Pynchon, Brown, and Bear for Mah A-Readin' Playzhur

Still on a sci-fi kick, though in addition to my satisfying my fix I’m allowing myself to be pulled to extremes. Sandwiching Greg Bear’s Eon, a “hard” sci-fi novel, to use the industry parlance, about an abandoned city/asteroid from another dimension, are Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, a lighter-than-light page-turner starring Robert “Tom Hanks” Langdon, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a must-read-before-you-die epics and out-and-out masterworks of contemporary American letters. My previous experience with Bear was the novella Hardfought, a nearly unintelligible depiction of a war between humans and insect-like aliens far, far into the future, a story, mind you, that if re-packaged as experimental prose would have won over my silly heart –– Bear’s language is fantastic, often verging on gorgeousness. Nearly every sentence is unique and borderline poetic. Still, the story is a handful of sand in quivering palms. With Eon, Bear is much more direct though apt to assume the reader is familiar with astrophysics and other “hard” science concepts. Just read over them. I’m about half-way through, and the going’s been fine.


Funny, but a majority of my newfound interest in sci-fi has to do with my novel, parts of which are set in my blue-collar Northeastern hometown during the early 1980s, when/where OMNI magazine was popular and appeared in our mailbox every month –– my oldest brother was a subscriber, and, a budding dork, I read the mag cover to cover (while listening to something totally dorky and totally apropos such as Yes, Genesis, or Emerson, Lake & Palmer). And I’m interested only in a particular type of sci-fi novel: It has to be space-related, it has to be set in the future, and it has to have been published in the early to mid ’80s. I guess I’m trying to go back in time (writing about my youth, reading stuff from my youth [including back issues of long-defunct OMNI], shirking adult responsibilities [a story for another day]), back to a metaphoric place that wasn’t nearly as scary as today is, what with all of the adult responsibilities and the spread of nuclear weaponry into third-world countries. (Hard to believe, but things were much less scary when The Bomb belong only to us and the Ruskies.) What’s really funny about futuristic novels from the recent past is that they all miss A.) the dissipation of the Cold War and B.) the preponderance of personal technology. In Eon, for example, there aren’t laptops but “memory blocks,” portable cubes of electronic information, like micro-libraries. And forget about cell phones, though Bear has his characters jotting notes down on “slates,” portable electronic notebooks of sorts. You’ve got to wonder why novelists of a futuristic bent didn’t come to think that instant communication would be a new “futuristic” norm. (Or maybe some did. I haven’t come across any, though.)

Futuristic and prescient in an odd way is Gravity’s Rainbow. Published in 1973, the nearly 800-page tome is set in WWII Europe (among other places), follows a cast of colorful characters, and is written in melodious, semi-stream-of-consciousness language that most often achieves Updikean poetry but occasionally sinks to the vague depths of Faulkner, who expected readers to be in his head with him, to know precisely which “he” among several male characters the author was talking about at any given moment. The details in Pynchon’s book are astounding –– you have to read it with a laptop nearby for the a-Googling, what with all of the obscure names of cities, towns, and regions, the brand-names of WWII-era products, the military mumbo-jumbo. Can you just read over all of that stuff? Sure, you’ll still get the gist of what Pynchon is saying and be able to follow the tale, but just think of all that you’ll useless trivia you’d be learning.

P.S. Finished The Lost Symbol. Dan Brown is a tease. He sets you up for some supernatural outcome but always ends up on a decidedly humanist, decidedly anti-fantastical note.

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Goodbye, Dune

Well, I’ve given up on Dune. About a third of the way through Children of Dune, the third book in the series, author Frank Herbert’s writing deteriorates into abject nonsense. The prose is fine, I guess, but the content is confusing to the point of impenetrability. I’m all for experimental writing, but there has to be a “spirited stroke,” to use the term applied to the visual arts, a vibe that lets me, the reader, know that I’m going to be rewarded for my efforts. Children of Dune makes no such promises. I struggled through a good 10 pages of nonsense before I threw in the towel. The seemingly random thoughts actually made my head hurt. I was on a plane at the time. Thankfully, I had some other reading material on hand, specifically a December 1981 copy of OMNI magazine and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, a book that my wife had picked up on a whim at one of the stores in the airport. So far, so good, The Lost Symbol. The prose is pretty elementary but clear and concise, which was refreshing after so much Dune.


