Every night and every mornSome to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night...
28 November 2010
Blakean Blake
Every night and every mornSome to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night...
27 November 2010
5
I suppose any song with a refrain is a kind of loop...or spiral, really. (After all, a spiral suggests motion, progress, either into the depths of the abyss or, up, out, above, beyond, towards something higher, whatever that may be.) The Greeks knew all about refrains. So does Bob Dylan. And Laurie Anderson. If a song is the world (i.e. the human soul) - or a piece of it - in microcosm, the refrain can be seen as the crucial touchstone. In the Kali Yuga, American-style, the need for a refrain often manifests as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or generalized anxiety. Or the weight of the "depressed" psyche sinking. The refrain's a place to catch your breath and recoup awhile, make sense of things. The space between breaths where a crucial nothingness can happen. If something like it isn't found, watch out: a real, true personal insanity (as insanity within an insanity) will bloom within the psyche. Nothing (not even C.R.E.A.M.) can cure insanity within insanity, except maybe a tonic exposure to the Wilderness - someplace far from man's combustible machinations. If this all makes the human psyche of modern man seem delicately poised, well...so it is. I don't know anyone that doesn't seem like they're on the brink of falling apart. You?
Ink, Room, Rain
In our local public library, there's a room called the Typewriter Room. It's just what it sounds like - one table, one chair, one IBM Selectric typewriter. You have to tender some form of i.d. to gain access, but once you're in, you're in. IBM's electric typewriters were/are beautiful things: Gatling guns of ink and instant action. When you're on a roll, one will sound like a Gatling gun, too. I think, therefore, that the Typewriter Room is probably equipped with semi-soundproof walls.
A few days ago, I visited the typewriter room and, as I was tendering my i.d. to the svelte Typewriter Room maven, realized that I recognized her from the Poetry Workshop. I said "Hey, how are you?" She said she was good, but that this was her last day working for the library. "How come?" I asked. "Because," she said, "John Q. Public is largely comprised of creeps and tactless weirdos." I looked over at her young co-worker, a zaftig Chicana in hornrims reading a biography of Robert Lowell. It wasn't raining yet, but it would be soon.
26 November 2010
C.R.E.A.M.
Money is weird. Because it exists, I don't have to go trying to barter my skills for wild Alaskan salmon or an oil change for my Jeep. I can just throw down the cash - bam! - no questions asked. Money is a language, really. And also a kind of deity. Increasingly, people are utilizing credit/debit cards instead of folding money, which is sort of like using a symbol for a symbol for a symbol (for a symbol). These are the things I think about at 7:29 on a Friday night. Meanwhile, the DOW fluctuates...
Mr.
We've been dogsitting "Mister," beloved companion of one of our Iowa City friends. Mister chases refractions of light. He is also a natural herder. I guess you could say that, when he tears off after a reflection, he's actually trying to wrangle light itself, put it in its place. He's an older dog, so having him around really reminds me of our old dog, Stella. Yesterday Eleanor pointed out that dogs don't have arms. "That's right," I said, "but they have a double-dose of legs - so it sort of balances out."
715
"Hammerin'" Hank Aaron was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1934. "The thing I like about baseball is that it's one-on-one," he once said. "You stand up there alone, and if you make a mistake, it's your mistake. If you hit a home run, it's your home run." In 1974, he broke Babe Ruth's record for home runs despite having received numerous racist death threats in the mail, most of them postmarked from northern cities.
25 November 2010
Arcane Compost Roundel Medicinal Rag
The abracadabra of ashes and life's return to dirt...incidentally, no one knows the precise origins of the word abracadabra, though the first, surviving written record of the word is within the Latin poem "De Medicina Praecepta," by Roman poet-physician Quintus Serenus Sammonicus (c. 200 A.D.). Sammonicus wrote that in order to get well, a sick person should wear on a string around their neck a piece of paper inscribed as such:
A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
A B R A
A B R
A B
A
The triangular shape blooming into the mystical phrase would, he wrote, act as a funnel to siphon sickness out of the body. Still, there are a number of theories and conjectures as to older origins of the word, including Aramaic, Hebrew, and Chaldean sources. Whatever its magical, medicinal origins, abracadabra is now used primarily as a shorthand way of signifying arcane, mystical gibberish.
