Bart Bull

Aphorism Sixty-Six: (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2012-01-26T18:08:00.006+01:00

Salt — so easy to add, so hard to remove.

Arizona: Copper, Cotton, Citrus, Cattle, and Crazy

2011-12-04T19:20:00.012+01:00

(As a kid in Arizona, they used to make you memorize The Five C's, which included "Climate" but not "Communism" nor "Capitalism" nor "Corazon..."; but hey, hence the title for an Arizona-based magazine....) (and yes, dammit, there are such awkward asthmatic aardvarkian-esque things as magazines from Arizona... Dude, we can totally read — we're just not in the mood, so we look at the pictures.)

Arizona's first state governor wasn't a Pontiac dealer.

Instead, he was a Zoroastrian. It was the Pontiac dealer — the guy who came in after the one-eyed newspaper columnist and then, eventually, the Mexican-born ex-boxer — who officially outlawed Martin Luther King Day. Then there was that early governor who refused to approve the state flag. But the governor who saw UFOs over Phoenix came way after that. Then he founded a French cooking school. (There'll be a test on this later, so take notes.)

A white pyramid looms over the mountains where Phoenix and Scottsdale and Tempe crunch together, marking the tomb of that first Zoroastrian governor guy. But since nobody remembers him, or knows why there's a white pyramid parked against the red rocks and cactus, or can figure out just what a Zoroastrian is, it simply serves as a symbol of just exactly how Arizona has always been, and likely always will be. Arizona is intentionally weird, oddball squared, a place where bold eccentrics have historically stumbled in to see just how they stacked up against the nutjobs who were currently running the joint.

Some of those nutjobs, of course, were those dang Indians — like, for instance, the Apaches, who were said to be able to run 50 miles a day (and bear in mind that Arizona was hot as hell, even before they paved it). It's hard to understand why the US Cavalry didn't just turn their horses around and go pick on the Hopi, who were pushovers, and a lot slower too. Perhaps this is why even today our license plates say "The Grand Canyon State" rather than "Famous Frybread," or "Geronimo Lives."

Tombstone, "The Town Too Tough To Die," became "The Town Too Tourist-Dependent To Close Until 9:15 PM," but that was later. Scottsdale used to be "The West's Most Western Town," but that was before it became a golf course. Phoenix ("Park And Lock It; Not Responsible") was built right on top of a system of canals that had originally been constructed by the Hohokam Indians, who wisely disappeared, apparently annoyed by the sight of Apaches sprinting back and forth. Tucson (pronounced "Tuk-sin") has traditionally been distinguished by its lack of canals, and by the fact that it was never the West's Most anything, perhaps its saving grace. Still, it features Old Tucson, where all the Western films that weren't filmed in Hollywood occurred.

Arizona, a place that has been, among other things, part of Old Spain, New Spain, Mexico, New Mexico, Sonora, the official State of Deseret, the Gadsden Purchase, the Compromise of 1850, the glorious Confederacy, the glorious Union, the State of Nevada, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Seven Lost Cities of Cibola, and . . . well, those dang Indians were so lousy at writing names down. Anyway, Arizona has a proud right to a perpetual identity crisis.

Ok, so the Clantons and the Earps were genuine trouble, one and all imported from out of state —snowbirds, in Arizona terms. But during my own lifetime, the Devil's Disciples and Satan's Slaves and the Mongols and the Bandidos and the Hells Angels and the Vagos and all manner of other well-meaning darlings have been among the genuine outlaws. (I used to have a safety-card from one of those charming dance-clubs, until the Secretary-Treasurer needed back, because it was the only one he had, and there were cute girls in the bar he wanted to impress.) Arizona is the proud state that first established the law that you couldn't wear your hogleg pistol into the topless club, a fine example of our state's firm, focused grasp on practical jurisprudence.

But 'twas ever thus. John C. Fremont, Arizona's first territorial governor, spent most of his career exploring California, for which you can hardly blame him. He was told he had to reside in Arizona, or resign. He resigned.

Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry House...in the Ghetto!

2011-09-30T11:31:00.000+02:00

The last time I was in Dennis Hopper's house was — let's be fairly honest — the only time. This was a while ago. Things may have changed a bit since then in Hopper's house, in Dennis Hopper's life. Hell, in my own life too. There may have been some rearranging of the furniture.

Hopper's house is famous, in case you didn't know, for not only being the home of Dennis Hopper but being the house that Frank Gehry built for Dennis Hopper. It was in the ghetto. Or that was its rep, anyway — Frank Gehry had built Dennis Hopper a house in the ghetto, right there in Venice and everything. The LA Times was every bit as titillated as the New York Times and the London Sunday Times, though there was reason to believe the LA Times would have had a harder time finding the ghetto — any local ghetto — on a map.

Of course, Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house in Venice wasn't in a ghetto. Not actually, of course. It was Dogtown, and there was placa all over everywhere, naturally, all kinds of locals-only graffiti. If you took a look, it just said really mild stuff like "West Side Locos," and "Con Safos." Venice has always been nice and funky and sweet that way. But really, the verdant sub-tropical neighborhood where Dennis Hopper had commissioned a Frank Gehry house-clad-in--corrugated-iron could be called a barrio, perhaps, maybe, possibly, but then so could so many of the best parts of Los Angeles. Or at least the parts where great food doesn't come equipped with valet parking. That may well be the way that we can best determine the ghetto parts and the barrio parts of LA from the non-ghetto, non-barrio parts — the presence or, conversely, the absence of valet parking.

Anyway, it had all proved pretty thrilling to all kinds of ultra-upscale and high-end magazines and even daily newspapers and other such slum-dwellers, this super-stimulating non-valet parking juxtaposition of Dennis Hopper and Frank Gehry and the ghetto and the graffiti and the corrugated iron exterior of Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house. Me, I could never never really figure out which locution was correct, or at least more correct — was it Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house? Or Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house? I think it depended on what magazine you were working for, and how glossy the magazine's pages were.

In this case, let it be said, the magazine was HG. Formerly, until only very recently, House & Garden. Which Anna Wintour had only recently boarded, the salty sea-breezes between the UK and the the USA still fresh in her hair, knife clenched in comparatively tiny teeth, promptly prying off the logo, turning the venerable House & Garden, one of the jewels in Conde Nast's crown, into the all-new, all-exciting, much hipper HG. (Over the next year or two, practically all subscribers cancelled, newsstand sales died, and before long, the magazine, which had been around forever, folded. Instantaneously Anna got given Vogue, which had been her undeclared intention all the while. (Grace Mirabella, who had been considering herself Vogue's editor, was, well, notified. By a phone call from a reporter from the New York Post, as I remember.) Conde-Nast brought their former cash-spurting-cow "shelter magazine" back successfully maybe a decade or so later but this time they named it, for unfathomable un-chic reasons, House & Garden. Go figure.

But hey, wasn't me that was working for 'em at the time. It was my pal, my boy James Truman, later to be knighted no less than the Editorial Director of Conde-dang-Nast — arise! Sir Knight! — but at the time, only just the mere cuff-adjusting West Coast editor of HG, an underling, a simple salary-man really, uprooted outlandishly from Manhattan and outposted like a bemused but wary cavalry colonel, albeit one with a posh-ish British accent, dispatched to a frontier Fort Courage in order to keep an peeled eye on the unruly local Injuns. Truman was doing it in perfect style, precise Conde-Nast style, making certain he'd leased a hell of a house in the Hollywood Hills, and he and I were considering putting together a shared writing office above La Fonda, on Wilshire by the Otis Art Institute.... with a fax machine! Of our exclusive own! Which seemed like a big deal! That's how long ago all this was — oh, and the fax machine had a tiny little green-and-purple polka-dotted pterodactyl flying around inside to make it work.

Anyway, among the other LA lifestyle accoutrements essential to the West Coast Dude for HG, Truman could see the absolutely essential necessity of possessing the absolutely essentially right car. As a Brit, and a journalist, he'd long since done the duty required by some tea-stained Parliamentary statute; as with each and every other British journalist ever sent on a junket, he'd got off the plane and onto the shuttle, and immediately rented a red Mustang convertible. (Then, over the course of their two-or-three day stay, they are required by law to drive back and forth along Sunset and the Pacific Coast Highway, before refilling the tank, dropping the car off, and returning home to write a story that emphasizes how shallow and absurd LA is, a story that contains the requisite surreal swaying palm trees within the first paragraph. I've always wondered, given the depth of their research, how come they can't ever pronounce "Los Angeles" right — always with that hard G.)

Truman was much beyond that by now, much beyond. Now he desired, needed, required, a Mustang convertible of his very own. A groovy one, a vintage one, a '64 or '65 or '66 Mustang — in red. As his pal, as a Californian, and as a car guy — though, let's face it, his dad had, after all, been a Jaguar dealer — it was my solemn duty to advise him, and in all good conscience, I had to let him in on The Truth: those old Mustangs pretty much suck. They're just sad little Ford Fairlanes, the lame-o econo car that Ford slapped together to battle the Volkswagen Bug, with a sexier body pasted on top. There's not one of 'em, no matter how beautifully restored, that doesn't rattle like a rusted bucket of rusty bolts. Naturally, as old friends and comrades and confidants, he listened closely to my sage counsel, and didn't believe me. He went and drove a couple of fresh new old-ass Mustangs, and discovered that, lo and behold — who'd'a thunk it? — they pretty much sucked. The redder they were, the more they rattled. And they cornered like tanks — like water tanks. Like fish tanks.

So instead, we found him a mint perfect '68 Firebird with a 326, a convertible, with that really cool grey-olive metallic paint-job that Pontiac was doing in those days, and matching interior. It was so wicked, so quick, so cool. It looked amazing. Because it was amazing. And perfect, and pristine. Until, of a wet Saturday morning, first good rain of the season, streets all nice and slick and oily-wet, he banged it into the back of somebody beautiful and blonde. As I remember, he was looking at the girl when he ran into her Volkswagen Rabbit up near Hillhurst. Although I may be confusing it with the time I banged my Mom's '68 Camaro, driving underage without a license, while I was looking at a girl. Probably both, actually.

Anyway, I get this panicked call from him. He's late — he's supposed to be out at Dennis Hopper's house. Watching over, shepherding, facilitating a Matthew Ralston photo shoot. At Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house. And then sweeping up afterward by interviewing Dennis Hopper. But he'd just pranged his perfect Pontiac, and now, profound remorse, powerful panic, pitiful regret, with that sickening sense of a world turned upside down, with no taxis responding because of the rain, he needed me to run him out to Venice. And maybe stick around to be helpful. (Which, as everybody knows, I am. Helpful — that's me.) Plus, as a guy who'd personally spoiled at least one pristine, perfectly bitchin' '68 GM product myself (327, automatic, with that amazing cool console shifter; pristine white interior), I was only too glad to be of comfort on the way out to Venice. Hey, dude, man, things like this just happen — wet roads, fast cars, distracting girls. Distracting cars, fast roads, oily girls. It's a lot like life. It's lifelike. It's especially easy to be philosophical when it's not your broken Firebird.

So we rolled, in my major primary ride of that time, which was a black '68 Pontiac GTO with RamAir hood scoops and beefed-up sway-bars with urethane bushings and old-school Cragar mag wheels and that amazing 400 cubic-inch Pontiac big block. If you were worried about Dennis Hopper's neighborhood in Venice being the ghetto, you definitely didn't have to worry about it after you'd parallel-parked that bad boy. A lot of the semi-vatos and their cousins who came out to have a look once they heard the dual exhausts setting off their car alarms were in fact related to the guys who took it as a privilege when I used to downshift into the valet-parking districts of LA, the guys who shoulder-shoved the other valets away so they could snag the keys and cruise around the block a couple times before they had to park yet another silver-grey BMW. Somebody actually moved their Nissan into the driveway so Truman and I could honor 'em by parking the GTO in front of their house — these guys had excellent valet parking skills, which no doubt came from living in the ghetto there.

Anyway, in we went. I wish I could tell you what the doorbell of Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house sounded like, but I don't remember. Probably somewhat like rusty corrugated tin grinding away. Then again, maybe we knocked. Anyway, once we got inside, it was a horrific scene. It was horrifying. Remember that part in Apocalypse Now? Or the sort of somewhat end-thing of Easy Rider? Or all the various movies with Dennis Hopper in them like Colors or Speed or Blue Velvet where nobody could figure out how to end the thing and so there's a big climactic scene where everything bursts into flames? Well, it was a lot like that. A lot. Only you couldn't see the flames. But they were there, take it from me.

Poor Truman. He was already not having a super-great day. Me, I was at my helpful and conciliatory best, but let's face it — wasn't my gig. Hell, I wasn't even on the Conde-Nast payroll at the moment, so really, I was in ever so many ways the absolute best guy to have on hand, with undoubtedly the clearest vision of all concerned. Not my ass on the line whatsoever. Although I do, okay, tend, perhaps, to get a little philosophical under those types of circumstances.

The main room (I'm sure it had a proper name, that huge room with the raw undulating ceiling, but we were just waltzing in late, and it wasn't really my gig, so I didn't write it down or anything) was this big open space but it was divided by hanging wall-divider deals, hanging from the ceiling, but on these extraordinarily smooth-operating bearings, like Swiss skateboard bearings but no doubt done to aerospace industry tolerances. And on all these big sliding panels mounted on sleek sliding Swiss bearings, there was a lot of Art. It was, anyone could tell, actual art. Sliding away, yet set so they could be glimpsed, there were things that looked like Basquiat, and some sure-enough Rauschenbergs, and a silk-screen Rosenburg, I think. There was either a Franz Kline, or else a really amazing Franz Kline copy. And among them, scattered in on the silent Swiss bearings, shuffled into the deck, were some of the artworks of Dennis Hopper.

Okay, but everybody was avoiding that room like the plague. Dead silence. Tumbleweeds were blowing through. Where all the action — all the downstairs action anyways —was going on was in the (what do you suppose Frank and Dennis had titled it?) The Amphitheatre Room. Man, it was pretty ultra-mega-fraught in there. There was this room on the first floor of Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house that was like a little 99-seat theatre all unto itself. There was a stage, with a real lighting rig and a big sound rig, and against the opposite wall, there was a series of those over-sized steps, amphitheatre style, carpeted in some rigorously nubby industrial-grade charcoal-colored carpet. And on the steps and the stage, there were all kinds of dazzling suits and blouse-y Versace shirts and blinding ties and socks and shoes and suits and shirts spread out, each on its own hanger, except the socks, which were folded on hangers in pairs. And there were like three fashion-stylist assistants and two make-up stylist assistants and two photo assistants and an intern, and one guy who was there with the rental lighting, and there was a catering team. With espresso machine, which unquestionably wasn't helping matters. And that's to leave out the make-up stylist, and the fashion stylist, and the hair stylist, and maybe another stylist for something I'm forgetting. Maybe a socks stylist. In the absence of an Art Director, there was Truman, and, hey, me too. Oh and there was Matthew Rolston.

(Once, maybe a year or two later, I got a peek at The Secret Sheet. There was once this piece of paper — it was genuinely on paper back then — that told you the name of each photographer that Conde-Nast used, and what they got paid. As a writer, and even as a pampered one, it was kind of discouraging. I mean, I wrote a lengthy profile on one of the most famous actors in the history of Hollywood, and one of the guys on the sheet had gone to do the portraits, and because the guy was Old Hollywood, hey, they simply did it in his backyard, so it was like picking oranges right off the low branches of the tree or something. And he'd blown the shoot! Screwed it up completely. Unusuable. Nothing! We had to send yet another famous photographer to go do it over! And the first guy got fifty grand! And the second guy only got forty! And they were just about the cheapest guys on The Secret Sheet! You really didn't count until you were up there with the six-figure guys. But even there, even among the legends, like Irving Penn and Horst and Helmut Newton and Hiro, they weren't really pulling down the biggest of the big bucks. That was Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, and, naturally, Matthew Rolston.)

So, really, as important as Dennis Hopper and Frank Gehry might have seemed, if only especially to themselves, they really weren't. Not really. I mean, Dennis Hopper had only just made the biggest comeback in the history of Hollywood, and Frank Gehry was probably about the most controversial architect of the time, at a time where even daily newspapers were suddenly gabbling ever so knowingly about "design." But believe me, the important one here today wasn't Hopper or Gehry or even the fabled Hopper-Gehry/Gehry-Hopper house. It was the photographer. And while Truman would eventually acquire the kind of power that made the most mighty of Manhattanites tremble and dream to be seen lunching with him in the Conde-Nast cafeteria — does one order the yellow Jell-O as a post-modernist ironic gesture? Or will he maybe not get it? Maybe better wait and see what color he selects —he was currently a bit on the death-defying, career-destroying balance-bubble in a fairly fraught three-celeb pile-up. Me, I was the guy who owned the '68 GTO parked out front, so as far as Dennis Hopper's neighbors were concerned, probably I was the most important. With power comes responsibility; I believe humility is essential.

Anyway, Matthew — I like to call him Matthew — was upset. Upset but professional. Professional but pissed-off. Pissed-off but at least still on site. On site but having his folk make the grand gesture of packing up. Packing up, but slowly. Slowly so they didn't actually have to leave, because once he and his people had packed up and left, they were gonna look like prima donnas. Or Matthew was, anyway. And Matthew knew who the prima donna, the diva, was. And it wasn't him. It was not him. It was Dennis Hopper, who had stormed upstairs. Slamming all the doors while doing it. Though, given that it was a Frank Gehry design, not all the doors stayed slammed shut.

Truman didn't beg so much, or plead, as just do a lot of very apparent, very gestural, very empathetic listening. He didn't, for instance, go down on one knee or the other, or both. He did, however, put the hand of reassurance on Matthew's shoulder, and that was really something, because Truman's not that touchy, not so much of a toucher. He can be clever and funny and he can be warmer than you'd think, but he's not, say, a big ol' bear-hugger. He's British, even if he hasn't lived there since before Diana was a princess. Anyway, he did a fine job of mollifying in the moment, and then, and then . . . and then, it was time to go upstairs. And speak to Mr. Hopper. As a show of good faith, Matthew had his people cease their faux-packing-up process. There was a momentary moment of relief, a glimmer of hope. Truman was, I think we all felt, just the man for the mission. Maybe.

Mr. Hopper — may I call him Dennis? — was not pleased. He, like Matthew, was pissed-off. But his version of pissed-off was different, and called for a different style of expression. A more expressionist style. He was barricaded behind the door that led to his bedroom and bathroom. And he was outnumbered, as well, having just only merely the one assistant, a reedy woman in her late twenties. She and Truman huddled, consulted, considered, co-conspired. Finally, she gathered her courage, threw back her shoulders, then hunched them back into servile position again and knocked on the door.

"Dennis?"

No answer.

"Dennis?"

[muffled but beyond miffed] "What?"

"Dennis, James Truman is here. He had a car accident on the way here. He was hoping he could come inside and speak to you."

A long pause. Actors, as I understand it, have beats that they work with, beats that are a great deal like musical rhythms, beats they can count out and use to create dramatic effect. I mean, it's not like I hadn't already known that Dennis Hopper was an actor's actor's actor, and that he'd studied and studied with and worked with the greats, but still, sometimes you have to be in the presence of a great actor when they're displaying their craft to really gather it all in. This, this, was greatness. I started to wonder how Truman was possibly going to be able to convey all this greatness, all this greatness that was surrounding us, how he was going to get it into his story. I didn't envy him.

"Dennis?" It was Truman. Man, he really had the touch. And the timing! I mean, here he was, working, mano a mano, with a guy that I myself was now recognizing as one of the greatest actors of the day, and yet James' voice had just the right note of quivering question, with maybe just a slightish soupçon of querulousness to it. Well-played! It was like a tercio de varas, the first stage of a bullfight, with the matador merely flirting, feinting his cape to learn just how fierce the bull will prove to be. Ole!

"Wha-a-at?" Again, the work of a master craftsmen — no, Hopper was a consummate artist, an artist who'd learned his craft and then transcended it. It was awe-inspirational. It was three syllables; no more, no less.

"Dennis, do you think I might possibly come in and join you there? We could perhaps talk? I feel so personally responsible for this whole problem..."

Nice! Nice. Was that nicely done or what? I felt a swell of pride, perhaps even a lump in my throat. Yes, true, Truman was my dear friend, my boy, my buddy, but really, it was the kind of thing that made you just want to root, root, root for the home team. If Nottingham had a football team with a football song that I'd known, I probably would have burst out singing it right then. I think, we can all agree, it's just as well.

Anyway, Truman was admitted to the inner sanctum, while the assistant and I, both diplomatically and cordially, smiled at one another briefly, and then commenced to considering our shoes and, alternately, the curved-versus-straight aesthetics of the Brian Murphy-designed interior. Brian Murphy was one of Frank Gehry's under-apostles but more of an interior design-y dude, so he was the one whose publicist, in conjunction with Frank Gehry's publicist, and Dennis Hopper's publicists (his personal publicist, and his latest film's publicist team) had sort of helped to, as we might say, inspire this story.

Truman was in there a really long time. He was in there for more than a century. I grew old and gray and died and went first to Purgatory, then got the guided tour of Limbo, and then was escorted to the very edge of the Gates of Heaven — but just then, just as I was entering into an all-access-laminated-pass negotiation, there came a shout. Shouting! It was startling! It was Dennis Hopper, back behind the brilliantly-designed bedroom/bathroom door. He was at full voice! It was glorious!

"NOT IN MY HOUSE! NOT IN MY HOUSE I FUCKIN' DON'T! NOT IN MY OWN FUCKIN' HOUSE! NOT! IN! MY! OWN! FUCKING! HOUSE!"

I wasn't in there, perched on the edge of the bathtub while Dennis Hopper paced manically around the open-plan bathroom with its industrial-grade fixtures, but it was kind of obvious what stage of the negotiation they'd achieved. Dennis' wan assistant and I raised our eyebrows at one another and then smiled wanly. Truman had just moseyed around to the part where he was strong-arming Dennis Hopper into perhaps considering wearing a few of the lovely suits and ties and socks and things that Matthew Rolston's fashion-stylist had so graciously provided. Suits that would be truly becoming, and perhaps even genuinely very flattering—

"NOT IN MY OWN FUCKING HOUSE! NOBODY TELLS ME WHAT FUCKING CLOTHES TO WEAR IN MY OWN FUCKING HOUSE!"

I'm trying to remember just exactly when David Mamet wrote "Glengarry Glen Ross." Whether it would already have been a big hit then, or what. I mean, it's not that Dennis Hopper had necessarily been auditioning for it or anything, or just using Mamet's script for vocal tune-up practice downstairs in the Amphitheatre Room, where all the suits and socks were now spread around all the places where an audience would ordinarily sit. But Mamet's masterwork, had, I realize now, a certain resonance, a certain harmonic resonance. I think it must have already been a hit, and they were probably already starting to talk about making a movie of it. I'm guessing, though.

Anyway, that particular moment was probably the most highly-pitched moment of drama, volume-wise, if not necessarily the most truly dramatic. Theater buffs, fans of method acting, and hack screenwriters probably already guess that it necessarily lowered in intensity before long, that eventually Dennis and Matthew made an uneasy peace before parting as good friends and then going on to say incredibly bitchy things about one another once the whole ordeal was done, once they were at last out of earshot of one another and each others' assistants and all. And Truman? James had wrung peace and photography from a world where before there had only been dischord and blank film. But really, even though he got it fixed, I don't know that he ever felt so in love with that lovely Firebird ever after that day. I guess it was never really mint perfect again.

Tijuana — Toda La Tripa, Ninguna Gloria

2011-06-06T11:33:00.001+02:00

"Tu primer fiesta de toros, tu primer viage a un protibulo y quiza tu primera borrachera, tu primer pelea en un bar, tu primer viaje a la carcel, tu primer soborno...."

Bart Bull, from Details, quoted in Tijuana la horrible; entre la historia y la mito by Humberto Felix Beruman

Picoesque

2011-05-25T15:11:00.044+02:00

(A brief hunk of my unfortunately destroyed novel that was sort of a love song about Los Angeles.)

You couldn't see faces when they came in, not at all, not whatsoever. Early summer evening Pico Boulevard southside sunlight shooting in sideways through blue and green paint letters on La Frontera's elaborate blue-green quetzal-elaborated front window on La Frontera's blue and green and yellow storefront, it kept you from seeing any of their faces. Three of them came in, one with a soccer ball under his armpit, three dark little short little men all shadowed blue-green, and parked the ball there square on the table top while Mauricio brought them beers and chips and salsa. They didn't move the ball. He didn't have much to say to them, and they had nothing whatsoever to say to him. Which was weird. Because everybody who comes into La Frontera jokes and horses around with Mauricio, and Mauricio horses and jokes around with everybody. Plus, also, moreover, Mauricio is one of the central ways that word gets passed about kitchen jobs, busboy and dishwasher action. He's a big main stem on the Guatemalan grapevine. It was strange. It stuck out. What was up with that?

So then Mauricio goes to me, "I got to go to El Otro Lado for got some more Cabros. You wanna go with me, maybe we take your troca — I maybe can drive us if you wanna'ed." I'd let him drive the El Camino when I first started coming around La Frontera de Guatemala y Mexico (that was the formal name, its baptismal name, the name out front) after he first spotted me parallel parking it out in front of the window so I could keep an eye on it in our lively, lovely, rotten little neighborhood — he'd come outside to direct traffic and make sure I didn't dent it up. Nowadays, he pretty much preferred that I keep my own use of it down to a minimum.

I fling him the keys. He catches them backhand, lefthanded, like a Dodger fan, which he most definitely is not. Mauro is a lifelong Giants fan, so much so that he's been known to switch the tv station if the Dodgers start to pull ahead, incurring all manner of wrath and such. Yet another thing he and I have in common.

Out the door to the parking lot, and Mauricio grabs, seizes, snags, shakes, rocks, rattles the ladder with Hector the muralist up there aboard it, chingaderoing him in mid-air fresh paint motion. Hectoro's up there painting another brand new flower basket high on the wall, another fresh new one, and Mauro grabs the ladder and gives it a good solid set of serious shakes. Hector offers, in contemporary Spinglish (on my behalf, for my benefit, because I'm there) to dump his wet yellow brush on Mauricio's perfect grey-and-black New Wave rayito pachuco pompadour. This mural, this former brown brick wall full of flowers and girls and super-scenic scenery, is very much A Work In Progress, has been for years now, maybe always will be if Mauricio has much to do with it. As he does, It's his place, even if it's Hector's mural — Hector's and Mauricio's both. Generally, I try to park the El Camino upwind of Hector's ladder.

It's Hector's place too, in the sense that La Frontera's mural is primarily, basically, allegedly, pretty much a street scene from their shared Guatemala, from somewhere probably a whole lot more like Antigua than Guatemala City, somewhere where the streets are cobbled and quiet, where willowy long-ankled peasant women in skirts sway with baskets balanced above their braids. You'll be waiting a good while yet in life to see your first willowy Guatemalan Indio gal, but both Hector and Mauricio know what they like and what they remember best. And that's what they like. Only it keeps changing, what they like and what they remember. And it's subject to discussion and revision and renegotiation, over chips y salsa y Cerveza Cabro y campechanas negro in the late hours. The street grows trees; the trees go away because now they block the mountain, a volcano shaped like an upside-down sno-cone looming on the horizon. With smoke coming out of it some weeks, other weeks not. Clouds crash into the volcano even though it looks to be a sunny day, even though for a year or two it was twilight there in Antiguatitlan. A window opens up where there was only wall before – Hector sometimes spends weeks and months painting elaborate bricks onto the brick wall — and then another willow-waisted campesina is sitting coyly in the window, and then a window box of flowers, great gorgeous flowers like a prodigy-kid would paint, maybe perhaps a little extra large and glorious and gorgeous for so small a window box, only now the girl is gone, painted out as a result of some all night aesthetic argument with Mauricio — all those flowers were stealing away her glory anyway — and her window is slammed closed. A burro shows up on the street, and then a great squared-off, squared-away, square-shaped load of green onions weighs him down, as it would, because practically every onion has its own painted-in personality. Plainly, obviously, Hectoro loves onions. A month or two later, after a long, long, very long series of discussions about the ways of burros and the ways of green onions on their way to the market, a little girl arrives to lead him. She has sweet ankles too.

"Este es el corrrrrido del ca-ba-a-a-l-l-l-o-o blannnnn-co..." Mauricio sang as he cranked over the Chevy, as he sang each and every time he stuck the keys in the El Camino's ignition. Turning it over, he turned to me. "So how come you don't never write some story for Motor Trend?" Mauro had been a faithful Motor Trend reader ever since he was a junior shoeshine kid carrying his matching deep-sea-blue box y banquito, the shoeshine box on a shoulder-strap and the banquito fitting just so, carrying them first all around his own little atitlan town, and then all across grim-ass, grimy-ass, brutal-ass Guatemala City, where the bloodstains began where the bullet-holes ended.. El Gran Tiempo. Where if you got there plenty early enough, you could park your personalized tuck-and-roll metalflake banquito next to a newsstand that was directly across from maybe probably the biggest turista hotel in all Guatemala, all full of crewcut American military advisors wearing casual beach togs and sunglasses (if no actual beach-togged sunglass-wearing American tourists — Guata-fuckin'-mala?). Mauro told me about twenty times, or thirty, maybe that he used to always shine the black Beatle boots of the actual gringo guy who wrote and sang "The Ballad of the Green Beret," and so now he was always trying to find a copy, a 45, to put on the jukebox at El Otro Lado. And since Pico Boulevard was littered with what was left of the old school Rhythm & Blues jukebox 45 single business, all these scattered storefronts that had once been the original R&B record labels, loose teeth still sticking around but now morphed into Mexicanismo labels and distributors, banda y Norteno y tropicalismo y mariachi y mas, staying low and loose under the table then and now, traditional record business practices still in place, never actually paying anybody not holding a loaded pistol but only just skidding by and sliding and surviving on smiles and promises and shiny cars and signed contracts and contracts specifically unsigned, and on shoe shines as well . . . well, sometimes me and Mauro would stop in on our way to and fro up and down Pico and we'd see if we couldn't locate a clean-ish vinyl copy of the Greatest Hit of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, Green Beret. "Fighting soldiers from the sky... fearless men who jump and die... men who mean just what they say... the brave men of the Green Beret...." Ah, but no dice, dude — it does not say — all that ever happened is I ended up scooping up even more Carlos y Jose albums and cut-rate Los Tremendos Gavilanes cassettes, and Mauro would end up being ceremonially presented with a few more free tropical bikini gal posters for the restaurant, so that he'd have to Scotch-tape 'em up amidst all the current ones, amidst all those ever-so-unlikely svelte sexy dark brown-eyed Budweiser morenas, the ones who obviously didn't ever drink beer or eat beans or tortillas or anything else from the starchy side of the border.

