Some Thoughts About the Next Minor Arcana Record

Posted by landis on Jan 7, 2012 in Blog, Music, News | 0 comments

I was born in the wrong era of pop music. Or so I’ve often thought. But as I listen back to a lot of the avant-garde and experimental music of the past (which I love so well), and think of how some of it managed to seep into the mainstream and successfully blend artistic ambition, avant-garde sensibility and enjoyability for music listeners…and then consider how maybe I can fill a lacuna in some aspect of the current musical landscape, I think—maybe this is the perfect time for me. I have been interested in straddling that line and bridging that gap. And I’m excited, because I think this band can actually do it, and do so in interesting and unique sorts of ways. This is essentially why I formed The Minor Arcana. And the next record is shaping up to be interesting. As I read this article by Lester Bangs, I became REALLY excited. I thought about the possibility of capturing some of what he’s talking about myself. THe primal nature of the music, it’s ambition, it’s lust for experimentation and AUTHENTIC kinds of emotional and artistic fusion. And it made me think of some of what I’ve been listening to as an active sort of “research” for the next record. Here is an accounting thereof and then, the article by Lester Bangs that excited me so.

I’ve been listening to and attempting to interpolate: Scott Walker stuff (basically his 4 songs on the last Walker Brothers record Niteflights up thru his current stuff); Berlin-era Bowie; some of the bands mentioned by Lester Bangs in an article I’ll post in a bit—but specifically Television; the more aggressive/darker King Crimson (think “Larks Tongue in Aspic I-IV”, “Red”, “21st Century Schizoid Man”, “Easy Money”) ; more impressionistic composers & players like Brad Mehldau & The Claudia Quintet; avant-garde composer/saxophonist Tim Berne; really enjoying/trying to work with the electronic soundscapes of artists like Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker, and Autechre as well as a lot of ambience created by and rhythmic inventions of Throbbing Gristle and Trent Reznor; 20th century composers like Ligeti, Messiaen, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Boulez; the voices and great work of three amazing women: Patti Smith, Kate Bush, & Laurie Anderson; and my typical dash of bands/songwriters like Firewater, Elvis Costello, Morrissey mixed in. I figure, why not try and make this all work together. Perform a grand experiment. Sounds overly-ambitious, but hey…if the article posted below (needs to be quoted in full) can describe real life, why can’t I do something like this of my own with this band?

FREE JAZZ/PUNK ROCK

by Lester Bangs 

In a New York City nightclub, a skinny little Caucasian whose waterfall hairstyle and set of snout and lips make him look like a sullen anteater takes the stage, backed up by a couple of guitarists, bass, horn section, drummer and bongos. Most of his back-up is black, and they know their stuff: it’s pure James Brown funk, with just enough atonal accents to throw you off. The trombone player, in fact, looks familiar, and sounds amazing: you look a bit closer, and of course, that’s Joseph Bowie, bother of Lester, both of them avant-garde jazzmen of repute. But then the anteater begins to sing, in a hoarse yowl that sounds more like someone being dragged naked through the broken glass and oily rubble of a back-alley than even the studied abrasiveness of most punk rock vocalizations. The songs are about contorting yourself, tying other people up and leaving them there, and how the singer doesn’t want to be happy. After a while he picks up an alto sax, and out come some of the most hideous flurries of gurgling shrieks heard since the mid-Sixties glory days of ESP-Disk records. The singer/saxophonist’s name is James Chance, and you have been watching the Contortions.

Across town in another club, what looks like the standard rock ‘n’ roll lineup saunters onto a stage set right in the floor, making it impossible for anybody in the room except those at the very front to see. The group consists of two guitars, bass and drums. Then their lead singer wanders out from in back, casting a baleful imperious eye over the crowd. She is short and chubby, filmily dressed with waxy black hair and a ring in one nostril. Her name is Lydia Lunch; she used to play guitar in a way that has been compared with Chilean torture chambers. Now she just sings, and surprisingly enough, what was once confined to a banshee wail to match her guitar work has now broadened, from Ilse-She-Wolf barks to little-girl mewlings and back to banshee wail again. They open with “Diddy Wah Diddy” and run through a contemptuously short set of originals and carefully chosen covers like Nancy Sinatra’s “Lightnin’s Girl.” Interestingly enough, the sound of the band is a lot closer to the jungle than that of the Contortions, less strained and more sensual; one of the guitarists doubles on sax and guitar-synthesizer, and the jams are short and to the point. The name of the group is Eight-Eyed Spy.

Finally, back home at CBGB’s, original spawning ground of the late Seventies punk revolution, Richard Hell and the Voidoids are running through one of the final sets of their career. Ironically, where the group used to put on sloppy sets in front of small but adoring audiences, now they’re playing incredibly tight, slashing rock ‘n’ roll to a packed house consisting mostly of rubbernecking tourists and suburbanite teens who have heard about all this punk stuff and finally found the courage to come down and check it out, and for whom it wouldn’t make much difference which band was onstage. But for those who are there to listen, it’s obvious that the Voidoids have something more than the usual punk engine-gunnings going for them: in the dense mesh of guitars are, unmistakably, quotes from and elaborations on Miles Davis lines off albums like Agharta and On the Corner; if you listen and look closely, you can tell that this incredible stylistic melding is emanating mainly from the guitarist over stage left, a quiet, balding guy in sunglasses named Robert Quine. When the Voidoids break up, he will make an album of instrumental improvisations with guitarist friend Jody Harris (ex- of the Contortions) and a rhythm machine.

Just what is all this stuff? Well, guess what, folks — the end of the Seventies, with its apparent exhaustion of forms and general disgust with what has come to be known as “fusion music,” has brought us what seems at first glance to be the unlikeliest fusion of all: punk rock and free jazz. But it’s been a long time a-borning, and it has antecedents. If you want to know how we got to such a strange common ground, or perhaps if you just want to be pissed off, read on.

But before we get into this thing, I think it might be good for writer and reader to have a little eyeball-to-eyeball chat, if only to clear the air. As a probably regular follower of this magazine, your musical tastes I’d imagine are a little more refined, at least in certain directions, than the average person’s. Not trying to butter you up; it’s just that, let’s face it, for most people the whole subject of music and its relative importance in one’s life can be summed up by the sales figures of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. For most people, music, if it’s thought about much at all, is thought of as an underscoring for the far more important concerns of day-to-day living: music of any kind is a good thing, as long as it knows its place and stays there.

That leaves the rest of you, or us, depending on exactly what and how much we are going to be able to agree upon. Now, without getting too snobbish about it (snobbery being an affliction unfortunately endemic to a great many jazz fans), I think we can assume that in general good or great jazz is music of a higher caliber than a good deal, if not most, of the more pop-oriented stuff coming out. Duke Ellington was better than Paul Whiteman. Thelonious Monk was better than Roger Williams, comparing John Coltrane to Boots Randolph would be making a bad joke, and so on down the line. The music these figures produced, I further submit, was better not because it was any more technically complicated, or because Ellington and Monk and Trane had the greatest chops of anybody who ever lived (even if they might have), but because of some rare wellspring of feeling inside them that caused them to create art that moved mountains, changed history, has endured and will continue to.

I’m discounting chops and the technical end because as far as I’m concerned that sort of thing has basically nothing to do with what’s in a player’s heart, and expression of passion was basically why music was invented in the first place. A lot of people don’t see it in quite those terms, of course; their absolutism takes another form: they think you have to “know how to play” your instrument according to some preset and as far as I can see arbitrary standards before anyone can even begin to take you seriously. They further think that the more technically proficient a player you become,ipso facto the better music maker, or let’s say maker of better music you become. Why do they nurse this curious notion? Probably because they have been brainwashed, but who picked up the first bar of soap? It seems to me that this kind of thinking is by definition quantitative rather qualitative: you can sling arpeggios all over the place, you can freeze the baby in the bathwater and mail the ice to Siberia, but the fact remains that if you take one note, any note, and let two different people play it, what comes out of one’s axe just might be nothing more than the note, whereas through some magic the other’s note might be just a little more expressive, probably because there was something, a kind of inner urgency and yearning, behind it. And all the conservatories and theory books and virtuoso chop-flashings in the world aren’t gonna make one iota of difference in regard to that one humble note.

