Were Mulvaneys read like it was meant to capture some of the weepy women's market and I put it down, and Beasts was a novella of abuse that was better left in the manila envelope, as it was a flat litany of sexual assaults that she's done better before. But just as you think Oates is all used up, she surprises you. The Tattooed Girl was an amazing book, as was The Falls, with their portents of violence, domination, skewed rationalization of unworthy deeds. She has made an art of the dystopian personality, and it is here that she gets greatness. She merits a bit of respect, although you wish she'd stop trying to win the Nobel Prize so obviously with her tool-and-dye production and take longer to write a novel a reader didn't have to rationalize about. Editors hold much less sway in the preparation of a book, it seems. It's not just a matter of writers who write quickly getting away with redundant excess and awkward passages, such as Oates and Stephen King. Those who take their time also seem to avoid the more severe markings of the editor's blue pencil . 

The Huffington Post Rips Down an Article Sharply Criticizing Spotify — Here's the Original

The Huffington Post Rips Down an Article Sharply Criticizing Spotify — Here's the Original:

This is worth reading because it makes the case convincingly that musician creators are getting the short end of the stick financially from having their music featured on the Spotify streaming service. The caveat is that I find the author's recollection of the conversation with a Spotify executive about the financial relationship between the service and the creators who make their content reads a little pat. The executive comes across as too stereotypically dense and clueless and the narrator shows himself as a guy who too easily comes up with fast and stunning bits of pithy truth telling from which there is no response. It comes off as stunningly cliched TV drama, and I think Huffington Post was on reasonable grounds to doubt the veracity of the author's account of the meeting. Still, it's worth a read to glean the essential truth herin, that deserving artists are being cheated by the service . Spotify , from what I understand, is "making bank", as the kids say, and can well afford to pay these good people what their work is worth. Also, checking out the author's"I Respect Music" Website can help, perhaps, move the needle in the right direction.

The sublime "The Shape of Water"

"The Shape of Water," directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a splendid Beauty and the Beast story, succeeding to be sweet, menacing, hopeful, thrilling, and finally affirming in. Some of us might blanch at the storybook particulars of this movie obviously--it's hard to do anything fresh with his done-and-done again idea, no?--but del Toro is skillful in balancing the needed balance between the sweet and the dour, the joyful and the threatening. Additionally, this is very much an adult film, not for kiddies, as the characters have genuine emotions expressed in authentic language. 

That is, there is no shortage of f-bombs. Also done incredibly well is handling the sexual element that's usually obscured by sentiment and courtly sentiments; del Toro brings this aspect, and the entire premise, into a world we recognize, in this case, the early 60s in Baltimore. Time, place, inference, and the use of nicely chosen incidental details and art design set up the way the tale is conveyed. Most importantly, there is a human connection here, with the theme of loneliness being a primal driving force to seek love or revenge superbly embodied in fully rounded characters. 

Visually, this is your typical del Toro production, with the deep, rich, dark color scheme, seamless editing, controlled and adequate contrast between the more human and banal world of the 60s and the more fantastical, menacing interiors of the more sci-fi sequences. Stand out performances from Michael Shannon, a grand and messed up baddie, and Richard Jenkins, who seems incapable of doing bad work.

These chops don't cut deep enough

Patrick Yandall would one of those jazz-inflected guitarists I would usually go nuts over.The qualifier "usually" gives you a hint of what I thought   of his new album A Journey Home. The San Diego-based musician is a veteran of the scene, active since the ’90s in many bands and collaborative efforts, and has released 20 albums of his music. His productive longevity is understandable, considering that Yandall is an excellent guitarist, potentially a great one. He is a master of groove, tone, and feel, a fret man able to fill space with Wes Montgomery-like octave chords, punctuate the beats with short blues riffs and , and, when the feeling merits, let loose with an impressive flurry of runs. In its best moments—and there are many sweet spots on this disc—his soloing transcends the often repetitive and simplistic structures of his self-penned material. After the fact, the grooves lack personality; they are placeholders, more or less, existing less to push Yandall  than they to keep his chops from getting too hairy for the average listener.  The guitarist restricts himself , keeps himself in check, careful not to offend. The conservative approach creates conservative results.In another discussion, we might call it being chintzy with the available bounty. A guitarist as technically gifted and as fluidly expressive as Yandall ought to be leaping over such barriers and cutting loose for real on a track or two. Stronger, more varied, more intricate compositions would aid toward that goal, if Yandall were so inclined. The songs on A Journey Home are simple, hardly a sin, and there are some good melodic ideas here,.But there is a formula smooth-jazz/light funk motif they fall into, with incidental keyboards, synths providing a few pale shades of color, an occasional piano solo (played by Yandall, who, as I understand, plays all the instruments). The drum tracks, honestly, are without soul. The burden falls to Yandall’s obvious virtuosity, which raises to the occasion on several tracks, especially on “Passion,” a Latin groove where the artist unleashes what he can do; hot riffs, screaming ostinatos, raging note clusters.  But alas, it is too short a solo, as it fades and we return again to the album’s steadfast sameness, waiting for another moment when the guitarist steps into the spotlight again. You might find yourself fighting an urge to fast forward through a mostly indifferent set of rhythm tracks to find some places where the music starts to cook again. Well, the guitarist anyway, if not the actual tunes to composed to hang his virtuosity on. Agreeably, Yandall,  does a good turn with the last track . a stone cold blues shuffle, “Blue Jay Blues,” highlighting a glorious walking bass, and a pulverizing solo from Yandall, with brief and sharp assertions, serpentine runs weaving between the one-four-five beats, some bittersweet BB King-like vibrato. This track is a rousing, strutting jam. One wants more.This ought to have been an outstanding album. As is, it is only good one, buoyed by Yandall’s spirited playing. A musician this gifted deserves the energy and inspiration an actual band of musicians can provide, and the improvisatory possibilities better material can provide.

(This was published in slightlydifferent form in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission)