Publisher’s Note: These street rants appeared in New York City during the last eleven weeks of 1995. Written mainly in pen and ink, they were xeroxed and pasted as 8½” × 11” sheets upon postal kiosks, vending machines, electrical posts, dumpsters, community bulletin boards, subway pillars, fire boxes, salt trucks, ambulette bumpers, and roadblocks.
Pavement, Part One
When Marie says she loves me I know she does—and yet I wonder, how can she? Someone so good love something like me? How? By forgetting the importance of character, integrity, civility? By impossibly lowering her standards? By sidestepping that intuition which tells her, again and again in pounding refrains—wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong? Has she lost all sense of smell? Is it the love that a chime tower bears for the dead or a mountaineer for thin air; is it the love each seismologist carries for temblors or a youth fascinated with a Glock pistol? There is only one thing I love anymore—it is not you or me or her but a band you don’t even know—but how I love them, with a closet’s shadowy purpose and depth. The band is Pavement and only I know them—you may own all their CDS but so what they are mine alone and I am theirs all theirs, they do not write for you as much as evoke to me (they do not even know you, my friends). I saw them give the most astonishing concert when least expected—they did it for me!—and they hauled their own equipment and tuned their own instruments and listened attentively to one another closely and finished most everything they started. (Note that I gave up making music myself so they’d have more room to maneuver about onstage!) She says she loves me what does she (who is not Pavement) know of love—she was not tasty enough to make me retire—she does not “captivate the senses like a ginger ale rain.” [Pop song musical words? Yes, yes, I know! The dreams she details each morning sound doubtless no more dry and dull, and dull and dry, and stupid stupid stupid, to me than the rock lyrics which I, in turn, quote out of context to her. I must learn to be better! I know!] She did not issue the sprawling challenge of Wowee Zowee as a follow-up to the tight-knit pop-crammed Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, she does not haul her own equipment or tune her own instrument—where may I set down this bulky item she terms “love.” (I would so like to!)
I hereby suggest the American President of the United States and all them U.S. trade reps haul Pavement to the trade talks. They are our grandest export, our finest product, infusible in hot weather, our best materials. Pavement should be carried on our shoulders and emblazoned on our backs and ushered unto waiting planes at the last minute and with an almost effete, deliberate importance, their bellies bloated with our very best meats.
Pavement must be not dismissed as sell-outs, hear me now! Nor shall they ever be taken for granted, never! They might seem to you lazy and overrated but they work very, very hard and are very, very good.
That they have not become household words is testament alone to their genius for craftily sidestepping the Romanovs (but certainly I do recall “pavement” as a household word, I remember hearing it offhandedly employed many times in less enlightened circumstances).
Pavement (we clamor) and once more: “pavement.” Listen how they mature LP to LP—if Hitler had ever learned of their existence he would’ve ordered Pavement to be kidnapped and called them his “ultimate secret weapon” and brought the world to its knees—instead they are ours and thank God for that!
Untitled
It is always imprecise, dreadful, wrong, evil and stupid and unjust and filled with sin to compare literature to music and quote one in the hopes of arguing the other but yet here I am to do it. (Watch Me Now!)
Marina Tsvetaeva, when you hanged yourself at the Brodelshchikov’s house nobody noticed (it was Russia, late ’41, with Nazi invaders a few miles off). The landlady who discovered your body said you were “round-shouldered, skinny, grey-haired, like a witch of some sort. Not at all attractive.” Pardon her! She did not know, watching your unsteady cadaver creak there to and fro on its heavy rope, that she was describing one of Russia’s greatest poets. When I saw (late ’94) you teeny-tiny singer Mary Timony sing before your band Helium you too were skinny and like some sort of dead witch withdrawing right before us, performing less than is possible, nobody could be so stiff and still but some corpse, your eyes contained nothing, you remained flat, unaffected. Not at all attractive. I grew worried. Of all of today’s tired bands of noise that nobody notices, why should your particular one compel me so utterly? You looked to be dying from something (love?). You appeared as if you might set down the guitar, step backstage, kick out a chair, and dangle to your death. Teeny-tiny Timony (I wanted to shout): no!
