So Much Soul

My grandmother, Louise Reiberg, died a year ago, this past weekend. It doesn’t seem like it has been that long, but the calendar and my crow’s feet don’t lie. We all still miss her dearly, the last of my grandparents to pass. Perhaps it was serendipitous that one of my favorite bands, Glossary, from Murfreesboro, TN, began offering free downloads of their new album, “The Better Angels of Our Nature” in the same week that we were celebrating this somber anniversary. The serendipity to be found not in the surprise of their offer, I knew that it was being released in this manner. (And I am not so callow that free music does my grief relieve.) Nor is it in some misreading of the album title, I know from whence this quote comes, and it has nothing to do with our relatives ascending to heaven on cherubic wings. No, the happy coincidence comes from being able to listen to the album’s single, “Little Caney” and have it color the circumstances of the week. To summarize the song: It is about a family matriarch or patriarch taking a young child out to an old cemetery to visit the overgrown, but still hallowed, familial burial ground.

Joey Kneiser, the songwriter and lead vocalist for Glossary, is always deft at keeping his lyrics engaging but austere, and the conflict and resolution of the song satisfying. In this particular composition, he knocks the cover off the ball. It also helps that the melody and orchestration of the song are a pitch-perfect rock and roll, kitchen-sink epic. I will reprint the lyrics and link to the song below, but I’d like to conclude my thought first.

The death of our relatives and loved ones is arguably the most psychologically affecting experience in our lives. Whether it makes us finally and fully appreciate the indelible impact of the newly dead on our own lives, or gives us pause to reassess how we will choose to live the rest of our time on Earth, no other single event can change our psychology more drastically. I know that births are profound experiences, having recently experienced one. Where there was nothing there is now something, and nearly all of one’s attention is now focused on protecting this new life. Births, however, are not inevitable. They happen because we make them happen, something we (usually) hope to happen. The new child, while joyous, dramatic and life-altering, is a being that is integrated into that which came before and that which must follow. Every watershed event in our life, birth, marriage, divorce, career success or failure, is a culmination, a coalescence of a succession of events that have been somewhat predictable and lead to a new iteration of our life. Every one except death. Of course death, too, is predictable. It is inescapable, our whole lives lead us down the path to its door. But all of the other formative elements in our lives are additive. Even divorce is a change that, though we may not desire it, adds greater depth to our lives and creates a broader base of experience upon which we subsequently live. Death, on the other hand, is an excision, a knife-quick dissolution of a being and a life whose presence had been a constant and whose sudden absence colors by subtraction everyone and everything that they ever touched. Even if the process of a person’s death is especially protracted, the exit itself is still stunning, perhaps even more so. The moment when their living breath is extinguished is not simply a coda to a longer movement. No, it is a single-note orchestra. Perhaps a soft minor tutti, perhaps a blast of brass and sharp strings, but there is no dynamic to that moment; it is both crisis and resolution all in a flash.

This morose proclamation does not mean that a person’s memory, past acts and influence cease to exist. On the contrary, since these relics and psychological artifacts are all that remain, they become even more important and cherished by those who loved the departed. It is why we bury our dead, in a prehistoric kind of suspended animation, making very secular shrines to people who, though the pious may never speak it, were far more important to us than any God. Why we cremate and condense them to their carbon essence and keep them in urns tucked neatly into our living room décor, so they may continue to be a part of our quotidian lives. Why we spread the ashes into oceans and through vegetable gardens and under looming oaks, so that the remnants of their physical being might be incorporated into the water we drink and the food we eat and the trees that give us shelter.

And so here is where I found myself while listening to this humble American song, played by humble American musicians, the kind that so often in the last century have stumbled upon some of the most profound truths and authentic artistic moments in Western Civilization. You may shout hyperbole and you may not like the song. But I’ve found myself singing it at moments when I was sure not a sound was passing through my lips. In the last week, I have longed for a field with simple limestone slabs that state plainly, my people were once here. And moments later, I’ve cringed at the notion of ‘rotten clothes in boxes of bones’ being kept like junk-drawer detritus for some funhouse notion of tribute. And it’s all because of this song. Mainly, I just love listening to this song and thinking about my grandmother and my son and the fragile human bridge I form between them. And if that is all I am, I am wholly satisfied.