A good example of this dichotomy is the old argument (which never should have been an argument in the first place) about who was better, Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie. Now, I would be the last person in the world to say anything against Dizzy Gillespie. I will concede that technically Dizzy from the starting gate could wipe the floor with Miles and everybody knew it, but Miles has always had something so emotionally compelling in his playing that he changed our lives in ways that Dizzy, magnificent as he is, never really did. I’d say put it down to the fact that they must make two different kinds of music, both valid, but it has been observed more than once that, at least until On the Corner, Miles’ playing never seemed to change so much as its context; Miles likes the middle register, apparently because it’s where he can best summon his quiet fire, and has seldom gone for cascades of notes where a few with optimum soul would suffice. But let it be remembered that when Miles first appeared with Charlie Parker in the late Forties, a lot of people said he couldn’t play, was a downright embarrassment to Bird. And you know something? If you listen to some of those old sides, you can hear Miles flubbing up here and there, an adolescent fumblingly finding his way. Obviously Bird heard something in Miles that all those detractors didn’t, and obviously he was right. What’s perhaps even more interesting is that when John Coltrane, the “sheets of sound” man himself, first joined Miles’ band about ten years later, people said the same thing about him: “Coltrane can’t play.”

Maybe it was because he had a bit of R&B in his background, and for a lot of people into jazz that was strictly anathema at the time: you could hear them imperiously snooting about the presence of Chuck Berry and Big Maybelle in the movie Jazz on a Summer’s Day, things like that. Hell, Coltrane used to walk the bar in, I believe it was Philadelphia: can’t you just see him, the author of Omand A Love Supreme and Meditations, Ohnedaruth Himself, strutting the length of that thing kicking over whiskey glasses, probably sloppy drunk himself, driving the crowd to a frenzy with those raw, fartlike, obscenely loud and unquestionably tasteless and vulgar “HONKs!” and “SQUEEEs!” immortalized by Flip Phillips and Illinois Jacquet in the old Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts? And people called Phillips and Jacquet “tasteless” and “unmusical” too. But the way I always saw it, all that honk-squee stuff was just one part of rock ‘n’ roll getting ready to be born, a great cry of freedom from the constraints of “good” music, perhaps even the cerebral conceits of bebop. And a decade later you could hear that same gutbucket approach resurrected in things like Roland Kirk’s solo on “Hog Callin’ Blues” from Charles Mingus’ classic Oh Yeah album. It’s great that Kirk and Mingus had all the technique to let their eruptions slide on through, but as far as I’m concerned all the technique in the world is never going to make somebody like Al Dimeola or Stanley Clarke or Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock at this point, or almost any of those fusion cats matter a damn once their latest little space opera slides off the charts, ’cause if they ever had any soul they lost it by now. So now you know at least part of my prejudices in front.

Another part is that I love rock ‘n’ roll in its basest, crudest, most paleolithically rudimentary form. That’s right, I love punk rock, and I’m not apologizing to anyone. As far as I can see, what Philips and Jacquet were doing on those Jazz at the Philharmonic sides was kind of the punk rock of its day. What’s more, I don’t give a good goddamn if somebody can barely play their instruments or even not at all, as long as they’ve got something to express and do it in a compelling way. Because to me music is any kind of sound made by one human being that moves another one. I suppose that validates a lot of stuff I consider total rubbish, like the aforementioned DiMeolas, Clarkes and Hancocks of the world as well as all the Jethro Tulls and Emerson, Lake and Palmers. But any musician is only as good as his attitude, chops be damned or fall where they may, and rock ‘n’ roll is all attitude. It was originally conceived as an outburst of inchoate obnoxious noise and that’s what most of the best of it has remained. In other words, punk rock is as venerable as Little Richard. Admittedly, there have been some people over the years who have made rock that was technically (more often technologically) complex and musicologically erudite and still not be worthless — the Byrds come to mind — but trying to turn the blare of the outcasts into something arty and thereby respectable is as sick as the attempts made over the years to “upgrade” jazz by polluting it with all sorts of European classicist elements (the efforts of John Lewis and Gunther Schuller, few others, excepted).

Okay: by any standards of “good” music, rock ‘n’ roll is just a lot of garbage noise, always has been and always will be or it’s not rock ‘n’ roll anymore (cf Billy Joel). Great jazz is great art. But I submit that, when it’s not arty, garbage noise can also be great art. Because great art is anything that stirs the human breast in profound ways that may even have deeper psychological and social implications, and that’s just exactly what, say, the Sex Pistols did. You may despise them, but they can’t be denied their impact. Who cares if they had no talent (a contention I consider debatable anyway)? Their talent was for aural carnage and rabble rousing.

The reason for all this blather is that I’m just about to try and convince you that punk rock and the very best jazz can not only coexist among one group of musicians performing together at one time, but that successful examples of said mutant hybrid already exist in abundance. That’s right, Iggy and the Stooges were every bit as good as Archie Schepp, and John Coltrane could have played with the Velvet Underground. (I more or less proved this contention the other night when I went on WPIX-FM in Manhattan and simultaneously played “Race Mixing” by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on one turntable and the short version of “Nonaah” by Roscoe Mitchell on another, saying “Get ready all you tape hounds, because we have here a vintage unreleased take of Roscoe jamming with Lydia Lunch and the Jerks at the last Montreux Festival,” and most people apparently believed it.) It’s all music, and has more qualities in common than many fans of either genre might at first think.

For instance, both free jazz (which, with rare and minor exceptions, is probably the only kind of jazz which should ever be mixed with rock ‘n’ roll — things like Blood, Sweat and Tears were Vegas lounge acts) and punk rock are musics with no explicit existing fundamental rules. That’s why Ralph Gleason once more or less admitted to me that he had no idea whether Archie’s Three For a Quarter, One For a Dime was a great album, a good album or an abortion, and that’s why we currently have the highly laughable spectacle of punk partisans from all over the map claiming that this or that favorite group of theirs is great, while the other guy’s is obviously garbage, and hardly anyone can ever seem to agree on which is which.

Also, beyond a certain point both punk rock and free jazz give up all sense of structure. Result: atonal anarchic spew. Now if somebody told me that some new group was nothing but a bunch of horrible atonal noise, I’d be the first in line for tickets, but like everybody else I have my own highly subjective places where I finally draw the line. I love Teenage Jesus and the Jerks but can’t stand Siouxsee and the Banshees (their classic fourteen-minute version of “The Lord’s Prayer” excepted). I lived for Africa/Brass and Ascension, never could quite make up my mind about Meditations,and found Om totally unlistenable. I told old Ralph that on sheer quality of a fairly easily perceivable emotional authenticity, Fire Music can be recognized as a masterpiece and Three For a Quarter, One For a Dime as masturbation. On the other hand, since we had that conversation, it has become common knowledge if not conventional wisdom (The Hite Report, etc.) that masturbation is good for you, so if I still owned a copy I might re-audition Three For a Quarter now and discover that Archie was up to a wank there ten years ago I wasn’t experienced enough to appreciate yet. I do know that I put on Om the other night for the first time in about a decade, and found that I actually liked it, but I suspect that this may be due to my conditioning by all the punk rock I’ve listened to over the past few years having broken down my resistance to welters of squawl.