Marina Tsvataeva, Mary Timony: you bear identical initials, the same bite and disinterest in theatrical falsity, the same self-destructive stubbornness. Marina, you hailed a revolution which then subsumed and wrecked you, and proud haunted Mary could easily do the same—witness Helium’s first release (Pirate Prude; love leads to betrayal, prostitution leads to vampirism). “Careful your pretty face,” runs the refrain of one song which Marina could have composed: “Your love is like small change.”
In here there is no comfort in realizing that it’s a man’s world because although men have so thoroughly botched it yet still too few women will acknowledge it or step to the fore. “I shall walk with this bitterness for years across mountains or town squares equally, I’ll walk on souls and on hands without shuddering.” When beauty at last flees, it leaves one as a ravaged remnant to recite things that sound written on the back of one’s hand in a pique, in a smelly dark closet, with magic marker: “I may be very small but you’ll never lose me at all.” Blood tastes like wine, love makes you money, hearts are devoured candies or disengaged lockets. In this sick sad and yet wonderful world airwaves criss-crossing the globe with sorcery spells and mean wishes it is always imprecise, dreadful, wrong, evil and stupid and unjust and filled with sin to compare literature to music and quote one in the hopes of arguing the other but yet here I have done it (watch me now).
Kill The Movies
You heard me right! Now that we have hounded the networks off the air and tossed each TV off each motel balcony and now too that we have made the politicians reveal their most true, least flattering colors (their intense opposition to any culture) which displays them at a square disadvantage in a stuck-up stance of unenviable weakness as insipid cowards stuck in broke-down cars, now that we have almost wrested our lives back from those who might want it otherwise, let us finally collect ourselves calmly to finish the task at hand: and let us at last turn to the big screen, undisguised fervor glimmering from our held-out knives, and see us now race down the popcorn-dirtied aisles to cut those overpaid models right out of there, hack those bigheaded hipster snots and their glamorously large thirty-foot Hollywood faces from the projection screen, and like some circle of soiled fabric simply roll them up, make them long trumpeting tubes in our hands, which we could raise to our nothing mouths to amplify our puny voices (and thusly steal back the recognition they deny us) as we broadcast to the world: Kill the Movies and Set Yourselves Free. We can be quenched no more by your poisoned milk. Give to us time and money instead of demanding $8.50 to spend two hours with you, no one is worth that kind of dough (except anyone who is not you). Ah, the life I have expended wastefully in dead-dark cinema houses waiting for something to happen, in that escape-land I once so adored, and which once adored us for that matter. But no more!
Bring Me the (Fat) Head of Fred Fatzer
Know that I once was a bigger fan of Freedy Johnston than any of you, and that I felt assured—in hearing his soaring Can You Fly? second record album—that we had a good thing on our hands yet now I must reverse myself as I command unto you now: Bring me his bored bald head with a fat fork stuck in the forehead, and let us decant into it the heady broth of his betrayals, and drink! Yes, Pinochet and CIA slaughtered the modern socialist movement and we forgave them; yes, LBJ betrayed his pledge to the Good Society and we shrugged it off, yes, Nixon snapped the constitution like a dry stick over one knee and he was pardoned—still This Must Not Be Forgiven!
Freedy now is not even reminiscent of who he used to be, gone is his voice, gone is his inner life, gone is his subtle poetry, gone is him looking at you, hoping you like him. Now he wears leisure suits! Hear him now praise famous crap! Now he cynically croons “Autumn in New York” everytime I see him lately, and what—is this funny to you, Fathead?