Little Caney

Hold my hand and walk the ground softly
We don’t want to wake the dead
Just want a little corn in our bread and settle down
Come on Little Caney you know the sun is sinking now
And we got to make it on out to where your branches lay

Marked by stones and covered by wildflowers
Is family you’ve never known
Rotten old clothes lying in boxes of bones
I wish you could’ve been there when they all had souls
So much soul

Don’t get lost in the tall tall grass
It’s grown as high as you
I can see the graveyard peeking through the trees
And the scattered monuments of your kin
Reunited in the dirt
Only absent the hurt that living brings

Marked by stones and covered by wildflowers
Is family you’ve never known
Rotten old clothes lying in boxes of bones
I wish you could’ve been there when they all had souls
So much soul

An’ looky here Little Caney honey don’t you cry
‘Cause you know we’re all going to die someday
And the hand of another you’ll be holding tight
When you walk out to the site where I lay

Marked by stones and covered by wildflowers
Is family you’ve never known
Rotten old clothes lying in boxes of bones
I wish you could’ve been there when they all had souls
So much soul
Where did it go

http://glossary.us/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-free-download/320-kbps-aac

St. Mark's Place

In my fiction class we did an exercise about describing a setting or environment in writing. It seems to fit thematically, at least in terms of the setting, of the previous post.

St. Mark's Place

For three blocks in the heart of the East Village, 8th Street is called St. Mark’s Place. Where I live above Avenue A, I can look down and see where it ends on the east side of Tompkins Square Park. It turns back into plain old 8th St. on the other side of the park. I only ever walk in one direction on St. Mark’s. West. Away from the impending morning, and later, towards the setting sun.
I fall out of my building’s aging terrazzo-floored vestibule, thermal coffee mug reluctantly purchased at Starbucks, briefcase that my great uncle gave me for Christmas, or was it graduation? Hard right at Narducci’s on the corner. The green, white and red door in my periphery and the smell of warm pepperoni too early in the day tell my legs to turn even before my mind does. Step by step, I know what I will see for the next three blocks like a useless psychic who can only see one second into the future. A Pakistani fellow, who may or may not be the Maitre’d at one of the restaurants on 6th St. sweeping his stoop with a broom that is worn down almost to the threads that bind the straw. Across the street, the Eileen Fisher boutique with loosely clothed mannequins, comfortable in their muted earth-tones and raw silk ankle-length skirts. Every seven paces, trees are planted in the sidewalk, the base of the small trunk covered in mulch and topsoil, and that small square of dirt is surrounded by wrought-iron borders. I pass slower pedestrians on the street side of the arborial impediments, and weave back onto the sidewalk once clear of the foot traffic. Lazza Café is at the corner of 1st Avenue. Like every morning, I ponder what the Eggs Benedict they are famous for taste like and make a note in my mind that I should stop in sometime. Five years in the city and I can still convince myself that just maybe this will happen. I cross 1st Ave. against the light, stepping past the tourists in baseball hats and jean shorts who patiently await the green figure. Stride past The Gap and know that in minutes I will be on the Lexington Avenue Express headed north/northeast to the Mobil building, where there is now not a single shred of actual Mobil Corporation. Only Pfizer pharmaceutical and its 42 floors of offices and my small closet of a space where I design the perfectly compliant drug packages that house the blood pressure, cholesterol, and erection medicines that Pfizer sells.
As I move past the A-1 Fast Grocery awning, “A Dozen Roses, ALWAYS $7.99!!” I notice something different. A woman. People are always there, around me as I walk to the train. It’s Manhattan. Characters. Types. The Homeless Guy, The Artist, The Power Suit, The Drunk, The Punk. You want these? St. Mark’s has them like a Field Guide for NYC. But today I see a woman so absurdly beautiful that I stop. Altogether cease movement, right in front of the copy store that never has any customers. And not like “implausibly super-model hot” absurd. (In fact add that stereotype to the list of people St. Mark’s has in spades.) No, absurd because her features are so huge, out of scale and incongruent to themselves that I probably shouldn’t find her attractive at all, much less be contemplating the idea that she might be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her eyes are larger than children on greeting cards. Between her almost swollen cheeks is a nose that defies ethnicity, sharp and large, a bump in the bridge, nostrils narrow but obvious. Perhaps it is the supple black leather blazer that seems to have been cut within a millimeter of every corner and curve on her torso. Perhaps it is the subtle angle of her hips as she searches through her purse for the searing red lipstick that she is now applying to her astounding, tumescent lips. Perhaps I better move faster since she is walking away from me. I follow the Demoiselle down the sidewalk, oblivious to everything but her gait. We careen past the piercing and tattoo shop at 2nd Avenue. Past the austere 19th Century beauty of the Cooper Union and onto the cement sidewalk island that is home to the giant sculpture of a cube set on its vertex, a sort of colossus guarding the entrance to the train. It is here that St. Mark’s Place ends, evaporates into a notion and the paved asphalt around us once again assumes its numerical appellation. I continue to follow her billowing mass of chestnut hair, her slim black pants, her gunmetal silver heels into the green glass portico covering the entry staircase that leads to the 4 5 6 lines of the Subway. Through the yellow turnstiles, and I begin sweating. What would I possibly say to her, what words could I form that wouldn’t be preposterous? “You are so gloriously out of proportion that I think I may be in love with you?” As the train chatters into the station, she turns around glancing towards the white and black sign reading Uptown. Was she on the wrong track? Was she going to leave to find the correct route? Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend she was waiting for? Could she not read? Did she vote for Hilary? Or worse, Giuliani? Does she go to church? Does she hate the Yankees? Was she contemplating doing any one of the thousands of things that would ruin everything? Everything that she is to me right now? The picture, the wonderfully imperfect picture. The two blocks that I followed her that doesn’t exist now. So as she lifts her leg, calf muscle flexed above her feet and fluorescent orange toenail polish, to board the 6 train, my train, I inhale. Exhaust fumes fill my nose and I step back. Away from the platform. Search for and find a bench. Watch the stainless steel train doors close in front of her as I dab the sweat from my sideburns. Listen to the hydraulic hiss of the cars beginning to move up the track. And I wait with my coffee and briefcase for the next train.