24 November 2010
Holiday and Her Mobile Debuted In 2010
Mabila was the Indian fortress-settlement of yore where Chief Tuskaloosa and his army of braves fought Hernando de Soto and his conquistadors - and lost to them - in a bloody maelstrom on October 18 of 1540. De Soto lived another two years before dying from a fever on the banks of the Mississippi. Present day Mobile, Alabama takes its name from Mabila and the Mabilian language - a Choctaw-based pidgin used as a lingua franca for trade and general communication amongst various tribes in and around the Gulf of Mexico. The "mobiles" of the art world, however, derive their name from the Latin movere, meaning "to move." Alexander Calder built his first mobile in 1931, the same year the Empire State Building was completed. Marcel Duchamp coined the term.
23 November 2010
12-Bar Shoestring Mobile Hanging From A Tree Blues
The term "lynching" is generally regarded to be a derivation of the surname of Charles Lynch (1736-1796), a Virginia-born son of Irish Quakers who would grow up to become a justice of the peace (a post that cost him his status as a Quaker). Lynch became known for his vigilante anti-Loyalist actions, later seen as a kind of peculiar, American antecedent to the white supremacist lynch mobs that sprang up in the South, fueled in the late 1800's by such organizations as the KKK.
22 November 2010
Sweet Black Angel
"There is often as much heterogeneity within a black community, or more heterogeneity, than in cross-racial communities. An African-American woman might find it much easier to work together with a Chicana than with another black woman whose politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality would place her in an entirely different community. What is problematic is the degree to which nationalism has become a paradigm for our community-building processes. We need to move away form such arguments as "Well, she's not really black." "She comes from such-and-such a place." "Her hair is..." "She doesn't listen to 'our' music," and so forth. What counts as black is not so important as our political commitment to engage in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work."
18 November 2010
16 November 2010
2 p.m.
I am tired. Slept only a little last night & still have many requisite hours of steadfast wakefulness ahead. Outside it's a mild cool rainy sunblown afternoon. My shoes are off, stockingfeet on desk, resting between sessions. Don Quixote & his faithful Pancho digging time.
This morning there was a massive gathering of prayerful Iowa muslims in the lobby of this building, spilling out of the ballroom on the 2nd floor - men, women smiling, hands on hearts and shoulders - Eid children shrieking, clambering on the staircase & eating hard candy, laughing. I glided through them, Son House in my earbuds, and an idea for a poem in my cerebellum.
15 November 2010
Cans, Wars
This Wednesday is the birthday of Frenchman Nicola Appert, pioneer of food preservation. A confectioner by trade, in his mid-forties Appert began experimenting with ways to keep foodstuffs airtight - and to thereby preserve them. This was in the late 1700's. His method was eventually patented and he went on to open & operate the world's first bottling facility. This bottling plant was later burned in the war. The use of tin cans as a means of keeping food from spoiling wasn't really widespread until the mid 1800's, along with the invention of the can opener. Roughly a century later, during WW2, the U.S. military invented a pocket-sized can opener, the P-38. The P-38 folded and fit easily in soldiers' pockets. (The P-38 can opener is not to be confused with the Walther P-38, a WW2-era German handgun, or the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a WW2-era American fighter airplane.) At 38mm in length, it is regarded by many as the essence of military concision.
12 November 2010
Peafowl Need Companions
Peafowl need companions. When isolated, they become depressed. Polygamous by nature, peacocks usually have a harem of 2-5 peahen. Peachicks can walk, eat and drink all on their own, within the first 24 hours of life. Peacocks are colorful. Originally intended to represent & market the then-new color television technology, the peacock symbol has been the logo for NBC since 1956. (Before that, the logo had been a snake.) An actual peacock's feather trail changes colors depending upon the angle from which viewed. And in real life, peacocks can kill and eat poisonous snakes. "Pavo," is a peacock constellation. It can be found in the southern sky, right next to "Indus," the Indian. The national bird of India is the Blue Peafowl (Pavo cristatus). Peacocks are omnivorous. If you have one as a pet, you can feed it dry cat food.
11 November 2010
The Pump
"Peggy Sue" is a loop, lyrically speaking. A very simple structure, but also a heavy one, because the idea substrating the poppy, boppy lyrical confectionism is the notion that direct experience (knowing) of the prized Peggy Sue will answer any question the listener has about the narrator/singer's "love" for her. Of course, this can be construed in more detail at least four different ways: (1) The narrator (Buddy Holly) is aware of his medium and assumes the audience does not know Peggy Sue, girl of his dreams, personally; (2) The narrator (a kind of Socrates addressing a chorus) is assumed to be speaking to an audience in particular - one that might know Peggy Sue personally (but not nearly as well as the narrator) and therefore knows her to be not-especially-desirable (for whatever reason - she has poor personal hygiene, overuses the word "basically," she has thick ankles, etc. - whatever); (3) The narrator is assumed to be speaking to an audience that knows Peggy Sue personally/conversationally but doesn't know her in the Biblical sense, as does the narrator, effectively making the song about the power of carnal pleasure; (4) in a combination of the first and fourth scenarios, the narrator, Buddy Holly, is pretty sure you, the listener, don't know her, but this chick named Peggy Sue gave him the best skronk (the I love you / I need you / I want you progression throughout the refrain underscores this nicely) of his life.