Meanwhile, back in Guatemala City, back in his shoeshine days, wedged in there somewhere beween the newsstand and El Gran Sheraton-Hilton, the patrón-proprietor of the newsstand liked to leaf philosophically through Motor Trend himself, and he charged a very reasonable quetzal-rate rent for thumbing though any fresh copies he got just as long as Mauricito covered his shoeshine-smeared manos with yesterday's newspapers and didn't get any shoe polish smudges on the pages. Yo, you smear 'em with Shinola, you just spent next month's masa harina money. But all very well worth all the big risk, extra especially since back in Mauro's metalflake tuck-and-roll banquito days, Motor Trend was bulging with brand new muscle cars from Detroit, wicked Mopars and fierce Fords and each-and-every God-entirely-forsaken division of General Motors, Pontiacs and Chevys and Buicks and Oldsmobiles — hey, and even those long-forgotten Javelin's and AMX's from American Motors, with red-white-and-blue paintjobs — all of 'em ramming massive big block boat-anchor high-performance engines into indisputably the best Body by Fisher design since the late 40s, and then swathing them in spoilers and racing stripes and colors that vibrated long after the ignition was cut off.

In fact, Mauricio had squatted on the very first banquito in Guatemala with a racing stripe. Bright amarillo-yellow against that azul anil, taped off officially by a body-shop hombre who'd received in exchange daily shoeshines for a solid month — although Mauro told me that he'd stinted on the ultra-valuable Kiwi polish as much as possible by making grand gestures and spitting and popping the rag twice as much, doubletime. With great stealth and cunning, he'd ripped from two successive months of Motor Trend ads the Dodge SuperBee logo, a mean little cartoon bee with racing helmet and goggles and a maniacally gleeful grin; then, after that, he'd shellacked them both to either side of his shoeshine box with the somewhat inaccurate legend "440 cubic inches" hand-painted in yellow underneath them. A pristine version of my own SS-396 El Camino had been righteously representing right there in the Motor Trend ads too — with the inverted hoodscoop, and Chevy's own big-belt version of a racing stripe — and it resonated, vibrated, rumbled Mauricio's ribs to this day, right up against his corazon. Few things in life, let me tell you, are anywhere near as enjoyable as driving east against the incoming late afternoon traffic tide on Pico, heading downtown when everyone else is heading home, staring into the glare, then you cutting over at Alvarado to Olympic on the way to the Garment District with Mauricio popping down into neutral at every red light so's he can rev the engine so loud he can only just barely be heard singing Jose Alfredo Jiminez' classic corrido "El Caballo Blanco" over it. Which is not on the radio, but in his head. And now in the clattering LA air as we blasted down Olympic.

"So what's with those guys with the soccer ball, with the football? What's up with that?"

He quit singing, kept revving. Long ago I'd given up on guarding the redline on the tachometer; I might mention it to him occasionally when he got too enthusiastic but he was more interested in how the revving harmonized with his singing while we waited at the intersections. He had a sense of the harmonics, if not the tappet valves. "These guys, these guys, they think I'm all a cholo, because of so they don't give me no respect I deserve. See, they like to come to at La Frontera at this time of the day, when the sun still lives in the sky high up still, so they can eat Elena's tamales, tamales estilo tipico Guatemala, con crema de Guatemala, not no Mexican tamales with the crema de Mexico, that you can get everywhere. And they eat Elena's tamales and drink lot of Cabro beer from Guatemala we like to drinks, but only they don't think so much about how this Cabro comes here to get out from Guatemala to from here. To their mouths. Because they are so traditional. Because they are all indigenous. Because they are Indios. Because I am not Indio because I live in Los Angeles and own and have a restaurant. And because they don't need a job for today for them or their hermanos." His eyes rolled back quick, back and again. "If they are so indigenous I don't know how they can kick some football no Maya din't make for them. That their women din't weave it. Out of the pattern of their village, traditional. And they think maybe I got to pay them money for who they know back in Guatemala that they might know Elena's family that still stay there, or else maybe they try to make me some trouble here too. Pinche cabrones who don't know me or they don't show me more respect."

"So how come they call you a cholo? Junior's the cholo, not you..."

Junior was the white t-shirted cholo, born in Guatamela, definitely, but raised in LA among Mexicans, 17 or probably 16 or so, a vato loco de la old school, complete with all authentic accessories except the hairnet. He'd been romancing Mauricio and Elena's daughter Estrella in the only way he knew how to romance her, which, in the absence of a zocolo, in the absence of your basic central plaza around which to take her promenading around counter-clockwise while all the vatos with no sweetheart came silent or sneering around clockwise, well, in the absence, he mostly just sat around and acted stupid. So far it had mainly been a methodology of hanging around the restaurant in the afternoon watching the telenovelas and American talkshows and sit-coms and cop dramas and Dodger games and teasing her while she did her homework and trying to talk her into serving him beers until she finally got annoyed enough to scald his sad ass out the door by telling him all the things he wasn't and many he was never going to be and a lot he would never even be smart enough to know he wasn't. All true, but it was tough on the both of them. Mauricio's solution was that maybe I should marry Estrella.

"Because, see, in California, in the U.S. United States, in California, see, Junior, they call him a cholo. But see in Guatemala, see, cholos are Indios who wear the clothes of like the Ladinos because they want to look like they are Ladinos and not Indios. Because they don't wanna be be Indios."

And the Ladinos? "These are the ones who own all up of everything in the big cities and the towns and in the little small villages also most of the time too. Because they come with a name of Spanish from Spain. Because they're not Indios. The Indios don't got a Spanish name, or if they got it, they don't look nothing like Ladinos, see? Ladinos, see, they try and look more like gabachos. They come there with the conquistadores, the Ladinos. From the time of Don Alvarado. The Ladinos got the land. They end up got all of the land. In Guatemala, everybody wants land or else they wanna look like they got land. That's what they like in Guatemala, is land. So they can make corn. Corn and land and coffee. That's what they love. They kill you for corn and land and coffee. These kind of guys. "

Mauricio and Elena's place downtown was called La Frontera too — Hector had painted La Frontera en el Otro Lado, blue-green, naturally, high upon the facade, way up where hardly anybody ever looked. The Border on the Other Side. Mauro used to call it La Frontera de Guatemala y los Estados Unidos, but nobody who actually noticed it ever got the joke. They kept telling him there wasn't no border between Guatemala and los Estados Unidos, that Mexico was the one with the border with the U.S., so finally he had Hector climb up his ladder and paint a whole new name. "I thinked about maybe La Frontera de Guatemala y Cañada but then I mostly got to spent all my time telling to people that I already know that they don't got no frontera of Cañada and Guatemala. So I just had him put "El Otra Lado." And where the other words had been, Hector painted a cartoon of Mauricio running away from a dog with longanizas, sausages on a string, trailing out of his mouth behind him. Mauricio's mouth had the sausages, and the dog was chasing after him.

The garment district was always deep forest blue-green quiet by early evening, but the watch peddlers stayed late and some were talking together as they put their things away, box by box, re-wrapping the display models in their fittled plastic wrap, perfectly painstaking, box by box, each into a box and then a larger carton, each motion it's own prayer. They were African, dark black, darker than blue, as Curtis Mayfield said.

"Ola, Abraham — que paso?" Mauricio said after we parked and walked over to them. "How is the weather in your tuba today?"

"Hot and dry and perfect, my friend, my amigo. Always perfect there."

"Sometime we got to go there. Maybe me and you go sometime together there."

"Sometime we will go soon, amigo, mon frere. My cousin has just come from there, back with all the news. It is peaceful and perfect there. You must come with me."

"Probably they don't got no Guatemala food there. Maybe when we go, we can set up a little restaurant. And you can sell watches from it."

The African laughed so hard he had to lean in to his friends and tell them too. "Your food we sell, but there are too many sellers of watches now already now. Maybe I must become your cook for you there."

"When we go, I will be the cook and you will be the one who speaks the language to the peoples. Together me and you will have together the first Guatemala restaurant of your city. We will be rich. We will wear fine watches and fine clothes."

"Already we have fine clothes and fine watches here in the District. What we will have in that city will be perfect peace."

Mauricio began unlocking the restaurant door. "Then soon we got to make our plan. Maybe my amigo here comes with us."

"If he comes, he will have perfect peace there too."

El Otro Lado was a lot more along the lines of a taco stand than La Frontera on Pico, with its big three-man hand-carved wooden marimba and its relaxed late evening atmosphere — El Otro didn't even have a jukebox, but just a ghettoblaster hung by its handle between the cash register and the grill, where he and Elena could fuss equidistantly over which radio station they played. Just around the corner and down the street from Callejon Santee, Santee Alley, the seven-days-a-week bazaar, El Otro most served as a loncheria for the Garment District — the Fashion District, as the city government determinedly kept trying to re-label it, upscaling it away from images of little Asian ladies and little Latin ladies and little Latin men and little Asian men and little men and women from all over the world hidden in the upper floors of every building downtown that wasn't a bank, rip-racing through piecework, tossing their days into white canvas hampers on wheels. Then again, in general, as a whole, lumped together, the immigrants of Los Angeles are unquestionably the nattiest immigrants ever, thanks to the immeasurable outflow of pirated designs, the unstoppable inflow of boatloads of containers of crates of cartons of boxes of sporty shoes, the unceasing clatter of color and cut and logo and label and brand name knock-offs and no-name knockdowns, socks three pair for five dollar, cinco dollores para tres.

I still hadn't gotten past the beginning of their conversation. "What were you saying to Abraham about the weather in his tuba? I couldn't figure you out."

"Ibrahim — he's called Ibrahim, not called Abraham. He come here from Senegal, in Africa. All these guys who sell the watches, they all come from there, from Senegal. They are Senegaltecas, those guys with watches. And where they want to go is they all want to go back to their city they got there call Touba. In Touba they always say everything stays always perfect. The weather is perfect and the peoples there is perfect. Everything perfect. Nobody never fights and they don't got to pay no taxes because they all of them send money there to Touba from selling watches and purses. It is a place that is perfect. It's maybe for them like Guatemala used to be before when my father was a niño. Or right before then, maybe. From long before."

We were loading cases of Cabro, the beer so refreshing they dare to choose to use a realistic goat on the label, when a yellow Nissan pickup pulled up, piled up impossibly high with flattened cardboard boxes, and parked in front of us. Yellow plastic rope held flattened boxes way high over the top of the cab, maybe three or four feet higher. A little Mexican-looking lady was driving; she got out and yanked a rope loose but before it was loose, her children were scattering all down the alley, climbing up into dumpsters to check for boxes. "Mijo," Mauricio called to one, a nine-year-old kid or so. He shrilled his whistle, his Mauricio whistle, so the kid would know him next time forever. "Venga, mijo." The kid came along as Mauricio went back inside. They came back with half a dozen boxes each, and the other kids instantly dismantled them, taking them apart and stomping them flat, then winging them up to their mother, who stood balanced on the edge of the truck bed, spreading them out evenly. I asked the mother if she hablar Ingles but she smiled and pointed to the kid handing her up the boxes. He was probably eleven or twelve. What I wanted to know was just how much a truckload of flattened cardboard boxes was worth. "It's worth a whole lot," he told me con mucho enthusiasm. "The recycling center, they give us thirteen dollars, probably. Sometimes fifteen." So how long does it take to get a load? "It depends — depends on if you get lucky. A lots of times you get lucky. But sometimes you don't — sometimes you get there and somebody else already just been there and they already got all the boxes before you." And then you try and go somewheres else and and somebody already just been there too. But a lots of times you get lucky. The bad thing is when they make you wait for too long a time in line at the recycling. And sometimes they close first before you get weighed and paid. And then you got to sleep in the truck there so nobody don't steal your boxes."

Mauricio had climbed in the back of the El Camino and — cracking up the kid's little brother and sister — was personally stripping the cartons out from the cases of Cabro. He dumped the bottles loose in the back of the bed by the cab and tossed the beer flats one after another down to where the kids were seriously stomping boxes on the sidewalk. The kids leaped on his offerings with giant glee, and then they flung them up to their mother like frisbees, like flying tortillas, like flattened cardboard boxes. "Buena suerte," Mauro told them, and then "Suerte," he called again as they pulled off, all the little four of them pressed into the cab of the little truck, the imperfectly high load just a little higher now, just a little slightly more impossible. Only slightly.

He drove us back to La Frontera with six or eight cases of beer bottles clanking loose in back, a clattering brown tide sloshing forward when he stopped for lights, sliding all the way back at the tailgate once he took off again. No delicacy involved between him and a big-block El Camino. He was certain the superior construction of Guatemalan beer bottles would keep them from breaking, and so he drove con mucho gusto — after all, you only go 'round once in life. At La Frontera, parked beneath a lavender-blooming jacaranda tree, I guarded the beer while he went in for green plastic garbage bags. We loaded them up with beers and laid them over our shoulders, beer delivery Santas, and Mauricio dropped off a couple of free beers at the table of the soccer players. Tops popped, foam flew furiously forth, cursing commenced, Mauricio crowed like a rooster, a gallo, a chingadero. A couple of the marimba players, saxophone straps hanging loose over their shirts, their guayaberas, began to warm up. Commenced. Evening light ended, lightly, over with, blue-green night descended on La Frontera de Guatemala y Mexico. I left a little later, not that much later, walked the maybe half a mile or so home. The jacaranda had rained lavender blossoms entirely all over the El Camino; the hood, the bed, the roof, the windshield, all littered solid with wet lavender-purple, a fresh paint-job of petals that would have dried up and blown off if I'd tried to drive. Spring was beginning its ending; summer was coming, on the way, here now. Incoming.

A Sign o' the Times

2011-05-09T22:57:00.002+02:00

Hey!

Good news!

(If maybe a little late. Maybe I'm not paying the proper attention to this stuff.) (Hey, but I'm willing, near-perfectly...)

(Or maybe I'm just like my mother...)

In any case, our eternally beloved, if poor ol' battered and beaten-up-beyond-Bondo-repair good ol' SPIN magazine (hey, cats 'n' kittens, remember way back when?) has declared Prince's Sign O' The Times the Official Most Second-Best of All The Albums of the Past 25 Years. Yeah!! (Ok, so I'm like a year or two late in noticing... but who reads SPIN anymore?)

Whoa!!

And check it out — my very own review of the album is quoted, if dope-ily, by whoever that week's dumbass dope in charge of organizing the Today's Super Dopey List Of Whatever-The-Fuck We're Listing Up Today! Yeah!! Whoah! (BTW: Don't let the elevator break you down...)

Here: here's the poor sad nitwitted knucklehead's intro: (and I'd urge ya'll to enjoy it, as I can't help but do so my ownself..)

Prince's divinely, defiantly eclectic double-album came out at a time when SPIN was all agog. "I guess you know what the problem with Prince is: he's too good," goes the start of Bart Bull's review. "He's so good he can do anything he wants...and sometimes the dumb stuff he does works out to be the best stuff anybody's ever done. Ever." That even-the-dumb-stuff-works spirit imbued an album as personally pointed and stylistically varied as any ever made, and it's aged well enough that, in a 2005 tribute, SPIN's Michaelangelo Matos called it a "one-stop superstore for the past two decades of pop."

And then, here, here's the actual undying review thing.... there's such a great story that goes along with this one, a story that swirls together Al Green and Don Dixon and Marti Jones and Elvis and Graceland and Albert King and Duck Dunn and Memphis itself and . . . well, I'm'na get to this story, with Polaroid photos, perhaps, sooner or later. (Me, I'd hold my breath, breathlessly...)

http://www.spin.com/spin25/125-best-albums-past-25-years#page=13

Aphorism Sixty-Five (as printed in Vogue, no less!) (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2011-02-16T23:17:00.007+01:00

Directors are a debased currency in today's Hollywood. Producers count, studio heads are stars, stars are social philosophers, agents inspire more fear than ever, but instead of wielding the staff of power as they once did, directors now stand in line for a chance to kiss it.

Irving Berlin has nothing to do with you or me.

2010-11-25T14:23:00.015+01:00

So this ran in SPIN back in the day, in the slot where the Editor's Note went, oddly enough. As if it weren't odd enough to get paid to write about Irving Berlin. In an issue with Belinda Carlisle on the cover (hilarious story behind that one) and full of features about Poison and Tracy Chapman, OMD, Michael Hurley, Big Pig, and a ton more, with Johnny Cash, LL Cool J, Megadeth, and Soul Asylum all co-starring in the Special Summer Swimsuit Special. With accompanying guide to summer vacations in the US that guided you to The World's Largest Tire, and Einstein's Brain; plus, there was a map to Europe that declared where all the Taco Bells and Elvis Presley museums were. Which is to say, I keep realizing, that as much as SPIN drove all of us all crazy all the time, we were trying to get everything in there. Including, swear to God, Irving Berlin.

Irving Berlin has nothing to do with you or me, nothing at all. Just an old, old man from a time too far gone to bear the slightest resemblance to our own, Irving Berlin was last month's brief cultural news item, worthy of a USA Today cover sketch, deserving of 100th birthday wishes and a warm wink from the hostette of Entertainment Tonight, recipient of all manner of mass media graciousness, despite his pointed lack of participation, despite his unwillingness to create the most minimal of photo opportunities. The achievement under question wasn't the music but the extraordinary length of the man's life. The length of his life is exactly what Irving Berlin lived to regret.

Irving Berlin and his music are so far away from us, so remote from our own dull and thrilling end of the century. Years and years before the birth of the Beatles, or of Nike footwear, Berlin quashed all requests to use his tunes to pimp products, a curious stance for a man who'd begun as the brassiest of Tin Pan Alley song pluggers, desperate to devise new ways of getting a song sung on a stage — any stage — in hope of a hit. Hits sold sheet music in those days, not CDs, and the difference is huge, undeniable, impossible to bridge.

His first hit was "Alexander's Ragtime Band." It was the work of a white man, a Jew, imitating a black style a good number of years after the black style's early innovations, at a time when white audiences were still less than receptive to the black practitioners of the style. The music bore no resemblance whatsoever to, say, the Beastie Boys.

Unlike most songwriters of our own era, Irving Berlin never learned to read music and was forced to rely on the crutch of technology in order to create. He could only play the piano in the key of F sharp, but with a special transposing piano, a mechanical device allowed him to switch keys. A pitchbending synthesizer with built-in rhythm settings and sampling capabilities is light-years away from so crude a contraption, and guitarists who rely on capos are invariably much closer to being true aesthetes than the uncouth likes of Irving Berlin.

The streets of his youth were cluttered by petty criminals and ruled by organized crime. The world of his lifetime was dominated by war and rumors of war, swept by an unfailing tide of fear and hope, and powerful joy. He was virtually the Anti-Morrissey, the veritable Jonathan Richman of his time, a relentless optimist through decade after decade of depression and despair. Born at the onset of modernism, contemporary to the greatest tragedies of history, he failed to understand that mankind was doomed to suffer, to wallow in gloom, to wear the most existentially profound of black wardrobes and stare glumly into cold cafe au lait. Instead, when he suffered profoundly after the shocking death of his new wife, he addressed his wounds frankly, he made light of his life, and he moved on. He wrote "Blue Skies." He had nothing to do with our time.

He began insinuating himself — a white man, a Jew, a Russian, an immigrant, a near-illiterate — into Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville, into a culture that was aping the culture of the black people it feared. As only the greatest of bluesmen ever do, he found a voice that was his own, a distinctly American voice that sang through the mouth of others, of millions of others. As vaudeville was destroyed by the movies and as movies found a voice and began to sing, he stayed in style. As Broadway grew ambitious and artful, as the world lurched from war to war, as show business died and moved to Las Vegas, Irving Berlin stayed in style. Through not just one generation but a half dozen, he remained in vogue. And then he lived a little too long, and all of us grew wiser than he was. Maybe living past your time is worse than a sin. Maybe we'll all get lucky and it'll never happen to any of us.

(Addendum: for a few years in a row, every few weeks or so, I'd been calling the offices of Irving Berlin Music and speaking to Mr. Berlin's longtime secretary, Hilda Schneider, continuing to ask for an opportunity to to speak with the man himself. She was pleasant but firm; I'd try to chat her up. She'd seen, apparently, the likes of me before. No dice, damn it. But let it be said; I was getting paid to do this — well, and a few other things, like ignore the phone calls from all the West Coast publicists for record labels who were trying to beat their East Coast counterparts at getting their label's own Latest & Greatest on the cover and wedging ol' Belinda Carlisle off of it. I don't know that I was ever smart enough to suggest that if Irving Berlin would give us an exclusive interview, we'd put Hilda Schneider on the cover . . . but the thing to be said about SPIN is that we might have. )

Aphorism Forty-Five: (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2010-10-26T17:06:00.000+02:00

Life is a long series of humiliations. If you're lucky, anyway.

Aphorism Forty-Four: (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2010-10-26T15:42:00.001+02:00

The best way to make sense of things is to be stupid.

Aphorism Forty-Three: (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2010-10-26T15:35:00.001+02:00

Travel can be so narrowing.

(Attributed, falsely, to Rick Steves.)

Irene Kuo's "The Key to Chinese Cooking" considered yet again

2010-09-02T13:49:00.003+02:00

Among the several things I've been thinking about lately is a book called The Key To Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo. I've quoted from it before; God willing, insh'Allah, I'll quote from it again. But this quote is not from the book — it's from the book's jacket. I like it tremendously.

"It is impossible to do more than suggest the richness and clarity of this book. Everything is here — every piece of information you need about planning, buying, preparing, cooking, timing, serving, menu suggestions, etc. Irene Kuo is at your side. Open to any page and you will immediately recognize the true and unmistakable voice of someone who knows how, and knows how to make you know how. "

And then, immediately below, the only photo of Irene Kuo I've ever seen, cleaver in classic cutting hold. She's right-handed, and because the photo is black & white, I'm guessing that her nails are lacquered red.

Aphorism Forty-Two: (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2010-09-01T20:50:00.000+02:00

Maybe I haven't been dumping out as many aphorisms lately, or maybe — and it may be a sign of extreme mental health — I haven't been listening to myself as much. Probably that.

Anyway, I fell across this one in a Chinese cookbook. A great Chinese cookbook, maybe the great Chinese cookbook in English: The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo. The first cuisine I ever really got involved with (unless you count cooking as a short-order cook in a wino cafe named "Stanley's," even though the neon outside said "Swede's," just right across from the post office in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, as being involved with a cuisine) was Chinese. It's a long story that I'll spare you, because I like these aphoristic deals to be brief. Or brief by my standards, anyway. But brief, just the same.

To this day I still cut almost everything with a cleaver, just as I learned in Chinese cooking, in those Chinese restaurant kitchens in Oakland and San Francisco, and Ms. Kuo's very thorough and accomplished book is clear and direct on cleaver technique, as it is on anything she touches. Discussing the great kitchen truth — the Great Life Truth — of why a sharp knife is safer than a dull one, she says:

"A razor edged cleaver sobers one's mind and sharpens vigilence."

If fortune cookies read that crisply, well, we'd probably stop putting "in bed" on the end.

My favorite sentence this year; Este Es El Historia de El Camino

2010-08-24T15:02:00.013+02:00

My absolute very favorite sentence I've written this year just fell off of me, like one of those muffler-tailpipe assemblages you've been meaning to get out and get under and get down and take a look at, because it's sure been rattling a lot lately, but every time you think of it, you're wearing something you don't want to get all greasy and grimy and and covered in shit. And then the next thing you know, there you are, a million miles down the road from nowhere, all late at night and all, and there's this blinding brilliant explosion of friction-sparks and a pretty blinding glorious grinding noise coming from right directly behind you. And your engine is suddenly roaring louder than hell too.

It came forth sideways from an exchange of letters with a friend, whose son has . . . well.... anyway:

"What year El Camino?"

That's the kind of writing I expect from me, and it's nice to know that I can just fling that stuff forward at will.

Poor long gone Faulkner is probably grinding what's left of his teeth. Hemingway — or what's left of him after the academic coffin-worms have chewed him and deplored how minty-fresh he didn't actually taste — is very likely super-dead-fuckin' jealous at the elegant, concise, abrupt perfect smix of Spanglish-AmSpan. And Kerouac, who, it must be said, if sadly, mournfully, dolorously, never even rode in a damn El Camino, would certainly get it, but not actually envy it, if only because he'd also have wanted to know what color it was too. Neal Cassady would've wanted to know what was under the hood.

I would hasten to remind him, and them,and other dabblers, other tip-tapping typers of aggregated language-hunks'n'chunks , that not every sentence can hold everything.

And only ever so few can be so ultra fine-ass.

Fuck A Duck; A Flocking of Canards

2010-05-13T13:31:00.005+02:00

The way the story gets told, he was, at bare minimum, bisexual. And that's to be gracious about the waterfowl. His most notorious film, 1926's Le Canard, was titled, allegedly, supposedly, in English, Fuck A Duck. Although that may itself be yet another canard. This is the kind of story where we'd better question everything, each and every quacking duck we stumble across.

Bernard Natan wasn't his real name. He was a Romanian Jew, so it's likely that Natan Tannenzaft or Tannanzapf probably wasn't really his real name either, though it does suggest he made his way across Germany at some point. And before he was shuttled back across Germany, he ended up owning Pathé, France's biggest film company. The one whose proud symbol is a rooster. Le Coq.

That's an actual fact — though declaring facts in the life of Bernard Natan is to take a swan-dive into the murkiest of French duckponds, into the cluckingest of coops poulet, into the near- impenetrable bird-poop of the closed-shutter French business-banking-judicial-governmental hierarchy of the 1930s. And then, even worse, to paddle into the time of the Vichy government, when the Nazi occupiers were pleased and bemused to discover that they'd at last invaded a country whose citizens were not only willing to rat out the Jews but to help provide the proper enforcement mechanism too. Worse yet, when you come up for air, all you can do is breathe in the successful silence that followed the grand national collaboration. Which became known, in the ex post facto aftermath myth, as le Resistance. Vive le Resistance!

Bernard Natan, Jew, foreigner, financial wizard, technological visionary, marketing seer and distribution innovator, studio chief and new owner of that ultra-modern French institution, Pathé, had appeared, the French courts were told, in scandalous stag films, lewd movies with elaborate sets and scenarios, films he wrote and directed and produced and then performed in as well. (As it was still The Silent Era, translation was a simple matter of, shall we say, inserts.) He was, they let it be known, a sodomite, a foreigner, a pornographer, a Jew, and, of course, surely, a swindler. En plus, he had purportedly fucked a duck. It was enough to make a judge's knife hesitate above his medaillions de maigret.

He was accused of fraud, of financial mismanagement, and he was, let it be said over and over again, a foreign Jew who fucked ducks on film — native ducks, noble French ducks. (Natan had, as well, been the first presenter of the much-beloved Mickey Mouse in France, though under the circumstances this probably didn't much help his case. Donald, uncharacteristically, retained his spluttering silence, as did les jeunes Huey, Dewey et Louis.) Early in his career, an emigrant, he had established a film company that produced nearly three dozen movies, and then he created his own production lab, Rapid Films, on rue Francouer, with labs and studios, workshops and soundstages that have since been transformed into le Femis, the French national film school. He created a advertising/publicity firm that still exists (under a less-troubling name, of course); he created the first footage of the 1924 Olympics; he built studios and stages and distributors and labs and projectors, and he produced major commercial movies.

In 1928, Charles Pathé, announcing that film was no longer profitable, stripped Pathé Cinema down to a shell company and sold off its assets. Bernard Natan risked acquiring it, transforming it into the extremely dynamic Pathé-Natan. He began purchasing theaters, sixty-two of them across France; in September of 1929, he produced France's first talkies, licensing RCA-Victor's sound system for his new theaters; he re-launched Pathé's newsreels and added sound to the pioneering international news source that would be be both distributed and widely imitated worldwide and which would lead to television news; by November of 1929, he had created France's first television company; it developed a transmission of television using telephone lines. He funded the research that led to the anamorphic lens, which led to Cinemascope and the contemporary wide-screen film. He innovated what we would now call vertical integration, controlling not only the means of production but the production labs as well, and the distribution and the theaters themselves. By 1930, no longer so convinced it was impossible to make money with movies, Charles Pathé wanted his company back.

Articles began to appear, to occur in the press, so many that they could surely be considered a well-organized campaign. Despite the fact that he'd been married to the same woman since 1909, despite the fact that he had two children, despite the fact that he made at least 60 major movies during the first half of the 1930s, Natan was now under steady attack: a Jew, an etranger, a pornographer, a pederast, perhaps even a foul violator of feathered French fowl, and yet with his grasping grip clutching such an important economic institution of la France. A swindler, an embezzler? Surely. How could he not be?

The anti-Semitism of France in the 1930s is only so little remembered because France's next-door-neighbor was so successfully raising the standard, and because . . . well, there are other reasons. After years of steady slander and innuendo, of gossip, and rumors in the press, all meant to destroy Natan's unpatriotic grasp on the proud nation's most famous film company, in 1936, at the height of the Depression, the Tribunal de Commerce succeeded in appointing a receiver who proceeded to declare Pathé-Natan bankrupt. Bernard Natan continued to produce films; his firm continued to operate at a profit. But by 1938, just after the Kristallnacht in Germany, Natan was arrested, and indicted, accused of fraud, of bilking investors, of negligent management and of hiding his heritage by changing his name.

Natan was imprisoned in 1939, and indicted yet again in 1941. This time he got convicted. Released in September, 1941, the Vichy Government efficiently arranged to have him placed on what is said to have been the very first train from France to Auschwitz. He was not seen again. Pathé (sans Natan) carried on with proper French management into the 1980s, based on the armatures Natan had created; the theater chain he established lives on today.

