War Dances by Sherman Alexie - review

Passion from outside the mainstreamFor all Sherman Alexie's trademark energy and bravery, War Dances reveals a more mature voice
Gale Zoë Garnett

Published on Friday, Nov. 06, 2009 4:53PM EST

I first met the work of Sherman Alexie when reviewing his short-story collection Ten Little Indians. It was love at first read. Years later, I saw a film called The Business of Fancydancing, featuring a deeply moving performance by Canadian actor Michelle St. John. Alexie acted in and directed the film, from his own script.

A predisposition to embrace all created by an author never rules out the possibility of a dud appearing. Happily, War Dances, Alexie's new collection of short stories and poetry, is a leap forward. The author is also a stand-up comedian and performance artist. In earlier work, he sometimes charged into performance-style rants that, as words on a page, needed tightening. War Dances, for all his trademark energy and bravery, shows a more mature voice that does not see economy as a betrayal of passion.

Alexie is a Seattle-based, native of the Spokane/Coeur D'Alene bands, and his work reveals both the light and dark within native American life.

A paradox in his writing is that you can be in the middle of delighted laughter when he will hit you with a sentence so true to the core of a character's pain that you suck in your breath or are startled to realize you are crying.

The poetry selections are less “poem” than “riff.” Not jazz riffs. Alexie's riffing, some of which is kindred to the serious and comic universe of Tom King, is, for me, “First Nations Dub” – not based on African-Caribbean rhythms, but rather connected to drum groups, powwow dancing and funny, lyrical conversations in “Indian bars.”

From The Theology of Reptiles:

We found a snake, dead in midmolt.
“It's almost like two snakes,” I said.
My brother grabbed it by the head
And said, “It just needs lightning bolts.”

Laughing, he jumped the creek and draped
The snake over an electric fence.
Was my brother being cruel? Yes,
But we were shocked when that damn snake

Spiraled off the wire and splayed,
Alive, on the grass, made a fist
Of itself, then, gorgeous and pissed,
Uncurled, stood on end, and swayed

For my brother, who, bemused and odd,
Had somehow become one snake's god.

The short stories are the greater gift of this book, and Breaking and Entering is one of the best. The narrator is George Wilson, a professional film editor who is incapable of editing in telling his own story. Cluttered word clusters, weasel words and phrases are everywhere. It is a tribute to Alexie's verbal dexterity that the irony is clear on the first page.

“Skip the door” is a good piece of advice – a maxim, if you will – that I've applied to my entire editorial career, if not my entire life. To state it in less poetic terms, one would say, “An editor must omit all unnecessary information.” So, in telling you this story … in constructing the scenes, I will attempt to omit all unnecessary information.”

When he opens a door, the reader, while laughing at the goofbabble, is dropped, hard, into the story. A window shatters, our editor goes to the basement, surprises a teenaged burglar, whacks him in the head and kills him. This précis is encased in self-centred filigree. And, as always with Alexie, the pain and bewilderment still bleed through.

The dead boy is “a good kid … a decent athlete … a decent student … a decent person,” is African-American. His mother declares the murder a hate crime, another case of a white man killing a black youth. Wilson believes he has become “the most hated man in Seattle.” He is indignant: “I am not a white man. I am an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. Oh, I don't look Indian, or at least not typically Indian. Some folks assume I'm a little bit Italian or Spanish or perhaps Middle Eastern. Most folks think I'm just another white guy who tans well.”

The black community continues to protest. Wilson calls a local newspaper and proclaims his ethnic identity. Finally, his actual deed hits him: He murdered a kid who screwed up and was trying to flee.

This acknowledgment causes constant anxiety about black people seeking retribution. Black men in groups, however small, fill him with fear.

“What if they recognized me? What if they were friends of Elder Briggs? What if they attacked me?”

Two other remarkable tales are the title story and The Senator's Son. War Dances is the close-to-the-bone story of a man's relationship with his beloved, wounded and wounding, alcoholic, funny and philosophical father.

“Frankly,” my doctor said. “Your brain is beautiful.”

“Thank you,” I said, though it was the oddest compliment I'd ever received.

I wanted to call up my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful. But I couldn't tell him anything. He was dead. I told my wife and sons that I was okay. I told my mother and siblings. I told my friends. But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father would have. I miss him, the drunk bastard. I would always feel closest to the man who most disappointed me.

The Senator's Son chronicles a brother-deep childhood friendship that sunders when one of the adolescent boys admits he is gay. Time passes, and the now-adult senator's son (whose father is an ascendant politician) brutally smashes the nose of his unrecognized childhood friend in a random gay-bashing. Realizing whom he has mauled, he seeks his old friend. They meet. Jeremy, the gay man, with the wisdom and weariness of smart people who live outside the so-called mainstream (e.g. gays, native people, the disabled), gets to bring clarity and hard-edged, unsentimental forgiveness to his friend.

