Critics Who Know Jack Read online

  (Cough — Cough!) “I’m so frantic! I love you guys — that’s awesome! Really?!” And then Keith Richards says: “That won’t bust you! You gotta get higher than that though Roy (Orbison) had a way of gettin’ up there in that pukka kind of way. No it ain’t how come I fell off a tree!”

  The compression of the larynx and the tightening of the nostrils. You can do it with a pinch between your thumb and forefinger or you can take in helium or inhale paint-thinner. They say the moon is loaded with it! He . . . (reference great science journals).

  And along the way on the streetcar a dude is going to the hospital and he’s getting closer to where he has to get off but needs to touch base with home and on his cell phone and goes: “Hee, Hee, I think I’m getting closer . . . ah ya mean I gotta come home ‘cause I gotta get some balloons for da partee — hee hee!” And he kills you with the greatest phrase of surprise — “Holy Crackers!” his high-pitched squeal goes. Then he lets up and gets off and behind you four twenty-somethings from God-Knows-What-Neighbourhood start in with their own pitch and squeal — “My name is Andrew . . . like Jeew . . .” And his lady friend goes: “At least it ain’t Tom Dick and Hairy! Like Hairy-dick! Oh LOL — imagine if they dropped the ‘n’ in the word Clinton (name of a street) and called it Clitoris Street!” And he repeats: “Like I’m not a Jeew. My name is Andrew. Like Jew. Which I know is a derogotree term but it’s my name.” And you feel the urge to turn and do, and ask: ‘What is it that’s derogatory about the word ‘Jew’?” And he goes: “Sorry. Sorry.” And puts his hand on my shoulder and says: “I wanna explain. You see my name is Andrew and I know it’s derogotree to say Jew but that’s my name.” “Your name is Jew?” I ask. And you can smell the thinner on his breath and he squeals as his girlfriend says: “You’re a Jew. At least you’re not Tom Dick and Hairy! Ha ha ha!”

  And you say to yourself, the guy getting to the hospital had major Mensa advantage on these dudes. Maybe the thin Helium-like voice is how you have to pitch the vocal chords given the heavy bass rhythm of the rails and traffic beyond the car?

  What was it with films from the 1930s? “Say, hey! You kids better get back to class — OHHHH!” Was it the sound equipment of the time that pitched the voices of most actors to a squeal-like tone? Maybe it was left over from radio days? The thinner and higher you spoke or sang, the clearer the voice was. Certainly, the discovery of the bass end of the sound spectrum and the use of equalizers were a God-awaited improvement.

  And then visit a gym. Most of the guys with major pectoral and biceps muscles seem to have a thin high voice? Is it too much apical breathing or is it steroids? “Hee! Hee! Sure is hard to lift that weight! Hee! Hee!” He indeed. Why do men’s voices heighten with weightlifting and women’s voices deepen?

  It’s a seagull world and I don’t mean Jonathan Livingston or Chekhov. Voices seem to be growing thinner in the din of contemporary post Valley-girl life.

  HEE! HEE! HEE! Indeed! All those laughing gills and gulls whether we came from sky or sea in that high and ancient dinosaur age? And since we’ve touched on rock & roll, let’s look or listen to a bit of Little Richard and The Bee Gees. The double ‘ees’ is already a hint. We’re talking raw and honest rock & roll in its early days and the manufacture of smaltz from a band that once had a crack at musical integrity with New York Mining Disaster and Massachusetts. What happened to this brother band from Down Under? What’s with the disco phase? Was Robert dating Gloria Gaynor or Frida Payne? Was that high-pitch squealed tone meant to get teenage girls to listen to it? Was Barry Gibb’s silver lamé suit in the video release of Stayin’ Alive an adventure in astro(naut) travel?