If you should visit le Femis on rue Francouer, in the 18th, where once Bernard Natan first established his film lab, you will enter the gates under a striking antique arch that still says, so quaintly, "Pathé Cinema" with the fabled rooster emblazoned. On a sunny day, you will see France's elite young film students smoking underneath solemn marble plaques with the names of those who died defending La Belle France against the Nazis. They are the cream of their generation, these film students. As ever in France, to succeed, to advance, to prevail, you must absolutely attend the proper school; all politicians, left, right and center, attend the same school, and all up-ranking military officers uniformly attend another. And le Femis is where the future of film in France is being instructed. There is, of course, no mention of Bernard Natan on those memorial plaques. In fact, to the degree that he is remembered at all — and he isn't, not much — he is noted in French film history as a swindler, an embezzler, and as a dirty duck-fucking pornographer. There is reason to believe he never did any such things, and much proof that he didn't, but he never got a chance to tell his tale. Putain. Fuck. Fuck a duck.

(Note: In 1999, Gilles Willem published an article, "The Origins of Pathé-Natan" in Screening The Past, Issue 8, and it was translated by Annabelle de Croÿ. I'm indebted to this remarkable effort at re-examining the restructuring of Pathé, Natan's innovations, and the financial and judicial machinations of that time. Without it, I would have joined in understanding Bernard Natan — his name; the name he chose for himself — as he has been understood in all the years since he was escorted out of France.)

Escoffier, Stanley & Me (& Danny, Tiger of the Balkans)

2010-05-13T13:26:00.005+02:00

My cooking has direct lineage to Escoffier. I wish I could say that was true from my initial professional experience in the kitchen, but that would be fudging the facts around a bit. And Stanley's Cafe — the sign outside still said Swede's Cafe but now Stanley owned it, and he'd had the the front window repainted to say so; besides, the neon on the sign only lit up on one side, and even then it didn't say Swede's Cafe, because only the part that said Swede's still lit up — anyway, Stanley's Cafe, a wino diner directly across from the post office next door to the Westward Ho in downtown Phoenix, Arizona in 1974 was not my direct connection to Escoffier. Unless, perhaps — and while I can't prove this, I guess I also can't prove it wasn't maybe possibly so — there was a Escoffier hook-up through Danny, the regular cook. Danny whose professional name had been "Danny, the Tiger of the Balkans."

Danny Unpronounceablelastname (and thus, in the Arizona of 1974, known forever and ever as merely "Danny") had been an Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler representing Yugoslavia. He was five and a half feet tall, and four and a half feet square. He didn't speak much English but just enough. The first actual words he ever spoke to me — he had grunted at me previously a lot; actually, a whole lot, actually, as in "Get out of my way" or "Go home" — were when Stanley appointed me the new night cook since Danny wanted the last couple hours before downtown Phoenix deflated like over-used condom, and since I was always hanging around drinking free Sprite while waiting for my girlfriend the waitress to get off work because we only had the one car. (Imagine, Americans, Arizonans, Phoenicians — only just one single car! What were we thinking? Gas cost somewhere between 19 cents and 29 cents and 36 cents; gas stations pretty much didn't need any of the other numbers — and it was our duty and responsibility to burn it up — but anyway, the first actual ungrunted Move Your Boots words Danny ever spoke to me was when Stanley took me back into the kitchen to make formal introductions.

"Danny, this is Bart. He's going to take that last shift."

I'm guessing that Stanley would have liked it if we'd shook hands and all, but it would have probably put me out of commission. So I kind of nodded and smiled and grinned and tried not to wet my pants and all.

Danny, perhaps the most exotic chef in all of downtown Phoenix at that stage, stayed focused on the cuisine. He gave me my very first professional cooking lesson. It's one that rings in my ears, that resonates in my spirit, that inspires my soul, that clenches my testicles to this very day. "Don't Touch The Soup." Then he turned his back on me.

Exclusive! Hank Williams' Pulitzer Prize Acceptance Speech, April 2010

2010-04-16T01:21:00.006+02:00

(Pre-recorded on 78 rpm vinyl, as Mr. Williams was unable to attend the awards ceremony due to prior commitments)

Well, howdy, friends and neighbors, I would give anything to be there with you on today, or tonight, for the receiving of this fine award. For which I thank you kindly. But since I can't be with you there in Pulitzer, I just want all of you to know just how much this important trophy will mean to me, now and at future times.

It's not every day that a old shirt-tail boy from Alabama gets to receive such a trophy and a honor award, and I want you to know that I intend to make sure to be worthwhile of such a trophy and honor. It's not so long ago that I was a-travelin' between these here little towns and church centers or fellowship halls where I couldn't hardly go stray off the straight in narrow path, and where there was nothing to do but maybe go see a bootlegger or to write a new song off of you, the people that give me this award and trophy. And this has been my inspiration. A lot of people feel it hasn't been nothing like this, and if they mean how it ain't been nothing like they would of guessed at, well, I'm here to tell 'em so. All I know is that its a lot of hard-working days that I ain't ever gonna see again, so let's just say good night and set off the fireworks and then head on home before they commence again.

But meantimes, I want to be sure and thank my dear Mother and my late old dead Father, who was a big influence for me on account of his running of a log train when I was a child. And also thanking my big sister, Irene, who rooted around and did a lot of the dirty work when I was not around to do it, like taking out the wet slimy trash from out of the bathroom where it belongs at, and for [message garbled] So thank you kindly. But enough of about me. Let's all of us get into a nice good mood here tonight, and anything that they do, either whether they're on the right side or the wrong side of the road., well, you can see how they're still having trouble finding whether they're in the Bagdad Hilton or the... [message garbled] ....and the creek don't rise....[message trails off]

En Dernier Canard

2010-04-12T20:28:00.008+02:00

Seeing as how this whole darn Duck deal has landed in my lap, it occurred to me that I better do that orderly asymetrical three-on-a-plate thing. Went to the market, and there were the usual absurdly cheap "canard manchions." Duck drumsticks, basically. And the reason they're so absurdly cheap is because they're so absurdly tough. Because ducks are made for swimming, and that's just what they do. They're muscle-y, tendon-y little bastards, those canards enchainé, and you've got to cook them slowly. You can make confit from them, if you have the patience, but I decided to see if I could swim against the current, and paneé them, poelle' them. Ever so slowly. We shall see.

I'll be missing Malcolm's funeral, and Bernard Natan, among a great number of of others, wasn't given one. I'm not so sentimental as to suggest A Last Meal — knowing Malcolm, he would have been trying to pitch Bernard a movie, and then would have stuck him for the dinner check — but I'm inclined to savor my canards in both their honor this lovely evening. It's wonderful to be currently alive, it's wonderful to buy duck for so little, it's wonderful to hear it sizzling rather than to be sizzling. I wonder what they would have thought of one another, that pair of odd ducks? I wonder what kind of movie they might have made? I wonder where Russ Meyer is? I wonder what Roger Ebert would order?

Duck, Duck, Duck! Malcolm McLaren: Sex Pistol Man, That's What I Am...

2010-04-11T22:28:00.007+02:00

Only just a mere six or seven million years ago, I dined with Malcolm McLaren. There were others in attendance as well, like James Truman and Roger Trilling and so forth. It was a good deal like a Hollywood version of The Drones Club. I had nothing to do, I hasten to assure you, with the choice of location, with the food, with the mise en anytheeng. Of this you may be sure, because it was a Chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills, which you can be double-damn-dead-certain I would never have suggested, thank you very much (and as Malc was famous for never even considering picking up the check, I don't know that we can blame him either) and I damn sure wasn't going to have us eating at a hoi-toi Chinese place in Beverly for God's sake Hills, when with a merest jaunt East on the freeway we could have been in Monterey Park, the largest assemblage of astonishing Chinese food on the North American continent. No doubt over the course of the meal I ingraciously mentioned this. I probably couldn't help myself.

More, I also couldn't help myself from butting in with a question or two, but not about the Sex Pistols, or Johnny R. or Sid the V, or even Sir Richard of Branson. What I wanted to know was what had happened, by this late date, to The World Famous Supreme Team. Because to my mind, as earth-shatteringly important as Les Pistoletes du Sexe were — and continue to be — what Malcolm McLaren achieved on Duck Rock, his own solo record, the album that pioneered hiphop album-ism and dovetailed it with South African mbquanga Zulu jive and hillbilly square dance and double-dutch jump rope songs and Cuban/Dominican voudon chants and all that scratchin' that was makin' us itch, and meant it, man, as emceed by two late-nite Newark-to-NYC deejay party-promoter knuckleheads that Malcolm's big Brit freckled ears had flapped wide enough open so as to be invited to the party as an honor guest and patsy . . . . well, it was a stroke of trouble-brewing genius even broader, even brighter than the Sex Pistols, if never as widely, whitely notorious. And it was even then still sending off ear-freckling reverberations in the culture, as it continues to do to this day. While he was discovering hiphop, he pretty much innovated that funny stuff, that greasy kid stuff called "World Music." And, remarkably for a Brit, did both without ever mussing his ginger hair with a pith helmet. And made super-silly '80s Britpop-poses for the photo sessions too.

Malcolm was all too plainly pleased to talk about 'em again, the World Famous Supreme Team: See Divine the Mastermind and Just(ice) Allah the Superstar, two high-pitched h/h hustlers who were absolutely capable of sweet-talking the frilly panties off lovely ladies from remarkably remote boroughs (and Philly, even! and Rochester! long distance!) with their magical radio-wave microphone skills. They were natural hustlers, born to brag and boast and to receive hot butter on their breakfast toast, and Malcolm's respect for such fast-talking past-masters of his own grand-ceremonial game just reeked and radiated and rattled forth. The last time he'd run across them — surely he hadn't been sharing any publishing checks with them, after all — they had headed West, to the Coast, to Cali, to Hollywood — just as he himself had done — and were now throwing nearly-official after-parties for the pre-HIV Magic Johnson.

I got in contact with Malcolm in Paris a couple of times a while ago with the idea of going back in and having a look at how Duck Rock came to be, exploring how it happened, and how all the variations on "Buffalo Gals" and "Double Dutch" and "Lookin' Like A Hobo" "D'Ya Like Scratchin'?" wandered their way back into the world, but now guess I was a little too late. (Which is fine; I'm usually the reverse, and it's nice to feel that other way. I guess that's why there's so much affection for nostalgia/nostalgie.) I regret it, but not entirely. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have afforded all the dinners. I know I wouldn't have let him choose the restaurants, that's for sure.

Aphorism Number Sixty-Four; (One of A Series: Collect The Whole Set!)

2010-03-29T19:30:00.003+02:00

What could be more repulsive to a woman than a rock critic?

Aphorism Sixty-Three (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2010-02-21T14:41:00.000+01:00

Real rednecks think dumb is a virtue; fake rednecks are even dumber than that.

Saint Joan of Jett

2010-02-18T20:53:00.005+01:00

(from SPIN)

Some people really like Joan Jett. The Kerista Islanders of San Francisco, for example, are crazy about her. In fact, they have a pamphlet called "18 Reasons Why We're Crazy About Joan Jett." They have another pamphlet entitled "The Moral Philosophy of Joan Jett." They have another publication, "Utopia 2 — Blueprint for Heaven on Earth" that sort of sketches in the details of why a polyfidelitous Haight-Ashbury commune engaged in creative caffeination, junk food therapy, computer consultation, and Gestalt-O-Rama would declare Joan Jett a saint. Sort of.

Last summer, the Keristans actually spoke with Joan, putting her on the speakerphone so everyone could gather around. When it came time to let Joan know she was a saint, they were kind of nervous. "You see, " they told her, "we have this paranoia that you're going to think we're like Rastafarians and the way they felt about Haile Selassie." You can see how they'd be paranoid that way, right? But it's not like that at all, because even though Joan is a saint, the Keristans are totally into equality. "We've gone through this in our mind," they explained, "even before we became your fans. We know that all human beings are equal, even if they're astonishing artists like Leonardo. You're in the Leonardo category."

Who was Joan to disagree? "You guys are very articulate, and I don't get that weirdo vibe at all," she said, practically the Patron Saint of Graciousness.

(more to follow...)

Aphorism Sixty-Two: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2010-02-04T12:52:00.001+01:00

"I don't want to talk to the angels — I want to talk to God."

Patrick Foynard, hier soir

From Elvis, The Colonel & Me: Elvis — A Golden Celebration

2009-12-27T16:16:00.024+01:00

for Hardy Price

(excerpt)

Within five years of his death in August 1977, RCA had released records like Elvis Sings For Children And Grown-Ups Too! (1978); Our Memories of Elvis; Vols. I & II (1979); The Elvis Medley (1982); and, (if in prominent past tense), I Was The One ( 1983). Our Memories stripped away ancient old backing tracks so as to forfeit and/or counterfeit and/or destroy and/or damage/and/derange and/or delete what was left of Our Memories. I Was The One' encircled Elvis' voice with other voices, fresh new voices, anonymous and updated ones. The Elvis Medley sliced him into itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bite-sized beef-a-roni bits, and if Elvis Sings For Children And Grown-Ups was actively and aggressively bizarre while still achieving the spirit of the relentlessly stupid, it was only bizarre and relentlessly stupid in a tradition, in the tradition of earlier Elvis & The Colonel royalty-collaboration records like "Bossa Nova Baby, " "Petunia, The Gardener's Daughter," and "Do The Clam."

Unsurprisingly, it stank loudly of the same obtuse Country & Western greed that had turned the 14-year-old Hank Williams Junior unloose in a Nashville recording studio only just a few years after his father's unfortunate but entirely lucrative demise, and set him to singing along with his old man's overdubbed publishing ghost. There's never been any indication that RCA, most prominent of the biggest, dumbest, dimmest, least clever record labels in the history of the big ol' dumb record business, didn't intend to keep on doing Elvis forever and ever. The year or two before and after Elvis died, every rock critic's brown-cardboard promo-carton of RCA records, arriving a couple few times a month, featured fat wads of wee tiny wallet-sized pocket-calendars, sometimes focused on the coming or current year, but not necessarily, not always; there were plenty of mailroom slip-ups, and undoubtedly even more mailroom jokes, featuring a slapped-together photo-collage of the white-suited Las Vegas Elvis as graphic-arted against an X-Acto'ed-in Christmas tree, and then a creepy under-age pink-petticoated sub-Barbie doll with Shirley Temple curls, set off against a shared mono-autograph that said, swear to God, "Merry Christmas from Elvis and The Colonel," with the Colonel himself playing Santa somewhere amidst the entire proposition. (The Colonel was collecting extra-large management commission from Elvis whilst counter-back-charging RCA for his promotional expertise, presumably by the added-mailing-cost calendar-pound; hence the fact that there were often more of these wallet-calendars in your promo-pak than actual RCA records — RCA was using them, featuring its most prominent artist and Santa and a plastic doll and this or that or some other year's daily calendar, as filler and as package-stuffing styrofoam popcorn and as independent promotion all in one, achieving a cost-tripling trifecta — and everybody already knew that RCA wasn't going to ever actually sell any records anyway, so the guy at the used record store was only gonna give you . . . well, nothing beyond than the bulk doubled-down trade-in rate, because it was on RCA, the amazing hitless wonder label.) There was a time when I could have wallpapered my bathroom with Elvis & The Colonel & The Little Pink Petticoated Creepy Doll-Gal Calendars, though now I inevitably wish I had an extra few to give away. In our joyous holiday season. I'd certainly send one to you. Personalized, from Elvis and The Colonel and me.

The Arizona Republic, December 12, 1984

Aphorism Sixty-One: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-12-27T16:12:00.000+01:00

"I know when I'm serious, even if no one else does."

Aphorism Sixty: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-12-21T17:24:00.002+01:00

History, whatever it may be, is not helping liars tell their lies.

(from forthcoming work, about . . . well, A Piece Of Work.)

Aphorism Fifty-Nine: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-12-04T01:54:00.004+01:00

I don't look for irony. It looks for me.

Sex And Lies And Dutronc

2009-11-04T18:35:00.006+01:00

(Here's a little something I did earlier this year (en Anglais, remerciez Dieu!) for an oddly-titled French publication that hasn't actually gotten around to paying yet, of course, but will, undoubtedly, certainly, soon. It was, however, lavishly illustrated with some Jean-Marier Perier's amazing photos, including one of Jacques Dutronc lounging in the black interior of a yellow '69 Pontiac Firebird convertible while thoroughly surrounded by naked women. I'm not sure any of my writing has ever been so pleasantly illustrated.)

“To tell the truth, you must lie.”

Jean-Marie Perier

Possibly there are more important questions about Jacques Dutronc. Still, I have less curiosity about his living arrangement with Francoise Hardy than.... well, than practically anybody else in France. She with her quiet Paris apartment, he in his Corsican villa legendarily crawling with cats, with fifty cats, or sixty cats, or seventy cats, or more. They, together, a couple for forty years, married for more than twenty-five; how do they do it? My burning question, the only one that matters to me: Just how many cats does Jacques Dutronc actually have?

At his early career peak, Dutronc unleashed a set of sardonic songs, satirized the excesses of the moment, a moment that has since been lumped together lumpily as The Sixties. Dutronc, whose hair was only long-ish, long-esque, at a time of long-nosity, wore very stylish but very proper suits at a time of paisley and purple and Nehru collars. He was a bespoke set of ironic quotation marks. Much more a rocker than his peers on the French pop charts, he dressed instead as an up-swinging broker of stocks, a ruling-party political hopeful. It was a joke, sort of. He was a playboy (just when his pal Daniel Filipacchi was selling French Playboy back to a startled Hugh Hefner), surrounded in photos by women en deshabille. His mere proximity, said the photos, worked as a powerful anti-clothing device for women, yet he himself managed to keep unmussed and amused.

Earlier, hanging handsomely around Le Golf Druout — the ‘60’s CBGB’s of Rock Et Roll En France, with shing-a-lingin’ copains et copines, as instructed by the arm-and-leg-flinging likes of Sheila and Clo-Clo, stomping et tromping around the 16th fairway of a mini-golf course above an English tea room in Paris — the young Jacques is just another guitar-playing loup garou impatiently waiting for his mini-tee-time with fate. His greatest asset? His look, casting his ironic blue eyes up and out and at and through you from a deGaulle-esque height. And perhaps the fact that in a time of astonishingly bad bandnames (Les Chaussettes Noires; Hector & Les Mediators; Gil Now & Les Turnips), he achieves a bandname that rings out in awe-inspirational awfulness: El Toro et les Cyclones.

For this, apparently, he is made musical director of Vogue Records. But in an elevator with Jacques Lanzmann, founder of Lui, greatest skin magazine in the inglorious history of such, they are joined by Antoine, hippie kid who has just blown youthful French brains with “Le Elucubrations.” A legend in his own mind, Antoine cuts them dead, ignores the be-suited salarymen, and righteously pisses ‘em off. Together , apres lunch, they write “Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi,” a meta-parody of such youthful self-orbitration, and Dutronc is launched.

Dutronc’s music, Lanzmann’s lyrics, these are certainly, unquestionably some of what made Dutronc into a central icon of the late ‘6os — the only popstar ever noticed (and thus, automatically, denounced) by Guy Debord, Pope of Situationism. But in fact, as good as this music is and enduring as it has turned out to be, there’s no question that much of Dutronc is his image, and it arrived first in the photos of Jean-Marie Perier, Dutronc’s friend, the man he replaced at the side of Francoise Hardy.

“For thirty years, my work was shit. Now they tell me it’s art. It’s neither art nor shit. It was just pictures to put on the wall of young people to make them dream.”

Jean-Marie Perier

Jean-Marie was the photographer for Salut Les Copains, a magazine that showed up in France in the early ‘60s and instantaneously gathered in all the pop moment as no other publication ever has. If one man had singlehandedly invented MTV in the early 1980s . . . but MTV never had as much impact in any single pop universe as SLC had in France. It was everything, and Jean-Marie’s photos were everything about SLC. The only direction he ever received from his friend and boss, Daniel Fillipacchi, was this: “The parents must hate your pictures.”

As SLC arrived, so did Francois Hardy, but so much more quietly. “Everybody in Paris, in show business,” Jean-Marie observes, “was obsessed by America, because America is the future in this time. They’re all trying to look American. Suddenly Francoise arrives. She has a French name, she writes her lyrics, and she makes original stories in her music. She is the only one! Everyone else is a copy. And she had a French name.”

It’s her complete lack of ye’-ye’ loco-motion, her disinclination to twist disrhythmically, that distinguishes her. She will become, whether we in the English-speaking world ever got it or not, the first Girl With A Guitar. Silent, serene, seventeen, she stands in front of Jean-Marie and his camera and she captures the Canal St. Martin, le Tour Eiffel, him, his Nikon, and all the rest of us. She begins, mild and beatified and bemused, as if she happens to know the precise spot where Lourdes and Fatima triangulate with the 14th Arrondissement, as though she’s perfectly prescient about how many cats Jacques Dutronc will posess in Corsica in the year 2009. Presumably Jean-Marie treated her to a croque madame to celebrate before dropping her back home to la mere. He was, after all, as dazzled as the rest of us.

“She was extremely beautiful — she didn’t know it — and she was great, especially for a girl of her age, and especially for a guy who’s in love with her.” And what follows, what transpires, what we can still see, is the greatest series of photographs a lover has made of just how lovely his love is. And she is. Dante’s Beatrice was kind of butt-ugly by way of comparison. Nobody ever loved Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn nor Louise Brooks in quite this way.

But Jean-Marie cuts to the chase. Or in this case, the crash. “So we live together five years, and then one day she tellls me, ‘I’ve met someone.’ I met her when I was twenty-two, she was seventeen ... we were children. Ok, life separates us, voila... I said, ‘Alright, so I want to meet him....’ Because for me, it would not have been possible to not love the person that she loves, since I love her. She’s my best friend, so who she loves, I will love.” A pause. “So she presents me Jacques." Another pause, but shorter. "For at least two years, I was more in love with him than with her.

“And with his music, it’s the same thing as with Francoise six years before. These are the two who are saying things in their music, Francoise and Jacques, because all the rest of the singers are singing stupid lyrics, stupid copies of stupid songs.

“Plus Jacques had an.... insolence? Isn’t that the right word? So loose, so....almost aggressive, that all the people in the business, I mean all the singers, used to go and look at him ....What he was daring to do on stage, he was daring so much! When Giscard was President, a big charity show, and the announcer asks Jacques, ‘What do you think about singing in front of the President?’ And Jacques pushes the President — like this! — and says to the crowd, ‘I fuck him like a rat at the pinball machine!’" Jean-Marie is pensive. "Jacques was the most insolent person of all the Sixties and Seventies.”

“Eddie Barclay said, just before he died, ‘Today there is more business than show.’” Jean-Marie Perier

Looking at Jean-Marie’s photos of Francoise Hardy, a friend said, and with truth, “But she doesn’t look this way any longer.” C’est vrai; this can be said of us all. She has returned to be the sixty-some-year-old version of the petit-bourgois French schoolgirl she was when her life exploded merely because she wrote a few simple songs. She has fulfilled that girl’s destiny. But more, much more: Once Jean-Marie’s astonished, astonishingly loving photographic eye left her, once his eye fell more modestly away, she was free, in her way, to be perhaps even a bit more of an artist, but ever so less an icon. It’s easier to be an artist than an icon, and surely so for Francoise Hardy. Pursued hotly by Mick Jagger, by Bob Dylan, by Peter Sellers, by the florist’s assistant down the street, by any guy with eyes, she is now the mother of Thomas Dutronc, manouche guitarist, gypsy-esque Djangoist of much modesty and some style, who waited into his thirties before bothering to venture near the mass-media launching pad that was his inadvertant birthright; of whom his mother has said, in effect, in her way, “He’s really quite good....”

And an email, as I write, from Jean-Marie:

“Jacques has actually 30 cats.”

In journalism, accuracy is all.

Aphorism (sorta) Fifty-Eight: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-11-02T15:00:00.000+01:00

I was Dr. Pepper and she was Mrs. Hyde.

Aphorism Fifty-Seven: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-10-23T22:21:00.001+02:00

No use crying over split milk.

Aphorism (Sort of) Fifty-Six: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-28T16:35:00.002+02:00

Some cultures like kites more than birds.

(Translation into English [never my native language]:

Some cultures prefer kites to birds.

Aphorism Fifty-Five: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-22T18:15:00.000+02:00

The French — they're so German!

The Marshal of Tombstone

2009-09-21T11:58:00.005+02:00

The marshal of Tombstone reaches down to his gun belt, runs his hand over the black leather loops that hold the cartridges in an orderly row. His dry fingers push bullets up against the loop, six of them, one after another. One after another, he pushes six bullets down.

The squad cars are parked with their bumpers backed up to the gate of the OK Corral, ready to roll. The southern Arizona sun is rising but the morning is still cool and quiet — maybe too quiet.

from The Washington Post, August 31, 1897 (oops, 1987)

Aphorism Fifty-Four: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-18T14:05:00.005+02:00

“You say one thing,” he said, “and then you say the exact opposite.” I thanked him for the compliment. “There’s a reason for that,” I said. “It’s because I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

William Michaelian

Aphorism Fifty-Three: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-18T14:05:00.001+02:00

I've spent my whole life avoiding men's underwear...

Aphorism Fifty-Two: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-09-18T14:01:00.005+02:00

from Patrick:

"Rope? If I had any rope, I would have hung myself already..."

Aphorism Fifty-One: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-08-13T12:47:00.001+02:00

"You can beat a dead horse to water but you can't make him drink it."

from How The West Was I

Really Short Fiction

2009-08-12T12:28:00.003+02:00

Here's the first line or two from the second chapter of my first novel or two, written way back...well, a while ago. And now, today, oddly, it felt appropriate to me.

"When we come back again this time it was summer time which if you go to Arizona in June or July or August and know better all ready than you are probably crazy or stupid or more."

Aphorism Fifty: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-08-11T11:35:00.002+02:00

"A lie can only thrive on truth; lies, heaped one upon another, lack substance."

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Aphorism Forty-Nine: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-08-10T14:43:00.003+02:00

"That's like trying to pick out your favorite leg."

Jerry Reed, all-'round genius guy. . . and, ironically, a master picker

Aphorism Forty-Eight: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-07-26T13:08:00.000+02:00

What's not grim is good.

What IS The Blues?

2009-07-20T14:09:00.004+02:00

Elderly Bluesman, interviewing Little Stevie Spielberg:

"So tell me, man — what is The Movies?"

(from SPIN; John Lee Hooker profile)

Aphorism (Sort of) Forty-Seven: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-07-20T13:23:00.000+02:00

Black Sabbath invented having the name of the band and the name of the first album and the name of the first song on the first album all be the same thing.

Aphorism Forty-Six: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-07-14T15:43:00.001+02:00

Guess I shouldnt'a wiped that SuperGlue on my eyelids, huh?

Aphorism Forty-Five: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-06-12T15:46:00.000+02:00

Man, if you think I look young now, you should've seen me when I was young!

Aphorismes Forty-three and Forty-four: (Two ((or maybe Three)) among a series; collect the whole set!)

2009-06-08T13:14:00.012+02:00

Patrick, who on any good night is good for a dozen or more, and on any bad night is likely capable of twice that (aphorismes, that is) had a good set of weekend nights. I was there a bunch, but the mind— well, mine, certainly— is only capable of absorbing so many pithy witty bits. From among the few I remember:

"Sobriety is a quality."

And this one (or two, more or less), uttered as we were standing out front, Parisian twilight, not quite night, but trying hard to be, and nearly succeeding, Patrick rolling a cigarette:

"You can always lose more..."

And a contemplative pause. A puff.

"There's always more you can lose."

Me, I haven't figured out which I like more. Not that I like either one, in their essence or truth or trial; it's just that I recognize them both. Equally.

Carl Sandburg Proves You Can Do Folk Music And Not Be A Thief

2009-04-05T18:24:00.000+02:00

Carl Sandburg, once neck and neck with Hemingway as America’s most famous writer (while unequivocally winning the droopy unpaid laurel of “America’s Most Famous Living Poet,” Non-Academic Division), has long since been given the unceremonious heave-ho from any and all AmLit surveys, defenestrated from the Pantheon’s upper deck, his literary stock sent plummeting like a brawny-shouldered Illinois anvil shoved sidelong off the once-and-former Sears Tower skydeck. But Sandburg was back in those days considered — and especially on the Left — as America’s Poet, probably the most widely known American literary figure since Mark Twain.

Sandburg had lived the type of life that would later become a standard joke, the fabled Proletarian Novelist’s Pedigree, practically a literary genre all on its own. (And one which as much as anything was inspired and shaped by Sandburg’s chronicling of the Great Rail-Splitter’s own homespun linsey-woolsey checkered past.) Child of Swedish immigrants, an illiterate blacksmith father and a mother who loved books, he had been a porter, a shoeshine boy, a kid with a milk route, a short-order cook, a hobo who did ten days on vagrancy charges, a dishwasher, a harvest hand, a house painter, a volunteer in the Sixth Illinois Regiment of State Militia when the time came to drive the foul Spaniard from Guantanamo Bay, a Socialist labor organizer, a salesman, a newspaper reporter, a poet (whose hog-butchering poem “Chicago,” actually won a $200 prize in 1914, a mark that may not yet have been eclipsed when you consider what $200 bought then, and what poetry in print pays then or ever), a pro folksinger and published folk song collector, and finally, as he would be best known from 1925 on, as the biographer Abraham Lincoln might have wished upon himself.

But Sandburg was beyond all this, because like it or not, he was actually a poet, and a great one, though a great one of sorts. At his worst, he was too direct, too maudlin, and plainspoken to a severe fault. These were his strengths as well, because he was determined to speak directly, a reporter-poet ready to risk the emotion raised by the drama of daily life observed closely, and he was especially determined to talk in his poetry rather than declaim, to talk, to talk as an American, to risk missing the arch tone of the poet if he could achieve the poetry of a joke made at lunchbreak. A committed Socialist, he was determined to trouble the political waters, but he was at least as determined to locate poetry in the land he’d surveyed around him, the same land young Abe had surveyed as frontier. It’s a pretty tough row to hoe, this political poetry jazz, and he missed more often than he hit. It was a batting average to be proud of.

Sandburg’s Lincoln biography, begun as “a book for young people,” bloomed beyond that but maintaining a certain intended sweetness at heart, was in its day considered to be one of the great literary works of America. “A Lincoln whom no other man than Carl Sandburg could have given us,” said Mark Van Doren; “A monument that will stand forever,” wrote Robert E. Sherwood, and the New York Times reviewed it as, flatly, “...the best biography of our day.” The very few nay-sayers it ever gathered derided it as a hagiography but it was less A Life of the Saint than A Life of the Christ. The Prairie Years, published in two volumes in 1926, and originally titled simply “Abraham Lincoln,” had more of its juvenile origin in its genetic code, but after its great popular, critical, and financial and public success, Sandburg spent much of the next thirteen years working on the four volumes that would be The War Years, with their unavoidably darker vision. It was the Prairie Lincoln, though, — railsplitting rockabilly Abe, the Young Elvis, not the bearded Las Vegas President Lincoln — that was everywhere in the Popular Front years. Sherwood’s own play “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, and was dutifully turned into a dull Hollywood movie in 1940, lagging behind John Ford’s 1939 Young Mr. Lincoln.