It would be super to quote from this story, but I've used up my word quota. And besides, you should read this wonderful book for yourself.

Contributing reviewer Gale Zoë Garnett's current novel is Savage Adoration. Her current favourite book is War Dances.

From The Toronto Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/review-war-dances-by-sherman-alexie/article1353823/

Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara - review

June 29, 2008
Urban Poet
By WILLIAM LOGAN

SELECTED POEMS
By Frank O’Hara.
Edited by Mark Ford.
265 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

Death is often a good career move in poetry. No sooner are the obsequies over and the baked meats eaten than the publisher warms up the presses for a definitive edition of the collected poems, solemnly proofread down to the last querulous comma. Yet not all poets are well served by such an exhaustive volume, which may seal up a reputation forever — indeed, such a book has sometimes been called a tombstone. A collected poems may be cruelest to a poet whose genius shone as intermittently as a firefly.

At 40, Frank O’Hara was struck one night by a Jeep on a Fire Island beach. He died scarcely two years after the publication of “Lunch Poems” (1964), the volume that introduced him to most readers. As a poet he wrote so much — so wildly and unevenly much — it has been difficult to reach a just estimate of his wayward, influential talent. O’Hara was born in Baltimore and schooled at Harvard, a roommate of Edward Gorey and a friend of John Ashbery. He soon went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, where he rose to become an associate curator. As he had fallen in among a crowd of painters and poets that included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, it was perhaps natural to make poems out of their parties, feuds, love affairs and drunken gossip.

By the poetic fashion of the day, it was not natural at all. In the heady atmosphere of postwar Manhattan, however, young poets hostile to the philistines surrounding them (even coddled artists believe their society philistine) envied the technical bravado and rebellious invention of the Abstract Expressionists. The poets of the New York School, as they were eventually known, were long on spontaneity and short on traditional literary effect. O’Hara later recollected, according to Brad Gooch’s biography, “City Poet,” that he and other young poets “divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artists’ bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped; in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip. So far as I know nobody painted in the San Remo while they listened to the writers argue.”

O’Hara’s earliest poems, the work of Harvard and just after, sound like Wallace Stevens at the soda fountain (“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!”). Jazzy, elated as an eel, a talent giddily in search of a manner, the poet scatters exclamation marks like penny candy. Posing as a wide-eyed innocent, O’Hara was drawn to illogic and absurdity, to modes of presence and display far from poets like Yeats and Eliot and Lowell. When Auden chose Ashbery’s first volume for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, he wrote O’Hara a thoughtful rejection, saying, “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”

The peculiar thing about O’Hara’s “surrealistic” style is that it sounds not like early Ashbery but like late Ashbery. Here’s O’Hara:
How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight blue pants we should
love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.
Wasted child! I’ll club you on the shins!

Ashbery developed such insouciant nonsense into a charming anti-literary manner, but O’Hara soon grew bored with it. He was always looking for some vivid stimulus, preferably one a little outlandish — not a bad thing for a curator of modern painting, perhaps, but not necessarily a good one for a poet (O’Hara treated contemporary art with far more deliberation than he treated poetry). He began to make poetry from whatever happened around him — today, he might have written a blog. At the time, however, this preoccupation with the trivial, with the nothing of life that is nothing, seemed to jettison everything — meter, the calculated symbol, the grave poetic tone — associated with the manners of the art. However much one loves “Four Quartets” or “Lord Weary’s Castle,” it’s refreshing to open O’Hara and read:
LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich.

The headlong style, the lines broken like breadsticks, the punctuation limping along or missing entirely, capture the city’s rush and welter, though O’Hara’s physical world is curiously impoverished. Every poem seems to start from scratch. The back cover of “Lunch Poems” claimed that frequently O’Hara, “strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up 30 or 40 lines of ruminations.” This was most unlikely (even more so the notion that he had “withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life”); but the lie was as close to an “Ars Poetica” as the poet ever made.

O’Hara’s instincts may have been anti-Romantic, but Wordsworth would have noticed that walking around Manhattan wasn’t all that different from walking around some Lake District fell or other. You noticed one thing, then another; and perhaps you composed a few lines as you went. What O’Hara most objected to about poetry, however, was the hard work. A poet like Yeats turned his first thoughts, often in prose, into verse that disguised the labor of its passage (“A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”). The labor was never meant to look laborious. O’Hara wanted his poems to look easy as a sewing machine but to take no work at all.