What fascinates me, has in fact since the late Sixties, is the points of intersection. That you could take a bunch of guys who had just held guitars in their hands for the first time in their lives yesterday, put them together with someone who’d mastered tenor saxophone over a 25-year span of rigorous discipline and dues-paying, and come out with something that was not only not oil and water, but aesthetically valid and emotionally compelling.

I’ll be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about music technically, but the way I always looked at it, it made perfect sense that you could take one guy playing two moronic chords over and over again, let one other guy whoop and swoop all around him in Ornettish free flight, and if the two players were blessed with that magic extra element of conviction and the kind of inspiration that produces immense energy if nothing else, then hell, they could only complement each other. Because, to get just a little cosmic about it (any free jazz critic has a right to at least once in each article), the two principles of metronomic or even stumblethud repetition and its ostensible converse of endless flight through measureless nebulae should by the very laws of nature meet right in the middle like yin-yang, etc.

All of this, of course, relates intimately to the search for new forms and absolutely open-ended freedom of expression that all the arts were undergoing in the dear, dead Sixties. I can recall my own shivers of delight when, in early 1965, I first heard the Yardbirds and the Who unleash their celebrated deluges of searing feedback. It struck me immediately that this was one element which perhaps more than any other gave the rock renaissance of the day a full-fledged shot at matching the experimental forays that jazz had been experiencing since the turn of the decade.

Of course, the Yardbirds and the Who were, almost from the beginning, relatively accomplished musicians in the rock arena, which was increasingly falling prey to the sort of chops-mania which would eventually give us such abominations as the worship of guitar players who got compared with jazz giants just because they had the stamina to play scales for an hour or two at a time (in other words, to hell with Duane Allman and the Grateful Dead).

No, what I wanted to hear was “Louie, Louie” with Albert Ayler sitting in (which should not be confused with Ayler’s own rather pathetic attempts at crossbreeding/crossover like New Grass; he had the right idea, but went about it all wrong).

Again, since a lot of you probably think I was out of my mind then and have obviously degenerated even more by now, let me remind you of two things. Number One is that for the first couple of years he was playing sax, Ornette Coleman was misreading the bar clef by a third, mistaking C for A, which many people feel accounts for his “freaky” sound then and now. (It might also be instructive for those who think the whole idea of punk rock a hideous upchuck in the face of all musical values held by right-thinking citizens to recall that almost exactly the same things were said about Ornette, Cecil Taylor, et al. when they debuted: Downbeat critics regularly slagged off classic albums like Africa/Brass, Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard and Eric Dolphy Live at the Five Spot Vol. One, and one of them called Ornette’s Free Jazz album “psychotic.”)

The second little story I’d like to dig up comes from A.B. Spellman’s beautiful book Black Music: Four Lives, wherein Cecil Taylor recalled jamming once with a schized-out bassist who just happened to wander into the club one night, played a set and then ran out in a typical paranoid spasm after the set but before Cecil could ask him who he was, where he lived and maybe get his phone number. Cecil said that this guy didn’t really know how to play the bass at all, but that because of that he did things that more schooled musicians wouldn’t even think of trying because they had been taught that there were immutably fixed “right” and “wrong” ways to do everything. Which Cecil felt was a crock — he said that if this guy had stuck around, he might have had a shot at being one of the great free bass players.

A quantum leap in terms of rock ‘n’ roll freedom occurred in the late Sixties, with the appearance of the aforementioned Velvet Underground. Building on the possibilities opened up by the Yardbirds and the Who, the Velvets, perhaps even more than someone like Jimi Hendrix, redefined the meaning of noise in rock. Lou Reed’s solo in “Heard Her Call My Name” in 1967 was so ahead of its time that even I found it a little abrasive, whereas now it sounds right up to date and totally fresh; and the collective improvisation that he and the rest of the Velvets (who were all musical primitives except for a conservatory-trained Welshman named John Cale who studied under Cage and Xenakis before abandoning “serious” music to form the Velvets with Lou) laid down in the 17-minute “Sister Ray” is probably the finest example of extended jamming anybody in rock has put on record to this day.

One band they inspired was the Stooges, who in their 1970 album Funhouse (still available on import, as are the Velvets’ experiments in repackaged anthologies) let a young Ann Arbor saxophonist named Steve McKay honk and squawk and shriek his way through a whole side of the most primitive, grinding fuzztone-feedback punk. Obviously McKay had been listening to people like Ornette and Ayler, and other rock ‘n’ rollers of atonal bent have not been shy about crediting their influence. Captain Beefheart, Tom Verlaine and the Contortions’ James Chance have all attested at one time or another to the effect on their playing of Ayler specifically; around the time he was cutting things like “I Heard Her Call My Name” Lou Reed said in interviews that he’d been listening to Ornette and Cecil a lot, and he’s recently returned to jazz-rock amalgams in a big way, collaborating with Don Cherry on last year’s The Bells.

As for Beefheart, the Ayler influence is unmistakable in tracks like “Hair Pie: Bake One” on his monolithic masterpiece from the late Sixties, Trout Mask Replica. When Beefheart put together his Magic Band for that album and its successors, he taught everyone else in the group how to play their instruments according to the logic of his own revolutionary musical conception: some he taught from the ground up, others he had to force to unlearn everything they had ever been taught. Drawing equally on Delta blues, Howlin’ Wolf, free jazz and the whole gutbucket rock ‘n’ roll tradition, Beefheart created a unique new musical language. In a way, he stands outside not only styles but time — I saw him a year or so ago in New York, and his approach, while it has not changed startlingly in the last decade, remains as uncompromising, unduplicated and unduplicatable as ever. It swings, it rocks, it’s filled with wildly unpredictable hairpins turns through blues, dissonance, atonality and sonic dada, yet through all this it remains so distinctively earthy you can dance to it. But then, you can dance to an awful lot of Ornette’s stuff, too.

If Beefheart still seems to stand alone, he has spawned a whole generation of musicians who credit him as a major influence: the Ohio art-school conceptualist group Devo, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols (now back to his real name John Lydon in his new band Public Image Ltd.) and the Clash have all credited him as a major formative factor in each of them finally stepping out to make that godawful racket. From the same neck of the woods as Devo come Pere Ubu, who combine Ornette/Ayler sax flurries, synthesizer murk, guitar distortion, and a deep industrial rhythmic force somewhere between clank and drone. They claim to be heavily influenced as well by the sounds issuing from the factories all around their native Cleveland/Akron grounds. Probably because of that, Pere Ubu’s music has a rhythmic quality that doesn’t flow in the sense to which most rock and all blues-derived musics have accustomed us. When you first hear them, what they’re doing may well sound upside down and backwards, and it may keep on sounding that way. For my money, their best work is their earliest, on the import EP Datapanik in the Year Zero, though if you like that you might want to check out their three albums, The Modern Dance, Dub Housing and New Picnic Time.

Almost certainly the most interesting experiments at what I like to think of as the real fusion music have occurred in New York City. A lot of people credit the late Television and their leader Tom Verlaine in this department, although for my money Verlaine’s guitar playing always sounded more like John Cipollina of the old San Francisco acid-hippie band Quicksilver Messenger Service than anybody else. The first real-deal punk-jazz mix I heard around this town came from the recently disbanded Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and mainly from their lead guitarist Robert Quine, a brilliant musician who has somehow figured out a way to combine what Lou Reed was up to in “I Heard Her Call My Name,” James Williamson’s [guitar] work on Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power, and a heavy dose of the Miles Davis sound that began with On the Corner and grew into something genuinely new.