Your name was once Fred Fatzer—hear that, world?!—and you were once six hundred pounds with no ego—where have you gone, fat Freddie friend? I liked you better then. Now you are thin with a five ton ego and an embarrassing inability to convey complicated phrasing. Oh Mr. Big Star, look at yourself. When next I pass you on the street Freedy I will bump you (I promise!) into high voltage wires—there must be some way out of here! It would be a mercy killing for you are like Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest after the operation and your old self would be disgusted at this alien now passing itself off as “Freedy Johnston world-famous Elektra Recording Artist.”
I would crawl through glass to claw your eyes.
I would offer a hug if my suit were explosive.
I would send you poisoned orchids
(if I knew you would sniff of them deliciously).
Your last release stunk so bad I couldn’t even finish it—damn you, Mistah Freedy you maked a liah outta me and done broke my heart! To even sing this “Disappointed Man”—how dare you! You have disappointed me (for that last time!) and now you dare to sing-song of it?
Remember who you were if you want to live, Mr. Fred Fatzer, remember and make good on your promise—or else!
Yo La Tengo is Good to Eat
Who dares to suggest unto me that Yo La Tengo are not great like Chinese food?
Can you not understand?
Chinese food, so reliable no matter what is ordered, whether you’re thinking budget or palate, whether you’re sitting on naugahyde or at a cloth-covered table: the steam off rice rising, tea and cookies, the exquisite exotic, the comforting otherness, garlic and ginger—our home? Why, it’s in every Chinese restauarant anywhere, that’s where. And this, like them our Yo Las, our friends in feedback or in soft tones, who perhaps cannot do everything (make that one clear: Yo La Tengo can do little with their voices and appear incapable of hitting consonants—they are not always straightforward or tender enough—they wear their damn pants too slippery low on their hips and slacker disrepair adorns their most every move—yet there is Chinese food too at times which falls short arriving half-cooked or grease-smothered yet always reassuring and kind) but I defy you to find another Yo La: their two “perfect” record albums (Fakebook and Painful) are more than most any band ever ever could . . .
Listen to “Drug Test” (the greatest something masterpiece).
Listen to Ira figure out distortion and sweetly worked moods.
Listen to Georgia when they heft the song onto her back and make her carry the whole damn thing . . .
So remember: when the waiter says “What’ll it be—chow fun or lo mein?” always order “Yo La Tengo,” the most distinctive vodka in the world.
O! Frank O’Hara! It may be silly to call across to you so cold in the casket you inhabit but I am hopeful you are not for reals dead but rather that was you who was spotted beaming in the colored jewels of Nike Town, penning ad copy while smushed against a candy shoppe window and taking the sorrow sympathetically, hard but happy. Where have you been all my life, frank one? (Dead, is the answer.) Have I always had you but not got you till now? O!Hara (as in Frank) how I wish you had been there pressed against me in those cheerless years of yore, with sugar hard-pressed to find and days airtight and lead-lined as a safe and skies grey as a fort and hope like some bon-bon in wartime which we cherished and brought out to polish but never dared to consume—
Sing to me of deep-fried airplane wings, sing!
Oh! Frank OH!ara! Now you are my brother, it seems. Will you phone me up soon? I am listed in the city directory. You, the saint of accidents yet robbed from us by the biggest accident of all, if you had only lived—if you had lived, how I would hug you and gin drink with you.
Oh, Frank O’Hara, your bones were pulverized to make ink for this pen and others similar to it and thank you.
Dear History
You are no quaintly fickle aunt but a greasy dunderhead lavished with too much brandy diplomacy and festooned with honorary degrees, stretch limos there to pick you up and drop you off, private cellulars and wine cellars and silk collars at your instant disposal—how might we instantly dispose of you, though, Mister History? Killing you is one thing (a cinch! consider it done!) but disposal of the body (a mess). One day we will all be dead and what sort of lives will it be said we led, steered through the hopeless Radio Free Afternoons with bowlfuls of medicating Rolos and pretzels, compromised hourly by today’s etiquette of evil, the last boss I ever expected to obey, taking luxury abundant for granted, overstuffing the aisles in every pop star’s superstore, piggish and kingly lives while in other parts peasants were being marched into fields and shot, left to whisper final wishes at the Lord’s retreating back—are you even listening, History?