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Dune: Messiah

Just finished Dune: Messiah, the sequel to Dune (referenced below). Once again, Herbert’s writing is esoteric and insular, though there’s just enough narrative thrust to keep the reader’s attention. For whatever reason, I finished the book in a day. Do I like the Dune series? I can’t really say. I still don’t feel that I know enough about the Dune universe to offer an honest opinion, and I’ve even glanced over Wikipedia’s Dune page a couple of times to help orient me. I still don’t know what power the Emperor wields over the houses or why there even is an emperor in the first place, and I always forget what the Landsraad is. Last week, I was heartened to learn that filmmaker David Lynch was as clueless as I –– his 1984 adaptation of the first book which just so happened to pop up on cable in the middle of the day last Friday was equally confusing (and terribly cheesy). I’ve also just started Children of Dune, the third book in the series; there are five books altogether, plus prequels, interquels, and sequels co-written by Kevin J. Anderson and Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert, starting in 1999.

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Two New Poems

Thanks to Foliate Oak for publishing two new pieces of mine here.

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Psyched About Some Back Issues of OMNI Magazine from the '80s

From eBay, I recently “won” several issues of OMNI magazine (“won” in quotes because I was the only bidder). They are from the early ’80s, and they are awesome. My oldest brother was a subscriber, and I have fond memories of just hanging out with him in the microscopic converted attic bedroom that the three of us brothers shared, listening to A Trick of the Tail, Telekon, or something equally mind-bendingly cool, and just reading OMNIs. OMNI, according to this stellar tribute site, began publication in ’78 and ceased in ’95 (longer run than I’d thought) and was basically The New Yorker of science/technology and sci-fi mags, offering a mix of features, news, opinion, art, fiction, and mind games, everything of a futurist bent, everything produced by high-dollar creative types (Stephen King, H.R. Giger, Tsutsui Yasutaka). OMNI was no rinky-dink operation. The publisher was Bob Guccione, he of the Penthouse empire.

There are a couple of reasons why I sought out the old mag. One, I’m a nostalgist at heart. You can’t beat the comforts of yesteryear, especially if you had a childhood as wonderful –– not lavish by any stretch but wonderful all the same –– as mine. Two, the bildungsroman that I’m writing (The Book of Etna, excerpted here) is set during that period of my youth, the early ’80s, and I figured that poring over some back issues of a magazine that informed my burgeoning nerdacity would put me in the right frame of mind to conjure up those days of yore. I don’t know if my suspicions are correct or not, but I’m enjoying the psych-archaeological digging.

All of the issues that I “won” are ones that I recall having read as a kid, though I don’t recall all of the stories, images, and games, just some of them. I’ve finished reading/enjoying thoroughly only one ish so far: July 1980, whose cover art –– all of OMNI’s covers, as The New Yorker’s are, were conceptual –– features a pronged satellite-slash-egg whose shell is cracking on a blue horizon to reveal a human eye hovering over what can aptly be described as a brown cubiclescape. Super-cool is right! The highlights of the issue are: an essay by Frank Herbert about the genesis of Dune, accompanied by a spread of paintings of Dune characters (including the sandworms) and the Arrakis landscape by John Schoenherr; an excerpt of Stephen King’s “new” novel Firestarter; an editorial by Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, encouraging support for his “newly” founded Space Studies Institute, a privately funded entity devoted to his High Frontier space-colonizing concepts (the organization still exists, though Dr. O’Neill passed away in 1992 after a seven-year bout of cancer); a short story by Barry N. Malzberg about a reanimated Sigmund Freud’s service on a spaceship that may or may not be at war with a violent alien race; newsy stories about an “asteroid event,” “new” sci-fi publisher Gregg Press, movie theaters at malls (!), UFO sightings, and a $50,000 federal investigation into animal mutilations in New Mexico attributed to aliens; a feature on pyschographics, the (allegedly) empirical study of what sells and what doesn’t, which was of particular interest to major corporations of the time; a Q&A with Dartmouth and MIT prof Arthur Kantrowitz, who proposed a Science Court to deal with controversial science-related issues of the day; and a news story about a lawsuit filed by OMNI editor Ben Bova and sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison against ABC and Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement –– evidently, and the courts agreed, the “new” ABC show Future Cop (starring Ernest Borgnine and a robot!) was lifted from a short story written by Bova and Ellison. In the issue is also a section featuring the winning entries of an anagram contest. Some gems: Watson and Crick (cracks DNA to win), Robert W. Bunsen (best burner now), Piet Mondrian (I paint modern), Freudians (ids are fun), and, the $100 grand-prize winner, U.S. Space Shuttle Program (Support us. Telegram cash!).