Of course, the song became a hit because it works on all four levels at once. The kiddos could gyrate along to its poppy, anesthetized sexual current. Their parents dug its innocence. The tweenie middle schoolers could sing-song the deceptively nursery-rhymesque hypnotic refrain. And the rockabillies know the song is all about a sex goddess that don't even have time for a rock avatar like Buddy Holly. Everybody wins...except the tune's poor, woebegone narrator.
10 November 2010
Spaghetti
Charles Mingus was into Andres Segovia, who never had much to say about rockabilly. Sam Philips did, though: "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." And Buddy Holly never recorded at Phillips' Sun Studios, but Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley & Johnny Cash did. In fact, there's a 1956 Sun Studios recording of an impromptu session (now the subject of a Broadway play) featuring Lewis, Perkins, Presley & Cash all jamming together. That same year, Mingus recorded Pithecanthropus Erectus for Atlantic Records. Also in 1956, John Wayne starred in The Searchers, which the AFI has since nominated as "greatest Western of all time." Wayne's character, "Ethan Edwards," is an Indian-hating racist. The refrain of Buddy Holly's song "That'll Be The Day" was inspired by dialogue spoken by the Ethan Edwards character. Saxophonist Buddy Collette never said much about Segovia, but once remarked that Charles Mingus "was always a disaster to have around. I loved him, but he was worse than a child. He didn't know how to clean up behind himself. He could cook, but there would be eggs on the floor and the ceiling. Couldn't find his shoes when he had to go to work, didn't have a white shirt, couldn't write a check. All he could really do was play the bass and write." Collette, who died on Sept. 19 of 2010, once organized a concert in support of politically-conscious actor Paul Robeson. In 1956, Robeson, who had visited Russia and admired the racial equality he witnessed there, was called to appear before the House of Un-American Activities. At one point, a senator asked Robeson why he didn't choose to remain in Russia. His reply: "Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear? I am for peace with the Soviet Union, and I am for peace with China, and I am not for peace or friendship with the Fascist Franco, and I am not for peace with Fascist Nazi Germans. I am for peace with decent people." Andres Segovia was sixty-three years old at the time.
09 November 2010
08 November 2010
07 November 2010
Shoe Mandala
I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, 'Well if you go out and save your money.' So I went and got - I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I'd bring whatever I made.
-Ornette Coleman (god of free jazz, 1930- )
A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
-Thomas Carlyle, Scottish wordsmith (1785-1881)
The cobbler's children run shoeless.
- traditional English saying
Sometimes I don't even pull my shoes off for six weeks at a time, except, you know, just to take a shower. I just take breaks between 24 hours a day, just a break now and then, it don't take me long to rest; maybe 20 to30 minutes sometime, or maybe an hour.
- Howard Finster (visual artist)
You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.
- John Coltrane (saint)
05 November 2010
Swaddled In Plastic
Big hoarfrost last week, so I began sealing the windows for cold weather...which is a drag. Fortunately, this chore only has to be done once a year, but it's always a big ol' hassle, as it involves double-sided tape and broad sheets of a thin plastic film, both probably carcinogenic and a pain in the ass to work with. It works, though: Once that action goes up (along with the R-value & ambient temperature of our home), our heating bill goes down - as outside, the landscape sinks into a wintry coma.
03 November 2010
Bicycle Superior
From the pine cone-like shape of the cluster, the grape family we call Pinot derives its name. Noir, of course, equals "black." Black as night. Black as crude oil. And I don't know about you, but to know that a phrase-coiner of yore spied a cluster of grapes on a bright vineyard day and imagined a pine cone dipped in night's oil is poetry enough for me to last the rest of the week.
02 November 2010
Deliver Me
In song, bound by it, I stood in the back - a bedeviled fool melting into a cast of bedeviled fools. And our voices rocked each cornice of the parlor, now beginning its spin of stupefaction & deliverance. Songs ancient and covered in dirt rose up from the Mesozoic. Hymnals of blood and placenta. Yalping dirges of extinction & survival. "We cool?" the duende seemed to ask.
"Yeah, mami. We real cool."