Does it make a sound?

If a blog goes unupdated for 9 months does it disappear? An internet photo company informed that they were going to delete my account if I didn't order anything for more than 6 months, when I'm sure they have enough information storage capacity to keep every picture ever taken in the history of the world. We already have ghost blogs and myspace accounts, the online remains of humans who've shed their mortal coil. Do I really even care how the interenet will be affected by these online orphans? Not really. I'm just going to drop things on this page as I feel like it and maybe one day I'll start paying attention to this neglected little corner of Al Gore's mind.

William Topaz MacGonagall

A long time ago I used to write poetry. None of it remarkable, most of it not very good. There were no Tay Bridge Disasters in the lot, but needless to say, I was no Keats. I lacked the patience and discipline to write when there was no visceral prompt, no muse whispering in my ear. And on those occasions when Calliope did descend and move me to commit my verses to paper, I was too lazy to go back and properly revise and refine the words that earlier poured from my pen like so much water from a fountain. For example, I wouldn’t take the time to go back and remove awkward and unnecessary similes, like so much garbage from the roadside. So even though I still write with some degree of frequency, I stay away from the poems.

Earlier this week however, I discovered, while organizing My Documents, a poem I had toyed with while working as a Data Reporting Specialist. On one of my lunch breaks, presumably during some early-infant sleep-deprived haze, since I don’t really remember ever composing it, I took a phrase from an email my mother wrote. The communiqué involved some familial medical difficulties that at the time were rather dire, but from which my relative recovered successfully. I took some liberties and made up my own story based on the letter. It’s all totally fictional. I just loved the deceptive exposition of my mother’s introductory line, and so used the same line to start this poem. Perhaps with this poem, I will set my sights and really whittle it down to its essence. Or expand it, who knows? Perhaps, I’ll just let it lay the way it spilled onto the page. Either way, I don’t think it’s terrible.

Things I’ve Learned

Sweetie-
things I've learned;
Autumn is actually a woman about our age,
53, whose son just graduated
high school and he is traveling this year.
He’s got a backpack and a rail-pass and I must admit I’m jealous.
She moved here from Charleston and decided to stay when the first snowflake hit the ground.
Single mom for a long while, her field is Conflict Resolution.
Autumn thought she had a place lined up to stay and thought
she had a job with a guy who's a bigwig in the Con. Res. business,
but he balked after she got here.
They had quite a nasty argument.
I think perhaps they had been sleeping together.
I’ve decided I like the idea of skiing much more than the act.
Autumn took me to a small slope and I nearly broke my ankle.
I felt awfully lonely here in the mountains, waiting for winter to come.
Rivers sometimes look like they run uphill here.
Wouldn’t that be great? If something like a river
that has been forever charging downhill towards inevitability
could all of a sudden swing back up and ascend,
hinting at something not so final?
It’s just an optical illusion though. The roads and the rocks play tricks.
I will see my sister tomorrow.
She will only have one breast left.
I think she may try to adopt.
I hope Autumn can stay around with her once I’ve left.
She is a bit eccentric and unpredictable,
but when she’s here, she’s grand.