The MJ-97 wanders loose amongst us! He is making moves on Ms. Madonna—she has leaked to the tabloids her desire for an heiress, a youthful replicant to further besmirch the family name. Ah, History, your bodyguards and silver canes are no match for the Jack of Hearts.
It is time you tottered off to bed, my friend, with a baggie of barbiturates into some garage filled full with carbon monoxide—you are forgetful of your responsibilities, old man, and have let us off too too easy. That not one of us is conversant in the Lincoln Brigade or the WWI vets robbed of benefits by Doug MacArthur, that communism has gone down as a failure—why not also Love, old bastard? Love too hurts and disappoints, why not as well murder it, foolish History? But no—arbitrarily you steal from us communism and leave us Love! ARRRRRRGGGHHH!
I think it best that you should let me have your job now, History. You are weary and near-blind (it has been a long century, we sympathize) and now ruddier blood must be permitted to flow down your hallowed halls, if you please.
Please contact me soon.
The Other Greatest Record Album of the ’80s
When from the Nineteen Hundred and Eighties I fell as might a safe from a bank, awakening as an inmate released, my feet in someone else’s shoes, it was to taste Reagan on the tongue like a breathmint gone sour, everything at once beckoning and mocking me, in America.
We concluded that decade by clobbering a country called Panama, in an invasion nobody much remembers, because the leader called us names, and when that leader was eventually found cowering in the Pope’s Palace the army pummeled the place with punk rock songs, which also nobody much remembers, until the leader materialized. I liked punk rock that called people names and so did the Mekons, yet oddly this news did not cheer us.
I spent my time then alone within windows painted red-then-blue by the blinky-blink of a bowling alley’s neon in that uncommonly clean city where jobs could not be had and no beer was cheap, and when I finally made a good friend its name was The Mekons Rock and Roll, a cassette recording which automatically flipped over and over all by its lonesome, and I made it to the present thanks to that friend!
TV today bears relentless testimonials about how “Rock and Roll Saved My Life” but in this instance The Mekons Rock and Roll saved my life, and that makes some considerable difference. Because Mekon lives had not turned out as expected, and neither had punk rock, and neither had I, and so they built this loyal friend, this ultra-fine record album, out of disappointments and disputed memories, and each song gets wilder and madder than the last, though you cannot listen without weeping, and rock and roll (itself) inhabits every track, is mentioned by name a whole lot, as a character and a curse, and again and again you meet its promise and betrayals.
And now my loyal friend is still here beside me, still going and going and then flipping over and over now that I have emerged barreling from beneath ground like some train. If you see the Mekons, say hello. And when you get close to them, kiss them once. For me.
Son Volt Trace (Warner Bros.; CD, Cass)
I’ve come to feel that I was once a heroin addict, though in public I pretended I wasn’t by drinking vodka straight and calling my subsequently numb self satisfied even though I wasn’t—not really—not satisfied—without the heroin to help me past—and one time I believe I was broke, I really needed it, I had no vodka, no money, and I comforted myself with the thought that we’re all addicts, all of us (addicted to something) though not all of us really just those of us addicted to skag, this was my comforting thought as I cruised bodegas hitting up suckers and friends for change and getting nowhere so eventually I held someone up—I’m ashamed but I needed five more dollars and some comfort and had no more friends but I had David’s bowie knife—and it was a mother pushing a stroller which genuinely upset me (but I was a junkie what did I really care, really) her eyes scared to death and baby screaming but I got my five dollars (plus!) and bought that disgusting skag and went home afterwards walking like a whisper through the unloosed dawn and pink high-boughed sycamores (barely able to walk) and I laid in bed with the ocean rolling over my face, waves crashing on my head, down and withdrawing, the ocean inhaling and exhaling and so on—and I thought how life was actually okay in fact—quite okay, quite okay I murmured to myself underneath the sea—and this is the junkie hope that is called up when I hear Son Volt over the loudspeaker at the laundromat, and perhaps you must experience it (don’t do me any favors).