The book that followed on the heels of The Prairie Years, was a pioneering collection of songs, The American Songbag. Sandburg had always closed his poetry readings and lectures on Socialism with a few songs played on guitar, and on some nights members of his audience taught him new ones before the evening was ended. He described his collection as “ 280 songs, ballads, ditties, brought together from all regions of America.” He went on to declare the songs’ sources, commencing with “That notable distinctive American institution, the black-face minstrel...” and he spoke of railroad, hobo, work-gang, steamboat songs. He mentioned Mexican border songs before he touched on the lumberjacks, loggers and shanty boys, and even before bringing up the ballads of the southern mountains or the Negro spiritual. He was on the seventh paragraph of his introduction before he mentioned something called “folk songs.”

There had been collections of American songs before this one, and he pointedly acknowledged a number of the most recent ones. He suggested the songs be sung any way you could manage, and — listen; take note; pay attention here and now — he didn’t end up owning any of the copyrights. He didn’t claim any of copyrights. He didn’t get into any of the legal squabbles that the other folksong collectors who followed did whenever some tune they knew got on the radio, and the pennies began to pile up in somebody else’s account, even though they all knew they hadn’t ever written it. He proved that it was possible to print a folk song collection and not gut the wallet of any folk too dumb or dead or poor or stupid to have heard what a lawyer might do.

(excerpt from a forthcoming work)

Tom Waits; Boho Blues

2009-04-01T13:13:00.000+02:00

Tom Waits saves cigarette coupons. Moths fly from his change purse. The keys fall off his piano. Welcome to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. . . it's showtime!
by Bart Bull
(published in Spin)

Tosca, Tuesday, late, Columbus near Broadway, San Francisco.

This is a fine bar, a lovely bar, loud but not too loud. The jukebox plays scratchy opera music. Francis Coppola is in back where the tables and booths are. He's listening to Lauren Hutton tell a story and when he laughs, so does everybody else. Sam Shepard stands up from his stool at the bar to pay his tab. His MasterCard falls to the floor, unnoticed except by the redhead standing nearby. She puts her foot on top of it and carries on her conversation. Shepard leaves. Lauren Hutton leaves. Coppola and his people leave. Almost everybody leaves. The bartender works a rag across the bar, and in the doorway behind him we see someone who looks just like Tom Waits. He peers in, squints, rubbing his head. A cigarette butt, stepped on but still glowing, trails smoke across the floor, left to right. He steps through the smoke and goes to the jukebox, searches. He finds a quarter in his pants, punches buttons. A tenor yelps. It's "Nessum dorma," from Puccini's "Turandot."

A pink paper cocktail umbrella, the kind that sprouts at the rims of colorful tropical drinks, blows across the floor at the foot of the stage, left to right, pushed by an invisible wind.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks, and railroad boots. A big barrel-bellied woman sits next to him, one leg draped over his knee. She's wearing a red flamenco dress and a black mantilla, and her name is Val Diamond. She has eyeballs painted on her eyelids. She can see you with her eyes open; she watches you with her eyes closed. Polaroids are scattered on the stage at their feet.

TOM: I don't understand golf.
VAL: (mutters sympathetically)
TOM: It needs to have more sex. (Gleaming lightbulb appears directly over
his head.) Night golf!
VAL: Somebody won a lot of money golfing recently.
TOM: They get more money than boxers.
VAL: That doesn't seem right.
TOM: It doesn't seem right. Somebody gets beat up for an hour and somebody else hits a ball into a hole. Doesn't seem right.

From the floor, the DIRECTOR watches them through a little black lens, through his director's viewfinder. He hands the viewfinder to his assistant and walks off. The assistant stares carefully through the lens. Tom's zipper is at half mast.

It's dawn. Bats are hurrying back to the belfry, and below, one hand on the rope that rings the bell, Ken Nordine waits. Nordine, the word-jazzed Voice Of God as heard on Levi's commercials, has something he wants to say. This time it's Tom Waits' words and Ken Nordine's voice; sometimes it's the other way around. Here's how to tell: Tom Waits' voice sounds like he gargles with gravel; Ken Nordine's sounds like he's selling three truckloads of soft margarine in handy re-usable plastic tubs. There is no Devil (for our purposes here, at least), just God when he's drunk. Ken Nordine, God as we understand Him (for our purposes here), is not inebriated in the least, but he's willing to act (for our purposes here). He has something he'd like to say.

KEN NORDINE: (gritty voice) It's like Jack Nicholson said to me one time - Continuity is for sissies.

We're in a nightclub, an empty nightclub. A nearly empty nightclub, with a camera crew setting up in the back. Ken Nordine's butter-flavored voice is the only light.

KEN NORDINE: For our purposes here, perhaps some explanation is in order. Perhaps not. Welcome, in any case, to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club.

We see the stage now, bulbs flashing in sequence across the proscenium.

KEN NORDINE: Proscenium. Butter-flavored proscenium.

We see Tom Waits in a tuxedo, slumped in a chair at the center of the stage.

KEN NORDINE: We have a purpose here. We are filming a video here, a video to accompany the tune "Blow Wind Blow," from Tom Waits' new album, Frank's Wild Years.

As Nordine speaks, we see Waits rise from his slump (as it were) and sit stiffly upright. His lips move precisely in time with Nordine's words, and his arms deliver florid gestures.

KEN NORDINE: But Frank's Wild Years is not merely an album. Frank's Wild Years is also a play, a stage production. Frank's Wild Years is two...

Val and Tom are holding breath mints in front of them. They click the packages together carefully.

KEN NORDINE: ...two mints in one. And the video from "Blow Wind Blow" is not merely a scene from the play, but an all-new and improved production. Tom is Frank, as it were, or perhaps he isn't, but in any case, he's a ventriloquist. He casts his voice into the rest of the cast. And the rest of the cast is ably portrayed by Val Diamond and a prosthetic leg.

Waits reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pack of those personal details that reveal so much about a character's character. He smokes pre-war Lucky Strikes in the Raymond Loewy-designed green pack. Or Chesterfields, named after W.C. Fields' favorite son. In truth, they're Raleighs, and he takes a dramatic drag off the cigarette, makes nonchalant expressions as he holds it in, then looks off in another direction as Val, the ventriloquist's dummy, exhales a white cloud. Waits takes the pack, crumples it, flicks it into the wastebasket hidden in the wings. A pause, another pause, and then he leaps up, dumping Val to the floor, and we see him bent over the wastebasket, digging around for the cigarette pack. He finds it, tears a square off the back.

TOM: (turns to the camera) I save the coupons.

He sits back down. His lips keep moving.

KEN NORDINE: In truth, he doesn't smoke anymore. That would be too much like the old Tom Waits. And the old Tom Waits is over, done with, defunct, finito. Aesthetically, at least. He made his bed and he slept in it until it was past checkout time. Writing songs about dead-end kids on dead-end streets became a dead-end street. Damon Runyon demanded royalties.

Waits is making nonchalant expressions up on the stage. Val is staring baleful and blue-eyed, her eyelids clamped shut.

KEN NORDINE: And yet here we are in a nightclub, a nearly empty nightclub. Have you noticed the postage-stamp cocktail tables? The chains of garter snaps that decorate the walls? The black Naugahyde banquette booths? Once upon a time, this was Ann's 440 Club, where Lenny Bruce got that illustrious start of his. Ah, but that was along ago, and for more than 20 years this has been Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. Welcome. Have you met Miss Keiko yet?

A yellow spotlight comes on in the back of the club, illuminating a black and white photo. A signature in black felt-tip pen reads, "Miss Keiko - 1969." She stands forever on the toes of one foot, gazing over her shoulder, lifting her long dark hair above her bare back. Her costume is brief, her breasts are tassel-tipped projectiles. Tom Waits stands nearby, appraising the photograph.

TOM: (gravel-voiced) If I was a girl, I'd want to look like that.

Francis Coppola's sergeant-at-arms drops by to let Waits know that Francis is dining next door at Enrico's. He's willing to wait until the video crew takes a lunch break if Tom would care to come over and talk. There's a part for him in an upcoming project. Waits is sitting at the Chi Chi Club bar with a guy called Biff, waiting for the crew to set up the shot. Miss Keiko gazes down at them from over her shoulder.

TOM: Vegas. She worked the big rooms in Vegas. You know, I saw a guy go down with a heart attack at a crap table, and his wife was pounding on his chest, and the pit boss said, "New shooter coming up." I swear to God.

KEN NORDINE: (sounding godlike) Search me. Sounds like it could be true.

TOM: New dice, new shooter, keep it moving. Cold. Cold-blooded.

BIFF: How far away were you?

TOM: I was the new shooter.

BIFF: Were you wealthy when you left the table?

TOM: Nah. I gamble with scared money. I'm a tightwad. Moths in my change purse.

He gets up to get some cigarettes from the machine, although he doesn't smoke anymore. Moths burst forth from his change purse. He buys Raleighs. Doesn't smoke any.

TOM: So what do you think is suitable for manly footgear, Biff?

BIFF: Roman sandals. And beads to go with 'em.

TOM: I've been asking everyone I, uh, come into contact with, because I'm doin' a little survey. I'd say we're in a crisis in terms of American footgear.

BIFF: Slip-on loafers.

TOM: Nah, can't go that route. You can't go down that road, for down that road danger lies.

BIFF: How come?

TOM: I don't like the name. Loafers. For a guy that works as hard as you do, it's just not right.

BIFF: You could call 'em slip-ons, but...

TOM: That's even worse. That's worse than loafers. You wouldn't want me to call you a slip-on.

BIFF: You got a point there.

TOM: Points. I always gravitate toward points. Things are getting better - ten years ago, you couldn't find any points. Things are getting better, in shoes and music both.

Lunch comes, lunch goes. Coppola waits impatiently at Enrico's; Waits tells Biff of movie roles he's been offered. Coppola's fingers tap the tabletop.

TOM: Satanist cult leaders. The Iceman. I could've been the Iceman in 'Iceman'.

BIFF: You turned that down?

TOM: Yep. Big mistake. Look where the guy that took it is today. I could've been the hitcher in 'The Hitcher', too.

BIFF: Jesus Christ! You turned that down? You could've had a career. You could be Boris Karloff by now.

TOM: Yep. Big mistake.

Coppola, alfresco at Enrico's, fumes silently. Fumes loudly. Fumes. Vows revenge. One week later, Waits wakes up in bed next to the oil-splattered head of a 350 Chevy. He shrieks.

A small pile of pink confetti blows across the floor in front of the stage, left to right, blown by a hand-held fan.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks, and railroad boots. His sideburns are going grey. Val Diamond wears a red flamenco dress. Her ginger hair is piled high in Spanish columns. Her left leg is draped over his right knee. Black fishnet stockings.

TOM: You know who Dick Shawn is? Was?

VAL: The World's Second-Greatest Entertainer? The guy who did that show called "The World's Second-Greatest Entertainer"?

Although he doesn't smoke, smoke rises from an invisible Raleigh between his fingers. He taps his ashes absentmindedly. They fall onto the brim of the top hat at his feet.

TOM: I did a little show with him, played the Wall Street Wino. It never aired. He had a dozen midgets on it. Thirteen.

A pause.

TOM: He died onstage. His son was in the audience. He was in the middle of a bit about death, and he threw himself to the stage in a simulated heart attack. And it was real. And everybody in the audience was laughing. Not a bad thing to hear in your last moment.

More ashes, real as life, fall into the hat; real smoke rises from the invisible Raleigh.

TOM: Good way to go, I guess. Maybe now they'll air the show.

The Chi Chi Club is empty, near empty. One chair is at the center of the stage, one chair is set in the center of the floor below. From the chair on the floor, we hear the voice of Ken Nordine.

KEN NORDINE: Curious as it is that Tom Waits abandoned his signature style of writing, it's every bit as intriguing that he jettisoned the very sound of his established style at the same time. Once known as something of a jazzed-down beat generation throwback, as the romantic street poet of the least romantic of un-poetic streets, as a narrative storyteller of the most talented sort, as a truly gifted liar, he suddenly and abruptly ceased spinning yarns. And as he did, his music itself came unraveled. Or if not unraveled, then...

A long pause. Long.

KEN NORDINE: Perhaps someone else would be better qualified to discuss what happened to the music of Tom Waits. Perhaps it would pay to introduce Harry Partch.

A small spotlight illuminates the chair onstage.

KEN NORDINE: Harry Partch, sadly deceased, was an American original. An eccentric, that is; a tinkerer, a free spirit, an inventor of instruments and of himself. A nut, in other words. A Californian, like Tom Waits, and like Tom Waits, a man who lived the hobo's life long before he captured it in music. He invented his remarkable 43-tone musical scale, and he invented gorgeous and monumental instruments specifically for playing his odd and glorious music. You may have to grant him a certain grandiosity, a certain tendency toward the making of Major Pronouncements, a certain self-centeredness, a certain extreme certainty. Harry Partch received so little recognition during life, and he required so much of it. He called his musical scale "just intonation," and he felt entirely justified in doing so.

The voice that comes from the chair onstage is deep and rugged and rigorously resonant. It sounds much like John Huston's acceptance speech upon his being unanimously voted God.

HARRY PARTCH: As I understand it, this young Tom Waits fellow has had some small contact with members of the ensemble that serves the noble purpose of preserving my music and my instruments, the Mazda Marimba, the Marimba Eroica, the Cloud Chamber Bowls, and all the rest. This contact, however limited, can't have hurt him, although it's impossible to say how much it has helped since what I've heard of his stuff is not more than a literal-minded bastardization of the eternal principles behind my system of just intonation. He'd be best served to study a little closer if he cares to attempt any further homage. Still, there is some small sense of my own music's grandeur in the young fellow's stuff. Like me, he's interested in the largest and the smallest of sounds, and like me, he's heard the music of the highway and the resonant clang of the beer bottle tapped with a church key. IMAGINE the sound of a hundred Chinamen beating spikes into the ground with nine-pound sledgehammers, laying the rails of the transcontinental railway! And the scream of the steam whistle as a locomotive flies over those same spikes. Imagine the snores of hobos sleeping in the open boxcars. Imagine the contrapuntal snores of the conductor comfortably bunked up in the caboose. IMAGINE THE THUNDER, the mighty prairie thunder that wakes them all from their slumbers! And imagine the raw COURAGE a composer would need to even ATTEMPT to create such sounds! I wish the young fellow a great deal of luck. I admire his theatricality.

At the back of the club, at the bar, a light glows. Tom Waits and the guy called Biff are back there, a beer bottle in front of each of them. Tom is not smoking, yet smoke rises from between two of his fingers.

TOM: I traveled with a gas pump for years.

He tosses back a little beer.

TOM: I still have nightmare where the whole crowd is moving toward me and then the keys are falling off the piano and the curtain rips and my shoe comes off and I'm crawling toward the wings and the crowd is moving toward me, hurling insults at me. And car parts. I played cow palaces, rodeos, sports facilities, hockey arenas with the ice beneath the cardboard. It cools off the place. It's alright in August, but it's a bitch in February. But if you can appreciate the rich pageantry of it...

Biff tosses back a little beer.

TOM: Never have your wallet with you onstage. It's bad luck. You shouldn't play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.

Tom tosses back a little beer.

TOM: I don't play the piano much anymore. I don't compose on it. It's hard. Because sometimes it feels like it's all made out of ice. It's cold. It's square, so much about it is square, you know, and music is round. And so sometimes I think it puts corners on your stuff.

Tom and Biff toss back a little beer. Behind them, we see a single chair and a single spotlight on the stage, and now we can hear that Harry Partch has never stopped talking.

HARRY PARTCH: (from afar) ...the wrongheadedness of the chromatic scale of the Western world and the deleterious effect it has had on untold generations of innocent ears...a gang of Irishmen headed due west with nine-pound sledgehammers of their own...

A pink balloon blows across the floor in front of the stage, left to right.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks and railroad boots. Val Diamond wears a red dress and a black top hat. "Blow Wind Blow" is playing frantically in the background, sung by Alvin of the Chipmunks. When the soundman has re-cued it, the take begins.

A clapboard claps. A pink balloon blows across the floor, left to right.

TOM: Welcome to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. It's showtime!

Two pump organs, an alto horn, a glockenspiel. A gravel voice grumbles, singing. The voice comes from Val's mouth, and her eyes, clamped closed, stare blue ahead. Tom Waits, ventriloquist, nonchalant, takes a deep, dramatic drag on his cigarette; a smoke puffs from Val's mouth. Her lips grumble his song. He unscrews her wooden leg, pulls a pint of liquor from within it, swigs. He caps the bottle, puts it back, screws her leg back on. His cigarette rests between her fingers, his song sings off her lips. He takes his hand out from behind her back to scratch his head, and she slumps, but he catches her before she falls. The song grumbles towards an end, and as it ends, she pulls a dry-cell battery out of his back. He slumps, slumps and flops. He twitches in rigor mortis. Confetti falls free from his hand, gathers in a little pile. A hand-held fan blows it, left to right.

Wrap. The crew ascends to the stage, leaves nothing behind but a steamer trunk and a sousaphone. Tom sits on the trunk; the sousaphone sits on its side. A member of the crew grabs it and leaves.

TOM: Aw, bring the sousaphone back.

It comes back. Waits climbs inside it, adjust the mouthpiece. It makes hideous bleats, like someone is forcing it to watch its mother being turned into a coffee table. Waits' cheeks puff out, his face turns red. He hoists it off like a weight lifter. He leaves the stage with it under his arm, his tuxedo tails flapping behind. He puts his little finger in his ear and wrings it vigorously.

TOM: What should I do with this thing?

No answer. "Nessun dorma," from Puccini's 'Turandot."

Aphorism Forty-Two; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-03-12T09:58:00.003+01:00

Da mio amico, Michele Gazich, musicista e poeta e spiritu:

"Tra il diavolo e il mare . . . non vai a pescare."

(Between the devil and the sea . . . don't go fishing.")

But wait, there's more:

"Between the wood and the bark

Hide your love

Between the stone and the hammer

Make flowers grow..."

"Between Isaac and the knife

There's Abraham's heart..."

"Between the mouth and the wine

The road is short...

("Tra il vino e la mano

C'e un breve cammino...")

"Tra toro e torero

C'e poco pensiero..."

("Between bull and bullfighter

There's little thought...")

Aphorism Forty-One; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2009-03-10T13:14:00.001+01:00

I could see her point, but I could see mine better.

Aphorism Forty; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2009-03-10T13:07:00.001+01:00

Time flies either way.

Aphorism Thirty-Nine; One of a Series; Collect The Whole Set

2009-03-08T21:33:00.010+01:00

Think of the borders, la fronteras, the frontiers, the sheer distance, that tears have to travel from their home, the heart, only just to leap from the eyes.

(Piense las fronteras, la distancia escarpada, que rasgones tienen que viajar de su hogar, el corazon, solo apenas para saltar de los ojas.)

Aphorism Thirty-Eight; One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set

2009-03-08T21:00:00.000+01:00

Quoth Miriam (with Franco-Hibernian accent):

That's when you know you've been somewhere too long — it doesn't exist.

King David, starring Richard Gere; Not another ancient movie review? Mais oui, mon ami...

2009-03-02T12:27:00.003+01:00

Or, Meanwhile, back at The Bible...

Okay, 'nother movie review from days o' yore. I was having fun, obviously, if not at the actual movies. I mean, is this thing even on videotape? Much less an expanded director's-cut DVD? Despite the above-the-title of dual big dogs like Beresford and Geresford? (Not to mention that big ol' public-domain dog, the drooling St. Bernard of cinematic sincerity, The Bible.) Which means, I realize suddenly, that it's Filmic History! All it takes is a decade or two of free-fall through the cracks of commerce to make A Forgotten Hunk Of History, after all. (Although maybe its mere mention here, given my fanatical following over 'cross town at Cahiers du Cinema, may shift, Samson-like, the pillars of film scholar-ology. Let's wait and see.

King David
Directed by Bruce Beresford, starring Richard Gere

Why does everyone in King David, including (to the very utmost best of his ability) Richard Gere, speak with a clipped upper-class British accent. (And why did everyone in the mini-drama-docu-series A.D. speak the same way in those exact same English actorly accents?)
Ah, hell, let’s admit it — we all really know why it is, even if we generally like to ignore it. Americans have never gotten over the colonization process and we’re still in awe of all that’s upper-crustingly imported from England. All those plum-shaped rolling-toned stage-trained Old Vic voices turn an American’s under-developed class-consciousness to quivering jim-jams of jelly.

It’s true now, as it was again true a couple of years ago when pop music was once more dominated by pale young English accents; it was true when Hollywood first began importing washed-up British stage hacks; it was true when Mark Twain wrote again and again about shoddy conmen who assumed accents and then bilked their hapless fellow Americans by convincing them to bow down to their betters; it was true as soon as the first argument about whose family had arrived on the Mayflower took place.

But our laughable crush on the threadbare better-class of Brits — and the long-entrenched practice of using imported acting stock when the public must necessarily be impressed with the large artistic intentions of a film (the very term itself is British as well — we Americans say “movie” until we get self-conscious) — has to do with more than a slavish nastional inferiority complex. It has to do as well with our longstanding Anglo-Saxon disdain for the foreigners we’ve stolen our heritage from.

We’re Judeo-Christian as all get-out, but we’ve never thought much of Jews. We trace the lineage of Western Civilization though the Romans and the Greeks but when we create our dramas about those days, everyone looks like Richard Chamberlain and Peter O’Toole.
(Which reminds me, some way or another, of the headline on this current week’s TV Guide, timed to coincide with a docudrama about Sweden’s Raoul Wallenburg: "How Christians Saved Jews from Nazis." Nice. And concise!)

Plainly, we wouldn’t buy into the cast-of-thousands pomp and circumstance if our noble Romans had trouble speaka da Inglese, if the stars of our Biblical bio-pix spoke Lower East Side Yiddish. (Neither one would be any less or more correct than the clipped-tone, cricket-playing actorly English, even if it might lend a little culture-bending credence.) Our omnipresent docu-drama Nazis — and how many mini-series docu-dramas have delivered those thrilling, chilling, swastikaed savages to our screens in the last few years? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? — get to sprecht their Englische in Colonel Klink-isch accents but the poor old Romans are obligated to speak their contractionless British as if they’d just gotten back from a brisk sculling holiday invasion of Cambridge.

Meanwhile, back at The Bible, we have Richard Gere in American Gigolo Goes To The Holy Land, and giving The Proper British Accent the best shot he’s got. You can laugh at the idea of Richard Gere as author of the Psalms, or you can wonder instead if it’s typecasting. David is, after all, undisputed sex king of the Old Testament and the New alike, the horny shepherd boy who made good — good and plenty. The Amadeus of his day, quite literally the Prince of his place and time, and in the background, you can hear the producers of this one — let’s call ‘em Saul and Sol — rubbing their palms together in sheer glee. “We’ll be able to show the babe who plays Bathsheeba in the absolute buff and still rate a PG-13 — it’s in The Bible! This guy porks more cuties than the kids in Porky’s and Porky’s II and Porky’s III all put together, for God’s sake! And it’s in The Bible! And they all have big fat British accents! We’re gonna get a PG-13 for certain! There ain’t a publicity-seeking fundamentalist preacher in the country who’d dare picket this one — they’re gonna be running church-camp buses to see it on group discounts! Call marketing right now!”

And who’s to say it’s not true? Who’s to say that David didn’t dance like a grotesque ape (or worse, like Richard Gere), that Bathsheeba’s full-frontal, tight-focus, soft-lighting sponge bath wasn’t designed — perhaps even Divinely — expressly for the purpose of swaying both poet-kings and producer-kings? The demands of docu-drama are simple and easily satisfied, given a bit of rearrangement, given a dash or splash of revisionism.

George C. Scott’s about to be seen docu-dramatizing the life and persona of Mussolini. Will Mussolini’s non-docu-drama flesh-and-blood pianist son announce his triumphant cross-marketing “Victory” tour, while the entrepreneurial biggies of rock squabble over the T-shirt merchandising rights? What sort of accent will Scott use? Will it be actorish English? Will it be woppish burlesque? Perhaps, maybe, but most likely it’ll be a Pattonish bark, more patently patented George C. Scott than Il Duce, just as Gere’s David is more breathless American gigolo than warrior-poet-king.

There is one line in King David, a single sentence delivered by the Godly announcer in the roundest of actorly anglo-tones that nonetheless rings -ultra- authentically true. It comes from the Book of Samuel: “And David smote the Philistines and put them into the sea.” You can’t blame David — the real one, not Richard Gere — that they resurfaced in Malibu a few thousand years later.

The Arizona Republic

Aphorisms 36 & 37 (Two of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-02-23T21:51:00.008+01:00

I'm not sure why, but the slightly aged (no! it's vintage!) (it is!) (swear to God!) magazine-y feature below seems to feature far more than its share of pithy aphorisms... it's chock full'o'nutty aphoristic goodness!

I think it's the muscle car factor. I used to remove surfboards and skateboards and skimboards and wetsuits and boogie-boards and Carl's Jr. styrofoam burger-boxes and Yellow Pages (hey, geezers, remember them?) and everything but the essential Thomas Bros. map out of the various GTOs and El Caminos that I would then go dyno-tweak onto the Pasadena Freeway on-ramps....

(For them that don't know, the Pasadena Freeway, allegedly The World's First Freeway, was and is kind of bizarrely designed, in that you must NECESSARILY, no matter what manner of vehicle you're steering, STOMP ON THE GAS in order to enter, from a dead stop with maybe twenty or thirty or forty or so yards until YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING AT LEAST THE MINIMUM 55 MPH (which any Californian can tell you is and ought to be and ever will be somewhere between 65 and 80). Which is way-bitchin', frankly, if, on-ramp after on-ramp, you're tuning your Tri-Power three-carburetor '66 GTO, or better yet, seeing, for entirely scientific study purposes, exactly how far the gas-gauge needle will drop if you crank open the hood scoop on your low-geared, high-compression-head RamAir III '69 GTO and Fuckin' STOMP ON IT. (Aimed, let it be said, almost directly from dear beloved glorious downtown LA straight toward Pasadena's mythical Jet Propulsion Labratory.)

Anyway, as I was saying up there somewheres: aphorisms. Galore!

Such as:

"Fiberglass being fiberglass and easy to slice with a Skilsaw..."

(See, I don't much care whether you personally think much of this as an aphorism, but I know, in my heart of Skilsaw'd fiberglas'd hearts, that this is about as pure a sentence as is possible to achieve in American. Screw you, as Ray Wylie Hubbard nearly almost said, I'm from Arizona.

Same goes double-or-nuthin' for this one: "Blowers and air-injector stacks began bursting through hoods just as Big Daddy Roth's cartoons had always predicted they would; All Hell burst loose."

Or this:

"Hood scoops — functional, semi-functional, quasi-functional — sprang up like flared nostrils on horny beasts..."

Or:

"Rockets are rockets, and cars from the Fifties are anything but."

And then there's the opening line of this opus, which I think has proved to have a near-eternal aesthetic endurance:

"Muscle cars don't have fins."

Okay, so maybe by Oscar Wildean standards these are long-winded and louche' . . . but this next, this next one, this very next one . . . well, if I write no other sentence in life . . . (and some afternoons, that's exactly my mood) well, I wrote this one:

"Good cars go fast."

So there, dammit.

"Good cars go fast."

Take that, LeCorbusier et/und Mies Van derRohe; Form follows function, less is more; both be damned.

"Good cars go fast."

That, if I must say so myself, kicks major ass.

Heavy Metal: Muscle Cars; A brief (and speedy!) cultural history

2009-02-10T12:02:00.011+01:00

by Bart Bull

(published in Details)

Muscle cars don't have fins.

To put it another way: If it has fins, it's not a muscle car. This is my contribution to peaceably settling the nasty aesthetic battle that rages whenever scholars gather to debate the demarcation lines of the Muscle-Car Era. The argument can be made that the first muscle car was the 1964 GTO, created when Pontiac general manager Pete Estes and an ad exec named Jim Wangers snuck a 389 with no fewer than three two-barrel carbs into a Tempest body. Then again, what about those mid-Fifties Chryslers with the early version of the hemi engine? Or the '57 Studebaker with the Paxton supercharger? And if you're stretching things that far, how about those postwar Hudson Hornets that stomped anything else you could drive onto and off of a stock-car track? And that raises the question of all the limited-production devil-rides Detroit built primarily for stock-car racing, like the'64 Galaxie 500 with a 425-horse 427. As you can see, down this road hairsplitting danger lies, and around then next turn, angels dance on pinheads.

Now, when I was about 12 or so, my big sister had a boyfriend who drove a '57 Chevy with a 396 dropped into it, and cheater slicks that left black peel-out marks on our sidewalk, which my dad never got over. (You could tell it didn't have Posi-Traction by the little hops where he laid rubber.) Without question this was a righteous rod, but that's it exactly: it was a hot rod, something assembled after the fact by chopping and channeling and engine-swapping and such, extremely honorable pursuits one and all, but each aimed at adjusting the sad facts of life as defined by Detroit. What distinguishes the muscle car, and what's all the more remarkable when you pull over and park to think about it, is that for just about a dollar a pound you could go down to a new car dealer and buy something strong enough to scare you to death when you stomped on the gas — and it would look hairy as hell, too. With an absolute absence of fins.

It's my belief — no, it's larger than that, more like a faith bordering on religion, like the way some guys believe Fords Eat Chevys — that the best-looking, most fully realized mass-produced cars ever made came from Detroit in the 1968-through'70 model years (which is to say 1967-69). I'm nothing like an absolutist about this naturally; I used to have a way cool '67 Malibu, for example, and a '66 GTO, and I firmly believe those '71-through-'73 Dodge Chargers are as unappreciated as they are only because their predecessors were so nearly perfect. The way I see it — the right way – is that the cars of that period were the first group ever designed to look like nothing other than . . . a car.