The poet’s genius in these “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them, was to stop trying to have a point — the off-course thinking that was normally the means to a poem became the heady, helter-skelter end. He wrote compulsively about what moved him — his lovers, and avant-garde painting, and ballet and of course the movies (few poets have invoked Googie Withers and meant it). Wilde might have said that such things were too important not to write trivially about them; but O’Hara almost never faces up to the emptiness beneath this high life and low desire — if there’s a subconscious revealed, it’s very hard to detect. The poems describe an urban pastoral where no one has a real job, where martinis flow like nectar and where the days of Elysium are marked by the arrival of a new issue of New World Writing. Whitman’s search for the democracy of the American demotic — what he called slang — had a century later become the hilarious musings of a vain young man about town (O’Hara wrote about homosexual life with a cheerful nonchalance rarely matched since; Allen Ginsberg by contrast was slightly lugubrious about sex). It’s hard to know whether Whitman, who took poetry seriously, would have laughed or wept.

Still, it’s hard not to smile with appreciation at a poet who can write that he was lying abed when the sun woke him up to say:
“Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now, I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.”

The poem borrows from Vladimir Mayakovsky, from whom O’Hara also took his governing notion that the poem should wrap itself around the poet. Poetry needs to be taken down a peg once in a while; and O’Hara never condescended to the reader, unlike some slapstick poets now. He refused to apologize for his narcissism, his comic pretensions, his sometimes insufferable archness. These were the effects mastered and the price paid.

In the early ’60s, there was a distinct falling-off in the verse — what had been effervescent as Champagne turned flat and stale, as sometimes happens in poets who begin with a lot of élan and little of anything else. O’Hara finished fewer and fewer poems, as if exhausted by the very scenes that once provoked him (almost two-thirds of this new edition of “Selected Poems” was written between 1954 and 1960). Still, some of the best poems of lunatic happenstance came in these years, including what is arguably his most famous poem, which ends
and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up.

O’Hara’s wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest. At times the banalities pile up and overwhelm the poems — but then they were the poems. Rarely has an American poet so influential (two generations of urban poets have come out of O’Hara’s shopping bag) written so many poems dull to anyone except his genial fanatics — his very notion of the aesthetic courted failure as a method. With an Oliver Goldsmith or a Thomas Gray, the mediocre results from a lack of gift, the good from lucky accident. When O’Hara was lucky, he was very lucky, because his method could not help but fail most of the time.

This long-needed new selection of O’Hara’s poems, replacing Donald Allen’s standard work of more than 30 years ago, has been thoughtfully edited by Mark Ford. He has kept about two-thirds of the old selection, adding 50 or so poems and a small sheaf of the poet’s rambling prose statements and reminiscences, some of which sound more like Ernie Kovacs or Lenny Bruce than the author of these insouciantly unserious poems (O’Hara loathed academic hauteur, though he needn’t have sounded so oafish about it). The selection is not perfect; Ford has included a grindingly self-conscious play as well as two long poems almost unreadable now, full of campy nonsense like “whoops-musicale (sei tu m’ami) ahhahahahaha / loppy di looploop” and “le bateleur! how wonderful / I’m so so so so so so so so so so happy,” which sounds like Ezra Pound on happy pills. (The long poems are weakest not because the manner was difficult to sustain — O’Hara could have gone on forever — but because the manner became so irritating when sustained.) Still, among the shorter poems Ford has missed little of permanent value — I would have kept “Poem (‘I ran through the snow like a young Czarevitch’)” and “Mary Desti’s Ass” — while remaining admirably fair-minded to O’Hara’s variety. There may be serious intentions lodged in trivial things, but the poems often remain blissfully trivial.

It’s hard to care about a lot of O’Hara’s poems, but he doesn’t want you to care. To accept the present as a fallen realm risks making it insignificant, although other poets of the period, especially Elizabeth Bishop, wrote deeply without losing their lightness of bearing. In his best poems — “Thinking of James Dean,” “Why I Am Not a Painter,” “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’ at the Museum of Modern Art,” “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets,” “The Day Lady Died,” “Les Luths,” “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)” and half a dozen others — O’Hara found something beyond that terrible vacancy he was trying so hard to fill. (His best poems are rarely his most characteristic or frenzied.) The style, though at times foolish and self-parodic, remains fresh 50 years later. However much these poems live in the world of Lowell’s “tranquilized ’50s,” their giddiness in the face of despair, their animal pleasure in gossip, their false bravado, their frantic posturing and guilelessness and petty snobberies — and these were O’Hara’s virtues — give us as much of a life as poetry can.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Thomas Dolby on Prefab Sprout's Let's Change the World with Music

"It’s easy in retrospect to say that the original decision not to release ‘Let’s Change The World With Music’ did irreperable damage to the band’s career. Certainly it threw a spanner in the works, because the next twelve years saw only two more Sprouts albums, neither of which approached the critical or commercial success of their previous four...."