In the past couple of years there have been almost too many experimental bands in New York to keep track of. The one that’s gotten the most publicity is the Contortions, led by Ayler/James Brown devotee James Chance, who plays what is, according to your taste, either the most godawful or most interesting new sax around. Certainly at its best his playing, primitive as it is, has an edge and fury that’s missing from the recent work of most of the holdover “free” players from the Sixties. Unfortunately recently he’s cut back on his sax work to concentrate on perfecting his James Brown imitation, which isn’t too convincing. He’s released two albums, Buy Contortions and Off-White, under the name James White and the Blacks, the former more interesting than the latter, but the best work by the original Contortions (who were canned last year, owing to certain unfortunate aspects of Chance’s temperament) is still on Brian Eno’s 1978 anthology of Lower Manhattan “no-wave” bands, No New York. And come to think of it, his sax work has a precursor in James Brown, too: that guy who stood up in the middle of the title cut on Brown’s Super Bad album and took that horrible raggedy solo which probably got him fired.

The last time I saw Chance he seemed to have paled (no pun intended) considerably, though his new band had a trombone player who was an absolute motherfucker. Later I found out that this was Joseph Bowie, brother of Lester Bowie, and he has been leading a somewhat more funk than punk group of his own called Defunkt around the New Wave clubs recently. Also more on the jazz side, though he plays some of the same venues, is the much-publicized James “Blood” Ulmer, a musician who obviously has lots of ideas that in my opinion he hasn’t worked out to their fullest yet. (Though maybe that’s the point with all his stuff.)

More interesting than Chance’s current work is Eight-Eyed Spy, led by former Teenage Jesus and the Jerks lead singer/guitarist Lydia Lunch. This time she’s just singing, and her band, which includes some ex-Contortions, is probably the most interesting group in town right now — certainly they’re the closest thing I’ve heard to what Beefheart was up to. You can also hear Lydia singing with some entertainingly Kenton-like charts behind her on her recent album Queen of Siam, which also features several guitar solos by Robert Quine.

I don’t know if Arto Lindsay of D.N.A. and the Lounge Lizards has learned a C chord yet, but I do know that he’s listened to “I Heard Her Call My Name,” and that D.N.A. (also on No New York) carry that particular form of aural sandpaper to new extremes, which is a compliment. The Lounge Lizards, a group also featuring horns, play what they call “fake jazz” — i.e., they don’t really know the changes in the traditional sense, but they maintain a beatniky cool that never comes off camp and their instrumental explorations are interesting and refreshingly free of the oppressive solemnity that mires so many experimental groups.

There are more new bands of this ilk forming as I write these words, and where all this will end up is anybody’s guess. Me, I keep nursing this suspicion that since almost nothing new has been going on in the American popular arts in general for a good while and a nostalgia-addicted nation keeps cannabalizing its own past (cf. Grease etc.), free jazz just might be the next big mass produced, promoted and consumed musical fad. I have distinctly mixed feelings about that, but as far as I’m concerned almost anything is better than the kind of fusion music we’ve been served endless courses of the past few years. And I do know that from Frank Zappa to Pere Ubu is not so vast a step, that experimental music has never been more alive than at the beginning of the Eighties, and that if I were you I’d waste no time in getting the hell out there and checking all this stuff out.

— Written by Lester Bangs, published by Musician Magazine towards the end of 1979, and included in neither Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (edited by Greil Marcus and published by Vintage Books in 1987) nor Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste (edited by John Morthland and published by Anchor Books in 2003).

the Fire

Posted by landis on Jan 14, 2012 in Gigs | 0 comments

When I Get to the Border

Posted by landis on Nov 29, 2011 in Blog, Uncategorized | 4 comments

for Rory Danielle Wilson

I walked out into the kitchen of the trailer we inhabited in the tiny “shore” town of Marmora, NJ. A 12 minute car ride from the beach or so, but near enough to smell the salt air and be annoyed by the gulls. Camp sites like this, mere miles from the bridges to the islands which comprise the Southern New Jersey shore, are budget-friendly options for down-on-their-luck families—they pitch tents, bring in their RV’s, or (like Rory and I did) rent a trailer. The rent was absurdly cheap for the season. Less than $1000 for 4 months inhabitancy meant we spent $250 a month on rent, plus marginal utilities. When I walked out into the kitchen of our tiny, run-down trailer, wreaking of pot smoke and littered with empty beer and wine bottles, she sat on the kitchen floor, naked from the waist down, arms streaked in crimson (a goth-kid’s candy cane). She was holding a large carving knife and had cut up the rug in front of our sink and was taping it to the fridge in patterns that Duchamp would blanch at (…actually, no he wouldn’t have) and smearing the blood from the superficial cuts on her arms to add color to the canvas. She looked up at me, blank, sick, hallow grin on her bulimic face: “Look honey”, she said in an eerie sing-song, “art.”

§

On October 12th of this year, Rory Danielle Wilson—my dear friend, former lover, former fiancee—passed away. As I write this at 2:00 am in New Jersey, we still don’t know why. No indication of drugs. An inconclusive autopsy. Rory, when I knew her best and spent the most time with her, did not lead an easy life. She struggled with severe and frightening eating disorders from a time well before I knew her, she had a penchant for self-mutilation, she was a binge drinker, and after she was brutally sexually assaulted (her attacker never brought to justice), she developed a fondness for freebasing cocaine. I was no angel myself. I really liked dexedrine. And whiskey. And beer. I liked drag racing with my headlights off on dark country roads with my best friend (also named Matt), Camel Light hanging out of my mouth, bottle of Crown Royal in the passenger seat, and a tallboy of Red Dog in the hand not draped on top of the steering wheel. I was either suicidal or on serious amounts of Effexor and Lithium most of our relationship. She cheated on me. Repeatedly (I even walked in on her once). Still, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt closer or more intensely connected to another person. We saved each other’s lives in a way—if in no other way than by scaring the hell out of one another. And in the end, I never trusted anyone the way I could trust her. How could she hurt me more? What more could she take? What more could I give? The idea of having secrets just seemed foolish.  The fact that she’s gone now still doesn’t seem quite real. Nothing really does when I’m aware of her absence. But then, when am I not?

§

She would’ve liked Occupy Wall St. She was never “political” in the sense of being a “political junkie”, but her father (an ardent socialist and a fiercely intelligent man) instilled in her a basic sense of fairness, a fundamental suspicion of social norms and expectations, and he tried (but failed) to prepare her for the harsh reality that life so infrequently rewards either of those traits. That failure is part of the reason she could be so sweet and such easy prey—she genuinely wanted to believe that her sense of fairness and kindess would not be seen as weakness. She never got jaded.

We attended several protests against the impending Iraq War. We petitioned. And did die-ins. And marched in gay pride parades. As she got older, she paid attention to politics more. I guess, when she died the Occupy movement was still somewhat nascent, just starting to lose it’s baby teeth, teetering on the edge of being a “movement” instead of a flash in the pan. Rory was very much of the generation(s) which spawned the Occupy movement. 28 years old, 2 years of college, certification in massage therapy & herbalism, struggling to find consistent, decent paying work, relocating a few times, trying to harness the Internet to develop her own business—always scraping by, always trying some new venture, chasing some new lead, trying to find some way to utilize her training and her talent to help people in the manner she believed did the most good. It so rarely worked out for her. College, bartending, odd jobs, the haven of her aunt’s deli, spas, private clients, her own business…Rory was a transient person. She liked moving around and being active; trying new thinks and challenging herself. But that was fortunate for her. She didn’t have much of a choice.