The ads are also pretty great. Hooch, cigarettes, gadgets (calculators, personal computers, cameras, stereos, cassette tapes), book clubs, cars, watches –– lots of watches, especially of the calculator variety –– and air ionizers were pretty much OMNI’s main advertisers. As a futurist publication, OMNI, in general, was right about a lot of things, including cell phones and the internet, according mainly to the OMNI Future Almanac published in the early ’80s and discovered at my local library. What a book published in the early 1980s about the 2000s is doing in a library, any library, is anyone’s guess.

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New Short Story, in Sleepingfish

Thanks to Sleepingfish and Calamari Press for publishing my new short story, "The University Pub."

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The 15 Most Overrated Novelists

A little more than 1,700 comments have greeted Anis Shivani’s Huffington Post post about the 15 most overrated writers today. Who knew that people cared so much about contemporary fiction? Reading the story allows for great, swelling sensations of schadenfreude. There’s just something about calling people on their bullshit that’s invigorating, and Shivani calls a lot of big dawgs on theirs. Vollman is written off as a “third-rate Pynchon.” Poets Jorie Graham and John Ashbery are dismissed as amateur philosophers. However, Shivani seems convinced that for contemporary fiction authors to be relevant and worthy of his praise they must tackle only weighty issues and has no time for writers who experiment with language or who believe that pure language is the ur-reality to which we post-modern beings, with our fractured sensibilities, belong, truly. Also, by merely comparing someone to Pynchon, who’s one of my favorites, Shivani piques my interest in the comparisonee –– I’d never read Vollman before and because of the Pynchon comparison have just ordered one of Vollman’s books off Amazon.com.

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8-Year-Old Painter: More Art World Madness

Just when you thought the art world could not be any more absurd –– $1.5 million for a Richard Tuttle?! –– along comes the news that an 8-year-old British boy has sold in excess of $200,000 of his paintings. Kieron Williamson does scenic watercolors, and while his technique isn’t bad, it’s not exceptional either, definitely not a-few-thou-per-piece exceptional. Clearly, a majority of the people who plopped down their hard-earned money on the kid’s stuff, you can bet, are speculators, betting that he will continue producing art, better art, allowing them to say that they possess some of his earliest known work. (Earliest known works, however, are not always an artist’s most valuable.)

The exhibit at a gallery in Norfolk consisted of 33 paintings and sold out within 30 minutes, and evidently there’s a waiting list for Williamson’s work that’s about 700-people long. We all know that of all of the arts, the visual arts are heavily biography-driven. Most people can’t tell the difference between a de Kooning and a sixth-grader’s fingerpaintings, which means that people who (allegedly) can –– members of the dreaded art-world establishment –– must serve as intermediates. And “intermediate” is just another word for “gatekeeper,” keeping out the riff-raff and keeping in the people who went to the right schools and kissed the right rings, talent be damned. (What else explains that starfucking hack Elizabeth Peyton?) An 8-year-old boy with some painterly talent is nothing but biography and just more of the same old, same old art-world story.

Until an old man posing as an 8-year-old blind painter comes along anyway.

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On the Hunt for Meaning in Contempoetry

Bookforum.com offers a brief rundown of worthy experimental poetry books (some old, some new), which is helpful, but the article is ruined by the author’s persistence on imposing meaning –– that boon of the “serious” reader –– upon their contents. In his apologia, Craig Morgan Teicher, Publisher Weekly’s poetry reviews editor, argues that experimental and non-experimental poets are tackling the same heady subjects –– life, death, love, and taxes –– but that experimental poets’, uh, form-tackles are merely non-linear, which might be true. And might not be. Does any poet really truly know why he or she writes anything? (Muses are fickle beasts.) And by reducing the experimental poets’ work to merely variations on a theme, Teicher is sapping experimental poetry of its main source of energy, its ability to shatter Meaning into brilliant shards of pure language. As an experimental poet, I can say that when I write, I focus wholly on the act of saying something neat-o. I think that once you start imparting meaning (even through the lens of satire or poetry-about-poetry), you wander into Earnestness, and Earnestness is what I can do without. If I want undercooked prose, I’ll glance at a bad novel or short story. Poetry should be evocative, and if it touches on meaning, it should do so lightly and from an angle other than above-the-head-with-a-hammer.

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Novel Excerpt on Ben Marcus' Online Journal

An excerpt from my debut novel in progress, The Book of Etna, can be found here on the web site of Ben Marcus. Author of The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women, among other things, Marcus teaches creative writing at Columbia, where I received my MS, and is a man among boys in contemporary/experimental fiction.