More at http://blog.thomasdolby.com/?p=944

Honorary Oscar for Roger Corman

Extracted from AT THE MOVIES

Oscars give Roger Corman and Gordon Willis a golden glow
They will be honored for their achievements behind the camera.
By Susan King
LA Times
November 12, 2009

This year's honorees -- actress Lauren Bacall, 85; producer-director-writer Roger Corman, 83; and "The Godfather" cinematographer Gordon Willis, 78 -- will be in attendance. Producer and former studio executive John Calley, 79 ("Remains of the Day"), the recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, will be unable to attend due to health issues.

Roger Corman

The best film schools are well known -- USC, UCLA and New York University to name just a few. But for many working in Hollywood today, the greatest film institution is actually Roger Corman.

Not only did Corman turn independent film on its ear over the last five decades, making entertaining, low-budget horror films, comedies and dramas often in less than two weeks, he also gave such Oscar-winning and nominated directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme and Peter Bogdanovich their big breaks.

"Roger Corman is responsible for the 'New Hollywood,' " says Bogdanovich, who directed his first film, 1968's acclaimed "Targets," for Corman. "He has made a tremendous impact as a director himself and made very stylish horror films and made them fast and cheap and made them look good. If it wasn't for Roger you wouldn't have Jack Nicholson or Francis Coppola or Marty or Jonathan Demme.

"Roger was fiercely independent," adds Joe Dante ("Gremlins"), who began cutting trailers for Corman in the 1970s before making the 1978 hit "Piranha" for him. "He mostly worked with American International Pictures, which was essentially an independent company. I like the way he made his pictures. I liked the speed, the economy, the style."

At his peak in the early 1960s, Corman was making as many as seven movies a year, including the classic horror comedy "Little Shop of Horrors," which he, as the story goes, shot in just two days. He also made stylish adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe thrillers.

Corman says that his degree in engineering from Stanford helped him make movies economically by knowing how to plan. "I started as a writer," he says, relaxing on a recent morning in his office in Brentwood. "When I started directing possibly because of the engineering or maybe because the way the brain is wired, I understood editing and all the technical elements of making films. I learned that on the job quickly."

But he felt unsure working with actors, so he enrolled in an acting class. It was in that class he met a young Nicholson, whom he cast in 1958's "The Cry Baby Killer." "I simply felt he was not only the best actor in the class and although he never made a film he was better than most of the actors I had been working with."

Corman began to give young filmmakers their chance after some financial success. "I had made a little bit of money and the normal way people would invest was in the stock market or real estate," he says. "I said to myself 'I don't really know anything about the stock market or real estate, but I think I know something about motion pictures.' As a young guy around Hollywood, I knew the other guys around Hollywood. I thought the thing to do is back somebody in a low-budget film."

So he first chose Irvin Kershner ("The Empire Strikes Back"), who did a picture in 1958 called "Stakeout on Dope Street." "We sold it to Warner Bros. and had a substantial profit. I thought this was a great way to invest."

Then he gave his "ace assistant" Coppola the opportunity to direct 1963's "Dementia 13," which was also a hit. And so Corman continued discovering and nurturing filmmakers.

Corman is still producing films -- in fact his first Web series, "Splatter," which he made for Netflix, concludes Friday -- but he admits he's making fewer films than before.

"We are making three to five films a year," he says. "The market for low-budget films is the lowest I have ever seen in my life. Guys who I have known for many years, many of them younger than I, have simply retired. I am one of the few who are still there."

And retirement is not an option for Corman. "I love to make films," he says.

Though several of the directors whom he championed had sent a letter to the academy's board of governors to consider Corman, the filmmaker says he never thought he would ever get the award, "because I make low-budget films. Then they called me one night and said we voted to give you an award. I was really surprised."

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-oscar12-2009nov12,0,6630789.story

Friday Night?

Head of Steam...?

Honest John Comes Clean

Happy Birthday!

When I'm 64

Happy Birthday Neil

http://wbr.edgeboss.net/qtime/wbr/neilyoung/audio/neilyoung_001_dreamin-man_128.mov

Tough on Crime - and the Causes of Crime!

Police to be given a 93 page manual on how to ride a bike
Police officers are to be given a two volume guide, which runs into 93 pages, on how to ride a bicycle.

The official Police Cycle Training Doctrine, which cost thousands of pounds to produce, gives full instructions on how to balance, stop and get off a bike safely.

Officers are also given a step-by-step guide on how to brake and avoid obstacles like kerbs and rocks, and are also warned not to tackle criminals while "still engaged with the cycle".

Volume two of the booklet tackles manoeuvres such as deployment into a junction" , or how to turn left and right into a corner, complete with a handy diagram.

The "mandatory" national guide, drawn up by the Association of Chief Police Officers, has been heavily ridiculed.

TaxPayers' Alliance campaign director Mark Wallace told The Sun: "This is an absurd waste of police time and thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money.