Untitled
Let us now sing (as public men) of private things: how we buck and how we groan, and climax yes when told we’re tyrants (mess with us, such happiness! yes and yes! ah yes! we’re tyrants!). And let the happy pictures of toy-filled folks lead us to trust our inescapable selves, embraced in baseness while yet looking heavenward to pornographic priestesses aloft in their cathode-ray holiness. So tiny are we beneath this eternal celebrity balloon parade and our frantic gesticulations go unnoticed. . . . Let us now praise hot dogs and finger pies and stuffs which garner sneers! We are encouraged to believe we are above simple joys, naughty joys, camden joys—Ah! but the shivery feel of them coins of temptation, the comforting rankness of freshly chloroxed floors!
The only films that should be allowed anymore are those which can be caught in small unplotted segments and left for us in our minds to finish, those which inspire self-gratifications and cost just a quarter a minute, naked bodies watched and honestly excited, prancing on that small blue electric screen which goes at all hours—not just teasing but always always delivering (unlike the Romanovs who tease us but never give us so much as a drop) all the way through the abandoned dusk and the longing lunches, their video-ed bodies relentlessly pushed to places none but Boom-Boom Mancini can fathom, points which can no longer be called “acting”: screaming, ecstatic, drunk with it gleefully, visibly wide-eyed to find uncharted terrains inside here, within the frothing sea of their own passion, and the sounds of it, the sights of it, even them ordinary pleasures of being taken advantage of, or of taking advantage of someone who so desires it [small wonder that with each passing day we live less and less like the previous generations].
DO NOT FEAR US!
Untitled
As I do not respect movie films anymore I want it known that I too have many movie film thoughts (last count: 947!) to give away free. Please do me common courtesy of bringing up to famous cinematic personalities my thoughts for movie films about plight of Spanish Civil War’s Lincoln Brigade in which two American brothers (one fierce, other wary) protect one another from world’s hypocrisies, or my movie film set in smoggy gross future when populations have grown so dense that murders are roundly applauded which tells how accolades of world pursue particularly sadistic serial killer (Keifer Sutherland) so that it might pay homage to his genius, another sports comedy/cop thriller (Kuffs and Ducks) in which amateur hockey team of off-duty police folks bring in well-intentioned but oafish ringer for big match against crosstown rival but discover wacky hi-jinx when they can’t find cop job safe enough for ringer, yet another Merchant-Ivory character tale which dramatizes nobly mannered balloon contest of early 1800s when proud determined gentlemen manned primitive floaters to see “who coulde sail highest” (all emerged either dead deaf deranged or distraught), and one (Dirty Dozen and Commando) in which beautiful but bedraggled Italian peasant refugee Natasha Richardson trapped between German and Allied lines in basement of Benedictine monastery in Monte Cassino undergoes blissful epiphany with passionate mute monk Brad Pitt amongst ruinous bombing raid of Valentine’s Day, 1944. I have million of them like how about Mr. Bob Dylan glibly played by Luke Perry who gives us under-reported tensions and furies of Mr. Bob Dylan waiting out 1960s writing Self Portrait and recording basic tracks for his eponymous album of covers or you’d prefer maybe terrifying flick (Invasion U.S.A. and Red Dawn) in which inoculation designed to counteract space-borne allergy brought to earth by massive meteorite has unintended side-effect of turning whole cities into hardcore fans of pretentious wanna-be Jim Morrison pompous poseurs Dead Can Dance, who suddenly emerge to world domination when—during supposedly “mock” duel conducted mostly in virtual reality—band slays Bill Gates (Matthew Broderick), but also keep in mind ecologically minded animated classic (Hello Kitty and Jurassic Park) in which one rabbit, handsomer than rest, leads friends, relatives, and other small furry things to freedom by retracing what once [before devastating industrial accidents of 1997] used