Once Again, It's On...

New Year, new gear. Lots of music out there and lots of clever self-indulgent things for me to say about it. As a way to re-christen the old blog, I had planned on writing a glowing review of one of the last shows of 2006. And while I wrote a review, it is most certainly NOT glowing. Which actually makes me sad. I never like writing about disappointments or things I find to be of inferior quality. Critics who enjoy trashing something should find some other hobby or occupation. That said, sometimes when an album or concert fails to fulfill its promise by many miles, the only thing a writer can do is pan it. I will rarely ever spend my time panning a CD because I have very little experience as a musician and have never recorded a song in my life. I know what is good and what I like and so I feel much more comfortable expounding upon recordings that fall into one of those two categories. On the other hand, I've spent much of my life performing onstage and watching other people perform. While my own stage experiences only sometimes involved music, the elements that make up a successful live performance are universal, regardless of discipline or genre. So when I see a poorly conceived, orchestrated or executed live show, I can only feel compelled to comment upon it. There, I think I've buried the actual content deep enough on the page that only people with extraoridinary patience will read the review. I really wanted to like this show, and I am still a HUGE fan of The Margot in spite of the Dec. 30th event. "Dust of Retreat" is one of my top ten albums of the 2000's. And I can't wait for their second album and subsequent show that lives up to their immense potential and ability.

Dec. 30th, 2006 at The Irving Theater or Michael Portnoy’s Complaint

Old theaters have always held a romantic lure to me. And while I enjoy auditoriums that have been well preserved like shimmering early-20th Century gems, I am even more enamored of rooms that are skeletons of their former selves. Rafters laid bare and a long, raked floor where the rows of crushed velvet seats once stood, now only concrete. I picture some Keats-like figure, Jeff Buckley for example, singing a soaring ballad over the heads of a rapt audience, dim lights twinkling in their eyes. As I walked into the recently re-opened Irving Theater on the east side of Indianapolis this past Saturday Dec. 30th, I found myself standing in the exact room I just described. It was the kind of space that I always hope holds some magic power for bringing out remarkable performances from the artists that take that stage. The bill for the evening held immense potential, but I’m surprised and sad to say that very little of it was realized.

On the schedule to play at this all-ages show were the headliners, Margot and The Nuclear So and So’s and supporting acts Mike Bloom of Rilo Kiley, Cameron McGill’s String Quartet, and Chris Taylor, formerly of America Owns The Moon.

Knowing that it was an incipient performance space, I did not expect much as far as production values to be present in the theater. Upon a quick survey there was a very modest PA; however, Jonee Quest was running sound, so that boded well. There were fewer than two dozen lighting instruments, but since Mötley Crüe wasn’t playing, I didn’t think it would make much of a difference. The venue does not hold a liquor license, so youngsters were welcome and those of us of age would have to either drink early at home, or abstain altogether (or so I thought). Sodas were available for $.50, can’t beat that.

Taylor was the first to perform and after several minutes of rather unremarkable tunes, he began a song only to abruptly stop. He informed the audience that he, “Was going to have to go backstage,” that he, “was unprepared.” While I hated to see an artist who has been a great performer as the member of another group flame-out onstage, as one gentleman put it, “Sometimes people come to watch the crashes.” The promise of wreckage was never fulfilled though. Inexplicably, Mr. Taylor did not leave the stage, but attempted to soldier on through his set, thus sinking any chance of anything interesting happening during his allotted time. This night, only in failure would his performance have been noteworthy, and I guess he wasn’t willing to do that. I needed some air.

I returned for the last 15 minutes of Cameron McGill’s set. He’s a sturdy singer-songwriter who plays in Indianapolis quite frequently. Always a reliable opening act, McGill is an artist who I wouldn’t necessarily remember to go see as a headliner, but I am always pleased when I see he is on the supporting bill for a show that I’m attending. He’s never a spotlight stealer, for better or worse, but is able to whet the viewer’s appetite and leaves an audience intrigued enough to never be bored while waiting for the main attraction.

Mike Bloom took the stage carrying a guitar bearing the play-on-Guthrie inscription, “This Machine Kills Hipsters.” I chuckled and was relieved that in a sea of tapered jeans and scarves (Bloom included) a sense of humor was not absent. Bloom’s guitar riffs were fun and enthusiastic but his vocals lacked a punch necessary to carry off the solo performance. Whether it was insufficient clarity, volume, or just a muddy mix, I lost most of what he was singing about and quickly let my attention wander. Man it was drafty in that old place. And standing on a 22° angle floor can really eat up your calves after awhile. Bloom’s exceptional guitar work would, every now and again, pull me back, but sadly I still couldn’t hear what the dude was saying.