  Of course in outer space it must be squeaky on the larynx so there’s a chance, a very outside one, that the boys were meeting David Bowie’s Major Tom. But “Ziggy Stardust”, the Gibb brothers of the disco era, were not. Notice how deep Ziggy’s voice is, in particular on Space Oddity. Notice also how the character Bowie created was developed from a great sense of real theatre, mime and even operatic gesturing. Notice how Ziggy Stardust was a creative force and the Gibbs were practicing the vulgarity of superficial market-driven entertainment a la Las Vegas. And stepping back to an earlier reference, how Little Richard’s high squeals grew organically from the fury of momentum his rhythms necessitated.

  I know you’d like to convince me that taste is taste and there’s no accounting for it. And we all have our own but you can’t tell me that, regardless of the great mega-sales, what the BGs were doing in these productions wasn’t more akin to Dick Clark Bopsicles than, say, Alan Freed, and years later, Bill Graham. I do believe that helium sells. But maybe to the wrong people and it should stay in the hands of real astronauts and pop stars should get very little. But substance abuse has been with us since the beginning. It killed Elvis! Yet at least his lamé suit and vocal chords were gold. Is there a message in this? Yeah, there is. Listen to Al Jolson and if you need a high-pitched voice go for Brian Wilson. And if it makes you feel better, always understand we are all God’s children, even if some of us sing from ball-squeezed nasality.

  • • •

  Then there was glue-sniffing Bobby LeMay standing on the lawyer’s table in the juvenile courtroom and the HEE! HEE! HEE! coming out in rapid-fire succession like the funniest thing on earth was to be fourteen. And being caught for making Shirley MacKenzie pregnant at sixteen. Regardless of his auto-worker father and Bob Dylan’s warning to not try “No Doze,” Bobby got on board with the bullies, hoods and bikers in the neighbourhood and inhaled as much glue from his brother’s airplane model kit as truancy allowed. He HEE HEE HEE’d his way through summer camp, ring hockey, pickup basketball and football on gravel, yet was most polite and dressed in his little grey suit and red tie every Sunday as he approached the altar for communion. It didn’t help that in the back pews the boyhood dudes were sniffing large quantities of the latest mix, or had, just an hour before Mass. Parents always sat in the front. Kids and hoods in the back. And the moment the Reverend of the day would begin his sermon, the HEE HEE HEE’s became most audible.

  One particular Sunday Bobby decided to try Acid and see how far the light would go. “Holy shit! HEE HEE HEE!,” Bobby let out, pointing at the rising stained-glass Christ over the Sanctuary. “Look at the @#%$-ing Light!” Bobby howled and yelped and stood up on his pew. The HEE HEE HEEs were picked up by the boys in the back. “Shit, look at Bobby! He’s @#%$-ing blasted! Look at his Dad! Look at his Dad! His Dad’s gonna kill him!” Startled by Bobby’s outburst, Father Louis turned to view the wonder of Christ ascending. Soon, the girls throughout the congregation started giggling under their mothers’ hat-brims.

  Nobody noticed drunk Archie MacDonald who was usually the victim of incessant gossip and staring each week. Archie smiled silently, happy to see the spectacle unveil like the end of Days of Lent when the purple velvet robes were pulled from the marble statues. As he sat watching Bobby he thought of Sandy Lavoie, the French call-girl he would often visit on Saturday nights. “Yeah, I love that sorta purple. . .,” Archie mumbled to himself. “. . . Hmm, that velvet purple like that dress. . ..,” he thought to himself — “HEE HEE HEE! I wonder. . .,” Archie said in the confounds of his substantial inebriation, “. . . is it time yet to have those Holy Crackers?” And he rubbed his belly with gentle intent.

  So from rock & roll to the gods we see ascending to the women we dream of, there is always assistance from beyond the corporal cage of bones (to half-quote Hamlet in his Shakespeare).

  Bobby? He only made it to eighteen. I don’t know if he went out laughing but he left a lot of it. The Church had the final word. But we, his friends — we have the laughs and tears. And still I can’t hear a Bee Gees song without thinking of the kid in the white shoes who falls off the bridge when trying to impress his pals in Saturday Night Fever. Regardless of my love for country-rock (the counterpoint to the disco era), some of us did manage “Stayin’ Alive.”