When I think back on Rory overcoming (as much as one can) her eating disorder, her drug addiction, and her cutting, I don’t think of a damaged, fucked up kid (though, she certainly was that). I also don’t think of the strong, independent, happy, quirky, unfaltering optimist that she became as a result of her recovery. I don’t think of her loving parents or her caring partner. I don’t think of the life she managed to fashion for herself out of the hell that was our late teens and early/mid twenties. I think of how a person who could encompass all of these traumas and triumphs, these calamities and conquests…I wonder how it’s possible. I think of the disillusionment she exhibited and the stubborn insistence that she would not give into it. I think of the depression and how it nearly took us from one another (respectively) and how we both got our backs up and fought it. I think of the myriad ways we were failed by the mental health system, by shrinks and insurance companies, by teachers and administrators, by her friends, her lovers, and her employers. And I think of the people who wonder what the Occupy movement are complaining about. The people who cannot comprehend the violence entailed in a 5’6, 115lb girl being able to think she is too fat and starve herself or surreptitiously sneak into a bathroom and throw up her meager meal so easily, she no longer had to use her fingers to make herself gag, but could do so on command. That she could live in a society which, despite the obvious psychological damage done to her, the marks on her face and arms and hips, would force her to prove she was assaulted. To be unable to prosecute her attacker. To have to turn to drugs because she felt as though no one else would believe her and so it was better to kill what she felt inside of herself rather than understand it. To dedicate herself so fully and so selflessly to a career designed to improve the health and well-being of others and then struggle to find ways to share her new-found balance, grace, and  sense of belief in the world. And in spite of all this, to never give up, to always get back up whenever she let herself get down, to have friends and family to rely on, to demand more out of life, to demand more from authority, to hold the world she lived in to a higher standard, a standard she risked her life and her health to understand and eventually not only lived up to, but surpassed—to demand that her optimism and her sense of belief be justified and to demand of herself that she take active steps to contribute to that end each and every moment she walked forward on the road of her recovery.

Rory isn’t some tragic parable. She’s not an allegory for the disenfranchisement of the 99%. She’s a human being who lived an all too human life of pain, trauma, frustration, transcendence, joy, and possibility. It was a life ended too soon. But she is instructive, in a way; I suppose, yes she can teach us something. Her life was instructive because it was a reminder that no matter how insidious or internalized our oppression, no matter how hegemonic or inexplicable the violence we suffer, no matter how distant those other shores may be, we are always waiting at the border; we only need to take the first step to cross over. Rory managed to cross that border. She managed to overcome the alienation and trauma she lived through. And I don’t mean in the abstract, when she passed on. I mean literally. As she lived and breathed. She made a life for herself. And isn’t that what the Occupy movement is all about?

So as you congregate in the parks and plazas, as you link arms and sing songs, as you take over bridges, shut down traffic, wash the tear spray out of your eyes, bandage your scrapes, dress your bruises, and laugh and kiss (in spite of this) just remember what it is you are trying to make for yourself. A life. Do not be so satisfied as to say “this is my life”; for though it is, “this” may also be “that”; it could be “anything” or “nothing”; because life is not about the living, it’s about the making; it’s about creativity and the freedom to create; it’s about the belief that “this”, “that”, & “anything” are possible.

§

Greedy people take what’s mine

I can leave them all behind

And they can never cross that line

When I get to the border

Saw-bones standin’ at the door

Waiting till I hit the floor

He won’t find me anymore

When I get to the border

§

Mouth agape, I stopped and stared at what she had done. The vacant eyes, the smile, hollow as the bones in a bird’s wing. I looked at her arms, the blood and fabric smearing her thighs and the white tank top she had on. I looked down at her, and stammering, slightly replied, “Th..That’s…that’s great sweetie.” She looked down again and resumed cutting at the rug with the knife, tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth a little. Intent. Dedicated. And at that moment I thought she had lost her mind. I backed away slowly, quietly slipping the sliding door to our bedroom shut. I locked it. I slept on the floor on the farside of the bed, unsure if the violence she inflicted on herself might be turned against me in my sleep. I covered myself completely with a blanket and wept.

Now that she’s gone though, I wonder if that desperate, “pathetic” creative act wasn’t art—if it wasn’t a creative personality struggling with the limitations of their own life; their shortcomings, society’s shortcomings, their fears, neuroses, and unfulfilled wants and needs. I wonder if, in that moment, much like Eliot suggested in Tradition and the Individual Talent, she wasn’t Eliot’s exemplary artist: escaping the torture of her own emotional life through one singular, determined, bold, and uncompromising attempt to create. To invent form. To struggle with content. I wonder if I weren’t stupid for being so frightened that night. Truth be told, I regret not sitting on that floor with her, drawing my own blood and taking down the curtains and cutting them up and joining her in that endeavor. I regret not taking her in my arms and holding her. I miss her terribly every moment of every day.

I guess that is the other thing Rory taught us—never wonder “what if”, only “why not?” and then act accordingly. If only I had, I’d have had the “one more night” with her that the survivors of the dead so often long for. But I can’t have that. I can only honor her memory by being a maker; a creator; an artist; a prostelytizer of the possible.

And by missing her. And loving her.

But then, that’s never changed and never will.

The Minor Arcana Spring Schedule

Posted by landis on Apr 11, 2012 in Blog, News | 0 comments

So our spring schedule (April thru June) is now available for you to peruse and plan your lives around. We hit New Haven, CT in April, play our first show in Philly since January in May, then we hit Brooklyn, Philly again, and Trenton in June. More details regarding our summer schedule will be following shortly, so keep an eye out, will you? If yr not paying attention, who will? More details about all the gigs will be forthcoming, but for now here’s the deets for the New Haven gig since it’s next week!

We’re at The Elm Bar which is located at 372 Elm St. in New Haven. Cover is cheap (like $2 or $3) and we’re playing with The Caveman Go and The West Rockers. Doors are like 9ish and first band is on at around 1oish.

Long time no talk!

Posted by landis on Sep 28, 2011 in Blog, News | 0 comments

Long time no talk. Where the hell have you guys been? I call and call and you just never pick up.

Seriously, though—I’m finally back after tearing through Europe with the World/Infernos and I’m already gearing up to head back out with those whackjobs for a West Coast swing, Hallowmas festivities, and FunFunFun Fest in Austin, TX. And I know, I’ve told you this before but this time—I promise; I’ve changed (if this is starting to cause flashbacks of the last conversation you had with an ex—I apologize for any undue trauma). December and January, we will play shows. I don’t care if I have to drag a piano onto a street corner and play till I get arrested, this is happening. And YOU (yes, you) should be excited about that. Because we are—all of us—excited about seeing you, excited about entertaining you, excited about making you laugh, making you weep, making you dance, making you sing along, making you stand-in-the-back-of-some-dark-bar-with-a-too-tight-cardigan-and-black-thick-rimmed-glasses-with-yr-arms-folded-across-yr-chest-as-you-ironically-and-detachedly-judge-us-because-yr-too-cool-to-have-fun-and-too-lame-to-have-yr-own-band-(-or-have-a-good-band-at-least-)—. I (Matthew) am planning on having the band ready to throw some new material at you during these shows as well and we’re hoping to play throughout the Philly area and MAYBE, just maybe Gomorrah, I mean, New York City and Baltimore (because I read Role Models by John Waters on tour and outside of the vaguely creepy chapter on the Manson Family, it made me want to hang out in Baltimore).

In business news, beyond the Euro zone’s mounting debt crisis and American capitalism’s scorpion-in-the-desert-driven-made-by-the-heat-&-stinging-itself-to-death thing, you can now purchase our record, Emotional Alchemy on CD Baby & at Turtle Studio’s Bandcamp and will soon be able to access it on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, last.fm and other places with an ontologically digital constitution. Stay tuned for that, I will probably append a brief (I swear) note to the news section in order to alert you, my favorite feckless consumers, to the big (that is, wholly predictable) news. [EDIT: it is now available on aforementioned websites! Post reviews if you love me!] About damned time, eh?

Stay tuned for this and details about shows. I swear—everything will be different this time.

