Critics Who Know Jack Page 7

  It’s just the dowdiness of the present day voices passing themselves (the voices) off as expert in anything but opinion. The assumed authority of opinion by the nature of being associated to a big paper or online news site or broadcaster? Take public television. PBS in America. Why is it they present stories with an almost humble and low-key tone? Why is it they can have full-length conversations with interviewees and you actually experience insight and learning? How does a TV station do that outside of having to prod “Viewers Like You” and the donations from Bill Gates and the like? A belief perhaps? A belief that “the story” is more import­ant than the “storyteller” (i.e.: supposed broadcast journalist)?

  So Ray, Jeffrey, Judy, Jim and Gwen offer something Miss Dowdy does not. An honest face and a communication of information not intended to make them stars. You never get the feeling that’s their gig. From Miss Dowdy, and others mentioned above, it’s the distinct feeling you get. The star power of having a platform to mouth off from. Steroid punditry and an attempt to kick in on the fame factor associated with the camera/newspaper/radio/internet giving you a place regardless of your level of expertise.

  We all have aesthetic preferences. Even for the news we watch. But why do we have such a bevy of specialty stations where years ago we accepted we only had one or two and went with it? Without the need or want to turn away from what we didn’t like? $$$$ and a supposed taste for each person? The myth of individuality yet we all do the same thing. Turn the TV on, the radio on, read the papers — assume and furthermore borrow intelligence. And I have all these papers now but I don’t have any walls to paint.

  It’s been that way for a while. People using drop-sheets or painters so good they don’t use newspaper. So Miss Dowdy — sure you’re there. But what do you really do? Cynical cut and paste? You can’t be thinking what you offer is as important as Stein or Thomas Merton? Oh, you do. Well let’s see you shave your head and sit in a monastery for sixteen or more years. Then I’ll read you with faith and even charity. Just because I don’t believe you intend anything but intelligence and cleverness. Truth. That’s a whole other station. God knows there are more to come.

  JUNE 31ST, THREE IN THE AFTERNOON

  That was the day the moss started rolling off the rocks in Rattlesnake Park, an escarpment looking over farmland and the small towns east of the city. Year in and year out, the moss had grown there and the scent of musk and humus filled the spring air as hikers and families found their goat steps up the high incline leading to the cliffs.

  The day before had been one of mourning. A kid had made plans to hike with his pal and dad and as they had taken a break they decided to stand on a ledge of rock. It gave way, taking them all to the bottom. No one survived. The mother was horrified and shocked into depression and fear. She called on her extended family and together they prayed for the loss. At church that afternoon, songs were sung and one of her nephews brought his rock band as they did a punk version of Onward, Christian Soldiers. There were grimaces and frowns from the older folk. The minister hadn’t been too keen on the idea but he agreed to let it go when the mother insisted that the nephew was the dead boy’s best friend.

  In the front pews the closest of relatives were gathered and Big Lloyd, the woman’s younger brother, wrestled in his seat as sweat poured down his pink-striped shirt. He had that overweight Beach Boy look. Tanned and well fed, yet burned just a little too much by the summer’s sun. He had a welt on his right cheek. As it was deer fly season and his new home near a creek made evenings musty. As his kids rehearsed their Christian Punk numbers late into the night, Lloyd found it difficult to get in a full night’s sleep. He made his money as a systems analyst for an investment firm, his latest project being a public relations appearance by Freddy Breecher, a financial wizard who attracted a flock through his sermon-inflected seminars. In his mind, Calvin had it right. And Freddy, and his followers made no mistake that Christ wanted it Calvin’s way.

  Jenny, the dead boy’s mom, had contemplated suicide a year before. She had broken from her husband and dragged herself from state to state and into Canada with her kids, her first husband having left her for many other women (though he always said it was one). One night, at wit’s end and in the throes of a deep depression over having caught her second (now deceased) husband in a gay brothel, she went home and swallowed twenty pills. In the midst of the overdose she thought to call a new man she’d met recently. A Greek guy at an arts gathering. She always wanted to write the great novel. She thought if she could just find the right man to support her she would love him in return.