Then along came Margot. After a year banging it out on the road, those crazy So and So’s were back in the hometown to close out the year. A New Year’s gift to the kiddies who don’t get many all-ages shows like this and somewhat of a favor to a musical venue trying to make a go of it. With Richard Edwards, I had my Keats figure, and Emily Watkins, a sort of Fanny Brawne. Maybe a night of mystery and romance was still possible. Obscure poetic references aside, these two came onto the stage and performed “Light On A Hill” and sounded as mournfully beautiful as living souls can sound. Unlike the previous vocalists of the evening, Edwards’ diction was spot on (but only when he was singing) and the vocals sounded crisp and loud out of the same small PA that was there earlier in the night. The full band took the stage and began what was to be a serviceable set. It sounded above-average, buoyed by the material, but it was not the raw-edged, exposed nerve kind of set that they have played at The Patio and The Vogue. I couldn’t fault them for falling in line with the slower, more somber mood of the evening, it was thematically appropriate. Trouble was somebody forgot to tell their second percussionist, Casey Tennis. At other Margot shows, his court jester hijinx are less grating when the rest of the band is really rocking the wheels off. But during this more subdued performance he was positively unbearable. A kinesthetic air-horn seemed to go off whenever he did so much as tap a tambourine, flailing limbs and totally upstaging the other players and vocalists. Remember the 1998 Grammy Awards? It seems Casey has been interning at the Midwestern School for Soy Bombs. Ever seen a coked-up seagull breakdance to folk songs? 400 people at The Irving just did. Perhaps everyone else in the band was exhausted enough from the holidays that his hammy mania was okay by them for this one night. “Let the joker deflect the spotlight tonight while we just stay in our lanes.” But pull this kinda interpretive dance/percussion upstagery at the Double Door and nobody is going to remember anything about your music except for the goofy-looking bass drum-humper who apparently figures he’s the reason we all bought tickets.

Towards the end of the set, the band played several promising new songs. One in particular found Edwards sounding (in a good way) like a less pompous and more pissed-off Bono, but don’t tell him that. The overall vigor of the performance increased, but was once again undermined by two further annoyances. Apparently concerned that the audience was “not getting into it”, whoever was running the lights decided that blasting the house with super-wattage Par Cans every twelve seconds for a very Crüe video-esque crowd wash was the way to boost our involvement. My personal experience was that I didn’t like having my retinas seared that frequently and so I had to lower my eyes and look at the fucking floor every 11.75 seconds in order to avoid a career change to broom salesman. Not the way to get people throwing the proverbial ‘bows. Did the band really need to gaze out upon their scarf-rock acolytes that much? Vince Neil didn’t need to see the audience that often and he had boobies flashed at him on the regular.

As a final insult to the all-ages crowd who shelled out their cash to hang around in a very dark barn, there began to appear during the Margot set, various individuals backstage who started pulling back the curtains to watch the set. These gawkers were directly behind and over the heads of the band members onstage. Now, this was by no means distracting if you had already been fully blinded by the lighting engineer, but for those of us who still retained some vestige of eyesight it really STOLE FOCUS. It was as if the group onstage had been transformed into the upperclassmen rock band playing at the talent show and their too-cool-for-school pals were in the wings making fart noises and smoking Parliaments. Margot and the Nuclear Zack Attack. I’m glad you know the band, but perhaps people who are involved in the music biz and friends with the band should have some idea about things that detract from a live show and refrain from doing them. Or maybe they should just get the fuck back in the audience. Include the fact that these hangers-on were drinking openly in a venue that did not have a liquor license and it wound up making the affair look really quite bush league. If I were the owner who is hanging my future income on the possibility of getting a booze permit, I’m kicking these walking excise violations out asap. And at least have the decency not to rub it in the face of the under-agers present that, even at a venue they can enter, they still can’t enjoy a frosty beverage like the big kids can. And all we legal drinkers would’ve gladly brought our own spirits if we had known in advance that everyone would be sticking their dicks in the mashed potatoes. I guess Mike Bloom’s guitar missed a few of its targets.

Any of the romance I had hoped to experience in this venerable old building was squashed by the end of the evening. Even with decent-to-good performances by the artists, I was left cold and annoyed, almost wishing that The Irving was still a porno house and not taking a stab at live music. While there would certainly not have been any romance if that were the case, at least the evening would have had a happy ending.