to be “mighty” Mississippi river, and another movie film entitled The Bubblicious Movie Film (computer-animated spectacle) in which all the many gum flavors use their voice-over’d idiosyncrasies and distinct superpowers to defend the galaxy from a proliferation of inferior Made-in-Korea candies and Pataki and a washed-up forgotten playwright Jacques Levy played glibly by Luke Perry tirelessly seeking to revive his long-abandoned friendship with Bob Dylan (30th Anniversary Concert and The Buddy Holly Story) in efforts to kindle anew the songwriting collaboration which rang down Desire on unsuspecting world while Alicia Silverstone (in arty black-and-white role as Princeton student whom Einstein always secretly adored) calmly completes Unified Field Theory in nothing but brassiere and panties and stepping outside boards hovering spacecraft and portals into seventeenth dimension with heavenly whoosh! There’s more: that kid with that leukemia and his gently wise-cracking grandfather (Jurassic Park and On Golden Pond) searching to uncover truth about their haunted grand piano which was said to have once been played by Rachmaninoff and the true story from my own experience how one day great gobs of people were hit with a debilitation like amnesia (Jurassic Park and Being There), each day it spread until we were a planet of strangers who remembered no movie films and just then a great winged messenger dramatically descended from the heavens to liberate our vacated souls. These provide just a small sampling from my box of hits-to-be, I tell you all—shoot these movie films please and there will be others I’ll donate to you when the time comes! You’re welcome, Hollywood.
Untitled
Down below me the world tries to appear ecstatic but nobody trusts it, nothing can convince us, neither the sun burning high in the branches nor the lovers scrunched together kicking through leafy piles, neither is true, not Justina wrapped in her loud colors, not the children prancing in the hydrant, not the athletes in their devotional ways, none of this could be! Which is not to say I am happier than I have ever been (I am) but neither so far from despair. You wonder sometimes, can I ever get enough, when one drug has barely concluded and already you have ordered three more, when there’s no celebrity death you do not envy, when the waiters move to take away your empty plate of sadness, and you wave them off—“Not finished yet, pal!”—when falling-to-bits gargoyles high on the facade close up your throat and drag tears down your cheeks—make the world how I want it, I cry, dammit! I once said I loved Kurt Cobain then he forgot how I loved him and stopped his own life—so be careful who I claim to love next for they are doomed! And this is why I worry for today I think I love you all, you ridiculous people, who are so good to me.
“Be My Baby” by the Ronettes
“Oh, won’t you,” she said, “be my baby,” said it frequently and with such ambulance urgency I was captivated—capsized—no doubt about it, this crazy sandwich of a girl was ordered up especially for me. Ah, the ways we found to speak our love, those bawdy afternoons, bodies tasting of maple syrup, she and I, blithely dancing between the April raindrops with policemen nipping at our merry springtime heels, tea cups and forklifts raining down upon us. [My girlfriend is so great she lets me write on walls. My girlfriend is so great!] She confessed she was unhappily betrothed to an enigmatic enfant terrible with a penchant for pistols and sunglasses. (He was famous.) Every time he snapped his fingers one-two-three she had to go, “Oh won’t you please . . . Be my . . . Be my baby.” Her name was Ronnie, his name was Phil, and how we three howled and threw our arms about each other forgivingly while bellowing “More lime gin for my friend’s rickey, gents!” and bragging of feats performed on grass-covered squash courts and croquet yards and of our casual run-ins with Beach Boys. And we were aware of these as the gayest of times, she was from Philly, I think his name was Ron. (Oh, they looked identical and as to who-was-who I couldn’t’ve cared less, they both called me by my name “Joy” they called appreciatively “Joy” and I bounded over to them, barking and wagging and terribly in love—the specter of bliss passed into me via these Spectors.)