  DUDE STOPPING BULLFIGHTS

  He ain’t
Spanish. That’s all I know. He’s a rugby player from England by way of New Zealand by way of Switzerland and he’s polite as Roger Federer. You know, not like John McEnroe kicking the tennis establishment in the teeth. Mr. Diplomacy in action — “Ah c’mon ref! — are you blind?!” But the ref ain’t blind. He’s Dutch by way of The Virgin Islands by way of The Falklands. And he fought a war against the Argentines as a mercenary but was awarded a Star of Honour for his capture of Latin-blooded soldiers which remind him of when his father (and his grandfather) killed some I-talyuns in big WW2.

  No this guy stopping bullfights ain’t Spanish. He hardly even speaks the language. But his girlfriend does. She’s been spending the better part of her life running away from the paella and moustached men in dark clothes. Didn’t mind Mexico so much because there she felt superior in that colonial way. The way her daddy did when he said: “The Mexicans don’t pronounce things like us. They are part Indian. Not pure-blooded like us!” Nobody as full of it as the denier of their background in their concept of identity. And of those there are many. Yes, it is nasty to put a bull through the torture of meeting picadors and then the master torero but should not one clean his own house before cleaning others? For the answer to this we go to one Donald Rumsfeld. He of the quote: “. . . the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

  So why stop the bullfights? Why does a non-Spaniard want to stop a bullfight? Is it really a bullfight he wants to stop or is it about his love for a young señorita he met years ago who gave him the oomph to want to be something? And she told him she would leave him if he didn’t amount to something and he couldn’t let her go?

  So she had a plan. She would help him with his Spanish and introduce him to people she knew back home. Having worked as a spy, she knew her way around. Knew how to use others’ talents or evoke their emotions for her purposes. Lloyd was perfect. A perfect find for her. So how could she get this simple Englishman to do her work? Bring down the bullfighting establishment? But at a certain point everything became very plodding. Like horses stuck in the mud. And he and she, an old cart that even oxen had abandoned. Someone else had to take over the narrative and that someone else could have been anybody (as e.e. cummings once said).

  Yet, as the story goes, let’s pretend for a moment you were asked to turn off your TV and finish this story. You are surprised. You say: Why me? How could I write such a story given that I don’t even write except emails and go online to buy the latest garden accessories? A voice tells you you can do it though. Even if the last time you had anything to do with writing was on how to write greeting cards with references to flowers and sunshine and little bunny rabbits. In fact, at the time you were asked to sit on a locals arts jury to determine the winner of a writing prize. You were best friends with the donor of the award and did little theatre pieces for old folks and children. And, most importantly, you had been to Spain to see a bullfight!

  Yes, you were there when the bull got stuck with the final puncture of the vein. You had gone because you loved Spain and its wine and dark-skinned men. The great Latin lovers of the screen like Ricardo Montalban and Desi Arnaz. To you, it didn’t matter that Desi was from Cuba and Ricardo from Mexico. They were from the same place. The heat of your desire. The deep desire to run away from your middle-class husband and his suffering day-in day-out life as an accountant with an international client base. Through him though you were able to get a discount on your flight and accommodations. And so, the day you arrived you walked the streets of downtown Madrid in awe and held on to your purse for you had always been told that there were pickpockets and thieves at every corner. So you wore a disguise. You put on a black Cordova hat and found a red cape. Pulled out your long black leather autumn boots and hung a pink scarf around your neck just high enough to cover your mouth and lips.

  As you conjured up the calm it took to be so far away from your suburban North American home, you worked so many details with your eyes that you began to get dizzy, and in the first block you walked, you fainted. This was not your plan but it worked out well in the end because a gentleman in white found you splayed on the sidewalk and brought you a glass of water, then carried you to a cab and to a local hospital. As you recovered that evening he came around to visit your hotel with tickets to the next day’s bullfight. You were flattered and happy to go but the gore was too much for you and again, you fainted. The gentleman in white, Rodriguez, found himself taking you to the hospital once more. Is this how I am going to spend my Spanish vacation?, you wondered as you lay in the hospital bed.