  Jenny loved reading Jung. She saw archetypes in everything and knew French half decently given the ease of travel that the money from her first marriage allowed. The Greek guy, Johnny, had a bipolar cousin. Only a few months back, he’d had to call the police to get his cousin Phillip taken in to protect himself and others. Johnny was recovering from his sense of betraying Phillip when he met Jenny and a night after their first meeting, Johnny had spoken about the difficulty his cousin had faced, and his own shame at having had to turn him in.

  As Minister Cartwell began his sermon, Jenny sat thinking of Johnny and the poem he’d given her by Wallace Stevens titled The Credences of Summer. Jenny loved the airy feel of Stevens’ piece. She felt it said something about her son. The blonde youth and agility and happy glow he carried. She had chosen to read a section of it for the eulogy but the pills she had to take to calm her nerves from the latest bad news left her weary and anxious.

  Small towns are funny. Not in the haha sense but in the sense of gossip and everyone knowing everyone else’s business. Maybe it’s the open land behind the towns that makes them so gossipy as if saying everything and putting everyone in their place is a way of dealing with the forest’s unknown beyond. Maybe people just get bored and turn vicious in their predicament of nothing to do but drive up to the Seven-Eleven and back again from the DVD store? One thing is certain. If you’re from a small town, leave and come back, you are target number one regarding gossip. Given Jenny’s history and the story of her son’s death having spread, it was no surprise she felt anxious and the need to take yet another pill as Minister Cartwell started up the service. This was the day the moss started rolling off the rocks at Rattlesnake Park.

  LADIES WITH DOGS / MEN WITH “FAGS”

  Everyone knows that a fag is an old-fashioned way to say cigarette or smoke in England. All the women have dogs on my street. I have a fire-hydrant on my front lawn. I am not responsible for any of this. In fact, I woke up this morning and it was raining and I had nothing to do with that either, although I remember a few days back it was really hot and I sort of prayed for rain. Not really prayed but hoped it would. But the dogs and fags? Didn’t ask for them but there they are each day on leashes and men smoking cigarettes. They all (except the fire-hydrant) meet down at the park as weekend Friday starts rolling around in spring summer and fall. They stay through the weekend, sitting and texting and barking and smoke-smoking and sometimes there are even weekend athletes playing bad tennis and “short” volleyball. By short I mean . . . well . . . by short I mean that the volleyball players seem to be from a mid-South American country. They don’t really play by the rules as they palm and boot the ball over and have some thirteen players on each side of the court. I never thought volleyball was soccer with two men added, but you aren’t going to get an argument from me. Not on that anyway.

  What I do want to say however is that I wish people who like using parks would not let their dogs pee on the strawberry bushes. I know this is near impossible to avoid but I’d like to see it nonetheless. There are so many things to complain about and this is the one that bothers me the most. I once saw one of the volleyball players go and pee on the strawberries. I don’t really have a complaint about that either. After all, a man is a man and a dog is a dog. Perhaps if the dog played volleyball I would feel different about it but the dogs always seem to want to bite the volleyball players and the ball which makes it diff
icult for the thin-wristed ladies who were just out preening and getting the day’s air into their lungs before they have to stoop and pick up Rover’s number two.

  I’ve seen many a woman in high-heels standing tall over the volleyball men and scolding her pup while the men smudge the sweat on their stern brows. And they never say they are sorry. The dog owner ladies that is. The dogs might but they don’t get a chance as they are yanked back by a dominatrix-type command to heel and walk on with their noses high in the air. Everybody seems to want the higher air. The ladies, the dogs (after pooing), the volley­ball men and even the men with the smokes. Everybody looks up sooner or later.

  The most lovely thing at the park are kites. But the city fathers stopped them. Seems the wires could cut birds or strangle animals. One thing’s important though. If you are looking up watch where you step.