—MWL

P. S. — The next record is almost completely written. Isn’t that crazy?

more info

What Do I Like/Hate About Musical Artists and Their Records; and Why Do I Feel That Way?: LIKE, pt. 1—HONEY WATTS (Liz Fullerton)

Posted by landis on May 26, 2011 in Blog, Music, Reviews | 0 comments

As part of a new series I’d like to start analyzing records which I doggedly love or hate, as well as records by friends of mine who I think are wonderful, I offer up this consideration of Liz Fullerton’s project Honey Watts as a first installment…

Full disclosure: I’ve been friends with Liz for a couple years and played on the Honey Watts debut record. I’ve played live with her. And I’m not going to try and evoke the pretense of objectivity here. Liz is a great artist. What I am going to do is tell you why and try to give you a context in musical pop culture history in which to place her. As a synthetic thinker and a cultural genealogist, the more interesting one’s creative lineage, the more interesting they are. This isn’t always the case but…well… here…just keep reading.

Honey Watts self titled debut marks the first studio offering of Philadelphia songwriter Liz Fullerton. Folks may know her due to her involvement with the trip hop project Dutch (featuring Stoupe of Philly rap collective Jedi Mind Tricks as DJ). And you can hear elements of Liz’s background in trip-hop on this record. But in unexpected ways. Because this record is decidedly NOT a trip hop record. What it is, is one of the most startlingly plaintive, atmospheric, and dark (as in earth-toned, not goth) folk/country records you’ll ever hear.

Sonically it hints at PJ Harvey, Under Byen, even Kate Bush just with the inclusion of very subtle and able acoustic guitar. It really blends the warmth and emotive quality of folk and country with avant-pop atmospherics. It’s got the integrity of low-fi but with the high production quality of the aforementioned artists.

It’s sonically like PJ Harvey because it uses similar ambient sounds common to much of her early work. She doesn’t use the processed beats, but a lot of the white noise Jeff generates with the Juno and the icy reverbs remind me of her early stuff.

It reminds me of Under Byen because the arrangements are sparse enough to leave space for the more plaintive/introspective moments in Liz’s voice, yet layered and not-simplistic. Liz’s instrumentation isn’t as varied as Under Byen’s though (lack of mallet percussion, conventional drum sounds).

It’s sonically like Kate Bush because so much of Kate Bush’s 1985 record Hounds of Love was influenced by Peter Gabriel’s early 80’s solo work. Gabriel was aware of the record (Hounds of Love inspired him to use Kate Bush on “Don’t Give Up” on his 1986 record So. Some of the vocal processing, some of the atmospheric/electronic pads and washes are reminiscent. Also, the way Jeff treats the piano reminds me in some ways of a less 80’s sounding version of the piano on certain songs on Hounds of Love (e.g. “Mother Stands for Comfort”). The production’s similarity with Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, and Under Byen is not surprising. Jeff Hiatt (our able producer) is a great admirer of Daniel Lanois and the other great producers of that era of avant-pop (Lillywhite, Eno, Padgham), but he adds a distinctively modern and personal spin on the production. He gives the record depth and air, grain and polish, and then let’s these seemingly conflicting elements engage in dialogue throughout the record which is why the record can be both so unsettling and so comforting.

Another interesting comparison is Coco Rosie. Emerged from the freak folk scene, but pretty early on tended to throw in dark, atmospheric electronics and even (on their last record) hip hop as a part of the production. The two girls who front the band’s voices are also similar to Liz’s (though they lack her richness and resonance) in the sense that they too revel in odd note choices and trilling, melismatic phrasing….melismatic by the way is a great adjective to use when describing some of Liz’s vocal turns. But really, these comparisons are just a way of getting you to become pre-emptively familiar. It’s difficult to really prepare for or describe the instrument that is Liz Fullerton’s voice, however.

Her voice is unique, not quite jazz, not quit country and her songwriting has a certain darkness to it at times and a certain whimsy at others. Some of these unique voices/artists you could reference: a less minimalist—i.e., maximalist—Scout Niblett; Jolie Holland; Beth Gibbons; Kate Bush; Cat Power—historically, the sort of unique approach to phrasing and the unique timbre of her voice might even reference people like Billie Holiday, Karen Dalton and Elizabeth Cotton. The reason I mention Billie Holliday, Elizabeth Cotton, and Karen Dalton is because all three singers took simple melodies (jazz standards, blues, folk/country respectively) and found ways to alter phrasing or throw in an odd note choice and make it work within an established traditional style of vocals. Those three genres (blues, jazz, folk/country) are the three operative touchstones, in a traditional standpoint, of Liz’s record. The 4th is 80’s/90’s avant-pop/trip hop (same style, different name for different decades) a la Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Massive Attack and Portishead.

The Kate Bush comparison however is particularly instructive. The vocal qualities she shares with Kate Bush are the keening quality of her upper register, the way in which her note-shaping and enunciation is used as a stragecially emotive device…the way she draws out a vowel, or muffles a a vowel, or gets a little lazy on a consonant or snaps off a crisp consonant in a quiet moment is all a way of manipulating emotion and Jeff’s treatment of her voice highlights that. BUT, the difference is while Kate Bush’s voice is VERY trebly, Liz’s voice is more resonant. That resonance and soulfulness is what reminds me of Cat Power. Beth Gibbons, the lead singer from Portishead, is another good reference because she and Liz both use the spaciousness of an arrangement (pads, drones, ambient noise) in order to develop motivic ideas thru phrasing. You can turn an odd note choice when you’ve got the sonic room and open harmonic space. Gibbons did that expertly in Portishead. Liz learned from it, I think and brought Bush’s hermeticism and sophistication to it.

Lyrically, the thing Liz does so well is find interesting ways to relate personal experience to the listener without being trapped in the singer/songwriterly “I” (a more annoying persona has yet to be developed in pop music by the way than the courageous, solitary singer/songwriter)—whether it be tragic or joyous—and write songs that clearly reflect that experience. She does so by using very hermetic imagery or very evocative, allusive language. It’s not confessional so much as it is EMOTIVE. The “I” in her lyrics is complicated by the aesthetic and imagistic edifice of the lyrics— “chattering stars”, “palace of owls”, etc. And it’s fascinating because this symbolism and dense imagery is than juxtaposed with stark declarative statements “shut their mouths”, “i don’t live here anymore”, “this day was perfect”. The whole record jumps back and forth, from song to song or within the same song between these two poles.

Lyrically, that sort of subtle hermeticism (intensely personal symbolism and stark imagery) and direct address & it’s diffuse confessionalism reminds me of Kate Bush (who hid her own thoughts about her sexual awakening within a song entitled (& about) “Wuthering Heights”), Joanna Newsom, Coco Rosie, Scout Niblett (who I mentioned earlier…she tells personal tales and wraps them in alchemical language—and there is a sort of alchemy going on in Liz’s lyrics too), and even early Peter Gabriel (I’m thinking of songs like “Here Comes the Flood”). But ultimately, what would her songwriting be without that voice. That voice is what carries these songs off into the ether. Liz knows how to use her voice and use melisma, and ambiguous voice leading, and cryptic melodicism to work as a PART of her lyrics, as an instrument within the song. It is in this way that her lyrics transcend mere poetry and become music themselves—as if transubstantiated by that voice of hers. And sure, Liz’s songs have quirks, and humor. And her voice reflects that. The difference is her voice isn’t just quirky. It’s strong and pure and displays an impeccable sense of pitch awareness, control, and resonance…but her ear for things like phrasing, melody, and note choice as a composer is what makes her voice “quirky” or unique. It’s a matter of aesthetic choice and of feeling, not some ironic hipster pose. Liz’s voice is sincere and you can hear it in every trilled vowel, every elided consonant, and every modal shift in her melody. What’s significant about that is the following: All of these things (Liz’s voice, her compositions, her lyrics) are not a gimmick—they are evidence of the surprising precociousness and unquestioned ability she displays as a composer and melodist.