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The Burj Khalifa: A Gesture of No Importance

The tallest building in the world has recently been erected in Dubai. The project might be the grandest civic/corporate testament to self –– and sad symbol of implied impotence –– of all time. As Paul Goldberger says in his recent review in The New Yorker, “Erecting the tallest building in the world is a pursuit both pointless and exhilarating. Someone will always build a bigger [building], but that doesn’t diminish the intense allure of height, which can make a building famous whether or not there is anything else to recommend it.”

Dubai is not as oil-rich as its neighbors in the Middle East and has been trying to distinguish itself as a Westernized tourist destination and tax haven. A couple of years ago, the city embarked on a spending spree that would make Paris Hilton on Rodeo Drive look modest by comparison. Money quickly ran out. Projects were halted. But not the building, whose completion remained vital to maintaining whatever little was left of Dubai’s credibility. The project was salvaged by an oil-rich emirate next door, Abu Dhabi, and the building’s name was changed from the Dubai Tower to The Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The Burj is 2,717-feet tall or about as tall as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building stacked on top of each other. The building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and built by the real Dubai: dirt-poor migrant workers.

“Dubai is unlike any other city, but imagine a cross between Hong Kong and Las Vegas that tries to operate as if it were Switzerland, and you begin to get the idea,” Goldberger writes. “There are more glitzy glass towers than you can count, many of them put up not so much to house people or businesses as to give to rich Indians, Russians, Iranians, and Southeast Asians a place to park some cash away from nosy local governments.”

Most of The Burj is given over to condos for purely absentee-owner investment purposes.

Aesthetically, The Burj is a sleek, misty piece of sheer verticality that narrows to a fine point at the top and is compared favorably by Goldberger to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Illinois, a 528-story exercise in pure fantasy proposed for downtown Chicago in 1956 which rejected the glassy, boxy corporate totems that had begun popping up all over the country, all distortions of the pure Modernism beloved and birthed by Wright, his contemporaries, and Corb. Modernism was a result of new design technologies, new materials (steel, plate glass), and a new egalitarianism. The Modernists clearly had no inkling that there would be a severe disconnect between their Utopian designs and corruption-and-incompetency-potholed city property upon which they would be built. Over the course of only four decades, Modernism went from a style to, arguably, what it is now, a mere gesture (see: Calatrava, Gehry, Koolhaas, Piano, Venturi), a gesture that serves corporations rather than Modernism’s intended audience, we, the people. “We showed them what to do,” Mies once complained. “What the hell went wrong?”

Indeed.

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Philip Glass' Orphee: Journey to the Underworld

I'm assuming the accompanying video onscreen behind her is Jean Cocteau's.

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Lost: The End Series Finale (Spoiler Alert)

Here's a recent off-the-cuff post I've just written about the series finale of Lost.

New (To Me) Music: Thomas Hampson

First heard him singing Samuel Barber. Amazing stuff. Couldn't find any clips, though, so here's him in Copland's arrangements of the Southern lullaby "The Little Horses" and the hymn "At the River," two of 10 American folk songs re-imagined for voice and piano (and/or small orchestra) by the maestro in the 1950s. Enjoy.



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"Self-Portrait as Garuda, Circa 1983 (Quebec)" (ink on paper)

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The swarthy spiritual guide achieves Frankie Smith (in watercolor, ink, and magic marker on paper) ...

34

Go Big or Go Home

Though we all know how useless, frivolous, and inane lists are, we will enthusiastically devour one that will soon be published in no less an esteemed publication than The New Yorker of the 20 or howmanyever writers under 40 who will be –– will be! without a doubt! according to a few leisure suits in Manhattan suites! –– the most influential writers of this generation (Y, I guess). So. Not only do we have to deal with a list that will no doubt infuriate everyone except A.) the writers listed, B.) the writers’ friends and family members, and, most importantly, C.) the writers’ agents, we have a list that predicts the future. Now, I canceled my subscription to The New Yorker several years ago, not long after Sasha Frere Jones had become the pop music critic: The reviews section, the only reason I’d decided to subscribe in the first place, had become same-y. (I never read The New Yorker for its political coverage. I always got my politics elsewhere, mainly because I didn’t –– and still don’t –– care enough about Washington to read 10,000 words about the place and its innards.) I would have canceled my subscription earlier had I known that mag had pulled a similar list-stunt years earlier. Oh, well.