  IT’S YOU WHO LOOK DIFFERENT, NOT THE MIRROR

  (Feng Shui)

  Ha! You don’t believe that, do you? The mirror has been a sign of you for as long as mirrors and you have been in existence. Water. Narcissus. Pretty hair. Male or female. Female or male. Dogs and hippopotami and alligators have a peek too though the latter don’t get that good a view from under the surface. And there are days, modern days, where you can see you reflected at every turn. On a glass-building wall. In reflection off a streetcar or subway door. And the great many mirrors in underground malls that give you that roomy feeling so you don’t get too claustrophobic. This is an age of mirrors. No one goes through a looking glass. There’s no time for that. A reflection back at yourself takes precedence when your date is waiting or your prospective employer sits behind a desk expecting your best.

  If you’ve ever spent time in a cabin in the woods (a la Thoreau) without many mirrors (but one to shave to), have you noticed that you don’t really need a mirror as much? You are happy to look out. See the world beyond self. Listen to the rustle of wind in the trees and watch a leaf course its way to autumn ground. What do you look like at these moments? What do you look like not seeing your reflection back to you in reverse? It is in reverse, you know. Everything in a mirror is. Perhaps that’s why we feel twinned to something in this universe? It starts with you.

  Put then a TV monitor in front of yourself. A glass one. Don’t turn the TV on. Look into it. There is nothing but a kind of out-of-focus, vague you. The minute you turn the monitor on you disappear. You do not enter the monitor as many advertisers would like you to. Having you feel you are now surfing or eating lobster in Cancun like everyone else seems to be. Ah, that lobster and the skinny-dipping. Where is the beer bottle invented that has a mirror on it? But this is not a time for sales and marketing. I’m certain someone will come up with that in time. Mirrors give you pain.

  Mirrors give you pleasure. They give you laughs and tears and good and bad teeth. They give you naked. They give you winter clothes. They give you company yet in a strange way if you are actually standing there alone — you don’t feel quite as alone unless you are holding in your hand a book by Nietzsche or Kant. And even more so if you hold the book up over your head or in front of your face and the writing is backwards. So much for Überman. Superman comics don’t look good in mirrors. Somehow Batman comics do. And The Flash. He moves at the speed of light and can go right through a brick wall or a mirror. What to do with all that speed? Help me Albert! (Einstein!)

  There are concave mirrors pulling your image in. There are convex ones pushing your image out. There are magnified mirrors in case you want even more of yourself. Or if you don’t the dentist does. A good smile can make a mirror worthwhile. There are mirrors smashed and mirrors put back together. Though your image may come back a little shardy, it is still you, perhaps matching how you feel inside. And for further company, there is the triptych mirror. A bit of right, a bit of left and then you square (or oval) right in the centre. If we removed every mirror, would we be forced to run to the nearest lake for a sight of ourselves? Could we trust it when someone says we’re looking good or feel disheartened if someone said we were not looking so hot? How would we prove either?

  The mirror is a sign of you. Alligators and deep water dwellers aside, there’s a howling in the woods. But that’s another story. The image that a sound creates. But for now, just look at you, you, you!

  NEIL

  (The Name is the Same)

  Neil One

  “Hot August night . . .” goes the tune and the deer flies are buzzing to this American song about a revival tent in the Southeast. You feel like you are at the beginning of something. It’s the geography in this Neil Diamond tune from the late ‘60s. He does his ‘Hallelujahs’ and conjures up the crowd arriving at a gospel evening. What you are not sure of is whether the folks gathering — and for that matter — the character’s voice ND has created is African-American or Caucasian.

  We are taken with experience. Sometimes our own. Sometimes those of others that we merely witness and are moved by. In the world of political correctness there are tricky fault lines our attraction to “other” has to navigate. Paul Simon takes heat though includes musicians from South Africa on his landmark mid-80s album Graceland. The music press hounds him and the African-American community feels he has not the authority to go so deeply into a kind of sacred material. Not that there was a revolt by boxers when his ‘60s hit The Boxer came over the airwaves. We did not know whether the boxer in the story was African-American, Latino or Asian-American. We could assume that boxers in general were unlikely to use phrases like “squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises.”