The history of automotive design dates from the horseless carriage era, and even such bold efforts as the 1934 Chrysler Airflow had vestigial appendages like running boards. The next significant change in looks came once the Second World War was well and truly over, when Detroit preceded Cape Canaveral as America's rocket-ship launch pad. I mean, the dopey space-age sociological stuff is fairly self-evident, from names like Oldsmobile Rocket 88 to Buick Starfire, Ford Galaxie, Chevy Nova, and most especially from the fins and the hood ornaments and the round retro-rocket tail-lights. As late as 1961, Colonel Shorty Powers, the "10-9-8-7-6-5 . . ." guy from Cape Canaveral, had hired on as the official A-OK voice of Oldsmobile. Inevitably, it has all worked out to be contemporary kitsch-fodder, since rockets are rockets, after all, and cars from the Fifties are usually anything but.

By the mid-Sixties, almost all that spaceship jazz was over, and while the marketing guys were having a brief stab at bestiality and fish fetishism — Impala, Mustang, Barracuda, Cougar, Wildcat, Falcon, and the never-to-be-forgotten Marlin — the guys making the clay models were bound and determined to do something that had never been done before; namely, to lose all the chrome bombsights and nose cones, the way hot-rodders did in their quest for speed and stripped down style, and see if Detroit couldn't come up with something that looked like it was intended to wear tires instead of fender skirts. The original 1964 Mustang was like a bolt from the blue. Mechanically, it wasn't much other than a Falcon chassis with a 289, but the long hood and short trunk deck suggested the same kind of balance the drag racers were aiming for. It looked like no other car before, and Ford sold more than half a million the first year, the most successful new-model launch ever. Meanwhile, the GTO (short for Gran Turismo Omologato, a fairly hilarious conceit but one based, as all the other letter and numeral names would be, on racing and thus actual cars rather instead of fireworks and livestock) arrived and sold ungodly numbers straight out of the box. The difference between the '64 GTO and all the hyped-up Stock-Car-Specials that preceded it is that the Goat was meant all along to run on the streets, scaring children and scattering pedestrians and ticking everybody off with loud, reckless, and irresponsible displays of male arrested-development syndrome, an eminently marketable concept. Detroit went full throttle behind it.

The major Detroit manufacturers had been slyly flirting with the NASCAR stock car racing world since the Fifties, supplying engines and expertise under the table, but in the early Sixties Pontiac and Ford and Dodge and Plymouth came out and publicly admitted that good cars go real fast. Engine blocks got bigger, body shapes got aerodynamically slicker, and suddenly something Dodgelike or Fordish was flinging itself around the Daytona Speedway at speeds faster than the open-wheel racers at Indianapolis. Wind tunnels became an essential part of body design, ostensibly so that if Mom pegged the speedometer on the way home from the grocery store (grocery bags in the trunk supply that invaluable extra weight over the rear wheels), she wouldn't launch airborne. The more successful drag racers found guys from the factory hanging around, scuffing the toes of their wing tips in the gravel, and casually mentioning this spare dyno-tuned hemispherical-head 426 engine they happened tohave sitting around taking up space back at the plant.

What finally pushed the muscle car completely over the top was the funny car phenomenon. Some daring drag-racing visionary made a fiberglass mold of the little woman's Dodge Dart, flopped it over what was essentially a AA/Fuel Altered dragster frame, with a blown and injected big block engine running on a risky mix of nitro and alcohol, and took it out to the dragstrip to see what the hell would happen. Hot rodders being hot rodders and never any too respectful of Detroit's design sensibilities, and fiberglass being fiberglass and plenty easy to slice and dice with a Skilsaw, funny car racers commenced doing some open-air windtunnel testing of their own. Noses got lower and rooflines got cleaner and rear ends got jacked-up to where Uncle Frank's John Deere tractor seat used to be. Blowers and air-injector stacks began bursting through hoods just as Big Daddy Roth's cartoons had always predicted they would: All hell broke loose. Any wind-dragging design element Detroit had overlooked was as good as gone — fins were prehistoric science fiction but spoilers and wings and wheelie bars dragged you back down to earth orbit.

Over in Detroit, the designers and the engineers and the marketing guys were practicing burnouts in the corporate parking lot. Hood scoops — functional, semi-functional, quasi-functional — sprang up like flared nostrils on horny beasts, and racing stripses became to muscle cars what flames had been to hot rods: sort of a painterly metaphor of metaphysical intent. And as if you hadn't already been able to hear Mom from eight blocks away when she came back with all those groceries, colors got loud enough to compete with glasspack mufflers.

None of this was ocurring in a vacuum, and all those cliches about the swingin' Sixties ought to be troted out here with extra emphasis on the swingin' side. The contemporary collective amnesia that recals everyone under 30 driving their flowered Volkswagen mini-bus to the peace demonstration is a charming and convenient piece of historical revisionism, nicely ignoring the millions of mean-looking muscle cars prowling those same streets, skidding from stoplight to stoplight. Consider that entirely aside from the Corvette, Chevrolet's not atypical late Sixties selection of muscle machines included the Chevelle, the Camaro, the El Camino, and the Nova, with engine options starting with the incredibly strong and lightweight small-block 302 and moving up in cubic inches to the 327, the 350, the 396, the 427, and, by 1970, thge 454. Within each of those engines all manner of horsepower variations were available, as well as transmission choices and axle ratios and suspensions. That was before you even considered hood scoops and racing stripes or contemplated the weight-loss-versus-frame-stiffness issue of convertibles.

As far as cubic inches go, 1970 was the high-water mark. GM, never able to leave well enough alone, added rococo flourishes to the fenders of a few of its finest Bodies By Fisher, but for the most part you could drive any decent muscle machine off the showroom floor and turn at least a low 14-second run on the quarter-mile. The insurance companies, pitiful scriveners and drones, blinded worm-like by actuarial tables and fine print, had never been able to join in the spirit of things, and were doing their best to intimidate Mom into settling for a stationwagon with fake-wood paneling on the sides. Sales were affected and between the emission-control athsma epidemic and the great fat-fender scare of 1972, the era trailed off to a miserable end. When the Arab oil embargo occurred in 1974 and the priced of gas sky-rocketed (after holding tough at 29 cents a gallon for years), the muscle car suddenly seemed to have been some mass hallucination brought on by mixing psychedelic drugs with high octane leaded-gas fumes.

As late as the late Eighties, there was no collector's market whatsoever for muscle cars. The few remaining affficionados were prophets without honor in their own country, more closely akin to the type of eccentrics who collect samples of used gum from the sidewalk than to reputable collectors of rare and exotic objjects; the phrase "muscle car" had almost entirely fallen from the language. The movie The Road Warrior had much to do with reinvoking the rites and rituals of muscle, I reckon: a great bunch of guys and gals roaring around the Austral/American West in loud and shapely cars with hood scoops and blowers, gleefully racing to see who can make it to the gas station first. (The muscle-car era in Australia started and ended later than in the U.S., but produced some absolutely brilliant examples — the Ford XA-through-XC models, for instance, which are like seven-eighths-scaled Ford Torinos but far more curvaceous.)

In any case, the early Nineties saw the prices of muscle cars double and triple and double again, effectively hogging all the action on the entire car-collector scene, and kidney-punching the prices of even the most blue-chip of fin-mobiles. The most blatantly desirable cars have achieved prices in the highest of five-figure realms, all the more extraordinary in that at the beginning of the Eighties you could have bought some of them for prices in the lowest of four-figure dungeons. Naturally, the stamp-collector syndrome has emerged and there are all manner of Nineties types who restore their objets d'art to within an inch of the assembly line, wrap them in clear plastic, and never touch them again. Fortunately, more often than not, sanity prevails. Cars are for driving, and muscle cars are for driving fast — real fast. Recently, here in Los Angeles, Ford and Mobil got together and offered to buy — for some ludicrous lowball figure — a whole bunch of pre-emission-control cars. Placing a comforting hand on the throbbing hood of my '68 GTO (400 cubic inches, underrated at 360 horsepower to hoodwink the insurance weenies, 10.75-to-1 compression ratio, Hurst dual-gate shifter, Turbo-Hydramatic 400 transmission, extra-fat rubber in back, beefed-up sway bars with urethane bushings, classic Schaefer Cams Maltese Cross decal on the wing windows), I scoff at thaeir cultural imperialism, at their puny attempt at corporate P.R. eco-grandstanding. There's a place not two miles away from me that sells leaded premium gas, 93 octane. I don't know how they get away with it, but i can get there in one minute-thirty seven seconds if I hit the lights right. And if I don't run out of gas on the way over.

Aphorism Thirty-five; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2009-02-09T09:41:00.001+01:00

Cats abhor a vacuum cleaner.

Aphorism Thirty-Four; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-02-04T16:50:00.002+01:00

"Eddie Barclay said, just before he died, "Today there is more business than show."

Jean-Marie Perier

Aphorism Thirty-three; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-02-02T11:32:00.004+01:00

"We all wish we could play the way he couldn't stand."

Of Steve Connelly, guitar player, Coloured Girl, Bomber's barracker, Messenger, and more

Aphorism Thirty-Two : (One of a Series: Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-02-02T10:41:00.003+01:00

"Was the Sistine Chapel merely wallpaper for the Pope?"

(C'est moi, to JMP, eliciting a great laugh...)

Aphorism Thirty-One; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-01-23T18:46:00.004+01:00

God is invisible to the ignorant, and can't be seen by the knowledgeable.

Aphorism Thirty; One of a Series (Collect the whole set!)

2009-01-23T17:51:00.002+01:00

Marketing: Letting the right people know, so they can let the wrong people know too.

Aphorism Twenty-Nine; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-01-17T13:05:00.006+01:00

"I don't know if I'll ever write another song again."

Paul Kelly to me, May 1997, in his "music room" in St.Kilda, Melbourne (the actual music room being the shed, of course). (Of course.)

From the interim dry spell, eight albums or so, with toss-offs, thrown-aways, and fake-outs like:

"Little Kings"; for sake of aphoristic brevity, allegedly, the only one I'll lyric-ize: ("I'm so afraid for my country/There's an ill wind blowing no good/So many lies in the name of history/They want to improve my neighbourhood/In the land of the Little Kings/There's a price on everything/And everywhere the Little Kings are getting away with murder/In the land of the Little Kings/Profit is the only thing/And everywhere the Little Kings/Are getting away with murder/I was born in a lucky country/Every day I hear the warning bells/They're so busy building palaces/They don't see the poison in the wells/In the land of the Little Kings/Profit is the only thing...")

"If I Could Start Today Again";

"The Oldest Story In The Book";

"Won't You Come Around?";

"Song of the Old Rake"'

"God Told Me To";

"I'll Be Your Lover Now";

"My Way Is To You";

"Nothing On My Mind";

"You Broke A Beautiful Thing";

"Words & Music";

and perhaps two or three others.

Aphorism Twenty-Eight; (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

2009-01-17T12:58:00.008+01:00

"It's really quite large-ish, i'nnit?"

Quoth Ian Dury to me, of . . .well . . . of "Phoenix," and of "Arizona," and perhaps even of Apache Junction," but obviously, apparently, evidentially, tangibly, metaphorically, of America. (Though he'd no doubt've said "the States.")

Aphorism Number 27; One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

2009-01-16T13:40:00.006+01:00

Over coffee the other morning, we're looking at some of Jean-Marie Perier's photos, and among the hundreds that burst across the line of genius, there are some flash-blasted black & whites of young Bob Dylan being mobbed, Beatle-style, outside a stage-door in Paris. It was, Jean-Marie says, entirely a set-up, a fraud, a composed composition, a faux-Weegee (as Weegee himself was known to shove the murdered corpses around a bit before he snapped the shutter of the SpeedGraphic, before the flashbulb roared.). Jean-Marie shrugs:

"To tell the truth, you must lie."

Watch Your Step; Ted Hawkins and me (continued)

2009-01-05T13:27:00.011+01:00

The record cover showed a big black man with a big grey beard playing a big dreadnought acoustic guitar. He had a pink short-sleeve shirt on, and the background was a powerful construction of planes of color, white walls and barred windows, bisected by dark shadows and sun, and a bright raw triangle of blue, of blue sky. It was artful and direct and pure.

There was a terrific story connected to the record too, and the liner notes by the distinguished Peter Guralnick sketched it in roughly. Ted Hawkins had been singing on the streets of Los Angeles in 1971 when a young blues fan named Bruce Bromberg heard him Bromberg had produced a few bluesmen in the past and he recorded Hawkins. The problem was that these tunes weren't blues, and Bromberg didn't exactly know what to do with them, although one song, "Sweet Baby," even got played a few times on a local R&B station.

A dozen years later, 500 miles away, by sheer accident, I heard it on the radio too. I couldn't tell you if it ever got played again — I couldn't prove to you it ever got played in the first place. It begins: "Sha la la la lala la la . . ." in a blasting burst of joy so solid words won't stick to it. But then words gather:

"Sweet baby, you know
That no one can love you the way I do
And I just proved it . . . "

and then the words race across a mind exposed in love and fear and ferocious pride, bragging, begging for praise, flirting, flattering, starting a jealous argument just for the sweet sake of smoothing all those ruffled feathers, rolling and tumbling in a bed of laughter, swearing true strong love on a stack of Bibles, and then offering up one of the largest and purest lies a lover can ever deliver:

"Don't worry, darlin'
I'll do nothin' at all
That would cause your teardrops to fall . . ."

before raking it all back under again with another burst of "Sha la la la . . . " just to remind you what a pack of liars we all are.

[see the beginning of this piece, "Watch Your Step; Ted Hawkins and me," below somewhere, and other Ted Hawkins documents]

Ted Hawkins Tells His Own Tale; Another Nicely Handwritten Biography

2009-01-05T09:54:00.006+01:00

Over time, Ted sent me a number of versions of his life-story. In the music business, you'd call it a "bio," but the fact is that Ted was only just barely in the music business when he wrote these, and nobody who's really in the music business ever writes their own bio. Generally, they just hire somebody like Robert Hilburn, the "Pop Music Critic for the LA Times," and he or one of his cub scouts writes it anonymously and then, later, they get the privilege of quoting from it when they write a feature or a review or something. It's really kind of a charming music business tradition in its way. And Ted, had he known, would loved to have participated. But he didn't know. Of course. He didn't know. He couldn't know. Did you?

Written, with pretty nice penmanship (far better, say, than mine), on lined yellow legal pad:

"I was born in Biloxi Miss 10/28/36 My Mother drank Any thing she could by or beg upon. I had three brothers of whom I haven't seen since 1957. It was hard times back then for me. My Mother was always drunk. There Was Never enough food or None at all in that one room shack that we all had to live in together. I didn't have any Clothes Or shoes to Wair. The only way I could eat was on the little Money My Mother would luck up on Prostituting. I was forced to eat out of garbage cans. Of course I could sometime earn a little change singing On the street I was about 8 years of age then. The Children of the Naborhood used to Call Me dirty Junior. I went without shoes winter and summer. I don't remember a Father. He left My Mother when I was born. My brothers and I all had different Fathers.

"So After My Mother died I grew up and Caught a fraight train and left home. I didn't know where I was going or what what would happend to Me after I got there. I Arrived in Florida got a dishwashing job worked for one day. Caugh the fraight train and arrived in Chicago in 1958 Because I was Not Only riding the fraight. but I was also On the road and it took Me a while to get to Chicago. The Winter was Cold in Chicago. The Coldest Place I've ever been. The 'Windy City.' That is why I was forced to leave. Because it Was in December. So once again I Caught the Fraight train and arrived in Buffalo NY It Was 1959. There I got Married and had a little girl Whose Name is Marchell Hawkins. And the Marriage Was Anauld. So I took to the road again, arriving in Philadelphia Pen. It was 1960 I Could Not find Work there. You see I have Never been to school.

"So I took to the road again arriving in Newark NJ It was the year 1961 I Met A woman there. She fell in love With Me. So I lived With her about four years But she Coulden't hold Me. I left Newark and Went to Genevia NY That was the year 1965 There I got Married again. But My Wife died of Cancer. We Were togather one year. I left Genevia And Went to Los Angeles Calif. I Arrived here in 1966 got Married agan to a Verry select person Name Elizabeth Hawkins We have 5 Children and we are happy, And Verry Much in love.

"As I Write this, It is the Year 1981"

Ted Hawkins Touches Another Heart

2009-01-02T22:06:00.001+01:00

Here's a little Ted Hawkins tale for you. We're in the visitors' room of Vacaville of a Saturday afternoon, with all the chaos and formality that takes place on Saturday visits to any decent prison. Amidst our talk, one of the things I want to know is whether he's got a guitar. Well, no, in fact. "But Charlie Manson used to lend me his. I think my songs really touched his heart."

The Ladder of Success; a letter from Ted Hawkins

2009-01-02T12:58:00.000+01:00

Booking No 6872-844
Terminal Annex
Los Angeles CA 90054

Dear Bart:

This will acknowledge receipt of the literature you sent me dated February 28, 1983. Thank you for the Mention you gave me in your year-end review listing. If that doesn't Make Me look good, nothing else Will. Especially the part where you put Me Up With Mr. Bruce Springsteen; that caused the people here to look at Me With their Mouth hung open, in surprise. I haven't had the pleasure of hearing Mr Springsteen sing before, however I've been told Many times that he is a great big super star. And is one of the best singers in the World. Are you sure you didn't Mean to Tie Me With some one else? Am I really that good? I remain humble.

I've got a private lawyer thanks to My Wife's begging, pleading and crying, she talked a private lawyer into excepting a retainer fee for $75.oo. The fee in full is $500.oo. He will allow us to pay him on time. I am very optimistic about the Outcome of the Whole thing now. All I need is an agent to assist Me in Causing the Album to become a periodical publication. The public is not buying the record fast because they haven't heard it. No Matter how good a record sound, if there's No one to push and permote it, It's going nowhere. Any agent knows that in Order to sell the Artist's records, One first has to sell the Artists. Thats the agents job. And I know Not the Whereabouts of such a person. I would perfer a femail for an agent rather than a Mail. I can relate to a Woman better then I can a Man, in Any Circumstances. I am More incline to take their advice quicker. During your daily Activities, if you stumble across one please inform Me.

Thank you for investigating regards to the lone that I asked from Rounder. But I don't need them now. I'll take care of it. I can't wait to read about Myself in Mother Jones. Thanks for sending the press clips. It Mean So Much to Me, to know that people are reading about Me in some parts of the World.

Very Truly Yours,
"Ted Hawkins"
Theodore Hawkins, Jr.

Watch Your Step; Ted Hawkins and me

2009-01-02T12:14:00.001+01:00

The story I have to tell here scares me. It's a long story because it has to be, and I'm in it because I've never been able to find a way out. I don't know if the ending is happy or not. Although it was for Ted. I do know that — for Ted it was. I know that for sure, for certain. And for me? Well, I don't yet know. I don't know yet. I don't know.

In the summer of 1982, I received Ted Hawkins' album Watch Your Step in the mail. I always got lots of albums in the mail. I can remember the day, the afternoon, the shape of the room and the color of the walls, what the weather was like outside when I played that record for the first time.

The first thing to hear on that record is Ted Hawkins shouting, hollering:

"Watch your step!
Before you stumble and fall..."

and even though I listened to that record over and over and over again, a thousand times, and then a thousand times more, I still managed to miss the warning.

Read 'em & Weep; My tarot, ala Jodorowsky

2009-01-01T12:01:00.008+01:00

C'est vrai.

My new copain, compadre, comrade, Julian from Columbia, tauromaquier, polyoptician, brilliant illuminator of bordels et bordellos, acolyte of Jodo, laid it out in the Marseilles way. "I love painting," he told me, "but tarot is my passion." The array arrived entirely as major arcana, and none reversed, despite a thorough shuffling of the complete deck. If you know tarot, you might doubt that this is real. It's real. C'est vrai.

(oh, and feel free, preferrably privately, maybe, to offer your own interpretations)

Steve Connolly, guitar guy, Messenger. R.I.P. I remember. I remember. I remember everything.

2008-12-25T02:46:00.032+01:00

I don't know why, but here, in Paris, on Christmas Day, such as it is, I'm inclined to write about Steve Connolly, my friend and comrade and compatriot and well, whatever the hell he was. And isn't any more. And yet may still be, somehow, someway. Maybe, mayhap.

Steve was a guy I got to know first through coming across and upon and around Paul Kelly, the Australian singer-songwriter. Greatest songwriter in the English language, maybe, if it's a horse-race, and it may well be. And I've known a few of the very best, obviously, and listened to most of the rest. And Steve was Paul's guitar-player in what was called Paul Kelly And The Coloured Girls, until they got picked up by a major label in the US; after that, for radio reasons, they were Paul Kelly And The Messengers. Absolutely one of the greatest bands I've ever been near. Beyond that.

[So far beyond that, in fact, that as someone who toured with, oh, I don't know, what was left of The Band when Danko was sober, no less, and singing like a bird, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and Uncle Tupelo, and who heard Little Feat in the glorious days and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band too, and Graham Parker and the Rumour, and the Clash, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and the Plugz, and X, and Los Lobos, and so on and so forth, and in their time, more nights than not, the Messengers were the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world.]

A lot of water and beer and piss and vinegar and tears and sweat and moisture went under a good number of bridges amongst us over the years. It got a tad incestuous over time, certainly. I toured with Paul and the Messengers a wee little bit in the States; I remember an amazing evening at my place in Los Angeles where I introduced the great Texas singer-songwriter crowd of Joe Ely and Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore to their Antipodean equivalents over gumbo and Tecate and tequila; there was a time when my ex colonized the Messengers as her Australian touring band; there were a lot of times. There was that time in Tasmania when we took a mid-show break at a big Saturday night concert at the Uni just so the Messengers, Essendon Bombers barrackers one and all, could catch up backstage on a crucial match (against, I'd like to think, Collingwood), and it was late that same Tassie night that the American tour manager got so psychedelically drunk that he actually sang the Bombers fight song word-for-word, never having heard it before, never having seen a bit of a footie match in his life. It was magic. It was epic. Steve was, I reckon, the secret instigator. Had to have been.

Steve was intense. Steve was quiet, except when he wasn't. I've definitely known greater guitar players, but I don't know if I've ever known any who shoved down any harder on the strings. He played dead-simple lines, lines he struggled with, lines that he struggled to bring true, fiercely simple Spaghetti Western blues lines. Never busy, never crowded, never ever. And intensely critical of his own playing, never much satisfied with it. We all wish we could play the way he couldn't stand that he played.

(I haven't said enough here about Steve's guitar playing, but to say too much would be to be false, to be untrue to how he sounded. He said so much, and played so little. He played those big fat simple things, those dumb things, those great things. Every dog can have his day, Paul would be singing; any dog can win, and Steve would sing that melody back at him so simply. Hardly any dog can do that.)

I remember where I was when Paul called. I was in New Orleans, at home, under the banana trees, summertime, sweaty, out in the courtyard. It was night, early night, so I suppose it was late in Melbourne, or early, maybe. There were mosquitos. The cats were chasing each other wildly. Paul was calling. The air was thick but it always is in New Orleans in the summer. Steve was dead. Junkie. He taught me so much, footie and cricket and politics, Australian and American and Irish politics; he'd been amazed that I was there, standing there like a dumb tourist in Dublin, just outside the GPO on the Saturday when the Birmingham Six were paraded free down O'Connell Street -- what he would have given to be there! What luck or misfortune it was that I was the one instead. He was dead.

Six, seven months ago, as my life turned upside down once again, I woke up of a Sunday, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I mourned Steve as I hadn't before. Why? I don't know why. Maybe I was feeling once again, maybe I was alive and he wasn't, and maybe now I felt it. Hot wet tears on his behalf, then and now. R.I.P. So many gifts given, so many received, and so much belated gratitude.

(Oh, and this: Paul's one of those who keeps it moving, keeps it living, and keeps the arrangements fresh. But no matter how fresh the arrangement, no matter how hot the guitar-jock who's playing it, those old songs that he must necessarily do, well, if Steve played 'em first, his parts were so sculpted and scooped free of anything but the essential, that they still end up, inevitably, always, playing Steve's solos his way. It's not aping, it's not even a tribute, it's just a fact.)

Hey ya'll to Michael, Jon, Peter, Paul and all. Go Bombers!

Jimmy Stewart – A Wonderful Life

2008-12-24T10:48:00.000+01:00

"What was most heroic about Jimmy Stewart was he never tried to be a hero."

In a career spanning half a century, Jimmy Stewart has drawn an indelible portrait of the American man, and proven that regular guys can be heroes, too. He talked to Bart Bull about his long and wonderful life.
(published in Vogue)

The milkman is making his delivery – eggs and butter and quarts of milk stacked neatly in his wire basket. There was a time when salty jokes were made about milkmen and their midday deliveries, back in the days when wives stayed home alone and lonely while husbands marched off to work, but those days are gone, long gone, like the milkmen themselves. Gone and nearly forgotten, except here at Jimmy Stewart's house, where the milkman's white truck is parked in the driveway.

It’s a beautiful day, a wonderful day. “A great day for sightseeing buses too,” says Mrs. Stewart. A pair of tour vans has stopped in the middle of the street in hopes that Jimmy Stewart will come out to greet them in person. “He’s the friendliest, most accommodating star in Beverly Hills,” say the Hollywood star maps, telling how often he steps outside to chat with his fans. “You can hardly get your car up the street,” growls Gloria Stewart. At the moment Jimmy Stewart is in his backyard, trying to get his dog to cooperate while their picture is taken. Baron is looking at everything but the camera, cheerily wagging his tail all the while. “Never seen him act like this,” Stewart says, genuinely baffled, truly perplexed. “He’s a terrible ham,” Gloria cracks. “The dog, I mean.” Her timing is as good as Jimmy’s.

He gets up from his chair in the shade of an orange tree, stooping low, bending nearly in half to keep from scraping his head, legs every bit as long as you’d guess, maybe even a little longer. Half a century’s press clippings have ritualized the litany of words to describe him as he walks Baron back inside to look for a leash—”gawky,” “gangling,” “lean,” “lanky,” “awkward”—and for the way he folds himself into the family den when the photos are finished and it’s time to talk. It’s a comfortable room, crowded with books and photos and flowered cotton couches, not much different from most family rooms as long as you don’t notice who the people in the photos are or that those gold statuettes on the shelf are Academy Awards. Presented with an honorary Oscar in 1985 for fifty years of distinguished work in over eighty films, he was nominated five times in the best-actor category, winning in 1940 for The Philadelphia Story.

"My dad called me the night I got the Academy Award, called me at four-thirty. He never got the idea that our time out here was so much earlier than it was back there. It was usually when he got to work that he called me.” Stewart folds one full- length leg over the other slowly, purposefully, with deliberation, a man with all the time in the world, who’s never heard that life is a rat race, a man who learned his ways in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “He got there at seven-thirty.

“He said, ‘I heard on the radio you got some kind of prize—what was it, a plaque or what?’

“‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s a gold statue.’

“‘Well,’ he says, ‘why don’t you send it back, and I’ll put it in the window of the hardware store.’ So I packed it up and it was there in the window for twenty years.”

To trace Jimmy Stewart’s life from Indiana, Pennsylvania, to Beverly Hills is to risk all our hard-won skepticism about movie stars. The most fully realized personality in film history, he has played the widest range of roles of any American actor, roles so central to the times that to examine Stewart is to consider the American man. He’s played senators and lunatics, cowboys and test pilots, regular Joes and G-men, all of them different, each a lot like Jimmy Stewart.

What set him apart from the rest of Hollywood’s leading men was that in decade after decade of larger-than-life screen stars, he was invariably just the size of Jimmy Stewart—tall perhaps, but far too slender to punch his way through the plot. He was usually just a little too sensible for the grand gesture, and when he lost his senses, he was still too skinny to push anybody around. Besides, that wouldn’t be fair, and he was always very fair. A man left the movies feeling less capable than Clark Gable, less of a lady-killer than Cary Grant, but you never left a Jimmy Stewart movie feeling diminished. Nobody was less capable or, apparently, less of a ladies’ man. Instead, you reckoned that you or any other regular guy endowed with enough all-American virtues would have handled things just about the way Jimmy Stewart had. What was most heroic about Stewart was that he never tried to be a hero.

It’s a quality that extends into his own life, his offscreen life. At eighty-one, with an old man’s bushy eyebrows and age’s ruddy complexion, he stammers as he always has, and remembers everything. Son of the owner of the oldest hardware store in town—"I was born in 1908; it had been going since 1870, or 1860, something like that" —he had just about the most average of American boyhoods. He collected stamps, built model airplanes, practiced the accordion. A Boy Scout — ‘The most steadfast boy I’ve ever known,” declared Mrs. Addie Rose, his next-door neighbor — he ran the movie projector in the town theater, cranking the reels by hand. “I remember they did 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—very popular movie—and with the box of film came a green lens, there was a thing up on the reel that said ‘Green,’ and as you saw this, you put up the green lens. This meant they were going underwater. I suppose I was doing colorization even then.” He had a job one summer painting white lines on the highway.

Prepared at prep school for nothing much in general, he went to Princeton and lackadaisically acquired a degree in architecture. The day he graduated Josh Logan invited him to join Henry Fonda and a few others in a summer acting troupe, offering to let him paint sets and play accordion for tips in the tearoom. With little chance of practicing architecture at the height of the Depression, he opted for acting. Acting troupes led to brief walk-on roles on Broadway, and after a few years, New York led to Hollywood. Within four years, he’d made twenty-five movies; in six of those twenty-five, he played a newspaperman, then as now a sort of movie shorthand for brash, footloose young man. Already a Jimmy Stewart type was evolving: stammering, sincere, optimistic, perhaps a touch naive, but willing and honest and true. A voice that quavered, that couldn’t decide between high and low.

“You worked all the time. And you learned your craft. You worked all the time, in all sorts of parts.” He walks, hands hanging straight down at his sides, over to pull a picture of himself from off the wall, a black-and-white photo in a battered red frame. “I always show this. All sorts of parts.” Somebody who looks a little like young Stewart is looming, tall, bald, pigtailed, oddly slant-eyed. “The Good Earth. A very good picture. I think in ‘36, ‘37. They didn’t ask you, ‘Would you be interested in doing a Chinese part?’ They said, ‘Report to us on Stage Such-and-Such for a test with Paul Muni.’ And Muni looked at me and said, ‘He’s awful tall for a Chinaman.’” A pause. “So they dug a trench.” Another pause. “Didn’t get the part. They gave it to a Chinaman.”