34

The Book of Etna: Drawings

(See: below.) All are pen-and-ink on paper. All are hand-drawn. All are about the size of a postcard. In most of the completed pieces, I’m going for an outsider-artist-ish feel, aspiring to Chris Hipkiss, Ramirez, Zush/Evru, and other obsessive compulsives whose work is layered (strung like a violin?), claustrophobic, and full of painstaking detail that no one other than the artist himself probably notices/appreciates (i.e., borders consisting entirely of microscopic lines, stacked and minute curlicues, microscopic lines). However, in a piece such as “Griffin” (second from top), the billowing squares in “Proud Mary” (fourth from top), and the warped chimney bricks in “Hyacinth House” (bottom), I’d like to think that I’m nudging the sympathetic viewer to wonder whether or not I’ve enlisted the assistance of some sort of graphic-design program. (I have not. I am just obsessive compulsive.) Why? To mess with people’s heads, of course (and perhaps unconsciously though consciously lend some credence to the popular notion that I am indeed nucking futs). The Book of Etna will contain at least two-dozen pen-and-ink hand-drawings in toto; hopefully, more.

For the record: My art “career” peaked about 15 years ago, around the time of the publication of a small but glowing mention in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (the paper of record in the soul-destroying Northeastern ville of my youth) by an art critic whose writing I always considered suspect. I quit art shortly thereafter to concentrate on something equally rewarding though, incredibly, worse-paying: writing. But still tucked inside the satchel that rarely leaves my side is a (yellowed) copy of the review, kept not for me to luxuriate in the glorious and alarmingly apt descriptions of A.) how I executed a particular piece (“masterfully”) and B.) the piece itself (“extraordinary”) but for visual reference purposes. The article includes a clear photographic reproduction of the piece, of which I remain fond. “Untitled” is a large-ish (24"x18") portrait in graphite on paper of my father and his younger cousin Archangelo, dressed in construction clothing and laughing, evidently sloshed, and standing arm and arm in front of some dead trees in a snowy field. My father, the taller of the two, is sprinkling some snow on Archangelo’s head. The piece hangs in my mother’s apartment hundreds of miles from where I now live but not far from the ancestral stead of my soul-destroying Northeastern youth.

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New (To Me) Music

"Music for 18 Musicians" by Steve Reich.



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Another Excerpt From My As-Yet-Untitled Cultural Memoir

The polite applause flutters away, leaving just the steady chug of a bass guitar and, playing hopscotch with the beat, back-up singers’ hand claps: clap-clap-clap, clap clap … clap-clap-clap, clap clap … A twangy guitar riff shuffles up the fretboard, shuffles back down, then wiggles out of sight. In a heavy Southern drawl, Elvis speaks:

“Some of y’all never been down South too much.” He pauses. “Some of y’all never n’byah down South t’myah …”

He snorts, softly but directly into the microphone –– brrshhh –– and I imagine the sweat on his handsome brown face framed by a mane of black hair, and the galactic luminance of his white sequined jump suit, and the rings on his bloated fingers as says, “I wanna tell you a little story so is you’ll understand what I’m talking about.” He stops, ostensibly to gather himself as if about to explain astrophysics to a first-grader. He clicks his tongue and begins: “Down there we have a plant that grows out in the woods, in the fields. And it looks something like a turnip green.”

Another dramatic pause.

“Ehhh-verybody calls it ‘polk’ salad.” I turn the volume up. Elvis and his drummer are about to do a call-and-response bit, and I don’t want Adam to miss it.

“Now that’s ‘polk.’”

THOOP.

“‘Salad.’”

Boop-boop pop.

I look over at my brother, but he’s still staring mindlessly out the passenger-side window. I smile, hoping he catches it out of the corner of his eye and smiles back –– he doesn’t. I turn the volume down. But only a dash or two.

A female back-up singer yelps, “Yewww!,” egging Elvis on. The King, apparently inspired, says, “Lordhavemercy” –– brusquely as if it’s one word, as if he’s filled with The Holy Spirit –– but he doesn’t mean any of it. Not one syllable. He’s mocking it. He is ridiculous, and he knows it, and even in all of his glorious Elvisosity, his back-up singers know it, and the audience in Las Vegas, where in 1972 this version of “Polk Salad Annie” was taped, knows it.

But he is Elvis, and he is quick. As the fans and musicians are still trying to wipe the grins off their faces, he’s already back in character.

“Used to know a girl down there. And she’d go out in the evenin’s. And. Pick her a mess of it. Carry it home and cook it for supper. ’Cause that’s about all they had to eat.” He pauses, strongly suggesting something but it’s not clear what –– what the hell, exactly, is “polk salad,” anyway?