"Police officers are perfectly capable of riding a bike. It's no wonder we haven't enough on the beat if they are having to spend time and energy wading through this nonsense."

A Home Office source added: "Most of the red tape the police complain about is actually created by the cops themselves. This is a particularly bad example."

The guide has been drafted, but it has not yet been published and distributed among officers.

An ACPO spokeswoman said: "This guidance may have been drawn up by ACPO but we haven't fully approved it yet."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6548475/Police-to-be-given-a-93-page-manual-on-how-to-ride-a-bike.html

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilffred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.



The Veteran - Margaret Postgate Cole

We came upon him sitting in the sun
Blinded by war, and left. And past the fence
There came young soldiers from the Hand and Flower,
Asking advice of his experience.

And he said this, and that, and told them tales,
And all the nightmares of each empty head
Blew into air; then, hearing us beside,
"Poor chaps, how'd they know what it's like?" he said.

And we stood there, and watched him as he sat,
Turning his sockets where they went away,
Until it came to one of us to ask
"And you're-how old?"
"Nineteen, the third of May."



A Working Party - Siegfried Sassoon

Three hours ago he blundered up the trench,
Sliding and poising, groping with his boots;
Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls
With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk.
He couldn't see the man who walked in front;
Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet
Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing
Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.

Voices would grunt `Keep to your right -- make way!'
When squeezing past some men from the front-line:
White faces peered, puffing a point of red;
Candles and braziers glinted through the chinks
And curtain-flaps of dug-outs; then the gloom
Swallowed his sense of sight; he stooped and swore
Because a sagging wire had caught his neck.

A flare went up; the shining whiteness spread
And flickered upward, showing nimble rats
And mounds of glimmering sand-bags, bleached with rain;
Then the slow silver moment died in dark.
The wind came posting by with chilly gusts
And buffeting at the corners, piping thin.
And dreary through the crannies; rifle-shots
Would split and crack and sing along the night,
And shells came calmly through the drizzling air
To burst with hollow bang below the hill.

Three hours ago, he stumbled up the trench;
Now he will never walk that road again:
He must be carried back, a jolting lump
Beyond all needs of tenderness and care.

He was a young man with a meagre wife
And two small children in a Midland town,
He showed their photographs to all his mates,
And they considered him a decent chap
Who did his work and hadn't much to say,
And always laughed at other people's jokes
Because he hadn't any of his own.

That night when he was busy at his job
Of piling bags along the parapet,
He thought how slow time went, stamping his feet
And blowing on his fingers, pinched with cold.
He thought of getting back by half-past twelve,
And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep
In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes
Of coke, and full of snoring weary men.

He pushed another bag along the top,
Craning his body outward; then a flare
Gave one white glimpse of No Man's Land and wire;
And as he dropped his head the instant split
His startled life with lead, and all went out.



Suicide in the Trenches - Siegfried Sassoon

I KNEW a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.





The Happy Warrior - Herbert Read

His wild heart beats with painful sobs,
His strin'd hands clench an ice-cold rifle,
His aching jaws grip a hot parch'd tongue,
His wide eyes search unconsciously.

He cannot shriek.


Bloody saliva
Dribbles down his shapeless jacket.


I saw him stab
And stab again
A well-killed Boche.


This is the happy warrior,
This is he…





Buttons - Carl Sandburg

I HAVE been watching the war map slammed up for
advertising in front of the newspaper office.
Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons--
are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
And follows the yellow button with a black button one
inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in
a red soak along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling
death in their throats.)
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper
office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing
to us?



The Parable of the Old Man and the Young – Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold!
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art

http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/ohara/exhibit.htm

One Woman's Family - Martha Wainwright

Saturday November 7 2009 The Guardian

I can't separate music from my family, and I try to, as much as I can. My family wasn't like the Von Trapp family - it wasn't ridiculous - but my brother Rufus and I would go on the road with my mother [the folk singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle] and we'd sing and my mum would accompany us. We perform together as a way of being together.

Music was what my mother did and we were proud of being different. I grew up in a very matriarchal family. My grandfather died when my mother was 19, and my grandmother, Gaby, was, like my mother, a strong character; funny and charming. She got married late in life and became a mother for the first time at the age of 42. So she was different from what was expected at the time, and not under the thumb of a man by any means.

My first 20 years or so definitely revolved around my relationship with my brother. I wanted to be different. I was trying to find my way of being as intriguing and interesting as he was. He was something to live up to. Rufus started to show his talent when he was a baby. It was clear he was made for the stage - and girls were never a distraction. He had his own battles, coming out and telling my mother. My role was to be as supportive as I could be. And not care.