All the same, he misses the old contract system, the way the studios used to make movies. “It was like a big family. When you’d go to work at the studio, you knew everybody, and everybody knew you. It was wonderful. You went to work, got there at eight o’clock in the morning, left at six, and you did that six days a week. Not five—six. That’s why Saturday night was such a big night, and everybody collected down at the Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard. It’s not there, hasn’t been there for years, but there’s a big empty spot where it was.’’

And while it may require a leap of imagination for younger generations used to thinking of him in milder terms, Jimmy Stewart was known for more than a decade as “Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor.” “Well,” he drawls, “if you’re not married, you’re an eligible bachelor. It’s that simple.” Maybe.

Kim Novak remembers him even now as “the sexiest man who played opposite me in thirty years.” But he was romantically linked, as the gossip columnists put it back in those semi-delicate days, to a long list of notable beauties, including Olivia De Havilland, Dorothy Lamour, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and Rita Hayworth. He and Cary Grant once threw what the papers called a “boisterous, midget-ridden super stag party,” sipping champagne from the slippers of the glamorous women in attendance, some of whom secured admission on the basis of their impressive measurements. And in a very well-documented story from the set of Destry Rides Again, Marlene Dietrich simply got fed up with waiting for what she wanted and locked them both into his dressing room. “I was too busy,” Stewart rumbles.

Bachelorhood may have kept him busy, but as soon as he hit Hollywood, he got his pilot’s license and bought himself a Stinson airplane. “First thing I did when I got my first check.” Always an aviation buff, he went on to work for his commercial pilot’s license, despite the fact that the war was imminent and commercial pilots were among the first to be drafted. Thirty-two and already a major star, with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Destry Rides Again, and The Philadelphia Story among his credits as a leading man, he entered the service in March 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor. He failed his first draft physical—too skinny—but he force- fed himself to make the minimum weight. His income plummeted from nearly three thousand dollars a week to twenty- one dollars a month. He sent his agent a check for $2. 10.

Among the very few movie stars to serve in World War II, he flew twenty combat missions over Germany—”Nine Yanks and a Jerk” was painted on the cockpit of a B-24 bomber he flew—entering the Army Air Corps as a private and leaving five years later a full colonel. He avidly avoided publicity throughout the war, but when it was over, he feared his career was finished, too. “It was a very insecure time. My contract had run out during the war. And nobody. . . nobody remembers you. That’s why I thank Frank Capra in prayers every day. ‘Cause he just out of the blue called me up and said, ‘I got an idea for a story, and why don’t you come down to the house?’ And he started with this story, and I was so wrapped up I didn’t pay too much attention. He said, ’You’re gonna commit suicide and an angel named Clarence who hasn’t won his wings yet, he comes down and saves you, and you say you wish—I’m not tellin’ this very well. . . '

“And I said, ‘Frank, when do we start—I love the picture.’ It’s a Wonderful Life was the first production of a new film company Capra and a few other directors had established. “Frank and I and so many of us had such great faith in the picture. Our hearts were all in it, the crew and everybody so. . . so overcome with the meaning of the picture. And the picture was a failure, and caused the failure of the company.” His long reflective pauses are even longer at times, long enough to gather words that will say enough, that won’t say too much. “Looking, looking back over it, I can just see that the picture meant more to me than any other.”

Still single, still a Hollywood heartthrob (“What. . . gives Jimmy Stewart the power to tie the American woman into emotional knots?” Woman’s Home Companion wondered, vastly underestimating the power of innocence), he married for the first and final time at the age of forty-one; slow-going deliberation is more than just the way he speaks. “The first few times I went out with Gloria, we went golfing. Finally she said to me, ‘I eat too, you know,’ so l took her to Chasen’s.” One of his perfect-timing pauses. “We’re still going to Chasen’s.”

In the bargain, he acquired two sons; soon after, he became the father of twin daughters. He became precisely the family man the movies had shown us all along. But having taken his familiar Joe Average character to the brink of suicidal despair in It’s a Wonderful Life, he began to unveil more complex emotions in his characters. Although Harvey had a pre-war sweetness to it, the story of a madman whose hallucinations overpower everyone around him has a particularly postwar feel. In three Alfred Hitchcock films, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, Stewart’s affable all- American male is wound much too tight, traveling far past the breaking point. And in a long series of Westerns, first with director Anthony Mann and then with John Ford, we saw both a new West and a new James Stewart, angry and edgy, dogged and bent on bitter revenge. If all this seemed a shock at first coming from sweet-natured Jimmy Stewart, it would have seemed more shocking as time went by if he had stood still in a harsh world of change, ever the fresh-faced idealist.

Some things remained in place as the times changed. As a good luck charm he wore the same hat in almost every one of his Westerns. “I have that thing. I had a big argument with John Ford first time we worked. He said, ‘That’s a terrible hat.’ We were shooting it down in Texas somewhere—Two Rode Together, I think it was called. Next picture we did, he wouldn’t let me wear a hat at all.”

On the wall nearby is a precisely rendered watercolor of a red-brown horse, a little swaybacked with age, standing alone outside a weathered stable. He stands up to gaze at Henry Fonda’s painting of Pie, the horse Stewart rode in movie after movie. “This is when he was—he had to be, had to be twenty-eight years old. Half quarter horse, half Arabian. I rode him for twenty years. Hank Fonda did this on his days off, and I didn’t know anything about it. That was Pie.” They were making Cheyenne Autumn in Santa Fe, and the air was too thin for the old horse, the altitude too high. “He couldn’t make it. He couldn’t make it.”

Staring at a friend’s portrait of another friend, he can’t help but admire it once more. Fonda and Stewart were practically the last of their generation, and now there’s just one of them left. But there’s more to it than that. “This friendship with Fonda over the years was tremendous. I valued it so much. Tremendous friendship, tremendous admiration for him. He was good at his job if anybody ever was good at his job. It was a terrible thing to lose him. Which happens so much, you know. I think about it every once in a while—I try not to think about it. I’ve lost so many—I’ve lost so many people. You think of somebody and then you think, ‘When did she die?’

The rims of his eyes go moist, nearly wet, not quite. Not quite. He won’t cry, not here, to be observed and written about in a magazine. Instead, he speaks, quickly now, to distract himself. “But Fonda was a wonderful, close friend.”

Now he is the last one left, the last star of his era. He doesn’t know why it’s worked out that way, and clearly it bothers him, confuses him just a little. When he was headed off to England during the war, his father slipped the Ninety- first Psalm into his hand—”For He shall give His angels charge over thee.. . . “—and maybe that helps explain it some, but it’s hard not to wonder. His last movie was made half a decade ago, but even as the unseen voice on the current Campbell’s soup ads, he moves miles past the typical too- sweet lemonade commercial grandfather, lulling us with that querulous voice and then always adding more edge than we expect. If he were sent the right script, something he could sink his teeth into, would he be ready to do another picture?

“Sure,” he answers. Not a moment’s hesitation, none of his legendary pauses. “Sure.” No stammer, no stutter. “Sure. Sure.”

He considers a moment. “Can’t play cowboys anymore.”

Aphorism Twenty-six; (One of a series; collect the whole set!)

2008-12-20T18:29:00.003+01:00

Not every horse can win; nearly all can lose.

Aphorism (or nearly) Number 25; One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set

2008-12-13T17:01:00.001+01:00

Q. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
A. The nest.

Watch Your Step; or All About Me; Gatemouth Brown, Ted Hawkins, and uh, Me

2008-12-11T14:17:00.007+01:00

I'm pondering pensively, I'm considering meditatively, I'm thinkin' 'bout thankin' 'bout . . . about. . . about maybe possibly kinda considering doing something, a sketchy but sketched-in work-in-progress, a la the ongoing Ian Dury thing below here somewhere down there, about either:
A. Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown
or
B. Ted Hawkins.
but not, definitely
C: Both of 'em
though maybe
D: Pops Staples (and a smidge of Mavis and Yvonne and Cleotha and Purvis...)

I'm thinking about this in my artistically ruthless way (damn, Ruth isn't even answering the phone), which means that I'm waiting for clarity to arrive. Or serendipity. Or synchronicity. Or spontaneous combustion. Any one will do, and they always show up as long as I stand clear. So let's see what happens next.

Aphorism Twenty-Four & A Half (One & A Half of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2008-12-05T10:01:00.006+01:00

Ok, so girl-genius Kate can apparently hurl pearls like this at will:
"Takest thou a job in haste; enjoy thy redundancy at leisure."

Dang! I wish I'd said that! Though in fact, as intellectual property law is generally applied (which is to say until somebody actually bothers to drag you into court), and certainly in the context of slack and slipshod Euro-copyright, well, I basically consider that I did say it.

The other one, at least as genius-esque, began, as best I remember:
"'Tis better not to hunger for applause, lest...." and there was a "redundant" in there too. (But that would be redundant, wouldn't it?) Anyway, when I eventually remember it, and I will, I'll likely claim that one too.

Aphorism 23 (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2008-12-05T09:29:00.003+01:00

Another Patrick-isme, (perhaps made even more profound by last night, when he didn't actually show up for his grand return).
"Sanity is learning to live with your madness."

Aphorisms 21 y 22; (Part of a Series; Collect the Whole Set)

2008-12-01T15:40:00.004+01:00

Two in one lunch!
from Mohammed: (No, not THAT Mohammed, the other one....)

"To be rich is to have knowledge."

And a Kabylian dicho:

"A little goat smells another little goat."

Aphorism Number 20; (One Of A Series; Collect The Whole Set)

2008-11-28T19:16:00.004+01:00

A little truth goes a long way, but a little lie goes farther.

L.A. International

2008-11-26T12:24:00.008+01:00

In Los Angeles, a new, multi-ethnic generation is redefining young American style.
By Bart Bull
(published in Vogue)

I'm looking -- staring actually -- at a handkerchief.
It's more than a handkerchief, though; it's an epiphany.
It is, without a doubt, the single most perfect isosceles triangle in all of Los Angeles tonight. It droops, languid in its linen perfection, from the breast picket of a navy blue blazer worn over a white boat-neck sweater, white linen pants, white silk shirt, and a firmly knotted navy silk tie. The handkerchief itself is a brave ocher-gold, a grand gesture against all that blue and white. But it's the droop that counts, that studied droop, much like one of Dali's soft watches oozing down from the pocket, a profound counterpoint to those precise angles. Frankly, I'm proud to be in the same room with a handkerchief so eloquent.

It's worn by Jose, who is nineteen and standing in the lobby of the Ukrainian Culture Center with his left hand resting lightly -- just so -- in the pocket of his high-waisted baggy trousers, acessorized by his fully achieved air of distraction. Jose is anything but distracted, of course. His attention is no less perfectly ponted than the cheese-slicing edge of his isosceles ocher-gold linen handkerchief. This is war, style war. The Ukrainian is tonight's central stop of the Fashion Crowd circuit and no one is anywhere near as distracted as the poses they're striking would suggest. Reputations will be reupholstered tonight, egos will suffer shattering defeats, and when the smoke clears, style will reign supreme.

What I noticed about the Fashion Crowd was that no one else in Los Angeles seemed to be noticing them -- and how could you miss them? They dress. They wear clothes as if their lives depend upon them. Grammar and syntax and vocabulary skills take time, but clothes are something you can shop for next Saturday morning.

The boys are especially devoted to staying in front of the pack. Ever alert to shifts in style, they are, like Jose of the isosceles droop, master of delicate nuance. These are guys who would rather die than be seen wearing drab socks, who can quite literally identify the designer of a tie at twenty paces. These are teenage boys who can walk around wearing their double-breasted jackets unbuttoned and still manage to look polished.

A great number of them live at home in order to avoid wasting money best spent on clothes. At lunch, they haunt the very best sections of the very best department stores. Their bedrooms are stacked with fashion magazines, and their phones stay busy with updated comparisons of last weekend's triumphs and disasters. Although the open-air alleys and wholesale showrooms of downtown LA's garment district are thick with them every weekend, only the most daringly secure would ever admit to buying anything other than their most playful shoes there. It's not true, of course, but they truly with it were.

The truth is that for many of the Hispanic members of the Fashion Crowd, their peers are still living in an old world of low riders and gangs, of fierce barrio territorialism that leads nowhere more glamorous than jail or a janitor job. There are gangs among the Asians too, as well as the equally terrifying Old World option of fulfilling the role of scrupulously dutiful son or daughter. But the more limiting those older possibilities seem, the more important the distinction becomes between the Fashion Crowd and their less fashionable peers.

The best-dressed guys -- known as "GQs" -- put considerable distance between their looks and anything that smacks of gangster style. Since low riders and gangbangers have been dressing for more than a decade in revisisionist variations on on the '40s zoot suit, the GQs are rapdily moving away from the formality of suits and ties, and on toward something more fanciful, more freewheeling. Last summer's GQ cliche was the omnipresent varsity look, crew sweaters over ties with the hair buzzed almost comically short on the sides in apparent emulation of the Princeton sculling crew of 1926. Currently, though, the GQs prefer long hair tied back or flying free, and the most daring are adopting entire looks built around rough suede cowboy boots or white turtlenecks worn tunic style. "I'm tired of ties," one of the GQ trendsetters told me. "I work at a law firm downtown -- all I see all day long is ties."

The Vogues are evry bit as intent on widening the gap between themselves and their counterparts, who are referred to, in the deepest tones of derision that a teenager can muster, as "Cha-Chas." While the Vogues are inclined toward hats and gloves and Chanel-inspired ensembles, the Cha-Chas (though no one will ever admit to being a Cha-Cha) settle for miniskirts, high heels, and dramatic makeup that is only a small evolutionary step away from the girl-gangsters' "loca" look. The Cha-Chas, less willing to abandon traditional Latin styles, will typically have longer hair, often teased into the high-crowned look the Vogues call "lionhead." Vogues, ever inclined to emphasize the distance from everyting the Cha-Cha represents, are currently acquiring Louise Brooks bobs or dramatically brief pageboys. No cocktail parties exist in thier lives, but should an invitation appear, they're dressed for the occasion.

Given the social mobility available in California, in the West, in this truly New World, it's entirely possible that the elegant cocktail party will be their next accomplishment. Young as they are, these kids dress with more verve and wit and can actually be seen at any contemporary evening affair, and the clubs and dances they attend on the party circuit exist, everyone agrees, essentially for display. They even dance together in large groups, in circles rather than couples, the better to admire each other, and the better to remind the outsider of the supreme uniqueness of their clique. At a time when the ouside world seems fixated on archaic fantasies of hot-blooded Latin style, no one here takes particular pride in their dancing. It's the look, the style, the leaps and flourishes of fashion that count. And for tonight, in their remarkably polyglot beauty and taste, they looke even more stylish than they have ever looked before. Tomorrow night is just an evening in the future, a fashionable instant yet to be invented.

A Tale of One City: Or, Once Upon A Time In The Southwest; Or, Not A Metaphor for Phoenix, Arizona, That's For Dang Sure!

2008-11-24T18:57:00.017+01:00

(written for The Arizona Republic; not particularly published there, though)

Once upon a time there was a city, a big city.

It was so big it was a giant. It wasn’t a particularly smart giant, or an especially graceful one, but it sure was big, even for a giant. And it was still growing.

Well, kids, this giant city wanted to be admired and respected and appreciated. Like all of us, it wanted to be loved. And not just for being so damn -- oops, sorry, kids --so darn big. This city wanted to be admired for its beauty, its taste, its artistic sensibilities, its wisdom. It wanted to be what some people call "a world class city."

It wanted to be in the big leagues.

And it was, in certain ways. It sure was big.

And still growing too. It had a lot of golf courses. And some of them were world class ones. And they were all real big, awful big. It had a bunch of parks, including the absolute very biggest park in the whole wide world. And the fact that being the site of the biggest darn park in the world didn’t make anybody feel any better about anything only made the city feel bigger and dumber and more awful than ever.

Because the city really did feel kind of big and dumb and awful. There were a lot of other big things in the city -- big fountains and big freeways and big malls with big fountains and big houses with big yards in big gated communities with big fountains of their own but it didn’t make the city feel any more lovable. Just more awful.

Every once in a while -- not that often but every once in a while -- the giant city got an idea, a big idea, a really big idea. Other cities had giant-sized convention centers -- maybe it should get a really gigantic convention center and stick it right in the middle of downtown, right where the stores and people used to go, and then everybody would really love it.

And yet , oddly, nobody loved it. Nobody came.

Oh, sure, conventions came to the convention center, but they took one quick look at downtown and went straight back to their hotel and had the concierge book them a tee-time at a big world-class golf course. And then they went home again. As soon as possible. So the giant city decided maybe its convention center wasn’t big enough.

And maybe it needed some other stuff downtown too, like gigantic arts centers and massive major megalithic sports stadiums. Stuff like that.

The big giant ever-growing city had heard rumors. Frankly, it didn’t get around much but it had heard talk of other cities and how they had downtowns and other districts that were something called “vibrant.”

The giant city didn’t know very much about what “vibrant” was but it figured it wanted to buy some quick. So it paid through the nose -- the giant-sized nose.

World class cities all had mass transit, so the giant city figured it better send out for some of that too, even though it didn’t quite understand why. Because the giant city had a lot of giant freeways that went all over the place. It had even turned the little two-way streets that used to go in and out of downtown into big giant one-way streets that worked just like freeways. But it went ahead and bought a big hunk of mass transit anyway. It really wanted very badly to be loved, after all.

But even if it was guilty of looking for love in all the wrong places, it couldn’t seem to help from making the same mistakes over and over again. It kept shopping for expensive new outfits that would make it more attractive. It went on a lot of dates with a lot of new suitors but once they’d had their way, well, it always woke up feeling lonely and even emptier.

Well, you can guess what happened, can’t you, kids?

The big giant unlovable city kept making big giant unlovable grand gestures, and they didn’t make it any more lovable, only more laughable. And it wasn’t like it wasn’t trying, for God’s sake. It was paying big therapy bills, going to experts and university presidents and PR firms, and getting no relief whatsoever. The only friends it seemed to have were big developers and people on the payroll, and sometimes it wondered if they were just pretending to love the giant city in order to use for their own purposes.

But you’re worried that this tale of one city might not have a happy ending, aren’t you? Well, it does.

Because one day, completely out of the blue, a wonderful wizard magically appeared, waved his mighty wand, said an astonishing secret incantation, and all of the giant city’s great dreams and grand gestures came true! Yes! It really happened. Just like that! Really! You bet. Now go to bed, kids, pull those covers over your head, and go back to sleep.

Nighty-night.

Aphorism Nineteen (One of a Series; Collect 'em All!)

2008-11-17T14:02:00.000+01:00

Purgatory; Roman Catholicism’s metaphysical DMV.

Leadbelly and Ironhead

2008-11-15T15:48:00.007+01:00

"If you would learn from Leadbelly, you should look deeper to find his greatest qualities. In other words, don't just imitate his Southern accent: Learn his straightforward honesty, vigor, and strength."
—Pete Seeger, from "The 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly: An Instruction Manual by Julius Lester and Pete Seeger"; published by Oak Publications

"It is impossible to separate Huddie Ledbetter and his songs from the Negro South."
—Julius Lester

"Leadbelly — Huddie Ledbetter — was a man of depth who did not mask his contrasting moods... To me he was a guide and a teacher in country life, in politics, in Jim Crow."
—Moses Asch, Folkways Records owner and entrepreneur

"Because don't forget Because there is a a book riting about my Life and I don't think nothing about that Book . . . Because Lomax did not rite nothing like i told Him."
—Huddie Ledbetter (aka Leadbelly, aka Lead Belly, aka Walter Boyd)

"To which we must still add: if it hadn't been for old John Lomax, we would never have known Leadbelly, his genius, and his songs."
—Pete Seeger and Julius Lester

"Lead Belly drives the Lomax car
And he is never tired;
He's a better man, John Lomax vows,
Than any he ever hired.
He sings at prisons to convict throngs
And helps John Lomax gather songs."
—from a poem by William Rose Benet, The New Yorker, January 19, 1935

He was big, Benet declaimed (of Leadbelly, not Lomax) and he was black, and wondrous were his wrongs (we're still talking Leadbelly here, not Lomax). He was what scholars of the blues would call "a songster," by which they mean any old black guy who sang stuff other than just blues. It was a definition enforced by people perfectly capable of turning their own rectums into telescopes; there may never have been a black guy who only did blues, but ever since white folks first heard the phrase "the blues," they've been damn sure there ought to be.

For all the literary reams on Robert Johnson and his abbreviated recording career, for all the Lucky Strike-wreathed romance of hellhounds and crossroads, Johnson's hokum tunes like "They're Red Hot" ("Hot tamales and they're red hot/Yeah, got 'em for sale..." and pop attempts like "Malted Milk" manage to never much get mentioned. They're an embarassment, an offense against high romance, usually blamed against the insensitivity and/or commercial venalityof a previous generation's white blues entrepreneurs. Almost entirely unrecognized is the fact that the "bluesmen" were dance musicians and street performers who lived and survived and thrived by throwing all manner of change-up pitches. Almost entirely unremarked is the degree to which The Blues were demanded by generation after generation of white people -- first by the early record men who attached the magic word "blues" to anything and everything black folks did, and then generation after generation of field-recording "folk researchers" whose demand for blues has powerfully and effectively distorted what little is understood about the music of rural black Americans. For our purposes here, we can divide these people into two categories: obnoxious pirates and damn fools; curiously, as in the case of the preponderance of "bluesmen" over "songsters," there seem to be far more of the former than the latter.

Songsters were originally books, books full of songs from the minstrel stage, and big-lipped blackface pictures usually too. To be a black American musician has been to be insistently spanked into place, to be hectored by critics whenever you failed to be a "bluesman" or a "songster," when you veered too far from whatever definition of "jazz" somebody was wielding warily in the direction of "rhythm & blues" or in the direction of "strings" with their suggestion of symphonic sensibilities. The initial reviews the Fisk Jubilee Singers received when they went north from Nashville in 1871 were lousy, rotten, stink-o. The rock critics of the day didn't dig 'em, saw stoic black college students in suits and dignified dresses singing concert-style "Negro spirituals," and missed the minstrel man flash, the jigaboo jazz jive, the niggerisms. Once they got hepped, however, to the authenticity of it all (in part, at least by Mark Twain, who was so deeply Southern he pretty much never went home again), the reviews straightened out. When it comes to white critics and black music, they buy "Authentic" every time.

"Along with these in point of service I must place that group of Negro 'boys' who this summer, cheerfully and with such manifest friendliness, gave up for the time their crap and card games, their prayer meetings, their much needed Sunday and evening rest to sing for Alan and me -- that group whose real names we omit for no other reason than to print the substituted picturesque nicknames."
—John Lomax, from "Acknowledgment" in "American Ballads and Folk Songs"

"A folk song belongs to no one in particular - it belongs to everyone. Even though we may know the writer of a song which later became a folksong, we can say that without the people who went before him - to give him the rich background against which to create his song - he could never have written that song."
—Peggy Seeger, from her entirely non-ironically titled "Folksongs of Peggy Seeger," Oak Publications. (Peggy Seeger's husband Ewan MacColl wr0te "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," and she receives international publishing royalties on that song, which Billboard magazine declared both Song of the Year and Record of the Year in 1972, as well as on numerous compositions of her own and of others.)

Huddie Ledbetter was not poverty's child. His parents owned the land they worked near Caddo Lake at the border between East Texas and Louisiana, a land where white folks were often sharecroppers. He was strong and smart and loud and sexy, all of which have historically been problems for a black man in our country, all of which surely were blessings and a curse for him. He attacked a woman and killed a man, maybe two, maybe more, and did prison time for murder. The legends say he sang his way out, and the legends seem to be right. Between prison terms, he did five years on the street, which, in my experience with ex-cons, ain't bad. He went back to the joint on "assault with intent to murder." These things happen.

"The singer found it difficult to shed the habit of quick anger he had acquired during his years as a roustabout," the New York Times said in his obituary. He did jail time in New York too, for stabbing a man. That part was disturbing to the folk who needed him to be St. Belly of Lead, patron saint of patronization. He had failed to understand how truly, truly different things were up North, here in New York City, where Folkways Records were recorded. "Perhaps he wondered at my earnestness," says Pete Seeger, "trying to learn folkmusic." Perhaps.

Perhaps John Lomax had helped him get loose from prison during his second stretch, but whether he actually did or not, once Ledbetter was free, Lomax found a lot of handy uses for him. "Honorary Consultant in American Folk Song and Curator of the Folk Song Archives of the Library of Congress," Lomax was cobbling a career out of "collecting" other folks' music, and he knew where Negro folks were at their purest: "In the prison camps . . . the conditions were practically ideal." For collectors, anyway. Once Ledbetter was loose, Lomax took him on as chauffeur, as valet, as live bait to be dangled before other prisoners in hope of softening their suspicions. Payment was to be negotiated later, another folk music tradition. They left Marshall Texas, and set off straight Northeast. First stop: Little Rock.

Roustabout
(1964)
Paramount Pictures; starring Elvis Presley, with Barbara Stanwyck, Leif Erickson, and Pat Buttram.
Dynamic singer-guitarist Charlie Rodgers (Elvis Presley) is fired from his gig at a teahouse, wrecks his motorcycle, and has a run-in with the law, so he takes a job with the carnival. With Jack Albertson, Billy Barty, Teri Garr, Raquel Welch, and Sue Ann Langdon as the gypsy fortune teller.

Lomax was a pioneering arts-grant racketeer, an Aggie prof who went on to Harvard—no denser brick can be compressed out of red kiln-fired clay. His first book, a collection of cowboy songs, borrowed liberally from a little-known collection by another less scholarly-inclined author, Jack Thorp. Carrying a transcription machine around with him, he established the archetypal field-recording folklorist, more to be feared than wondered at, more to be fled from than sung at. Equipped with all the urges toward authenticity that have always driven white men to blackface, he was doing his pseudo-academic best to establish minstrelsy by machine. Further along, some field-recorders might change his methods—most would not—but the ethical standards he set have remained remarkably consistent.

Once he had his hands on Ledbetter, he knew he'd collected hisself a live one. He dressed Ledbetter in prison stripes, coon stripes, the stripes of minstrelsy, the not far from faux-nigger stripes of what would become Dixieland and of barbershop quartets, and brought him before East Coast audiences. Not much of a liberal himself, he knew how to work bleeding-heart Northerners like a pinball machine. A minstrel show was still a hot ticket up North, even if the white man was no longer weraring blackface, even if he was wearing an entire black man instead.

Huddie Ledbetter learned quick how politically-correct bread was buttered, and on which side. He learned to knock off singing about Brownskin Women and Yaller Gals, to hold back on all the Pigmeat Papa stuff. Prissy young Pete Seeger and his permanently PC Weavers would change the words of "Good Night, Irene" to "I'll see you in my dreams..." from the darker, dirtier, more dangerous "I'll get you in my dreams." Nothing like a fool, Leadbelly learned to fake the party line and commenced singing something he called "The Bourgeois Blues." It was a title that cut on every edge, more edges than the Folkways folk have ever understood.

John Lomax lost all semblance of scholarly objectivity when Leadbelly insisted on doing some collecting of his own: he wanted to collect his pay. More, he wanted out of the jailbird stripes and into a pin-striped suit. John's folk-collecting son Alan Lomax describes the clash: "Two such strong temperaments can seldom collaborate," he wrote. It was a rare and historic instance of a folklorist using the word "collaborate"— even if it was a hilarious malaprop—and should be cherished for its scarcity, then stuffed and placed in a museum, properly labeled, enclosed in a glass case, for public display and the annotated attentions of appropriately-accredited academics. In the Lomax's 1941 book, "Our Singing Country," they laundry-list a blind singer from the Ozarks, dispossessed Texas sharecroppers, a retired cowpuncher, a "Georgy cracker," farmer's wives (if not their daughters), a tomato-canning factory worker, a New England scissors griner, a miner's wife who became a union organizer, a Vermont lumberjack now a car salesman, and that undisguisable dustbowl (and thus dispossessed -- and gritty!) balladmaker, Woody the G. It's practically the entire Popular Front, front and back. It's pathetic and bathetic, Jim. Woe is Us, We The People. Finally, way, way, way down the line, Lomax Pere et Junior get around to naming, folk anonymity or no, ".....the singers who have moved us beyond all others that we have heard between Maine and New Mexico"—and no explanation of why they skipped Arizona and California which I admit pisses me right off —"the Negroes who in our opinion have made the most important and original contributions to American folksong." They name Aunt Harriet McClintock, they name the deadly deathly dull spiritual singers Vera Hall and Dock Read, they name "Dobie Red." They name "Iron Head," but they don't, do not, can not, will not say the cursed name of Lead Belly. They say "Iron Head" instead.

"Iron Head," see, was quite a character—quite a character. By 1947, Lomax had a lot of stories about "Iron Head" for his latest bring-'em-back-alive book, "Adventures of a Ballad Hunter." Lomax had personally gotten "Iron Head" temporarily paroled, see: "Thus, I picked this Negro singer of English ballads, of Ol Hannah, Little John Henry, The Gray Goose, Black Betty, Shorty George, Pick A Bale of Cotton, The Ol' Lady' -- yet this is Leadbelly's repertoire, oddly enough -- and other 'sinful songs,' to be my chauffeur and companion..." Best of all, this time, if 'Iron Head' got biggity, why, right back to prison he goes! But 'Iron Head' is a far more cooperative Negro than that doggone old Lead Belly ever was -- why, he admits that he was guilty of his crimes, for one thing, and when Lomax returns to New York, the place where Lead Belly was corrupted, "Iron Head' "...held on to me in terror." Even so, despite all that Mister Lomax tried to do for him, "Iron Head" eventually lands back in prison, incorrigible, unredeemable. "I should have left him in Sugarland..." to weave horse collars, Cap'n Lomax says, sadder, but much, much wiser.
There may have been, sort of, an "Iron Head." There is a furlough slip, nothing like a pardon, leaving a prisoner named Iron Head in the hands of John Lomax. A man, once upon a time named James Baker, was imprisoned in Texas, and identified only as Ironhead, he recorded some work songs for the Lomax machine. (Those recordings have a half-life that we are only beginning to suspect, by the way, but of course, as a prisoner, as a black man in prison, as a folk artifact, as an object and subject and reject and abject and construct of culture and Folk and of the frighteningly oxymoronic term "field-recording" with its creepy sub-harmonic resonances that reach beyond the slave labor that built the Pharoahs' echo-chamber tombs, well, we can only begin to speculate. Unless, of course, we care to look at the collection of publishing royalties, where reverberations transform themselves mysteriously into revenues.)