  Still we did gather insight into the experience of being a down-trodden, loser-type boxer looking back on his failed career. How did Simon declare for himself the right to speak/sing on this issue? One will argue that “race” is a different matter. But to tell you the truth I never heard much from the African-American music community (from Motown to Neverland) about Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Hugh Masekela (the latter did have an instrumental hit somewhere along the ‘60s) before Simon’s work.

  Was it an issue of jealousy? That someone in the African-American community didn’t think of it first. Especially on the heels of Mandela being released from prison? Did Simon (an old hand at the music hits game) take advantage of black South Africans and their music? Prior to this we had Dylan Zimmerman singing the story of Joey Gallo, with many a supposed quote from Joey and others. I do not recall any great hoopla from the Italian-American community that a Jewish-American singer was infringing on their experience, rights or “zone.” If anything it felt glory that one of their own was mythologized. So why was Paul Simon demonized? And why weren’t Dylan Bob and Neil Diamond? Envy? Their exploitative versus creative natures? Did Italian-Americans and Asian-Americans jump happily in their seats at Spike Lee’s interpretation of Italian and Asian-Americans in his Do The Right Thing from the same period?

  I remember buying that Neil Diamond album back when the Beatles had just broken up. That wasn’t the reason I bought it. I liked his voice. Was curious about his sound. Though I knew I was listening to a pop-song, not reading Thomas Wolfe or Jack Kerouac. There was appeal enough to try the album out. And that song, Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show, opened the window on joy, belief and enthusiasm for experience, firstly not my own, and secondly, for its ability to “geographize” somewhere I hadn’t been. In short, I became interested in gospel music through the son of a cantor.

  • • •

  Neil Two

  Neil, as in Young, was coming out with Crosby, Stills and Nash close to the same period. Now here was a Neil who sang off key and looked wired to his head zone with a lament and lilt of a man looking at the world from his basement apartment window. Not quite a poet (in the Dylan Bob) sense — (who was?) but a peculiar intensity nonetheless and a one-of-the stoners style and sound. His weirdness as opposed to Neil Diamond’s slickness was distinct. But he never hit me the way Steve Stills (his counterpart) in CSN&Y did. A truly gifted songwriter and vocalist/blues p
layer, Stills wrote the most enervating of the collective’s songs.

  Neil’s essence was his subtlety. Another singer in the back­ground who balanced the pulse and push of Stills’ work. The interior voice to Stills’ expansive and extroverted long-song forms. As Young continues with his sorties with later generation bands such as Pearl Jam and writes a protest CD, there’s more of a country gentleman Spanish-hat feel to him than a relevant creative force. He is not Dylan Bob. Nor John Mellencamp for that matter. No matter how much grunge he conduces from his electric as an overgrown hobbit.

  • • •

  Neil Three

  Of the two, Neil Diamond and Neil Young, I wonder which Neil Neil Armstrong would have played on that flag-waving moon half a century ago? My bets are on Diamond. Star-spangled with Sweet Caroline blasting across space and into our TV monitors. Songs that play between goals and touchdowns matter in America and on the moon.

  CRITICS WHO KNOW JACK

  (Some Words on Rock & Roll Poetry)

  I think it was 1969 or so. I came across a fantastic little book entitled The Poetry of Rock edited by Richard Goldstein, one of those New York Village Voice types who seemed to be in the vanguard of the discussion about the poetic value of the rock song lyric of the day.

  It didn’t hurt his case any, given that you had a decade of Dylan and Beatles albums that took their reference points and image foundations from everything from the stylizations of French symbolist and surrealist traditions and American Beat poetry to suggestions of Edward Lear, the metaphysical poet Thomas Dekker (as in “Sleep Little Wanton — don’t you cry.”) and a slew of other writers that predated the grand and vibrant cultural explosion of the decade.