My parents divorced when I was small, so there was more of a distance with my dad [Loudon Wainwright III]. With Loudon, my earlier years were the best time for me. I got to go to New York for a couple of weeks in the summer, and it was a vacation, special and magical, a bit of Disneyland. I was older when I discovered his music, and I had a love affair with his records, so he was more of a musical inspiration than anything else. Loudon and I have each written songs about our relationship. But we haven't spoken about them. The songs can express things that are beyond words.

My husband, Brad, is a musician and an artist. We work together, so I feel like our relationship is an extension of my family's life. My mother's cancer gave us the reason to have a big celebratory wedding and invite people from all the different stages our lives. Her illness put everything into perspective: in my 20s I was always fighting with her and not calling enough, and trying to find my own way. But out of fear of losing her that all changed, and I became a much better daughter.

Everyone in our family shows off out of habit. I guess we all want to be heard. It's kind of sick, isn't it? But it's good to have everything out on the table, because that way there are no surprises. In my family, it was encouraged in songwriting. I think everyone wanted to be centre stage. We're not there to yell at each other. We're a musical family - and that's harmonious.

Martha Wainwright's new album, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris, is released on Monday, and she plays at the Barbican in London on Wednesday

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandsty...-family-values

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #31

Sun competition gets Terry excited

Spotted outside Central News at the weekend.

Which salt mine do you fancy?

The wanderer returns . . .

Last night's set list at the Earl Grey, Gosforth: -

Long May You Run
Everybody's Talkin'
Falling
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
On The Way Home

By the time of the gig had developed a raging sore throat. So what remained of the gravel voice was courtesy of Strepsils Honey & Lemon.

Twenty Years Ago Today...

WOMEN IN MUSIC #29

John Cooper Clarke in The Independent on Sunday

A life of rhyme: John Cooper Clarke, the 'punk Poet Laureate', grants Robert Chalmers his first major interview in more than 20 years

Who'd be the 'punk Poet Laureate'? There's the heroin addiction, the gobbing hecklers, not to mention the cold shoulder from the literary establishment. In his first major interview for two decades, John Cooper Clarke delivers chapter and verse about life with Nico, 'keeping the dream alive' in Milton Keynes and being mistaken for Ronnie Wood

The Robert Chalmers Interview

'...We travel back to my house in north London – he has a performance nearby this evening – then walk to Banners café in Crouch End. Cooper Clarke struggles to suppress a flinch when I produce a recording device. His one significant interview in the past 21 years – given to Paul Morley for Radio Four – sounded, he complains, "like an obituary". This was hardly anybody else's fault, in that the poet's recollections were circumspect to the point that other voices ended up propelling the narrative of the half-hour broadcast. Actually, the poet is unenthused by the memory of almost every project he's ever been involved in. Two years ago, Sky TV presented a "John Cooper Clarke Night" for which he chose a whole evening of programming. His selection included a documentary on painter William Hogarth, and a concert by crooner Paul Anka.

"How did it feel when you watched TV that night?"

"I missed it."'

All this and much more at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/a-life-of-rhyme-john-cooper-clarke-the-punk-poet-laureate-grants-robert-chalmers-his-first-major-interview-in-more-than-20-years-1814712.html

Newcastle 3 Peterborough 1

Not sure if it was worth the wait, but it was a very good (if brief) performance and a great goal.

Josette Baujot RIP

Phil Davison
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 18.42 GMT

When the comics artist Hergé (aka Georges Rémi) created his most famous character, Tintin, in the late 1920s, he drew the tuft-haired young reporter in black and white. His fellow Belgian Josette Baujot, who has died aged 88, was responsible for colouring Hergé's Tintin albums for more than a quarter of a century during the peak years of his popularity, and established the "colour code" that helped take Tintin far beyond Belgium and France to an international audience.

Baujot's colouring, pencilled in by hand before the age of digital enhancement, is still revered by cartoonists worldwide and is said to have strongly influenced Walt Disney. The film-makers Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, currently at work on a trilogy of Tintin movies, due to start with The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn in 2011, are reported to have told their team to reflect the original colouring as much as possible.

In 1950 Hergé, overwhelmed by his growing success, had set up studios in Brussels with the aim of building a team to help him cope with the demand for his work. Edgar Pierre Jacobs was his first colourist. Baujot joined Hergé Studios in 1953, while Hergé was completing the Tintin album Destination Moon (Objectif Lune) and already planning the follow-up, Explorers On the Moon (On A Marché Sur la Lune, 1954), in which Tintin would become the first man on the moon, 15 years before Neil Armstrong.

"Hergé himself had the idea of a red-and-white chequered rocket," Baujot said, "but he asked me to add a little green in the red so that it did not appear too violent. And he was insistent on orange spacesuits for Tintin, Captain Haddock and Milou [Snowy, Tintin's fox terrier]. For the surface of the moon, he gave me carte blanche but, as it turned out, I opted for yellow, with the craters more emphasised. In those days, we didn't know what the surface of the moon looked like." Hergé was said to have been delighted with her yellowish, light-mustard colouring of the moon's surface.