And now you want that I should weep at their absence, at the death of innocence and Ronettes and young presidents, but at least I have my memories of how swell it was then, and you, you—you impossible person—what do you have that makes you so all hell-fire certain of things (when you have never even met Joy face to face)? Nothing, that’s what you have, nothing, except a worthless old scratched-up 45 by Ronnie Spector’s pop musical band: you have nothing.
I Need My Mommy
O! Ms. Madonna! Here winter is upon us and I remember yet again I have no children, no little ones to roast open fires for. Here the Millennium’s cold corner has almost been turned and I call out for my kiddies to gather round me in the featherbed—but no one comes. No chuckle-faced young’uns to stir me awake! And though I am much too large for my treasured swing set yet I cannot bring myself to toss it out. I admit now (with all the splashy ker-plop of a submarine breaking surface): I NEED OFFSPRING. Any takers? I saw in the paper where you—Ms. Madonna—are to begin soon advertising for a father to put a little Hansel in your oven. You too, Ms. Madonna? I toss my anchor to famous you. Madonna with child for this X-mas, right on!
You claim to have trouble meeting men who “are not a*****es.” Amputees? Is this what you mean? (Will Hangman be on your test? I excel!) Amputees are so prevalent in your glittery scenes-à-faire? Well then: Here I am. All limbs present and accounted for. Pick me! It is true I made this self-same offer to Patty Hearst—did she listen?—do not repeat her snobbish error, opting to marry within the entourage. No one you’ve met is father material (because, I know! I actually had a father once). None but me can name Red Red Meat’s releases in order, can get free quarters out of a Konelco change machine, can wring music from a gas pump—
I am so qualified for this, Boss-girl, it is ridiculous! I once heard one of your record albums! I saw you in Visionquest! I even find you attractive! Ah babe, how’s about you and me take down a pair of winged creatures via the utilization of a single weighty object! I mean: two birds! One stone! Those of us on disability have always felt you were one with us, that you too did not appreciate their signs every five feet saying “Wet Paint,” their demands to us signed “The Management,” their corner payphones always ringing, their deceitfully priced lunch specials, their things they claim to “know nothing about.”
Forgive me my blathering, darling, I am dizzy with passion at our pending prospect! Sleep with me by New Year’s Eve or my heart will be reduced to a size no bigger than your period at the end of this cycle. I will retire, I will jump off City Hall and I will meet John Doe no more forever—I am serious—and the world will lament the loss of Joy this holiday season.
Flat Old World
The whole world stinks to high heaven with the bands I have loved and lost (began with the Band, the Beatles, the Burrito Brothers, and then got stinkier from there) and now: more stinky news: the country musicale outfit Flat Old World is surrendering to the lack of hype which attends their every single move and will play no more forever post-Jan. 1996—what? Who will lend these days their necessary focus if not our flat old friends, who will speak to us of relevant historical antecedents (without actually speaking at all)? Who else cares enough to tell the small tales of towns like Two Blades, Jubilee, Lost Falls, to evoke heroes and villains with names like Haddy Mae, Sir William, Jigger Statz, Jenny Pretty-Eyes? Who will remind us of ancestral longings—conjure up antebellum britches, failed campaigns, Wilson-era lullabies, teapot domes, salvation armies, angel voices, weeds and dirt? No one—that’s who—and that’s why this stinks.*
Have you ever seen them, all the group’s characters belting out their theme “It’s a Flat World (After All),” crammed like canned cherries onto the disreputable stage of some firetrap? THERE is the honourable Tuba Jones, who donates all his proceedings to widows and builds orphanages in his spare hours (while the rest of us selfishly sleep), having brokered peace accords through the holy oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa of his blasted instrument! THERE is that percussionist fellow, what’s-his-name, who drums like he sings, stumbling, stammering, a faltering shiver of sound, arriving in the middle of words as if by accident! THERE is the strawberry-topped member who has been known to bellow with such breadth/width/depth that—as Hurricane