Scoring Speech & Scoring Song in Michael Cross’ IN FELT TREELING

Posted by landis on Jan 31, 2011 in Blog, poetry review | 0 comments

Michael Cross’ in felt treeling is a series of eclogues in the form of a libretto. The musicality of the language is evident in the internal assonance and the shortness of his lines. It lends itself to song and to melisma, encouraging the reader to embellish and to cut away. The short verses lend themselves to intense structural and formal analysis and aestheticized considerations of image and representation.

The verses sung by the two characters in the libretto, Eumenides and Lavina are scored not only with line breaks, but virgules. The virgules are meant to alert the reader to phrasing which extends beyond the practice of acknowledging line breaks as a sort of added punctuation in poetic performance. This lends itself to a sense of phrasing that reflects the realities of vocal performance and the way the voice—especially in contemporary classical/theatrical music (as libretto hints at)—is not treated as a purely sing-song device, but rather as an instrument functioning within an ensemble of structural, tonal, and aesthetic considerations.

e.

hath added water / to the sea

hath disengaged our sight / it’s teeming brink

and naught our watch / upon your lips

anon / kindly met and tempt

tempt such / purely sharp in fragrance

that we propelled / that those around can see

 

l.

not paper / nor brittle

in that stolid / posturing

in brandish crux/

so brackish / as to splendor

I, helpless / I am

within the chamber / of my mouth

of what became / a remedy

within that even / night

 (Michael Cross, in felt treeling, p. 42, Chax Press 2008)

It is interesting to note the difference between the rhythmic devices and aural consilience in each characters verse. Eumenides’ repetition of “hath”, lends a certain amount of archaic grace to his address. The first two lines are nearly, but not quite, halved by their virgules. Five syllables then three in the first. Six and then four in the second. This sense of the elongation of the line gives the stanza a sense of momentum which is maintained by the even split in the third line (four syllables on each side of the virgule) but the momentum is halted in the fourth line by “anon”, which stands as the lone word on the left side of the virgule. There is a deferment here which is then thematically suggested on the second half of the virgule (“kindly met and tempt”) and the meter is balanced by how nicely the “k’s” glottal stop plays off of the ephemeral “m” and the repeating dentals of the “t”. There is also the strong, short “e” in “met” and “tempt”, a perfectly rhymed assonance which restores the sense of momentum, which is built by the repetition of “tempt” in fifth line. The stanza then opens up into the neatly constructed six syllable line on the right side of the virgule (one 2-syllable word, two 1-syllable words, one 2-syllable word) and ends with the longest line in the stanza, the eleven syllable final line with four syllables followed by the longest syllabic grouping of seven. This sense of peak and valley and the knowing manipulation of momentum in this stanza pushes and pulls the reader much as Eumenides’ himself is pushed and pulled by the temptation and anxiety hinted to in the content of the line (“teeming brink”, “tempt such”, “that we propelled”). It is a stanza about unrealized momentum, a paradoxical inertia which is both “teeming” and “tempting”—replete with possibility and yet somehow also fraught (the “teeming brink” after all, implies an overflowing, yes—but that overflow might result in emptiness). In this sense the formal construction may aid the reader in the same way that the dramatic construction of opera aids the spectator. Even though I don’t understand Italian, I can understand Puccini sung in Italian due to the formal features of the music: its tempo, a major or minor key, the preponderance or absence of dissonance, how lyrical or disjointed the melody may sound, sharp & stabbing staccato or warm & rich legato.

Lavinia’s stanza contains many of these same formal elements (though it is more sparse than Eumenides’). Let us instead focus on the aural qualities of this verse. One of the striking things about Lavina’s verse is the third line. The lacuna after the virgule clearly signifies a longer silence. The sense of silence absolute due to the terminating consonant “x” in “crux”. Still, the lingering “s” sound at the end of crux could—I suppose—be drawn out for effect. The “s” sound is repeated when Lavaina’s voice re-enters in the fourth line and is reinforced by the glottal stop in the “k” in “brackish”. The device is even more accentuated due to the repetition in the words “brandish” and “brackish” themselves. The “-nd” is substituted for “-ck” and the suffix remains the same. Our “s” sounds then return “as to splendor”. The following line “I, helpless / I am” lends itself to dramatic moments in the frequency of pauses combined with the invocation of the lyrical “I”. We are made aware of whose voice is silenced in these pauses, of whose “helpless” voice was absent in the previous lacuna. We are then propelled forward by the longest lines of the stanza before we are halted in the last line, on the right side of the virgule with the single word “night” and its definitive terminating consonant. Lavina’s stanza is more sparse, there are more internal silences and thus more chances for dramatic phrasing. One can imagine the way one might “sing” these pauses. As I mentioned before, drawing out the “s” in crux, putting a little ritardando over the entirety of the line “I, helpless / I am”, and then snapping back a tempo into the next two longer lines—as in Eumenides stanza, we are “propelled” to the final line where an even more dramatic ritard awaits “within that”; setting up the drawn out elongated “e” ’s in “even” and finally climaxing on the “ah” of “night” (if one were singing anyway—best not to sing out of the back of one’s throat as the “aye” in the “i” sound of “night” implies; a nice open “ah” is better), closed off with unambiguous finality in the crisp, consonant “t”.

This is what—as both a musician and poet—I find most beautiful, most fascinating, and so thoroughly impressive about Michael Cross’ book/libretto. He managed to score the speech in such away that the musicality of phrasing not only lends itself to the evocative, that is, implicit suggestiveness which music possesses but also manages to capture the way in which structural inventiveness and formal awareness can inform the musicality not just of lyric poetry, but of song itself. When one sings in a contrapuntal piece, you are functioning within a fugal structure; when Messiaen writes vocal lines in modes of limited transposition (scales which cannot be transposed into every key and thus are limited as to which keys they can be used in within a piece) then that singer, too, is limited in the range they may sing in and, depending on the tonal qualities of the scale (or the lack of tonal qualities) what stylistic or interpretative options are open to them; one may also think of dodecaphonic music (Boulez’s strict serialism to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone rows) as an entire school of composition dedicated to exploring the ways in which structural, formal, and conceptual “limits” inform the performance, style, and interpretation of a piece for a performer and fellow composer far more than the “average” spectator or listener. Cross’ book manages to do the same for poets while still embracing the pastoral and elegiac tradition of lyric poetry—however, like the poet whom he studies (Louis Zukofsky), he has made great strides in helping to re-invent, complicate, and enrich the tradition of lyric poetry and what it can mean outside of the mainstream conception of lyric poetry as writing which is reader friendly and “not difficult” (i.e.—nuanced, subtle, elegant &c.). Michael Cross’ in felt treeling is a brilliant, innovative and experimental contribution to lyric poetry and full of gorgeous pastorale and beautiful, concise writing.

Magic, Mysticism & Politics in Poetry: A Few Thoughts in Response to a Note from a Friend

Posted by landis on Oct 25, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments

The following is an email I composed in response to an email thread that we at the New Philadelphia Poets have been kicking around amongst ourselves for a few days in preparation for an issue of Wheelhouse Magazine we’re curating or something like that:

I wouldn’t advocate squelching magic. And clearly I wouldn’t advocate attempting to stem the ebb and flow of imagination. I also wouldn’t want to say that one person’s prosody was “wrong” or “foolish”. And my rejection of the idea of disciplic succession, as it were, is more about the tendency for people to latch onto their chosen poetic lineage and to narrowly define the limits of the succession. I would count the Black Mountain Poets/San Fran Renaissance as an influence on my work as well. I’d also count Conceptual Poetry/Oulipo. I’d also count Cage and MacLow. And Langpo. And the New York School. And the Metaphysical Poets. And Patti Smith. And Gertrude Stein. And the Objectivists. I think we’re on the same page here, in the sense that latching onto poetic camps single-mindedly is bunk , right? I know, for instance, that while you might see yrself as part of the lineage of Black Mountain you also would never say, “Well, I don’t like John Donne or Jackson MacLow or Laura (Riding) Jackson because they’re not closely associated enough with the Black Mountain lineage.” You would never go about attempting to tear down the work of Language Poetry or Stein or Jim Carroll in order to advance the project of continuing the Black Mountain School’s influence. It’s that sort of rigidity I object to in the idea of disciplic succession. Because it is a choice and it is not destiny. Which is not to say an author’s choices are the first and last word, or that an author’s choices are destiny. I am certainly not obsessed with the individuality of the author. I’m certainly willing to admit something of an author function, a confluence of social forces which explain certain aspects of a writer’s work and I am also a BIG believer in the importance of the reader participating in the construction of a work.