Baujot had learned the art of evoking moods by creating colours through mixing, rather than sticking to the primary shades used by most of her contemporaries. She emphasised her style in the album Cigars of the Pharaoh (Les Cigares du Pharaon, 1955), the first colour reproduction of a book that Hergé had created in black and white 20 years earlier.Herge and Baujot

Although Hergé insisted on drawing the main characters himself, he relied on Baujot and his right-hand men, Jacques Martin and Bob de Moor, to draw and colour the backgrounds for the young reporter's adventures, from Tibet and the Soviet Union to Scotland and South America.

Hergé famously walked a tightrope between perfectionism and depression – perhaps, for him, they were the same thing – and Baujot became known for her straight-talking in the studios. She was said to have been the only member of the team to stand up to the maestro, notably when her boss, married and pushing 50, had an affair with a young member of her colouring team, Fanny Vlaminck. Baujot disapproved strongly and told him so. He eventually married Vlaminck and they remained together until his death in 1983.

Despite their altercations, Hergé admired and respected Baujot, and most of their disagreements would be resolved over afternoon tea with the entire team in what one of Tintin's English translators, Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, has described as the "friendly, kibbutz-like atmosphere" of the studios. In his last, unfinished work, Tintin et l'Alph-art, Hergé drew a new character called Josette Laijot, a gallery owner, and he often referred to her real-life model as La Révérende Mère du Très Saint Coloriage – "the Reverend Mother of the Most Holy Colouring".

Born Josette Marie Louise Nondonfaz in the Belgian town of Spa, she studied drawing, particularly portraiture, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Liège, and in 1944 married Joseph Baujot. Amid the confusion and mutual mistrust among Belgians after the allied liberation, the Baujots moved to Argentina, where they bought a vineyard and had a son.

In 1953, Joseph was shot dead while out hunting. There were reports that he had been shot by members of the French or Belgian resistance who had tracked him down, but he lived long enough to tell police that he had been hit accidentally by a friend. After his death, Josette returned to Brussels, immediately finding a job in the Hergé Studios. There she met Joseph Loeckx – at 17, he was half her age – who would become her lifelong companion, and a hugely successful cartoonist in his own right, now better known by his nom de plume Jo-El Azara, creator of the myopic, pacifist Japanese serviceman Taka Takata. He survives her, along with her son Michel.

Josette Marie Louise Baujot, artist, born 17 August 1920; died 13 August 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/05/josette-baujot-obituary#

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

GERSHWIN!

Ian's Randy

Any truth in the rumour that Ian's movie is Ride Lonesome with Randolph Scott?!

Paddy McAloon: new - and rather good - interview...

...but it's broken up in annoying fashion.
http://www.prefabsprout.net/interview2.html
via http://tincanpot.blogspot.com/

Just the thing for shattered nerves!

WOMEN IN MUSIC #28

Bob and Carla

When asked “What album would you take with you to a desert island?”, Carla Bruni replied: Nashville Skyline, “because it is everything I’ve always looked for, the words and music that you can sing over and over again.” On Tuesday April 7, 2009, she and her husband went to hear the author of Blowin’ in the Wind in concert at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. Dylan had never performed there. In his “Never-Ending Tour”, begun when he made his comeback with the producer Daniel Lanois (1989), the singer, in a mixture of folk, boogie-woogie and rock ’n’ roll, played some of his classics: The Times They Are A-Changin’, Masters of War, Highway 61 Revisited and also Like A Rolling Stone, superbly ignoring his latest album, due out three weeks later, Together Through Life. In his black Chicano hat and suit, in profile before the audience, the 67-year-old singer then proceeded to present his harmonica to the First Lady of France, who went to see him in the wings after the concert.

http://www.carlabrunisarkozy.org/en/dylan-bob/

Gratuitous photo of the First Lady of Alvinos

Norton Buffalo RIP

Steve Miller Band Member Norton Buffalo Dies at 58
Nov 2nd 2009 11:00AM by John D. Luerssen

Norton Buffalo, a singer-songwriter and the harmonica player for the Steve Miller Band since 1975, died Friday, Oct. 30, at the age of 58. Buffalo first wrote about being diagnosed with lung cancer in September after feeling ill following a concert. After his personal doctor mistakenly told him that his lungs sounded fine, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 Adenocarcinoma of the lower right lobe, with a subsequent MRI revealing that it had spread to his brain.

Born Sept. 28, 1951 in Oakland, Calif., Buffalo played with the Steve Miller Band for 34 years and performed with the group on its 2009 summer tour. As a session player, Norton's harmonica was heard on records by the likes of the Doobie Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, Mickey Hart, Commander Cody and Elvin Bishop.