“BUT” –– his voice low and coy –– “THEY DID ALL RIGHT.”

Adam’s still not buying it.

In a medium tempo that somehow sounds faster than it really is, the first strophe comes and goes, quickly, even though there’s a lot of tension between Adam, me, and the song, and even though I’m hanging on every note. I simply can’t fathom what my older brother doesn’t see in my favorite singer of all time. We reach the chorus.

“Polk Salad Annie,” Elvis sings, sounding not just a mite bored either. The horns respond: a hiccupping burp, followed by a bright, short, staccato riff, followed by another burp, followed by the bright riff’s reprise. The next line, “Gators got your granny,” is as lackluster as the first, but it’s followed by two intense, frightening blasts of air: “SHHHUW! SHHHUW!”

I look at Adam. He is expressionless.

“He’s doing his Elvis thing!” I say, smiling, feigning condescension. “He’s punching the air, like …” and I pretend that with one hand I’m holding a microphone to my mouth and with the other I’m smashing a pie in someone’s face. Twice. SHHHUW! SHHHUW!

We circle the VFW (Post 278) a couple of times, slowly, trying to find a parking space. It’s night, and the streets here in our old neighborhood are a suffocating labyrinth of shadows and small, crippled buildings. Everywhere you turn, there’s stack of red bricks or a crooked gutter or a wall of aluminum siding in your face. Snow from a couple of days ago has gathered in dirty, rocky clumps on the rows of parallel-parked cars and portions of the alleys. The water from the melted ice gives the black tableau’s edges and curves a crisp sparkle. We’re about 20 minutes late, but Randy, in the spirit of his alter-ego, likes to keep his fans waiting. We probably haven’t missed anything.

The song soon arrives at a pitched swirl of clarion calls and triple fills. But just as quickly it quiets down. Just a simple beat and tambourine. The back-up singers repeat “Chicka-bom chicka-bom / Chicka-bom-bom-BOM-BOM-bom-bom …” Elvis riffs on their scat in counterpoint: “Chang-chang a-ching-chang / Chang-chang a-ching-chang-a-linga-linga / Chang-chang a-ching-chang …” The music gets progressively louder, heavier. His voice gets louder and heavier, and it starts to quake, threatening to go completely off the tracks. “Chang-chang a-ching-chang-a-linga! / Chang-chang a-ching-chang-a-linga-linga!” And then, in mid-phrase, it disappears –– “Chang-ch- …” –– as if Elvis has dropped the mic. Or swallowed it. As the horns go off like sirens, the drums tumble and splash, crash and roll. The back-up singers’ bubbly sibilance soldiers on through the maelstrom.

Adam thinks Elvis has simply left the building, stranding the band. But I know better. I’ve seen just about every video of every Elvis performance from the 1970s, and I know that right now, while The King’s voice is gone, his body is onstage doing all sorts of weird things –– punches, chest heaves, kicks, lunges, karate chops –– and I cannot stop smiling.

Randy, like Elvis in the ’70s, also makes his entrance to Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” that song from 2001: A Space Odyssey. As soon as its ringing hallelujah of a crescendo stops, Mark’s toms begin to rumble, and the stage lights flicker. He triple-rolls from the snare to the floor tom, signaling the horns (actually, Greggie’s synthesizer): Da-da-DAH! Da-da-DUH! Da-da-DAH! … Randy comes out looking like Elvis from Aloha From Hawaii (1974), in a white sequined jump suit that Randy and his mother stitched, sewed, and taped together by hand. He strides onto the “stage” –– really just a portion of hardwood floor cordoned off by microphone stands –– and “See See Rider” takes off.

The same group of friends that goes to all of Randy’s “tribute shows” (do not call them “impersonations”) is here. Most of them are somewhat startled to see Adam, who –– when asked where he’s been, why he doesn’t come around anymore, or what he is up to that is so important, or so much more important, than seeing his best friend do his Elvis “tribute” –– trots out his pat answer, the one that hasn’t changed since the last time he was in: “I live four hours away, in D.C., and the Turnpike is such a pain in the ass. So.”

(To be continued.)

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New (To Me) Music

Will make you wanna slap the nearest gangsta rapper. British baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Iain Burnside’s iteration of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Four Poems by Fredegond Shove,” starting with “The New Ghost,” whose lyrics are below.



“And he cast it down, down, on the green grass,
Over the young crocuses, where the dew was.
He cast the garment of his flesh that was full of death,
And like a sword his spirit showed out of the cold sheath.

