GroupThink

The coils are warming & the gears teething. Something grand, romantic is in the works in various geographies & climates. Information available on request.

Plays Well With Others

Finding ourselves in a character, loving him because he is you (or at least who you were). At first, his faults seem cute, something to love him not in spite of but because of: his unquestioning loyalty, his ambition, drooping innocence. The novel moves on & the faults entrench themselves-- that loyalty becomes complacency, that ambition, competetiveness, & then we see ourselves.

I'm reading Allan Gurganus's Plays Well with Others for the second time in three years. I remember liking it the first time through, but this time it's staying with me. It's the story of a fledgling writer who moves to New York in the late 70's, befriends the most beautiful man in New York (a composer, naturally, & an Iowa transplant) & a talented, unruly painter from Georgia.

The first half is a story of talent & friendship & ambition & struggle.

It's a story of New York as a magnet & the implicit trust we all place in it when we move here, to erupt. I've not read anything else that immerses the reader in the hope & terror that come with moving to the city, with moving to New York to create something.

Finally, for such sweet trust-funded pals who took fewer chances, who believed New York to be only fun and merely a street address's difference from their own, we had no words. How to inform them?

How to explain that in the evolutionary race, the strongest know enough to swim beyond the horde, to paddle right into the cornering darkness straight ahead, a darkness that is terrifying fertility itself. A darkness that threatens you with your shadow-black death while promising platinum self-perpetuating immortality. (We youngmortals simply didn't know yet how little time we had to make ourselves immortals.)

The Immortal part, we worked at with endearing school-supply diligence.
The Mortal, we assumed.

And in the background of all of this, slowly making itself known two hundred pages is the threat of plague. Part Two, a member of the circle gets grenaded by AIDS.

For me, who turns off Moulin Rouge at the culmination of the final performance, when Nicole Kidman is still alive & in love & laughing in Ewan's arms, for me who just finished Part One of this novel, I want nothienr more than to put it down, write the characters' names on some paper & put it under my pillow for a week, seeing if I can change what I know the ending will be.

Maybe if I keep it there three days, if I turn around & spit outside at noon & midnight, if come Winter Solstice I burn the paper & throw the ashes onto 2nd Avenue, Hartley & Robert & Angie will make it. And by them making it, my friends & I will too.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

I Like American Music

So say the Violent Femmes, & I tend to agree. But I've tried to like jazz, specifically bop. I just can't. I've listened to Charlie Parker for a week every couple of years, I go off & buy a Coltrane album, & it's even hard for me to love Miles Davis in that mode.

Then, yesterday, reading this in the new Paris Review book of interviews:

Everything. Jazz showed this very clearly because it is such a telescoped art, only as old as the century, if that. Charlie Parker wrecked jazz by--or so they tell me--using the chromatic rather than the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

If I sound heated on this, it's because I love jazz, the jazz of Armstrong and Bechet and Ellington and Bessie Smith and Beiderbecke. To have it all destroyed by a paranoic drug addict made me furious.

--Philip Larkin

And the gulf between enjoying something & recognizing its grace. No argument that Bird & Coltrane were talented, but it's hard for me to grab onto that train when it's rushing through the tunnels. I can't find a hold. Listening to that style jazz is, for me, staring up a 100 ft climbing wall & realizing it has no grips, it's ice.

Too cool for me, kids.

Larkin's last comment, while true, misses the point. Parker's addiction ruined him not jazz. He'd borrow friends' instruments & pawn them for smack; he'd finish a set downtown, jump uptown for a fix & be back down to start his next. But drugs have been an integral part of American music since the end of WWII.

Imagine jazz without pot or heroin, Woodstock without acid, New Age without coke, the rave culture of the '90's without Ecstasy. The manager of Jefferson Airplane had a box with all the uppers & downers compartmentalized; Hendrix put acid in his headband; The Grateful Dead would play for hours on a truck in the middle of the street while high.

What is it about drugs & music that link the two so naturally? A higher platform, a thing to catapult your heroics & shut the nagging editor (conscience) down. An escape. A slowing down of time, an intense concentration, an understanding of beauty. Maybe.

But then why is the answer, every time, to the ubiquitious Paris Review question, 'Do you use drugs or other articifial stimulents when you write?' every time, No No No? Even Fitzgerald & Hemingway couldn't write while drunk.

Both writing & playing music are creative endeavors requiring talent & insight & time. I don't know anyone who can write anything worthwhile drunk or high; I certainly can't. How did there come to be two generations of American musicians who relied on narcotics to not only perform their music but to get by? Why can musicians perform & excel under the influence & writers fail?

Ghost in the Graveyard

In the northwest corner of our garden, there is a stone wall. On the other side, one of the oldest cemeteries in Manhattan. No one has been buried here for decades, but those with relatives underground can be grandfathered in. Marble Cemetery is open at odd hours for the more curious tourists & picnickers (an old custom again making headway—grass is a commodity on this island). There are no more than a hundred permanent residents & a handful of workers who come daily to repair the wall that’s crumbling in some sections.

I believe in ghosts without seeing one. Once, a decade before I was born, my grandmother saw something in my parents’ house in Petersburg, IL (a house, mind you, that Abraham Lincoln surveyed). Before dawn, she woke but kept her eyes closed, turned on her back, looked up & for a few seconds saw the afterimage of a man burned into the air. The house next door, though no one smoked, smelled of cigars, & a rocking chair would creak through the night.

