"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."
i've believed for a while now that college freshmen should be handed copies of augustine's confessions, o'connor's collected short stories, dashiell hammett's the maltese falcon, charles olson's call me ishamel, w.c williams' in the american grain, ralph ellison's invisible man & james baldwin's the fire next time & be left alone to digest what's found in the pages of those books. what the hell do i know?
"Congress was voting on my well-being Sunday night. Congress was voting on the survivability of my family. And one political party voted unanimously against my family. That is something I will never, ever forget." ron silliman
"They are the people who have "invaded" "us." The hippie commie queers, the blacks who "snuck in" on slave ships, Africans, Asians & Latin Americans who took Emma Lazarus at her word. Ultimately, I think that this is what all this lack of comity is about – one group of Americans (largely tho not entirely white males) look in the mirror & what they see does not look like America, although they may pretend that it does. That other America of difference & diversity has in their view wrested control of the government. Which of course is why everything government does has, for them, become illegitimate. (Tho they would like government, such as the courts, to do whatever it can to preserve their dying stranglehold on power.) " ron silliman
Coming home, I find you still in bed, but when I pull back the blanket I see your stomach is flat as an iron. You've done it, as you warned me you would and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper for me to look at. My son. Woman, loving you no matter what you do, what can I say, except that I've heard the poor have no children, just small people and there is room only for one man in this house.
i first read her in the american poetry review in the early 70s. it was the first year of their venture & i'd already been blown away by john ashbery & soon, thomas mcgrath. ai's poetry was visceral & spoke plainly & bluntly like someone you'd meet in a dark bar drinking during daylight hours. as troubling as some of the poems were, they never strained credulity. if the outrigger experience taught me anything, it's that some of the most awful things that happen to us can seem so mundane. if i'd paid more attention to her poetry, i might have skipped the direct experience of that truism. the cover of her first book of poems(my own copy now long gone): her l.a. times obit here. more on ai here.
well, we had our 10 or so days of winter here in the bay area. rain & temps in the 30s, lots of snow up in the sierras but mostly a relatively mild winter. springing forward w/the time change doesn't make me think spring as much as the birds returning to our pool area to build their nests & drive our girls crazy. this weekend ann came into the living room & there on the cat tree was a little sparrow. luckily, the girls were asleep in the bedroom.
our balcony gets lots of sun in the spring & summer too, which results in cat naps out there. hence, this peaceful shot of the two step-sisters blissing out.
i imagine if i were a cat i'd be out there w/them. however, being human i must do what humans do in the spring & summer. i must grill. yesterday was the first day i broke open the grill this year. in the summer, all that sun blazing through the balcony doors might be nice for the cats but it turns the apartment into a kiln. grilling mitigates this by making the stove unnecessary. here, a cheap piece of meat(skirt steak) transformed into a thing of delicious beauty by smoke & fire. an even cheaper piece of meat, my toe, was transformed into something too by smoke & fire. i stepped on a small piece of burning coals barefoot. the cats remained profoundly indifferent to my fire walk.
last year,i really got into grilling pizzas. ann loves them & i just think the whole idea is cool. the first time i heard about grilled pizzas was way back in the early outrigger days. i had bought a cookbook in new orleans i'd read about, cucina simpatica, from an italian restaurant, al forno, in providence rhode island. george germon & johanne killeen were the folks who introduced the idea to america in the 80s.
it's hard nowadays to see irony in anything since alanis morisette famously &, w/the immutable belief only found in teabaggers & young hipsters, wrongly mauled the meaning of the word in her song "ironic". still, the idea that alex chilton was scheduled to play this weekend at the sXsw fest w/a faux big star is hard NOT to label that way. the sXsw fest wouldn't exist w/o the idea of big star. that idea, that there's a band playing somewhere, anywhere that no-one is noticing but will soon influence the future of pop music only after an acrimonious breakup is pretty much the Ur-myth of pop music. the festival is where in-the-know hipsters can "make" that discovery before all the messy stuff happens, like an acrimonious break-up that would require forming a faux version of the band 20years hence. that chilton hasn't done anything near the quality of big star since the break-up(& yes, i know this point is up to rabid debate) just adds some poignancy to the "ironic" mix here. well, that & the fact that he died this week prior to his sXsw appearance, once more shoving his finger up the ass of the industry & fan expectation.