Nancy—she steers weather, knocks down houses of detention and sets the captive free! THERE is the robin-larynxed golden girl, that facet-heavy ukelele-ist, bearing so many shades and talents she can play any position from halfback to goalie, from safety to guard, from slugger to reliever, and always more disguises than Sherlock Holmes, more laughs than Lucille Ball, more cars than American Motors! THERE is that irrepressible Fink puppy (Canis bilious) pawing out single ringing fuzz notes from a Gibson guitar, one at a time, who never quits with the humbleness and the humility! THERE is the sure and able Governour, the band’s governing instinct, always quietly there, she with her stone-steady string section, ever-ready, ever-reliable, who has been known to outplay any player, outwait every waiter, even to outlast the Most Lasting Flavour! And then at last THERE is the one we truly most came to see: V.W.H. Cricklade, Mr. Magnetic South, the show-runner, the preacher-host, the shoe-tree, the reclusive composer extraordinaire Mister World himself, rarely spotted in the daylight hours but for to answer heartsick prayers, mysteriously slipping rooftop to rooftop & shadow to shadow outfitted in superhero colours. . . . Ah! but why even go on and on, why replunge the dagger over and over when the gruesome fact is already taffy-stiff and cold as a corpse: (sad enough words have not been invented) Flat Old World’s final show is about to begin and now is the time, my friends, for your tears.
It’s the end of the world.
Commencement Day
To you—the graduating class—you have not earned these diplomas, but here they are, come get them, but take with you too this warning: do not do as we have done. Take the reins gently; reward only the worthy; please stop scaring me; and forgive us everything! Put a man on Mars—two men! A lesbian (see what I care). Just leave us be before our TVS. . . . Lace up your loose-laced Nikes and take off your Walkmans and those hooded jackets and hooded sweatshirts and hoods and scarves and pullover hooded sweaters and Walkmans and participate in the world and take care of us aged and infirm by taking off your loose-laced, hooded things and showing your face and coming and getting your diplomas and participating and not scaring me in this world anymore with hoods and loose-laced Nikes.
On the eve of this prestigious occasion, presiding over your voyage through the shadows into adulthood, I am at some considerable loss and proffer neither advice nor examples to follow (I have none).
If you ask yourselves, “How can I get to be him, that fellow up there addressing my graduating class?”—Oh, but do not do this! You mustn’t do what we do, you must make something of yourselves, protect the ecology, find peace of mind and world-peace! This is a nowhere gig. I am merely the dupe of that American amnesia Romanovs advocate, and what makes me such an ideal idolatrous consumer (since you asked!) is that almost every day I get boinked on the head and have to relearn it all, the world afresh, anew, each of their bleating commercials convinces me utterly I am the best—the only—the brightest—if only I invest in their items. I am that much-prized eternally promised purchaser from Peoria boisterously ballyhooed but badly bamboozled and then boink it starts all over again.
Now I ain’t no popularly accredited student of culture (like the whole scary hooded flock of you) but I do notice myself growing whole in the bath of commercial television and ripped apart by real life and wonder if I’m probably losing some vital tissues.
So ignore this address, graduates. Just go do your thing and we need help, so take real good care of us, thank you.
* It’s because, you see, sometimes the trend seems completely this way or that way and rejectful of anything that seeks change or don’t fit, like all we ever thought once was “Doc Holliday, Great Gunfighter Hero Guy” and now it’s “Docteur Jour de Fete, le coupable sauvage,” now the world defiantly represents itself as round and big and glistening new and not at all “flat” or “old,” this contemporary Fed-Ex planet of ours delivers to your door with all its might in Tyvek toughness to quash the flat old sentiment but one day I know the world will kick itself in the head for having missed yet another broadening opportunity (they didn’t get Van Gogh or V.U. during their lifetime either so it’s not unprecedented!) and being forced to enjoy the Flat Olds solely in retrospect—as an extinct bird of pray not at all in their present-era modern state of living aliveness.