Spiritualism was a quasi-religious movement lasting from the 1840’s (around the time Lincoln surveyed the land my parents lived on) to the 1920’s, centered mainly in American but stretching to Europe (most notably Britain) & South America (Brazil has a large population of Spiritists, an offshoot of the movement). Rooted in Swedenborg’s teachings, Spiritualists believed they could not just see, but communicate with the dead. During séances, spirits would rap the walls or jangle the table to answer questions not just about themselves or those in the room, but about the nature of the afterlife. Believers saw in spirits an opportunity to learn more about God.




The movement had two peaks: during & in the years just after the Civil War & World War One. The séances & comminques appealed to the families of the soldiers, desperate for any word from their sons & brothers & husbands. It, of course, had its detractors as well, from Frederick Douglass to Harry Houdini. Because there was no hierarchy, no systemic organization, Spirtualism after the 1920’s gradually became more & more syncretic, branching out in different directions, & remnants of it can be seen in New Age beliefs.

More than my family, I veer towards belief & never heard a reason not to believe in ghosts. I don’t pretend to know anything about them, but the idea that, after we’re gone, something of us can remain, even communicate with the living, seems natural.

When I was younger, walking from the kitchen to my room, I was looking down at myself for nearly a minute. A friend has premonitions. Hoodoo. The Changing Light at Sandover. Lincoln’s dreams. Cork.

Unexplained does not mean unexplainable.

Random Spirit Lover

One of the better feelings in this life is having your expectations exceeded. A couple weeks back, a friend & I walked down the Bowery, had our wrists strapped with a drink bracelet & ducked into the Bowery Ballroom to see Sunset Rubdown, whose new album Random Spirit Lover appeared on the shelves of your local record store that same day. After two lackluster performances by the opening bands (& oh! how I wanted Johnny & the Moon to take me back to 1920's Appalachia!) Sunset Rubdown came out & opened with 'Us Ones In Between,' yesterday's video. It's a track from their 2nd album, Shut Up I Am Dreaming, that proves even with their weakness (slower tracks, the completely personal) they've got the talent & sight to double you over.

And you should always pass
when you get the inside lane.
Don’t pull your hair out;
I won’t pull my hair out.
For I have never seen the sun
that did not bury his head in the side of the world
when the day is done.

Random Spirit Lover is more listenable than the previous albums. And that's not a cut--it may be my favorite album of the year. It opens with of all things a riff that sounds like The Beach Boys came up in the 80's listening to surfer music that never made it. Underneath that riff is autistic piano, shaking through the entire song. & so Mending of the Gown starts, with piano & ride cymbal going, & never lets up for the five-and-a-half-minute opening. The exchange of a real chorus for a couple of repeated lines throughout & slippery lyrics keep it driving all the way through. At Bowery Ballroom, they played a slow version of this as an encore & turned it into a love song; Spencer & Camilla, with complete silence, singing back & forth across the stage, almost shouting, 'The way bloodsuckers do . . . the way bloodsuckers do . . . , the way bloodsuckers do . . . '

The star of the album, though, is the third track, Up On Your Leopard Upon Your Feral Days, which on first glance falls into the trap of some other Sunset Rubdown songs whose titles are willfully esoteric. The Irish jig opening lets us know we're in for something fun & they stay in the mode for a bit, but about halfway through the bottom drops out, the decellerando kicks in & we're down to half-time now. And then there's a typical Sunset Rubdown moment: we depart from the fantastical & surreal imagery of the first half of the song for a personal, confidential moment. 'Well shit, I know we're all growing old,' Spencer Krug sings with shit, I, know, all, & old falling on the beats, & this becomes the crux, the song falls into place along this phrase. It's not some exercise in storytelling, but a fable about betrayal & cracked hearts. if Mending of the Gown is a damn fine rock song, then this is a punch into the drywall.

It's not a perfect album. I'm not sold on a couple songs in the middle, 'Colt Stands up, Grows Horns' & 'Stallion,' both of which right now seem to fall into that category of willfully esoteric--surreal without any grounding, fantastic without any purpose, & long stretches of what sounds like carnival music. But the trio of songs before ('Up On Your Leopard . . . ' 'The Courtesan Has Sung' & Winged/Wicked Things') all blend seamlessly into each other, forming the strongest movement of the record, both musically & lyrically.

At Bowery, they played for about an hour-and-a-half, including a two song encore. Maybe the best praise I can give for their live show is twofold: I'm already scouring the web to find out when they're back in New York, & I didn't check the time once. Walking home, my friend who had never heard of Sunset Rubdown before that night, said to me, 'It's good to hear an American band doing their own thing, getting their own sound.' I didn't have the heart to tell him they're Canadian, but the sentiment remains. They put together a great record, that's for sure, but this is a group to see in person. Spencer Krug, the lead singer (also of Wolf Parade, Swan Lake, & at times Frog Eyes) sweats like no other man I've seen & damnit they have fun. They believe in their music. They're genuine & maybe that's what overcomes the potholes they find themselves falling in less & less.

& for those interested, here's a bit less than decent recording of 'Mending of the Gown' at the Bowery Ballroom:

Where'd the Fuckin' Sun Go?

I too have seen the sun go down outside Arkansas & seen the sun come up somewhere in Illinois.

And haven't we all spoken in tongues once or twice when the days get shorter?