I don’t object to the notion that we are not in control of our own universe (as writers or human beings of any sort). In fact, I’m rather convinced of it. What I am not convinced of is the potential for that lack of control to auger (the pun is deliberate) something potentially benevolent or enriching about that lack of control. I think the point made about Magic meaning different things to different people is quite true. It doesn’t have to be spiritual or superstitious (although I constantly throw salt over my left shoulder while cooking and don’t toast with water, etc…mostly because I LIKE the rituals even if I don’t think they carry meaning, which I’m guessing is also part of why many poets engage in mystical practice, which is fine). I guess my reticence is sort of Nietzschean in nature, in that it is rooted in my suspicion of hierarchy (which necessarily presupposed by the spiritual…sacred/profane, spiritual/physical; it’s not an equal playing field—one is certainly capable of some things the other is not, the primary difference being I have explanations & evidence for the limited capacity of the physical world and no explanations or evidence for the heightened capacities of the mystical world; ie, I’ve never experienced it and I’ve also found that the significance of coincidence or aberration tends to be something attributed only by those who have experienced such coincidences and aberrations, which means while it may be significant to that person and thus, have great impact, importance and REAL MEANING for them, it hardly constitutes evidence). It’s also rooted in my atheism or rather, what I’d say is more like agnosticism with convictions—the convictions being the belief that while the likelihood of there being a god, an afterlife, or any sort of mystical undercurrent to the world is highly unlikely, I also must simultaneously acknowledge my own inherent LACK of gnosis. I acknowledge that there are things I simply cannot know or understand. The difference is I don’t choose to accord some sort of significance to the inexplicable, I don’t try to read the tea leaves of ambiguous circumstance and liminal experience because I LIKE IT. I like the potential for wonder and curiosity, I like ambiguity and liminal experience. I suppose attempting to sift through it in a search for gnosis, or rather, to believe there is an ATTAINABLE gnosis to be had doesn’t interest me personally. What’s more, I’m fairly sure if there is such knowledge of god or of the universe or what have you…if there is such a kind of gnosis I don’t presume to think I could ever be the sort of person to grasp it. I’m not sure that human consciousness is capable of it. Humanity’s capacity to turn even the most beautiful and spiritual ideas into self-interested clusterfucks of violence and exploitation astounds me. Krsna consciousness, or Hare Krsna, a religion I studied extensively as a teen and found SO beautiful and open and free has been used, in some instances to swindle desperate and confused people out of money and material resources. The Gospel of Christ, one of the most astounding testaments on behalf of humankind’s potential for good and beauty, has been an ideology of exclusion and extermination since it’s institutionalization (never mind the fact that the Jesus Christ was not a historical figure). Look at what has been done in the name of Islam. And how the strife between Hindus and Muslims in India has been a fount of conflict and violence. Even Buddhism has been used as a front to maintain monarchical and feudal control.

I think that religion, mysticism and myth are important maps of humanity’s collective experience. In a lot of ways mysticism and religion are sort of like an act of detournement; absorbing the images of the past, its time. When Benjamin wrote in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that each age was endowed with a “weak Messianic power” there’s always been a sort of fundamental misunderstanding. It is not triumphalist, end of history rhetoric only the socialists win. That’s why it’s “weak”. And the Messianism he refers to is fundamentally rooted in the Kabbalah’s sense of Messianism—the Messiah never comes. Derrida addresses this in Specters of Marx as well. In the second footnote to the second chapter “Conjuring—Marxism” Derrida addresses Benjamin’s concept of messianism. He writes:

It’s interesting here, the synchrony between Derrida’s reading of Benjamin and Situationism. In the passage that this footnote is appended to, Derrida is discussing the concept of hegemony, specifically as it regards “critical inheritance”, as he calls it. He writes that “a hegemonic force always seems to be represented by a dominant rhetoric and ideology, whatever may be the conflicts between forces, the principal contradiction or the secondary contradictions, the overdeterminations and relays that may later complicate this schema—and therefore lead us to be suspicious of the simple opposition of dominant and dominated…” (Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 55). What Derrida is also attempting to address in the text is the way in which “mysticism, spectrality” is folded into the logic of capital. Derrida speaks of the provocation of other ghosts, of the multiplicity of this “sociality” as he calls it. There’s always more than one specter, more than one spirit. This mystical experience, this provocation of ghosts not only binds people together in a common experience (the mystical undercurrent), but it binds us together in the socialized relations not of but as commodities are bound together. Producing this “mysticality” (I’m thinking of the “phenomenological conjuring trick” as Derrida calls it…he refers to a passage in the first book of Capital where Marx describes how the table at an auction, seems to dance for the potential customers, how the commodity casts of an aura of exchange-value and mystically transforms itself from a table which can be used into a table which can be bought). “This socius, then, binds all “men” who are first of all experiences of time, existences determined by this relation to time which itself would not be possible without surviving and returning, with that being “out of joint” that dislocates the self-presence of the living present and installs thereby the relation to the other.” (Derrida, p. 154) Derrida is referring to Marx’s labor theory of value when he refers to “men” as experiences of time. People are transformed, mystically, into commodities endowed with use-value in the capitalist system. Derrida goes on to explain how if the “’mystical character’” of the commodity…is born of the ‘social form’”, we must understand this mystical character, this secret. It’s worth, again, quoting him at length since any paraphrase would lack his eloquence:

Derrida’s point (or more precisely, Derrida’s phenomenological distillation of Marx’s point) is that while mysticism or spiritualism (remember, Derrida is essentially discussing Marx’s Saint Max section of The German Ideology, the section on mystical experience, Fourier, and Spirit and Marx’s refutation of Stirners “mystical anarchism”) can offer a transcendence of “spectacle” (Derrida cleverly notes that the market is a “front for all other fronts”), but that this transcendence itself is still a reflection of the social system it is enmeshed in and engendered by. It’s not a question of whether mysticism pre-dates capitalism or vice versa either, it’s a question of whether mysticism is somehow singular in the fact that it has not become a reflection of the capitalist system. In another section of the book, Derrida reminds us that even ghosts must be given a body, that the return to the body (revenant) is what makes the ghost visible, that the transformation of the visible into the invisible the arrival (arrivant) of the ghost IS a revenant, a return to the body. It’s another of Derrida’s characteristic double binds, the arrival/return and the departure (the ghost must have left the body, the departure/arrival of the spirit). I wonder however, is atheism too, a reflection of the capitalist system? One would immediately argue not, since it is fundamentally a rejection of hierarchical organization and foundational principles. Still, it can be said that, ultimately, mysticism is not necessarily a hierarchical organizational principle. It can be an event, a transformation, non-hierarchical, completely subjective and unattached to any religion, faith or school. It can simply be an event. As Derrida would characterize it, the event of an event, the spec(tac)ular event of the event of transformation, the anticipated future event. However, if this future does not include a radical change in the social system which it arrives in, I wonder what the transformation means…is the arrival of a return a transformation at all? It reminds me of a passage by Vaneigem in his The Revolution of Everyday Life:

I’d add another question to Vaneigem’s closing interrogative: how do we know we are not just ghosts who cannot recognize ourselves in the mirror?