He went a pace or two, he went to meet his Lord
And, as I said, his spirit looked like a clean sword,
And seeing him the naked trees began shivering
And all the birds cried out aloud as it were late spring.

And the Lord came on, He came down, and saw
That a soul was waiting there for Him, one without flaw,
And they embraced in the churchyard where the robins play,
And the daffodils hang down their heads, as they burn away.

The Lord held his head fast, and you could see
That He kissed the unsheathed ghost that was gone free
As a hot sun, on a March day, kisses the cold ground;
And the spirit answered, for he knew well that his peace was found.

The spirit trembled, and sprang up at the Lord’s word,
As on a wild April day, springs a small bird,
So the ghost’s feet lifting him up, he kissed the Lord’s cheek,
And for the greatness of their love neither of them could speak.

But the Lord went then, to show him the way,
Over the young crocuses, under the green may
That was not quite in flower yet, to a far distant land:
And the ghost followed like a naked cloud holding the sun’s hand.”

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New Conceptualisms

In celebration of the release of Christian Bok’s chapbook of nivocalic lipograms, Eunoia, I’ve decided to try my hand at the style.

Onto oblong motors trot ghosts of strong provosts who long for Hong Kong.

Three men were there. We members fed them, served them, helped them.

Misfit, dimwit, I sit high, grinning, sipping gin, filming flirting Isis’ thin thigh.

(And I came up with another one that’s just too damn dirty for print. I didn’t mean to, I swear!)

Other conceptualist books to check out include:

Kenneth Goldsmiths’ Soliloquy, a 500-word doorstop of every word Goldsmith uttered during the course of one entire week.

Vanessa Place’s Dies: A Sentence, a war story told in one 120-page run-on sentence.

And Place’s and Robert Fritterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms.

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Robert Walser's Microscripts

A critique from The New York Review of Books by novelist J.M. Coetzee on Robert Walser, the Swedish author remembered not so much for his novels as his microscripts who died on Christmas Day in 1956 –– he had wandered from his mental institution and froze to death in a snowy field. He was 78.

He had stopped writing years earlier; rather, stopped writing in the traditional sense. Uncovered after his death were zillions of his microscripts: stories/descriptions/rants/reminiscences written on the backs of "tear-away calendar pages or on the detached covers of penny-dreadfuls," written "in a script so tiny as to be nearly illegible," according to another piece on Walser, this one in Harper's. A collection of Walser's microscripts came out a couple of years ago on New Directions.

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Excerpt From My As-Yet-Untitled Cultural Memoir

He’s given up on music, my buddy Dan. Says he can’t listen to anything nowadays without hearing the past: all of the original riffs and screams; all of the beats, shticks, and vibes that he claims vile upstarts have cribbed. There’s nothing that has come out in the past 25 years, he says, that he didn’t hear the first time around or that he hasn’t heard a zillion times already.

He’s not bitter, though. He doesn’t have any reason to be, according to him. He’s healthy, he has a comfy job, is married, has two great kids ...

Dan used to be a musician. He played in a garage-punk outfit in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, a place and time that by some weird, smokestack-black magic produced underground heavies Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys, and Devo. Dan’s running joke is that he played with all three bands but “never at the same club on the same night.”

But he’s not bitter.

Perhaps even more damning of his protestations to the contrary, my fiftysomething friend also still has some music left in him. He and his old band got together a couple of years ago and cut an album of new material. A killer one too. Almost as great as the packaging: puerile cover art, reproductions of fliers, alternately funny and poignant liner notes, and, the coups de grace, ancient band photos.

Among the myriad candids and cheesy publicity pics is one shadowy, sepia-toned action shot taken in what appears to be a tree house. In front of the drummer and in the middle of three guys with guitars is svelte Dan, lantern-jawed Dan, wearing a dark, long-sleeved button-up that he has tucked neatly into his white pants, his legs spread, and with one hand tilting the silver mic-stand that’s as tall as he is over his shoulder and, with the other, possibly shooting a finger-gun at someone or something off-stage. He leans back as if he’d just been popped on the nose, the bangs of his short, straight, dark hair swooping down past his eyebrows and extending, helmet-like, beyond his noggin and with his thin lips sealed shut. Even though you can barely see his eyes, you can still detect a look on his face, an emotionless, faraway aspect that is as peaceful as a corpse’s but dangerously intense. Even though he is not playing an instrument, his facial expression is as quiet and calmly purposeful as the other guys’. They all say, “We are a freight train. We are a barreling freight train, and we are coming at you from every direction.”