But if there was an Iron Head, his identity was swallowed, eaten alive, by Lomax's hunger, by his need to fix Huddie Ledbetter, who was succeeding in surviving in New York City, while he, John Lomax, a once-and-former-Texas banker, a fully graduated Aggie educator, an honored lecturer at Modern Language Association conventions, a guy who could pull out greasy dog-eared letters showing him to be an Honorary Consultant to some goofy governmental boondoggle with a damn official-looking letterhead, was flopping around looking for ways to scrape a living together still. Lomax was doing his dim Aggie damndest to write Leadbelly right out of history. He fucked up, mostly because he'd done to thorough a public relations job folk-pimping him in the first place. All the same, it was a less painful failure than it would have been had he and Alan and Folkways not ended up with their names on Huddie Ledbetter's publishing. That way, songs like "Goodnight, Irene," (the biggest pop music hit of 1950, with it's astonishing resulting effect, and its near-eternal flood of royalty revenues), and "In the Pines," and "House of the Rising Sun," and "Midnight Special," and "Boll Weevil," and "Rock Island Line" would be distinguished by the Lomax name, which in turn would make certain that publishing royalty revenues that might have been squandered on liquor and flashy clothes and such by an ungrateful Negro might go to a better, larger, more important cause.

"So here's to John A. Lomax
And to Orpheus his peer,
With a voice that makes brown ladies swoon,
And a scar from ear to ear..."
—William Rose Benet

"As the half century came to a close Huddie Ledbetter ended his walk through the valley of the shadow and sat down at that welcome table specifically prepared for Scott Joplin, and Dan Emmett, for Black Patti and John Henry, for Buddy Bolden and Blind Lemon. Like the rest of that happy company of American singers, Leadbelly had opened a road for the others who would come after."

—Alan Lomax, from "The Leadbelly Song Book," Oak Publications. (Nearly all copyrights would include either Alan or John Lomax's name or both; only some would include Huddie Ledbetter.)
[Among the happy company Alan Lomax has assembled to greet Leadbelly in that Upper Room's upper balcony, what Carl Van Vechten's novel called "Nigger Heaven," are: Scott Joplin, ragtime composer who died impoverished of syphyllis; the early white blackface minstrel Dan Emmett; the unprecedented "Black Patti," properly named Sissieretta Jones, who triumphed worldwide at the turn of the 20th Century as among the greatest opera singers in all history, though unable to break through the minstrelsy barriers, and who died thieved and penniless; John Henry, the mythic, fantastic, fictional folkloric figure who died with a hammer in his hand; Buddy Bolden, the emblematic New Orleans trumpeter who languished and died in an insane asylum; and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the master blues singer and guitarist and recording artist and street performer whom the young Huddie Ledbetter served journeyman duties alongside, and who died of exposure on a frozen Chicago street.]

"To ballad-makers, long dead and nameless; to the jokey boys whose smiles are dust; to the singers of the lumberwoods, the cattle trail, the chain gang, the kitchen ... and to the horny-handed, hospitable, generous, honest, and inspired folk-artists who carved thse songs out of the rock of their lives, we dedicate this, their own book.
—Dedication of "Folk Song U.S.A.", collected, adapted, and arranged by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax; Alan Lomax, Editor; Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Music Editors (piano arrangements by Charles and Ruth Seeger); copyright 1947 by John A. and Alan Lomax.All rights reserved. Permission to reprint material from this book must be obtained in writing, except that brief selections may be quoted in connection with a newspers magazine or radio review. All requests for permission should be addressed to the publishers.

The 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly; Pete Seeger (2 cassette set)
Pete Seeger Sings Leadbelly
Ballads of Black America; Pete Seeger and Revernd Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick
Washboard Band Country Dance Music; Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee
Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry; Recorded at Their Carnegie Hall Concert
Bantu Choral Fok Songs; Pete Seeger and the Song Swappers
Songs to Grow On; Pete Seeger and Leadbelly
How I Hunted the Little Fellows; by Zhitzov as recited by Pete Seeger
Folksongs of Four Continents; Pete Seeger
The Story of the Nativity; Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger Sings and Answers Questions
—from the Folkways Records catalog, which features 53 Pete Seeger albums and 11 collections including Pete Seeger; 8 Peggy Seeger albums and 10 by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl; 4 by Mike Seeger and 16 by his New Lost City Ramblers. Under SEEGER, PETE: see American Fok, American Folk Collections, African-American Traditions, African-American Traditions Spoken Collections, Blues/R&B, Blues/R&B Collections, Soundtracks-Musicals-Radio, Children's Recordings, Christmas and Holiday, Historical Collections, Music Instruction

"Administered by the Smithsonians's Office of Folklife Programs, Folkways Records is one of the ways the Office supports culture conservations and continuity, integrity, and equity for traditional artists and cultures."
—from "Folkways Recordings; The Asch Legacy" by Anthony Seeger, Curator, The Folkways Collection, April 1991

Currently, the BMI catalog contains 890 compositions with Alan Lomax listed as songwriter or composer; John A. Lomax is listed as the author of 694 titles; in both cases, based on legal issues or royalty revenue stream preferences, other songs are listed with ASCAP, PRS, or other international collection societies.

Aphorism Number 18; (Collect The Whole Series!)

2008-11-13T09:36:00.005+01:00

(This one, Number 18, was stated aphoristically and sagely by Patrick last night in Le Dixhuiteme, which I suppose would technically make it en aphorisme.)

"There's no school for losing."

Seventy-Six Inches of Bazoomas - The Chesty Morgan Story

2008-11-01T16:04:00.000+01:00

by Bart Bull
"Just minutes away from showtime!” the deejay at Fantasy World announces. “We’re only minutes away from Miss Chesty Morgan and her monstrous 76-inch mountains." We’ve been just minutes away from Miss Chesty Morgan for about two hours now but this time the deejay happens to be telling the truth. In the meantime, he’s got a question he wants to ask. “Is thisapartyheretonightorwhat?”

Her first appearance is from the floor by the side of the stage. She’s wearing a green-and-silver-spangled gown and an immense matching sunhat and she strolls the audience slowly, silently, her face set in ethereal abstraction. “Tits!” screams a fan. “Show us your tits!” She strolls on, silent all the while, then goes to the stage. Stepping lightly forward, stepping lightly back, stepping stage left to stage right and back again, she walks with the
concentration of someone balancing a beer bottle on her head. When she takes off a piece of her gown and reveals an even more generous portion of herself, the nightclub crowd goes wild.

“Can you believe those bazoomas?”asks the deejay. “TITS!” screams a fan.

She steps forward, she steps back. She holds a beer bottle between them and shakes, then does the same with a pitcher. She squeezes them together between her forearms, releases, then squeezes them again. She steps forward and back, steps back and forward. She says nothing, nothing at all.

When it’s over, the emcee brings her back to speak with the audience. “Hi, everybody,” she says. Her accent is broad and surprisingly thick. “It’s so difficult for me chust to carry my boobs, I dun’t have time really to do anyt’ink else.”

“You know, fel-lows, do we have any leg men in the audience? No leg men?”

“Pussy!” yells a fan.

“I kind off like dose leg men to get to see more,” she says, bending a knee, “because I usual get the wat-er-mel-on men come up to see my show, I would say so. Fel-lows, I feel my boobs belong to the public, they’re only ehtteched-uh to me. If I could, I would like for you to touched them but it’s ehgainst the law to touch et, really — that’s the Ar-izona law, you know.

“By the way, you know, fel-lows, I just got a divorce. The reason was we could not get to-gether because of my big boobs. Thet’s why I gotta divorce, huh. My husbend did try to drown me but no chence-uh. I took cold shower lest night, you know, but my feet still kept warm, believe it or no. Yes. I stay at the Hilton Hotel. Goink into the olovator, believe it or no, I kept the olovator from closink. Yes.”

The crowd is restless. They’re here for tits, not talk. “I can’t understand a fuckin’ word she’s saying,” complains a fan. Somebody is hollering at her from the back of the room.

“Who is dot big mout’ — do you heve any question, you big mout’? Chust a minute, honey, get you hands out of you pockets — no self-entertainment. Thenk you. Appreciate. Yes. What is you question, honey?”

The deejay holds the microphone for the fan. “Does anybody ever give you a hard time about the size of your chest when you go anywhere?”

“What, what?! I didn’t hear you?”

“Does anybody ever give you, you know, a rough time about the size of your tits — in other words, do people get freaked out about the size of your tits when you go out in public?”

“Honey, I chust knock them down.” She gets a laugh from the crowd. “Sweetheart, I chust knock them down.”

“You just kind of take those boogers and slap ‘em in their head, huh?" says the deejay.

“Thet’s right, honey. If I fall down, I bounce op wit’ no prob-lem.”

Another question from the audience. “Can you see your feet?”

“No honey. I don’t wanna see my feet-uh — I let the men see et, honey. I love my legs, and I love men and therefore I want them to see my legs. It’s so difficult for me just to car-ry my boobs, I don’t have time really to do anyt’ink else. That’s heavy weight really, you know. Very very difficult, you know. Appreciate you very much, very much. I would love for you to touch them, honey, but it’s ehgainst the law. I wish fellows that you could see it that they’re real. Thenk you very much for comink tonight — do appreciate you comink tonight, thank you very much.”

“The lovely Miss Chesty Morgan, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Chesty Morgan. Let’s put your hands together for seventy-six inches of incredible, amazing bazoomas! Insured by Lloyds of London! For one million dollars! Put your hands together for the lovely Chesty Morgan! Two more shows tonight, ladies and gentlemen, he sure to stick around! We are going to party!”

As You Do

2008-10-23T14:24:00.011+02:00

As you do, I'd forgotten this. As you do.

Until the other day. I got a call from my brother and friend, V, from County Meath.
(I'm tempted, sore and sorely tempted, to say "a ring-jingle from my pal Val...")

And since he's wont to rhyme at you and inclined to recite and declaim, say, much more than merely speak small and sensibly (many another friend of his will attest and affirm to this fact, and that's why we're all his friends, so don't dismiss this as a dis, dear Miss... ) well, now, anyway, as you do, I'd forgotten that of an afternoon this last midsummer, in Paris, in le Jardin Communite', unable to do my Proper Work for some damn reason, after days and nights and nights and days and middays and midnights and dawns meeting me rolling and strolling around in Eire for the first time in donkey's ears' years, after gladly receiving the gift of sight and sleep and sense and salmon from Donla, and the full Irish in the morning as well, after, as ever, being received by Onrai in his own sacred home as the very incarnation of the burr under his saddle that starts and stirs the itch that forces him to stay up scratching late into the night (he needs an excuse akin to myself, does Onrai, as we all know) after being ushered into tents in Kilkenny that resembled tents in Tibet, and into other tents in Kilkenny that resembled Boy Scout outings in Glastonbury, and into still other tents where wine glasses and glasses of stout were urged upon me, and other tents, tents from Japan, perhaps, or Thailand, paper flying sky tents, were lit and sent glowing, squadrons of light, into the sky... whilst a session of serious saints piped and fiddled and accordionated, and I changed reeds like a harried hurried Hessian sent to Pennsylvania on extra-curricular musical reconnaissance....and I think it was it that point that The Grey Guy came tumbling down the hillside and down the stairs and through the door and if I'd only been quicker of mind and intent, I could have swung the front door open and let him roll off toward the millpond or the monastery...

Well after this, this long but short weekend wedding au Kilkenny, and days of Dublin, and County Meath, it was my intention and my duty and my concern that I get right straight back to work on That Dumb Book that all and sundry, those that know me well, and those strangers et etrangers who repeatedly encountered me muttering along the green-broomed gutters of Paris uniformly all advised: Shut up for once and take the damn money, and, above all, quit calling it a stupid book. Or, as the Sufis and the saints and the sensible and the sane and the seanos singers and all the visiting Irish lasses and those in shouting distance of sanity, and several other sage counselors said, in short, and repeatedly, like a dang mantra:
Be Grateful
Accept.
Oh, and shut the fuck up, ok?

Ok, so anyway, I was supposed to get back to work on what I was ungrateful for, and of, and about, and because of, and besides, and, well, I wasn't working and I wasn't grateful. I may, you'll be surprised to know, have been grumpy.

Instead, though, to my credit, I went to the garden, le jardin, the community garden in Le Dixhuiteme, and played steel guitar or accordion or something. I smelled that the artichokes were still early yet and unripe, and the rose-colored roses weren't quite ready, even though we'd had a better, warmer, sunnier, artichoke-ier summer this summer, than last summer's nearly- rose-free grey-nosity. I could hear the bees, tending to business better, far better, than, say, moi. They had deadlines to meet.

V, a Meath man set loose among the bulls he was meant to herd, had turned me on to John Boyle Reilly, yet another astonishing man of Meath, a man among men, a man among men in a large and ever-growing world of ever-lesser men, a poet, a journalist, a Fenien, a transport, a trouble-maker, an adventurer, a prisoner, an escapee, an Irishman and an Australian and an American, a man who dared dig deep and then deeper, and reading him, I got given, "out the blue," as we'd say in New Orleans, this one, lo these many years away from having written poetry, and lo these many centuries away from lyric rhyme.

I'd be inclined to call it doggerel and be done, but I know that the ladder I was climbing was far too sturdy and too special to be dismissed so. And thus it wasn't mine that I climbed.


Val, I never ever write poetry any more, and certainly never lyric poetry.
That's for damn sure. Yet the day I got back, with lots of
work to do and deadlines to meet, life kept
interferring with my
life.

I went down the street to the  community garden, which lies alongside some
deceased train tracks in what might as well be a riverbed.

I had the book on John Boyle O'Reilly there, and lo
and behold, I scratched this one out.

Life is long
And far too short
A game played loose
On a shifting court
A pitch, a swing
A bell, a ring
An echo, a cry
We wake, we die.

Life is short
And far too long
The graveyards fill
With the names of songs
We sing, we cry
We laugh and sigh
We cannot see
The other eye.

Life is quick
Yet life lives long
We lose ourselves
Amidst the throng
We dream, we wake
We wake, we dream
We cannot see
Our own clear scheme.

Aphorism Number 17; (Collect the Whole Series!)

2008-10-22T21:57:00.005+02:00

Always a parade, rarely the rodeo.

I actually reviewed The Breakfast Club! Swear to God! It sucked too, boy....probably still does...

2008-10-22T14:02:00.014+02:00

(Ok, for almost an exact year, I worked -- well, they gave me a paycheck, anyway -- as the movie critic for the Arizona Republic's City Life section. It almost pretty much entirely ruined my ability to sit still in a movie theater for, gee, at least a decade. Or two. Three, maybe. I'm still counting.)

As I believe I’ve already mentioned, movie reviewing is exactly the easiest job in the world. But just like everybody else, movie reviewers like to think they got it rough — otherwise how could they come home and bitch about work?

The really, really tough part about being a movie reviewer, the really rotten, awful, painful, muscle-creaking, undignified part about being a reviewer of movies is that you’ve got to go see lots and lots and lots of movies that are, at least ostensibly, “geared for younger audiences.” Which is way, way, way below your dignity. You’re an intellectual, a critic, a big drinker of espresso. You’ve got a whole wardrobe’s worth of grey sweaters, some of them with leather elbow patches.

But now a movie like The Breakfast Club, hey, we’re talking a whole different thing here. You bet! — this is bonafide intellectual fare this time, boy. Here’s one teen movie without an eye-stabbing maniac, without rude sex, without car crashes, with literary quotes (or David Bowie song lyric quotes, anyway) and only one tiny video-style dance routine. And not even any nudity or crudity in that... A movie about real teen life today, with lots of touching real teen life traumas and everything. If only all those darned other unruly teen movies would just behave like this!

So maybe you can’t blame all the movie reviewing whores for matching their copy to precisely fit the film’s publicity, but it doesn’t mean you're obligated to buy in on the project. The Breakfast Club is a stagey little movie, five high school characters sentenced to a Saturday in library detention and thus spending most of the movie in one room. There’s such a thing as a good stagey movie but the immutable laws of drama are a lot tougher to evade when you can’t crash the General Lee though the library window for to rescue Bo 'n' Luke Duke. In other words, if it’s a weak play, it s going to be a crummy movie. The Breakfast Club is a crummy movie.

All the acting in the movie is uniformly just fine, and the little ensemble group of young talents is uniformly young and talented. Director producer writer John Hughes, who’s currently being lionized as “the kind of adult who understands the way kids are today” has provided all the uniform young talented actors and actresses with what is uniformly the sloppiest, dopiest material imaginable

If Hughes is the kind of adult who understands the way kids are today, then kids today are: poor-but-intelligent teen hardguys who play air-guitar to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida; student-council socialites who eat sushi from lacquered enamel lunchboxes but nonetheless are really caring individuals underneath; muscle-bound lunkhead jocks who are deeply disturbed by their own brutal treatment of smaller classmates; near-catatonic manic-depressive punk bag-girls who need only brush the hair from their eyes to bloom into a glowing teen normalcy; skinny little straight-A dorks who break up fights between guys who are twice their size.

Kids today, according to Hughes, are also in trouble because they have bad mean parents and bad mean teachers, and because all those bad mean adults keep forcing them to see one another as stereotypes — stereotypes like student socialites and lunkhead jocks and skinny little straight-A dorks. (Not Hughes, however; Hughes only has them be lunkhead and socialite and hardguy stereotypes in the beginning so that we’ll eventually be able to see that deep inside they’re all just one big warm sensitive soulful stereotype.)

And if you take five typical stereotypically untypical kids of today and make them all do detention in the school library together, well, they nearly bust a gut racing to bare their souls to one another, and falling into deeply traumatic psycho-dramatic states, and offering one another deeply revelatory personal thoughts on life and sex and then leaping up to dance on their desk. You know, real contemporary teen life stuff.

Now it’s entirely likely that some teen-agers are going to fall for this puerile garbage (nobody but nobody can feel as sorry for themselves as a teen-ager, and there’s no better balm than the Clearasil-creamy concept of bad, bad adults being to blame for everything) but I’d bet that most high school kids will recognize The Breakfast Club for the transparent shuck that it is. Teen-agers know just exactly how sensitive the student council socialites are, which is why they pack the theaters for the teen-slasher movies, and why they cheer uproariously when the bitchy glamour queen and the muscle-bound lunkhead and creepy gothy punk-rocker and all the rest of the stereotypes who make high school miserable finally get their bloody just desserts.

On the other hand, if The Breakfast Club does pay off, just wait until the plague of imitators begins later this year. We’ll have any number of knock-offs featuring sensitive young teens spreading their traumas across library tables before leaping up to dance all over them, beginning the movie as potential ax murderers and ending as tearful-but-reformed healthy and adjusted and productive teen members of society. We’ll be bombarded with the teen sensitivity formula as a substitute for the slash-a-teen violence formula and the horny teen virginity formula, and it will be twice as phony as Halloween At Porky’s VII, but you can’t say that movie reviewers won’t deserve it, even if you don’t.

Aphorism Sixteen: (One of a Series; Collect The Whole Set!)

2008-10-05T10:38:00.000+02:00

Grammar and syntax and vocabulary skills take time, but clothes are something you can shop for next Saturday morning.

Aphorism 15; (One of a Series; Collect 'em All)

2008-10-03T14:38:00.000+02:00

If only accuracy were art.

Ian Dury Encounters the Blazing All-American Sun, And As He Experiences Nearly All the Delights of Arizona, It Tans His Wee Li'l Gimpy-Ass Hide

2008-09-28T19:34:00.051+02:00

I believe, if I remember correctly, that I arranged to interview Ian Dury just ever so slightly before I'd bailed on the music magazine I'd been running for what was—

(Dang! Damn! At that age, at 22 or 23 or so, it was like a quarter or a fifth of my life, or something similar. Because I'd been doing it since I was like nineteen or something. Hey, dude, I dropped out of high school, so probably you better do the math.)

But all the same, I was inclined to go ahead on, to go ahead and interview Ian Dury because . . . well, because he was Ian Dury. And because I actually kinda got what he was up to, sort of, somewhat. And because it was possible or likely or probably way beyond probable that I might well be the only currently subscribing human species member within like two or three hundred miles of Phoenix F. Arizona who had the faintest fuckin' clue.

Me, I had the faintest fuckin' clue. Maybe only just faintly, maybe. But still it was a clue, Sherlock.

Because what he was doin' was in English, much of it. A whole lot of it, actually. And having been raised in Arizona, English was not my natural ouevre, mon metier, my language, my thang. But his work was, however, in a spectacularly gloriously fucked-up English, in Cockney rhyming slang and vernacular vulgate vulgarisms, and some sheerly poetic rudeness, and this, this cant I could and can do, in many a language, chingadero. I can call you inappropriate names in Dutch, dude, and I can certainly speak to you in Arizona-isms, in an argot d'Arizona that will make you feel like a Dutch, uh, Balzac.

(And plus, hey, I'd attended the occasional English class and everything before I dropped out. Some of which where they read Shakespeare at you, or at least had your fellow classmates stutter through it, and others where you were played records of some English-accented English ac-tor reciting "Paradise Lost," as written by some English guy. So it wasn't like I couldn't talk the stuff if necessary. Although I lived in fuckin' Arizona, dude, so English, let's face it, wasn't ever necessary.)

So I did what you did in those days, and still do today. I went to the desk and called the tour manager. (Though in those days, the tour manager was called the road manager, and it wasn’t until long years later that I truly understood the distinctions.) The road manager was named Kosmo. Kosmo Vinyl. It was early days still for punk rock names, but I’d been immersed from the earliest, so I was less off-balanced than I might have been, but still . . . it’s a tad bit of a challenge to go to the sparkly turquoise formica desk of the tasteful tan TraveLodge of Tempe, Arizona in 1978 and then get them to follow through on ringing Mr. Vinyl’s room, Mr. Kosmo Vinyl. Could you please spell that last name for me again?

Mr. Vinyl appeared after not too many minutes, the ceremonial three-beat delay, hand-operating the tour protocol that involved showing up, saying hello, then disappearing to go appropriately gather the Rock Star. It was, and is, The Way. You wouldn't, for example, have the front desk-tender of the Tempe TraveLodge pick up his tan-toned telephone and ring directly to the room of, say, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth, now would you? No. First, you'd ring Mr. Vinyl's room. De rigeur, dude.

Mr. Vinyl had an almost nearly perfect – no, it wasn’t almost, nor nearly; it was entirely, utterly, precisely perfectly Perfect – punk rock brush-cut hedgehog hairdo, short on the sides, spikey-bushy on the top, but his bush spikes were trimmed as symmetrically as the finest Midlands suburban hedge. It was red, his hair, flame red, fiery red, hot coal red, but Red, RED, a Red not found in nature but mostly in crayon boxes. (Marked "Red.") And this was years and years before this kind of hair-coloration could be located in all the finer hepster hair salons. Certainly in Arizona, that's for certain.

Anyway, Mr. Vinyl was a sight to cause sore eyes, quite likely black ones. In addition to his Woody Woodpecker plumage, he sported one of those sleeveless limey t-shirts, the kind that were known, upon their rare and infrequent sightings in Arizona, as "ladies' blouses," and suggested — no, demanded— a severe and serious ass-whipping when worn on a street by a man. I'd been interviewing the touring musical English for years by then, and invarably somewhere in their entourage, since at least about '75 or so, was a guy, a bloke, a geezer, wearing a t-shirt with no damn sleeves, and he invariably wanted to come with us to the bar where we were going to sit and talk, and when he did, a big ol' Arizona-style whup-ass fight was gonna break out, on account of him shamelessly wearing a ladies' blouse while talking in an English accent like a damn faggot, and thus absolutely enraging the dudes with the elaborately-detailed feathered-plumed cockades arranged precisely just above and across and around the brim of their cowboy hats. Some things is manly, some ain't.

Oh, and Mr. Vinyl's t-shirt-blouse thing was pink.

Meantime, as I did the ritualized heel-cooling in what the Tempe TraveLodge had in place of a lobby, which was a couch and a coffee table and a two chairs and a Coke machine, with candy and cigarettes vending available just down the hall for discretion, two sleepy tousled Blockheads wandered by, confused, as musicians usually are, and as great ones ever are, by their surroundings. The Blockheads, by the way, were Ian Dury's band, his assemblage of astonishingly ass-kicking musos. My memory tells me it was Mickey Gallagher and Norman Watt-Roy, but I've learned, in all the years since, that if you associate with the muddled musician mind of a morning (which for them, fairly enough, is post-noon-ish or better, much later) then your own razor-sharp organ of ratiocination begins to tilt gyroscopically. Soon, should you not be on your guardiest of guards, you'll be helping them find McDonald's in Pisa, or Boomer bass strings (but only the flat-wound ones, not the round-wound ones, the ones that are widely available) in Dunedin, New Zealand, on Sunday, around 6:15 in the evening, when the shops have been closed for 32 hours already.

In this case, I was handily able to help the poor sun-blinded dears learn the arcane ways and names and means and brands and shapes and filters of the cigarette machine, and all its knobby bits, and then as lagniappe, to help them sort through the candy machine nuances as well. All in a day's work, anything for a chum, though perhaps more than my job'sworth, mate. (This is me practicing up, don't you know, for the British-ism and witticism to come, once Herr Dury finally makes his appearance in this thang. And soon come!

(TO BE CONTINUED!!! Hold on to the edge of your seats, kids!)

In The Ring: Muhammed Ali Meets Leon Spinks y Tony y Ernesto

2008-07-27T15:45:00.003+02:00

Maybe it was all because we couldn't hear Howard Cosell. The bar was packed -- jam-packed to the point that getting a place meant you'd better have friends already there who were willing to shove aside, packed to the point that everyone was making queer jokes. In a Chicano bar, when someone gets off a good one, an appreciative audience gives a grito, a special sort of falsetto yelp --- the pachuco equivalent of a redneck holler. Anyway, the place was so full it made getting in and getting out of your seat a real challenge and the air was full of yips and yelps and gritos and laughter and the roaring boast of a bar on a championship fight Friday night.

So you couldn't hear Cosell for shit. And maybe that's why everyone I talked to for the next day or two told me what a joke fight it was, what a bore it was, how it was never really in doubt. Maybe that's what comes of hearing that stork of a voice intone its opinions at you for fifteen rounds. Maybe it damages your ability to get excitede to react the way you would react without it.

Then again, maybe it was the alcohol. Both screens were set over the bar, after all, and it was undoubtedly one of the barmaid's biggest nights ever The screen directly in front of most of us was a big fuzzy large-screen number; off to the side was another, a small and bright standard-sized model. When you wanted the grand picture, wanted to feel the force, it was the big one you watched. . . but when you wanted detail, when you wanted to know precisely where the punches were landing, you watched the little one.

Tony was just about the only one in Leon Spinks' corner. Tony's a truck driver where I used to be a truck driver. He doesn't speak English particularly well, but neither does Leon. Tony's pretty young still, fifteen or twenty years younger than Julian, and I think there must have been something about the idea of this young and illiterate guy climbing into the ring with Muhammed Ali and winning . . .winning! He's the new champion now! . . . that attracted him. Julian and Ernesto, the guys we started arguing and laughing with, they were both 45 or so, thereabouts. They both had those smooth black sweep-from-the-sideburns Big Daddy beards that so many Mexican guys their age have and they both had a firm and considerable but not really oversized gut. Jusian works in the production department of the same factory where Tony works; Ernesto, like Tony, had blue pachuco tattoos on his knuckles.

Ernesto was an Ali man all the way. About the only time the place ever quieted down was weh, just before the final bout, they showed the chronological clips of Ali's fight. Ernesto knew them all. The place was near-silent and you could hear Cosell's voice now but even before he could announce who Ali had been fighting, Ernesto would be telling you who it was and what round it ended. "Brian London" he chanted. "Down in three. Henry Cooper, stopped in five, TKO...." The man knew his fighter. Half the time, he remembered what punch it had been. "The day after the Spinks fight, my wife says to me, "I know what your trouble is -- Ali lost that fight." He laughed. "I saw this one in a dream. Spinks will go down in nine. Man, I saw it. It's a right in the ninth."

Only that historical film clip that led to the fight shook something loose in me. There was the young and clean-cut Negro boy of the post-Olympic press conferences, talking mildly and politely to reporters, trying to be a responsible citizen in a white on white world. And then, just before the first Liston fight, he appeared. Big ol' moon-wide eyes, howlin' and jowlin' and telling a moderately amused world that he was gonna take that big ugly bear of a man OUT! And then doing it. He was like the wild yuoung soul of the people nobody knew ever existed standing over the canvassed boy of Liston at the second match and demanding that he get up and get it on. There were howls of delight all over the bar as they showed those scenes, like memories of the best moments of your childhood coming back fresh and clean.

And for the first few rounds it looked like Ali was in trouble, or at least potential trouble. Many not to Howard it but it looked that way to us.. Tony scored the first three rounds for his boy Leon on his napkin and I think Ernesto remained calm only because he knew for certain that Spinks must go down in the ninth. I found myself concentrating on the little screen and not the big one.

I think it was the fourth round, though, or maybe the fifth, that really shook us up. Ali looked like he hade used himself upalready and was gong to be haning on weakly for the rest of the way, while Spinks looked like he was beginning to figure out how he was gong to win this thing. Ernie looked over at me and said, "I don'k know, sometimes when you think about things all day, you dream about them at night. You know?"

And then there was relief. You could feel it lift the entire bar. Ali started making it clear that the situation was easily in hand, that it always had been. He was not about to lose this fight, even if Tony's napkin had it scored 6-1-3 in favor of Spinks. "Gimme that piece of paper!" yelled Julian and Tony had to laugh as he snatched it away. He had wanted to see Spinks take it away for good, but he'd been smart enough not to put any money on it.

Ali didn't take Spinks out with a right in the ninth -- I'd told Ernesto I'd start going to Mass again if his dream came true, so I was especially relieved about that -- but no one lost interest in the fight at all, even as the closing rounds came along to make it clear. Maybe in homes across the country, people switched off the set, convinced it was just another boring fight . . . but when the official decision was announced, the place went silent again and then, when it was final, men jumped around and hugged each other and there were no thoughts of queer jokes I even saw a couple of guys cry. Maybe it was the alcohol.