  On a chair in the corner hung your disguise from the night before. You chose to wear those clothes to the bullfight and now you looked at them as though they were a curse. You remembered the Magic Show Evening at your son’s local high school and laughed thinking how he ended up enrolling in Engineering at university. He continued to do magic tricks on weekends and the skill with which he moved his fingers over cards and flowers and rabbits and hats without a wand was exceptional. Greatness was not something you thought of or wished for your son. He chose security and you concurred. His father though wanted him to study acting and performance. Having been limited to the tedium of accounting, he projected his hopes for something more dynamic and vital for his son.

  This was the part of your life known to some. The days of your disguise were known to none. The bullfights never happened and neither did you ever visit Spain. The writer needed a way out and you were working on a farm that summer. You never had a son and you almost had a husband and you were reading a travel book on Spain in the farm owner’s small kitchen library. He had never been to Spain either but did have to stop a bull fight once when he brought in a new cow two farm bulls took a shine to. You were looking out your window and the farmer seemed to fall over holding his chest as he tried to scare the bulls off each other. You put on your alpaca poncho and ran out to see what had occurred and in the process frightened the bulls off into their own sections of the field. Then you called the hospital and, as you waited for the farm owner to recover, watched a story on public television about the great matadors of Spain. The narrator said at program’s end that bullfighting was a dying art. You didn’t believe that but, as you turned the TV off, you thought how really dreamy and good looking matadors were.

  EDITORS

  (When you don’t want to get something done, ask someone’s opinion.)

  That’s not always the case. But in most instances editors are writers themselves or critics who aspired once to be writers and assumed their comfort in “assisting” in the creation of other writers’ works. There are editors like someone you know and trust maybe like a brother or a sister or even lover. Then there are those who work in the “profession” be it fiction, poetry or other. There are newspaper editors too.

  The greatest experience a writer can have with an editor is having one who doesn’t get in your way or helps open the way to your vision. A writer doesn’t always know where he or she is going with their work and most like it that way to a certain point. I’ve had editors that want to change key aspects to a work that suggest I should write a whole other book than the one I may be working on at a given time. This advice comes often from a “marketing” perspective. I.e.: “Nobody buys poetry or fiction or non-fiction like that (meaning mine). You should write a memoir that has some family dysfunction or crisis in it — or at least be famous like Keith Richards or Elizabeth Taylor or someone who has lived a life most would recognize.”

  This of course flies in the face of quality of work and literary breakthroughs in style and aesthetics. This of course doesn’t suggest that all editors aren’t looking for quality to sell. It does however say that the editor or publisher via the editor has some substantial control on what is deemed marketable. Some come out with that clearly. Others can get up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning and in their disgruntled-ness or lack of understanding of the writer’s stylistics, put their two cents and tastes ahead of what the writer is saying or trying to say.
r />   You might think: Well, that’s the way the market is. Or editors are so — Suck it up! Sucking it up or the suggestion that you live with the harness is half the point of this short piece. Sucking it up means “be tough” — grow thicker skin — let it go whenever someone doesn’t do their job well — take the hard knocks that result — be insulted and turn the other cheek, etc. A point then about what I call loss of purpose, or dysfunction by “attrition”, or default. Attrition in this case is when you don’t hear back from a publisher or someone whose attention you are trying to get for your work. The publisher just doesn’t respond. Some would even call this type of attrition “conflict resolution” but it is really “conflict avoidance” because editors “are too busy” to respond to work they can’t bend to “their” liking. Some also call this “chickening out!”

  Publishers have the means (power) to expose your work in the marketplace. And by marketplace I ain’t talkin’ bananas. I’ve heard one editor call this “the slow death technique.” The idea behind it (or should I say method) is to correspond slightly to begin with then pull back. This establishes the power. All editors and publishers, record producers and media people in charge like to be pursued. The power lies in what people want from you. But if you are one of the above and don’t want what an artist (in any of the mediums) has to give you, you do the slow death and let them gnarl in your non-responsiveness. The way to clear the decks on all this is to go independent.