I look at the pic quite often –– it’s thumbtacked to the particle-board in my cubicle at work. I’m not sure why I study it (the pic, not the particle-board). For inspiration? A chuckle? Nostalgia for an experience I’ve never had? I’m also not sure why the one face of the five that I always end up drawing focus on is the one that is attached to a future happily married fiftysomething father of two who has given up on music.

I haven’t seen Dan in a long time –– 12? 15? 16? years. He lives on the other side of the country, and, like most of us, he is the center of his own universe. We talk via e-mail about once a year, usually in colorful bursts of about 15 or 20 missives. The last time we corresponded heavily was a couple of years ago, when I gave him the news that I had gotten hitched. We did our usual friendly sparring –– going back and forth over life, love, work, sports, whatever –– and then one day I looked up and the conversation was gone. I wondered how long it had been dead before I’d noticed.

(To be continued.)

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Beatles Rock Band = Hours (and Hours and Hours and ...) of F-U-N

Along with some relatives at my in-laws’ house this past Christmas, I spent 14 solid hours playing The Beatles: Rock Band game. From the moment that my (39-year-old) brother-in-law feigned surprise upon opening the gift that he pretty much bought for himself –– around 9 a.m. –– until well into the night, the guys, some of the girls, and I played along to “Taxman,” “Paperback Writer,” “Day Tripper,” and just about every other Beatles song you can think of. Sometimes six or seven times in a row.

Video games have always baffled me. But Rock Band is a video game in name only hence its allure to someone like me, who played and wrote music as a teen, grew up, and entered into the bills-strewn rat race but who still harbors fantastical, hooch-filled, groupie-laden dreams of returning to if not transcending fully teen form. And, of course, no one likes good, clean fun more than I.

Though playing Rock Band drums is a little like playing real drums, in that you use sticks to pound circular objects rhythmically, playing Rock Band guitar is about as close to playing real guitar as pouring water or taking a nap. On the neck are five colored buttons or “frets.” You press them with your left hand as you flick a toggle where a traditional f-hole would be with your right. If you’re a lefty, I guess you’re screwed. The drum kit consists of a kick drum and four elevated toms, each outlined in a different color –– you play the color that scrolls across the screen. The singing is a little hard to decipher. As the lyrics stream horizontally across the top of the screen, a jagged line indicating pitch streams directly above them. You’re left to infer that high points on the line are high notes and low points low. The company that produced Rock Band might as well have just used staff paper.

The game is pretty easy to pick up. Like everyone else who had piled into my in-laws’ rather cramped TV room on Christmas day, I had never played any version of the game before –– Beatles: Rock Band is the latest in a series of Rock Band games, including Rock Band: Metallica, Rock Band: AC/DC, the original and classic-rocking Rock Band, and a few others. Before long, though, my in-laws and I were pounding, fretting, and flicking through medium-hard versions of certain of The Beatles catalogue. (Not every Beatles song is included. The rest are available for download off the game’s web site.)

I also was never really a Beatles fan. I appreciated them. But I never really realized how truly powerful, truly perfect they are until hearing their music through the Bose speakers in my in-laws’ TV room. Beatles: Rock Band motivated me to buy a couple Beatles CDs off Amazon.com. Annnnnd everybody wins.

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A-readin'

Finished Dune. Finally. Interesting and, putting on my 40-years-ago glasses, groundbreaking but not all that exceptional, y’know? Getting into the story that begins in medias res requires mucho attentiveness and patience –– lots of unexplained names come at you. Herbert’s writing style is hospitable enough and full of cool semi-made-up words. You could argue that constructions such as “falling in low-suspensor slowness,” “mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures,” and “the nexus-boiling of the cave” inspired Ben Marcus, one of my faves, who employs similar language but to hilarious effect. From Notable American Women: “all-vowel language nutrition,” “women’s-frequency hijacking,” “motion fear” …

Still working through my other stuff. Will prolly finish The Centaur before anything else. Also about half way through Hard Times (in addition to several other things mentioned earlier).

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A-writin'

Here’s a review I recently penned of the new Andy Warhol exhibit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The show focuses on the 10 years before Andy’s death in 1987. … Story about a Fort Worth rapper who performed the vocals for his new album over the phone from a federal detention facility in Beaumont. …. Long-form feature on Shea Seger, a Fort Worth singer-songwriter who signed to a major label 10 years ago when she was just 18, was all over the place, and then disappeared. Well, now she’s back, with a new album and new outlook.

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