(for Pat Murphy)

Joe Ely; Lubbock Calling

2008-05-29T14:57:00.010+02:00

The West Texas plains have produced a lot of honkytonk heroes. Joe Ely fits in just fine.
(published in SPIN)

Sitting around of a late Sunday afternoon at Joe Ely’s place, the talk turns back to Lubbock one more time. Maybe it always will. The creek has settled down after this last week’s rain flooded it out against the field, the road between Austin and the ranch is open again, and Jimmie Gilmore’s here to bring back the microphones he borrowed for his show last night at the Broken Spoke. Butch Hancock came along for the ride and they’re both sitting over close by the fire where it’s good and warm.

Another reason they’re here is this theater guy from San Francisco wants the whole bunch of them, all the notorious Lubbock expatriates –– Joe and Sharon Ely, Butch and Jimmie and Jo Carol Pierce, Terry and Jo Harvey Allen and all –– to write and act in this play he’s planning on producing if he can come up with some funding. Which is an interesting concept and everything –– maybe a little loose in the joints, but that’s about right too. It sounds like maybe he’s figuring on getting his funding by busting into some art council’s secret hidden vault–– something about "accurate determinations of currently outstanding grant-in-aid-assessments" –– but that’s okay. If it happens to fall together, that’s just fine. If it doesn’t, nobody’ll hold it against him. They’ve already gone back to telling Lubbock stories again anyway, starting with the Lubbock Lights.

Now the Lubbock Lights were famous UFOs that swung low over the Hub City back in 1957, back when flying saucer fever was pitched way up high. “I have kind of like a little theory, you know? Sharon Ely says. “One of the things that was happenign during that time was there was a lot of of honkytonks up in West Texas, and country music on the weekends, and everybody up there dances in a circle. I mean, I danced in a circle at the Cotton Club, and it causes a frenzy of heat and energy, and I think these Lubbock Light things that were flying over West Texas have this way of detecting heat energy, you know? And ‘cause it’s so fun, they probably went down and saw all these circles of heat rising from all these honkytonks and they probably wondered ‘What the hell is goin’ on?’”

Good question. If it was country music and Texas two-stepping that put Lubbock on the interstellar roadmap, it must have been the Cotton Club that kept the saucers hovering overhead in a low circle. The Cotton Club had been the last stop in West Texas for the big touring Western Swing bands like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys before they headed out for the coast, and it served the likes of Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams too. The original club burned down in what unquestionably was a burst of heat energy, but it was resurrected with futurific slumpblock architecture just in time for Elvis Presley and the flying saucer jockeys to show up. And through it all, spaceships or not, the Lubbock locals kept up their West Texas waltz, their enduring shuffle around the dance floor, counter-clockwise.

“Joe and I was talking about that particular time,” says Sharon. “The cotton was doin’ great, there was gamblers, there was railroads runnin’ –– there was a lot of energy coming though Lubbock. I mean, farmers were drivin’ Cadillacs! There were more Cadillacs sold in West Texas than in any place in the whole United States. It was a high-energy place.”

And that’s not even to mention Buddy Holly, Lubbocks’ most notable export besides Phillips 66 gasoline. And higher octane too. Holly had him a Cadillac of his own, pink with blue Naugahyde upholstery, and Joe Ely used to own one just exactly like it until the guy who was repainting it went crazy from too many paint fumes and wound up in a mental hospital and the Caddy just plain disappeared. Now Joe’s got a Honda station wagon he’s thinking of getting rid of. And a three-year-old daughter Marie Elena, named after Buddy Holly’s wife. Seems like there’s a trade-off for everything in life.

The San Francisco fellow has a theory abut the Lubbock Lights that dovetails neatly with Sharon’s. Oddly, maybe, but neatly. He reckons that it had a lot to do with the circular mounds the Plains Indians buil, and the fact that they too danced in a circle.

“And Stonehenge was a dance hall,” Butch adds helpfully. Butch has been showing his notebook around, cartoons and photographs and words all woven together into one lumpy life. Butch writes songs too; a lot of them have made real fine appearances on Joe Ely records, and he also has a real nicely evolved theory of his own about the wild winds that blow all the way down from the North Pole with no interruption at all until they hit Yellow House Canyon and dump raw unadulterated oddball energy right over top of Lubbock –– the wind’s own dominion, home of the dusty hurricane, the original wide open space. “Plus, it was Tornado Alley, so there was already this elemental cirucular thing going on.”

“Counter-clockwise,” Jimmy Gilmore notes. He can afford to be quiet. He sang at the Broken Spoke last night. The Broken Spoke is probably the closest thing to the Cotton Club that’s left in Austin and, well, let’s put it this way: if heaven looks a lot like Texas, the saints will spend Saturday night dancing at the Broken Spoke. In a circle, counter-clockwise. Jimmie’s songs have showed up on Joe Ely’s records too, including one that starts out “Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?,” a line that cansing itself. He can afford to be quiet. “Counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.”

“Like drains,” says Butch. “Dervishes dance counter-clockwise too.” So do West Texans. Always.

“I remember watching toilets before I went to Australia,” Joe says, stretching back, “made sure and flushed ‘em and remembered which way they went. And I got to Australia and the first thing I did was flush a commode. But their holes are square....”

Somebody or other starts speculating about the Lubbock Lights again, and how maybe what they were up to was they were out scouting around for Buddy Holly and maybe he didn’t actually die in that plane crash but got picked up by space folks. Of course that would mean that the outer space fellas got Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper as pure gravy. Anyway, somehow or other, this reminds Joe of a a little story about this cousin of his back in Lubbock who grew onions one year.

He didn’t know anything about onions, never grew any before this, but he went on ahead and planted onions. Got so all you could smell was onions. Since he hadn’t ever raised any onions before, he didn’t know where to sell ‘em when it came harvest time, so he picked and loaded ‘em all up and went to a Furr’s Supermarket in Lubbock. Maybe it was garlic and not onions –– anyway, he went to the manager, and the manager said, Sure, we’ll take a gallon or two. Well, he had a whole truckload of these garlics or onions, whichever, and after he’d drove around to supermarkets all over town and they each one took a gallon or two, he could see he wasn’t getting nowhere. Finally, he got so mad he just took it all home and dumped the whole load out in the middle of his field. They just set there and rotted and his neighbors got mad because it smelled so bad and he had to hire someone to come out and dig a hole to bury all these onions. Cost him five hundred bucks.

“Needless to say, there were no werewolves in Lubbock County that year,” Butch adds.

Fin de Seccion Numero Uno

Space Is His Place; or, The Toga Party of the Spheres

2008-02-24T17:49:00.017+01:00

It's easy to be weird when you're an ancient Egyptian from Saturn but nobody's ever accused Sun Ra of not giving it his absolute best shot. A lot of your Afro-Saturnians take a somewhat low-profile approach to life on this dull orb, dressing as the rest of us dress (more or less), speaking as we speak, sticking mostly to the sidewalk, crossing on the green. After all, when in Rome, join the toga party. Not Sun Ra, though; never a believer in shining his light 'neath a bushel basket, for at least the last 25 years he's let his Supra-CosmoPsychic origins speak for themselves. Say it now and say it loud: I am heliocentric ectoplanetary form made flesh, and I AM PROUD!

As you can well imagine, keeping an Intergalactic Arkestra together for two and a half decades is no small task. Consider the difficulties of assembling such an outfit in the '50s, when the big bands were withering away and the roster of those bands playing Basie-derived sub-atomic squonk was even smaller than it is today; when the majority of Afro-Saturnians were still passing, and thus rather loath to assemble themselves on the bandstand wearing fish-scale gold skullcaps and beam-reflective silver capes, especially when the bandstand haberdashery of the day called for something sharp in a dark Continental suit and a one-stripe tie, with maybe an off-the-stand addition of a sports-car cap set a jaunty angle for class,dash, and panache.

This time, though, Sun Ra and the Arkestra were playing Berkeley Square. That the nightclub is considered primarily as a new pave/wunk rock outlet makes no diff to Sun Ra; the Anglo-Plutonians who occupy such places dress in a manner that clashes wonderfully with the Arkestra's raiment, and besides, Sun Ra's always considered himself something of a teen idol anyway. "When we was playin' over in Portugal, the place we was playin' at wasn't that full up and the teenagers come in over the fence. 'Cause they didn't have no money anyway. Over there if they don't like you, they th'ow corncobs at you. Didn't th'ow any at us." He's talking to this guy from a radio station wearing a white leather motorcycle jacket named Uncle Mark — the guy, not the jacket— and Sun Ra's road manager and some guy with a notebook and another guy with a knit cap jammed full of dreadlocks are all in the dressing-room with them, all of them listening as Sun Ra runs it down. There's a little boy with a shirt that says he's Superman curled up asleep inn the corner on a ledge. "That's why musicians should be on TV more," Sun Ra says, "the ones that are doing something, 'cause in Mexico every Sunday they got all types of music on TV, got musicians from all the different places there, all the sections of the country, I guess, and jazz — they don't play too much good jazz in Mexico, the musicians."

Popular as he is the world over — and he is; most of Europe greets the Arkestra with the sort of welcome that America's cultural commissars reserve for visiting ballet troupes or noted French filmmaker/philosophers — Sun Ra refuses to restrict himself. After a recent swing through England and Scotland, some promoter apparently approached him with an exclusive offer that would have set the Arkestra to touring the length and breadth of the British Isles indefinitely. "Can't do that, 'cause we dealin' on a psycho-spiritual plane . . . can't be signin' up with one nation." And while he's on that plane, and before the No Smoking signs come on, there are some other things he'd like to accomplish. "I suppose there's such things as spiritual criminals," he tells Uncle Mark. "I'm trying to get them to let me be their lawyer, so I can talk to God for them."

Sun Ra is a pretty steady extemporizer, rolling right along, steady as a river with none of the rush. He takes his time, lets the pauses have their places, but the only thing that stops him dead full is when the fellow in the blue blazer and sandals comes in. He comes in on a glide — none too easy in so small a room, and he sweeps over to Sun Ra and gives hime a big wide hug. "You're lookin' good!" he says. "Lookin' good!"
Sun Ra nods and smiles, accepting his due. The fellow in the blazer has those hipster moves, those Love You Madly hipster moves you don't see much any more, graceful and direct. Smooth, like a knife slicing soft margarine on TV. He's telling Sun Ra about some woman they both know (or that he thinks Sun Ra knows, at least; if Sun Ra does know her, he doesn't seem too very interested in hearing about her) and about where the hipster is living. "I was living in the Village," he tells Sun Ra. "But now I'm out here."

"It can be nice here," says Sun Ra. "You got—"

"I don't think I'd want to live back there again. Oh, to visit, sure. To visit. But to live there again? Uh-uh."

Sun Ra is determined. "I'd like to live in Greece, there along the Adriatic, the Mediterranean. It's nice there, lots of sun—"

"Oh, the sun in Italy is just—"

"With them old temples and columns and—"

Superman stirs in the corner a little and goes back to sleep. The hipster in the blazer and the sandals shares a few more memories with Sun Ra, then he gets up to go. "Been wonderful seein' you again," he says. "You're lookin' great!"

Sun Ra gives him a benificent smile and a parting nod and gets back to his interview. He gets around to the suppression of creativity. "I saw a man with roller skates had a motor on 'em and the po-lice came over and made him stretch out and said 'You can't do that 'round here — you operatin' a motor vehicle . . .'"

My Separation From Cindy Crawford

2008-02-05T16:10:00.000+01:00

from Vogue

My relationship with Cindy Crawford was not a long one, but while it lasted, we were very close. Maybe it wasn't the deepest of relationships — Cindy is deep, I'm not — but it was close. Perhaps too close. Maybe we meant too much to each other. You know how these things are.

I was staying at a friend's place and Cindy — I call her Cindy — lived in the same building. As it happened, I spent a terrific amount of time in the elevator that week. No sooner would I get to the ground floor and through the lobby than I'd remember something I'd forgotten upstairs and have to get back in the elevator and go get it and come back down again. Sometimes I'd remember something else I had to go back and get. I had a lot on my mind at the time.

It was tropical in Manhattan than month, and only the brave dared venture out before the sun was on the wane. My friend Theresa and I cabbed over from her place late Sunday afternoon, stopping off at the deli for some beer and juice and some of that potato salad you ladle into those plastic containers. And Cindy was there, radiant, over by the cracker and cookie section. It would be ungentlemanly of me to to speak of her purchases; let it suffice to say that nothing she bought had the least bit of a percentage of butterfat. That figure and that complexion may be God-given, but she attends to a healthy diet just the same. I find that so admirable.

It has been my experience that not all models are as fabulous-looking in person as they appear in photos. In person, Cindy is a goddess. I think I can speak objectively here, because this was before Cindy and I were truly close. Unequivocally, she is a goddess. She takes a lousy photograph comparatively. She looks a lot better in real life.

At last, with a heavy heart and a cold six-pack, I left the deli. Theresa, not always as good a friend as she might be, was sort of dragging me by the elbow. Trudging down the block toward the apartment, a block that seemed a thousand miles, fumbling and fumbling with keys to a doorway to happiness that could never be mine, I wept silently, inwardly, tearlessly. "Takes you forever just to open a simple door, doesn't it?" inquired Theresa.

Then it happened. Cindy was there. She had followed me! I held the door; she held the elevator for me. Theresa got in too. At first, none of us said a word. The silence was eminent, profound. It was bosky.

No one in all the rest of our species looks as good in a gray t-shirt as Cindy Crawford. Cindy Crawford was who those t-shirt inventor guys had in mind when they invented the t-shirt. She was sweating. I was sweating. We were both sweating. I guess Theresa was probably sweating, too. I didn't notice.

We didn't have much to say to one another then, Cindy and I. How could we? What is there to say at such times, arms full of groceries? "Would you push the button for the fifth floor for me?" Words only interfere with life, force powerful feelings into tiny categories. What Cindy and I had to say to each other was larger than words, and quieter too.

That little mole thing, by the way, is as cute as can be.

Selling Postcards of the Hanging

2008-01-29T19:32:00.000+01:00

Al Green — Amazing Grace

2008-01-13T15:40:00.005+01:00

After a dozen years of walking the road to heaven,
the Reverend Al Green raises a little hell.
by Bart Bull
(photography by Anton Corbijn)
published in SPIN

White. White teeth — white, white teeth — white tie, white shoes, white pants, white jacket. And in the buttonhole, a red, red rose. Yes, and Al Green is smiling, smiling. Smiling, grinning, glowing — white, white teeth — gleaming and beaming with joy and gold jewelry, glowing with love and happiness.

And Al Green is always beaming, always, even now. Even now. Even now, just a few slim moments before he'll be out on a Northern California concert stage and the seats will be filled with devout churchified ladies from Oakland and Richmond and San Francisco, big broad-boned black ladies and little black ladies with bones like birds, and yes, they well remember all those worldly songs Al Green used to sing back ten or fifteen years ago, "Let's Stay Together" and "Tired of Being Alone" and I'm Still In Love With You," all of those and all of the others. Yes, they remember. But no, they didn't come here tonight, not one of them, to hear Al Green sing those songs. Tonight they came to hear the man who left all that talk of worldly love behind him when he finally took up his calling, when he stopped fighting and surrendered his life and his music to the Lord. Tonight they are ready to hear the Reverend Al Green.

And tonight the Reverend Green is beaming and gleaming backstage, talking with old friends, laughing, laughing. And if the ladies of the audience had been here this afternoon to see the Reverend rehearse his band, they’d have seen him relaxed and laughing, beaming and gleaming and giggling and just having himself a wonderful time working the band through the evergreen glory of “Let’s Stay Together.” Wearing those glasses of his for the scholarly effect, the clear ones with the tiny, tiny pink roses embedded in the frames, and adjusting the singers’ harmonies, squeezing the horns down tighter, teaching the drummer that unbeatable trot, and preparing to sing, tonight, for the first time in all the nine years since he came to Jesus once and all, one of his old songs, his secular songs, his love songs. Yes, and singing, just for a quick little moment, “Let’s . . . let’s stay to-geth-er . . . loving you whether . . . whether . . . times are good or bad, happy or—” before he cut it short, and burst out laughing. Laughing.

And he’s laughing backstage now, just moments to go, slapping his knees and howling high and maybe even looking out of the corner of his eye just a little to see if everyone is appreciating him appreciating the joke. And they should, truly they should, because tonight is like some moment fallen loose from a history book, a page falling across time. Tonight Al Green will step back across a line he has crossed just once before, a line that won’t be crossed too many times.

Sam Cooke crossed this line one time, going the other way. He left the Soul Stirrers, left the mightiest gospel quartet of all , left it to become a big pop star. And he did too, became the biggest of black pop stars, became a manly black symbol of style and sophistication. Yes, but something was missing, something was wrong that he could not right. Didn’t matter how well his worldly career was going, didn’t matter what he did, and so he tried to come back over the line. He went onstage with the Soul Stirrers in Chicago, and first the good gospel folks were silent as the dead and after that they catcalled him right off the stage. Yes, and it wasn’t too many months later that Sam Cooke was shot dead in a Los Angeles auto court. What does it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?

And from the instant the Reverend Green bounces up the steps to this Northern California stage, something is wrong, something isn’t working, some presence, some spirit, is missing. The ladies of the audience are patient but they’re ready too, waiting to be moved, to be shaken and stirred. Yes, and still something is missing, something is empty. Maybe Al Green’s mind is elsewhere, maybe deep in his heart Al Green knows he’s not supposed to mess with those old songs. He hasn’t touched one yet—not yet—but they’re so near at hand. All he has to do right now is call for “Let’s Stay Together” and he’ll have stepped back over that line again.

Those songs are so near at hand, and so are those good gospel-drenched ladies, the ones who have been with him in these years since he came to his calling. “You know,” he tells them, “there are two different kinds of love.” Smiling shyly, slyly, he’s scratching the back of his head and looking up at the lights. “Let’s not ever forget that. Let’s not ever forget that there are two kinds of love, that there’s God’s love and then there’s man’s love, the love of a man for his wife, the love of a wife for her husband. And that’s a righteous love too, because that’s why man and woman was created by God, for love and happiness, so that they would stay together.” And the band has just so very, very sweetly and so very, very softly eased on into a familiar little trot, has slipped into “Let’s Stay Together,” and even the sternest of the ladies can’t help but start to rock in the pews.

Yes, and even though it’s all falling in place for the Reverend Green to lean right back into the open arms of “Let’s Stay Together,” he carries on, he commences, he loosens his tie and continues to testify. A man’s love for a woman, a woman’s love for a man can be a righteous thing, but we all know that God knows when it is and when it is not. Can anyone out there tonight ever say that they have gone and fooled God? No, and it’s only a fool who thinks he can fool God, who thinks he can do any old thing he wants to do, who thinks he can escape from what’s right, from what’s righteous. Does anyone here know what I’m talking about here tonight?

Yes, and the band is still vamping on “Let’s Stay Together,” and before too many minutes the Reverend does grab that song up, goes ahead on and sings the thing but he can’t seem to find the spirit in it. It’s beautiful, it’s sleek as a cat, no one in the world can sing a song like Al Green, no one in all the world, but not this song, not tonight. No.

And it doesn’t matter what he does now, doesn’t matter if he stops and takes off his shoes to get a little more comfortable — he does — and it doesn’t matter if he throws those shoes, throws them deep into the cheap seats — he does—and it doesn’t matter if he sets himself down on the edge of the stage and dangles his stocking feet and lays back on the stage and starts to singing again. No, it doesn’t matter what he does, doesn’t matter that he goes on to sing “Precious Lord” or “He Is the Light,” doesn’t matter that he is Al Green, the Reverend Al Green, the sweetest, finest, greatest singer on God’s green earth, because tonight he isn’t moved, isn’t stirred. Because tonight he can’t find the spirit. And tonight the ladies are going home early.

On the following day, he’s scheduled for a morning taping of Soul Train, though by the time he arrives it’s late afternoon. He and Don Cornelius, the slowest-speaking host in show business, clasp all their hands together like old friends. There was a time when every Al Green song was a hit and every appearance he made on Soul Train was a gift. He sold 20 million records in the early ‘70s, with ten Top 10 hits. But it’s been more than 12 years since the last of those now, and there’s fair reason to believe Cornelius is simply offering an old friend a favor.

Still, if those hits linger in the memory of Don Cornelius, how much respect can be expected of the kids on this afternoon’s Soul Train? The Reverend Green has elected to wear the most conservative of navy blue suits today, in contrast to all the jangling spangled costumes around him; the only things the least bit flashy about him are his gold rings and perhaps the quiet pink roses of his boxy eyeglasses.

The kids dance to his lip-synched version of “You Brought the Sunshine,” — he may be the least interested lip-synch artist in pop music — but they dance to everything once the cameras are on. Everyone, the Reverend Green included, is standing in place so Don Cornelius can muff a few interview lines when out of nowhere a young guy, 17 or so, starts to sing. He sings the contagious little intro to “Let’s Stay Together,” Al Green’s very first No. 1 hit, and in the next instant everyone is singing too, swaying and clapping and urging the Reverend to join in. These kids were all looking forward to kindergarten when “Let’s Stay Together” was a hit, and there’s no telling how they know it but they all do, every word, every note. The Reverend doesn’t sing at all but simply soaks up the graceful sound of his own song. “I hope the tape’s rollin’,” he says, all smiles.

That very evening the Reverend Green is playing L.A.’s heavenly Wiltern Theater, a green-tiled monument to art deco architecture, a cathedral dedicated to man’s amusement, a glorious ornament. The Reverend James Cleveland, gospel music’s stout patriarch, is in the audience and with him are members of the Hawkins family, Oakland’s famed gospel household. In the audience too is Michael Jackson, surgically masked for secrecy, with the little surgically masked Emmanuel Lewis next to him. Alongside the stars and lesser music business scene-makers are the folks who fill the pews every Sunday, an audience with such very different matters on their minds. The Wiltern is lovely beyond compare, and the sound is marvelously bad, and neither matters a small bit when the Reverend Green walks into the light. Tonight when he reaches his right hand up into the air the Holy Ghost is there, lifts him up, raises him up. lifts him, and will not let him down.

And tonight he brings forth “Let’s Stay Together,” brings it forth in front of just as many church folks as were on hand last night, and he says all those same things he said last night, and tonight there is a glory in it. Yes, and tonight he goes past the glory of his old songs, mighty as they are, and he sings “Amazing Grace.” Just “Amazing Grace,” that simple old song that’s been done all to death and back again. Yes, and he is so filled with the spirit, and so much on fire, and so graceful, so grace-filled. Yes, and this is why people who don’t even faintly believe in Jesus find themselves with tears streaming when they stand back and watch gospel music, find their souls moving in step with their feet, find themselves stirred. Stirred.

And tonight the Reverend Al Green isn’t throwing out any shoes. No, tonight the Reverend is coming forth, is climbing down into the seats, is out among the flock. “It’s alright,” he tells the security ushers, “Ain’t no one gonna hurt me here,” and he laughs as he sings. He’s taken “Amazing Grace” and brought it down so very quiet, so very soft, and brought the audience along to higher ground. Any hand not clapping is raised high in the air, and all over the church — this is church now — the ladies have raised the holy shout, have found the sanctified bounce, have commenced to fall out, shivering, rattling, stiffening. And the Reverend passes through the crowd unmolested, hugging and shaking hands as he sings and delivering the spirit with every sound, every motion, every moment. “Was grace that brought me safe so far,” he sings, and the clapping is so many times louder than the band, “...and grace will lead me on.”

And on the day that follows, on Sunday afternoon, at a time when he would usually be finished with the morning services back home in Memphis and not yet ready to start the early evening Bible study, Reverend Green is quiet in his hotel room, quiet and still. A Bible is at hand and a guitar is in his lap. A little soft pass at the strings, a little soft smile. The sound stays and lingers like the last ripple in a small pond after a rock has skipped the surface and settled to the bottom. It sounds like The Belle Album.

Yes, but nothing else sounds like The Belle Album, not in the ten years since it came out, not ever. You could hear a man’s soul tearing itself in two, then knitting together again, larger and far finer. To make the record, Al Green had to part with his producer, his record company, his audience. He produced the album himself and played guitar, tart and crisp and clean guitar, guitar licks just like the ones he’s messing with this afternoon in his hotel, guitar licks that squeeze time and take you home. ‘Belle was Mary,” he says, watching his fingers where they rest on the strings.

And Mary, Mary Woodson, was a woman who was so very taken with the man Al Green was, she believed she couldn’t live without him. She was already married, although Al has always said that he really never knew it. She proposed marriage to him one night, to the man who sang “Let’s Stay Together,” who sang “Let’s Get Married” and “God Blessed Our Love” and so many songs, and after he turned her down he went and took a bath, She took a pot of boiling water—”lt wasn’t grits like they always say in all the stories, it was water boiling to fix grits”—and she threw it at him, scalded and burned and scarred him with it. Then she took her .38 pistol into the next room and there she died.

The water scarred his back but it may have saved his soul. “Belle,” he sings, “It’s you that I want but Him that I need..." and the guitar is a reflection, the words a calm confession. If the Lord is at the front of his life and at the back too, if Jesus is his All in All, his All and All, if He, if He, He, He . . . And words fail him, and the Spirit moves him, and his voice is triumphant. The storm has stilled, peace reigns. “It was Mary who told me first that I was going to be called,” he says, “that l would have a ministry of my own.” He pauses for a tiny sweet lick on his guitar, sweet and slim and pretty. “I laughed at her. She said I was called and I laughed at her and said ‘Who, me?’ “He laughs again just thinking about it a dozen years later. “She told me.”

In an airplane on the way home to Memphis, the Reverend Green claps his hands at the sight of the California coastline falling away beneath his window, gives the Lord a round of applause for some fine truly wonderful work. Smiling and thoughtful, the Reverend Green is reminded again of The Belle Album, of that same line from that same song, and of how much it meant. “That is the pivotal point right there. ‘It’s you that I want but it’s Him that I need.’ That was a statement that was given because it was given.”

Reverend Green is a man given to mild ways of amusing himself in moments of leisure — holding his red rayon scarf over his face and flicking its tassles across his nose, chewing mints, gum, and peppermint Life Savers, elbow-nudging a fellow passenger when a good conversational point is delivered. He has a tendency to view his own past as someone else’s, to see Al Green as though he were someone removed and remote from himself. “I don’t know why he cut that record,” he will say; “I don’t understand why, as much money as he had, I don’t know why he didn’t go to any studio he wanted. I don’t know what he was doin’, I really don’t understand. I think he did it out of the fact they told him it couldn’t he done, and they told him that if he did do it, they told him the album wasn’t gonna come out in the first place. I think it was a challenge for him more than anything else, and he did it in defiance. I think this is why he did it. I’m not sure. He did a lot of things I’m not sure why he did. I don’t know why. Just brought a 8-track studio down, just rolled it in there on some wheels and plugged it in—I don’t know why he done that. I don’t understand. But it does not go without Mary.”

Picking up an advance cassette of Soul Survivor, his newest album, he turns it over and over, admires the typed titles. “Now, this album relates to vintage Al Green because I don’t hear nothin’ else but Al Green, and him chankin’ on a guitar. If that ain’t Al Green, I don’t want to see it. That’s him for real, without all the make up and the glamour and the beauty. That’s him right there.” He raps on the cassette’s blank cover with his finger. “That is the very Al Green. Without all the cookies and candy. This is the very Al Green, right here in the overalls and bomber jacket, sittin’ here playin’ guitar on the floor.” Asked if he can find any hits inside this cassette, he smiles deeply and points to one and another and another after that. He points to every song but one, and then he includes that one too.

The music that Al Green made in the years before The Belle Album shows no sign of aging, no sign that a time will ever come when it won’t feel perfectly right, It’s pastoral music, always cool and sweet. Al was raised up in the country, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, the son of a preacher. There is country in his music, there are Hank Williams and Willie Nelson songs on his old albums, but there isn’t one of his songs, not one of the hits that filled the dance floors through the first half of the ‘70s, that doesn’t somehow suggest just a trace of mud between the toes.

Reverend Green can’t help but laugh and laugh when he considers the wonder of his songwriting. “Cause if you start with ‘Call Me,’ for instance, you start with ‘What a beautiful time we had together.’ He spreads it out flat and simple. “ ‘Now it’s gettin’ late, and we must leave each other. But remember the times we had. And how right I tried to be. It’s all in a day’s work. Call me.’ “ And then he giggles and giggles like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

By Sunday, the Reverend Green is back in church, back at Full Gospel Tabernacle, just a mile or so down Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland. There is nothing monumental or magnificent about Full Gospel, although like everything else in Memphis, it has a portable Rent-a-Sign marquee out front, yellow, with black plastic letters listing the hours of worship services. There is a scroll painted on one of the walls behind the altar that says “Let God Be Magnified.” A painting in back shows lily-pure souls rising to Jesus from out of graveyards, from office buildings, from cars crashed on a freeway and driven into the water, and from a Volkswagen van that has been crushed in a collision with an 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig.
It’s gathering dark outside and windy cold when the six o’clock prayer meeting and Bible study class is close to commencing. The Reverend Green is sitting just off the altar with his guitar player’s Fender in his lap and the amp cranked up, and if this wasn’t Sunday evening in Full Gospel Tabernacle, you’d swear those were blues he was playing. He fingers a few of those mean, mean little obbligatos, those rippling arpeggios, laughs, and goes off to mess with the organ.

When all the ladies are in the pews, there can’t be more than 20 in attendance What is it that would make a man lay down a singing career that showed no sign of stopping, or even slowing down, a man who had thousands of women battling to grab the red roses he threw them from the stage—what would make a man lay it all down to pick up a Bible and preach a Sunday night meeting that is hard-pressed to total two dozen?

The Lord’s Prayer starts the meeting, and a hymn is lifted. Things are settling in—this will be a long night—when one of the ladies asks her pastor if maybe they can sing one more, one she needs to hear. Her mama’s health is failing, she feels like her mama may pass, and she’s worried and troubled in mind.

“Will you lead us?” the Reverend asks her.

The song’s motion is slow and it rolls along deep. She starts it and he joins it and the other ladies are there too, slow and deep. It’s graceful and mighty and the ladies lean on one another’s voices the way tall trees lean in the wind. Two choruses, three choruses, and then the Holy Spirit is joined, the Holy Ghost stirs the hymn, and the song grows too tall to go over, grows too low to get under. It speaks all language and the woman who called for it is sobbing, screaming, praising God, wiping her eyes with a yellow tissue. Another woman stands, so close to falling out, so close, and thanks her Jesus, thanks her Jesus. The Reverend is with them, and in this moment his voice, his wonderful voice, is one of many.