personally, i loved the big hits from chilton's first pop music success, the boxtops. i still play a version of "the letter" on guitar myself & "soul deep" & "cry like a baby" bring teenaged dance parties, w/their mix of excitement, anxiety & disapointment, back to my mind like tea-cakes brought back the past to proust. chilton had less than an ecstatic experience in his first(&, really, only)experience w/pop stardom & its necessary corollary, the pop music business. that sour experience influenced him, good & bad, for the rest of his life. he eventually embodied the american outsider as pop music icon w/o any of the success usually reserved for icons. he earned this status by anamnesis, the recognition by others of his role in THEIR history.
initially, big star flew under our p'cola radar. #1 record came out in 1972, when i was a junior at washington high school. the two subsequent albums didn't register w/our gang either. in invisible republic, greil marcus writes about how something in the present can't be heard or understood for a myriad of reasons but, as history stretches out & shakes loose the oddball or irrelevant or mundane, something that may have appeared oddball or irrelevant or mundane asserts itself in a new way. from a place in the future that past speaks to the present as it's contemporary.
"In my opinion, Alex was the most talented triple threat musician out of Memphis - and that's saying a ton," said Paul Westerberg, the former Replacements frontman. "His versatility at soulful singing, pop rock songwriting, master of the folk idiom, and his delving into the avant-garde goes without equal. He was also a hell of a guitar player and a great guy."
in the interim between big star's break-up in 1975 & my discovery of them twenty years later, we had the replacements & rem & uncle tupelo & the various manifestations of those bands & their styles. as the impact of rock & roll splintered out over the country & world like the debris from a meteor hit, chilton's many musical personae insinuated themselves, discretely, into the disparate lines that erupted out of that impact. if you can't hear big star's "kangaroo" in wilco, you're deaf. if you don't hear "when my baby's beside me" in all of the power pop acts still going strong, i can't help you. what about rem? listen to "the ballad of el goodo". i think jay farrar makes my point most eloquently w/his cover version on another one of my favorite big star songs.
chilton gave direction to westerberg & stinson, stipe & buck, & tweedy & farrar about how to embody the project of pop music & he did it by example. it really only matters that those truly engaged in that project learned his lesson. as a consequence, the american outsider was invited to sit at the table where he's always belonged & the present insures the past w/its future.
this is not shaping up to be a stellar year for lo-fi, diy, outsider southern musicians. we lost the great vic chestnut on c'mas day to suicide & now mark linkous, better known i suppose as sparklehorse, has checked out. today we get news that memphis born & based oddball, alex chilton, has simply given up the ghost in new orleans. it can't be easy doing things your own way in the music business & each of these guys did so w/o apology. in fact, chilton just got weirder.
i have no memory of what my sources were back in c'ville during the mid-90s but i somehow stumbled onto will oldham, sparklehorse, soul coughing, vic chestnut, & the "reconsideration" of big star. w/the exception of mike doughty of soul coughing, all of these guys were southern boys doing the lo-fi thing themselves. something about their music & their approach appealed to me then(& it still does). some of it had to do w/the subjects they chose to write/sing about(greil marcus' "old weird america"), some of it w/the simplicity of the presentation.
oldham, linkous, & chestnut got better as they settled into their various, variable creative terrains & each became more musically accomplished. i'll write more about chilton later this week but here are several linkous videos, the first two songs from his first album, vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, which i owned back in c'ville & the last two from later work.
enjoy & lament. really. lament. this is a huge loss.
"Give us the fucking code...if you don't, what'll change? what'll ever fucking change? I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something." Neuromancer
as far as i'm concerned, this is one of the greatest climaxes in modern literature. when i read that passage, i was stunned. along w/haruki murakami, gibson presents the 21st century's ethical impasse w/humor, clarity, & precision. too bad the solutions aren't as funny or clear.