He also recorded several albums with the Stampede and appeared in several movies. He issued his solo debut, 'Lovin' in the Valley of the Moon', on Capitol Records in 1977. A year later, he dropped 'Desert Horizon'. Norton also led his own band, the Knockouts, and teamed with blues slide guitarist Roy Rogers for 'R&B,' which included the Grammy-nominated track 'Song for Jessica.'

Just ahead of his passing, Buffalo wrote, "While the tumor in my lung has receded a little bit, a couple of the tumors in my brain have grown. My doctors are now talking about the next step being full brain radiation and believe that I should begin that ASAP. [We] are doing research into that as we speak and we are, as well, looking for insight, personal experiences and/or more knowledge or alternatives that any of you may have regarding that."

"It sounds like such a daunting concept," he added. "As my brain is what connects me to my body and all of the gifts of love laughter, music, friendships and spirituality, I of course have some fears about how and what the radiation may affect. There is a heap more homework for us to do to learn about this before making choices and moving forward. Seems that the prayers and healing work did some good with my lungs, maybe we need to focus them more on my brain now ... Blessings to you!!"

Buffalo is survived by his wife; children, Aisah and Elias; stepchildren, Sierra Ruelas and Bo Winterburn; father, Ken Jackson of Paradise; and five brothers and sisters. Funeral arrangements are pending.

http://www.spinnermusic.co.uk/2009/11/02/steve-miller-band-member-norton-buffalo-dies-at-58/

Claude Levi-Strauss RIP

Obituary: Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss, who died a few weeks short of his 101st birthday, was widely regarded as a founder of modern anthropology and one of France's foremost thinkers.

He introduced structuralism to anthropology, an approach that seeks to identify common patterns of behaviour and thought in all human societies.

Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Brussels, Belgium, to French parents of Jewish origin. He grew up in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne.

In the mid-1930s he went to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he taught sociology before turning to anthropology. He conducted research in the Mato Grosso and Amazon regions.

Later critics pointed out that Levi-Strauss had spent limited time with the tribes he studied and had limited knowledge of their language.

However his fieldwork strengthened his academic credentials and would later form the substance of the book that made his name, Tristes Tropiques.

In 1939 he returned to France to take part in the war effort, and spent a few months behind the Maginot Line.

After capitulation in 1940, Levi-Strauss worked as a teacher but was dismissed under racial laws introduced by the collaborationist Vichy regime, and left for the US.

While teaching in New York City, he befriended and was influenced by the famous anthropologist Franz Boas.

In 1942, he joined the Free French movement and worked for the US Office of War Information.

Levi-Strauss returned to France in 1948 to complete his doctorate.

A year later he published his thesis as a book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which cemented his reputation among scholars.

In 1955 he published Tristes Tropiques, an account of his time as an expatriate doubling as a philosophical meditation.

The book - which starts with the arresting sentence: "I hate travels and explorers" - was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and turned the author into one of France's best-known intellectuals.

He went on to publish hugely influential books, including Structural Anthropology (1958), the Savage Mind (1962), and The Raw and the Cooked (1964).

The latter led to a series of works entitled Mythologies, in which Levi-Strauss found common threads underlying seemingly arbitrary myths across cultures.

By then Levi-Strauss was a worldwide celebrity and taught in the prestigious College de France.

He would later become a member of the Academie Francaise, the ultimate accolade for a French intellectual.

Although his ideas, like those of other structuralist thinkers, influenced the student rebels of 1968, he ultimately took a dim view of the rioters.

"After an initial reaction of curiosity, once I had grown weary of the fun and games, I was repulsed by May 68," he wrote.

Although not best-known for his sense of humour, Levi-Strauss did remark on the US garment company of the same name.

"That unfortunate homonymy has never ceased to haunt me - like a ghost" he once wrote. "Not a year goes by without my receiving an order for jeans - usually from Africa."

Paying tribute to Levi-Strauss, French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as a "very great scholar, always open to the world, who created modern anthropology".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/8341489.stm

Published: 2009/11/03 23:34:49 GMT

From the Archives

DA RETURNS IN THE MOVIE SENSE

Ian, poised to be 59, has a movie to show at the usual location. It's going to be great. That's Friday Night. The FBs all need to be there to record our CHRISTMAS SONG. Dave on lead vocals.

STEVE DITKO

Self portrait

Born on this day (2 November) in 1927, Steve Ditko was one of the key figures who revolutionised Marvel Comics in the early 1960s along with fellow artist Jack Kirby and writer Stan Lee. His major contributions were the co-creation of Spider-Man and Doctor Strangeand many of the villains that have also lasted close to 50 years. His realistic and occasionally low-key style has many fans among the artists and critics of today.

Prior to his work at Marvel in the 60s, he contributed comics in a variety of genres to a number of companies. He quit Marvel in 1966 over artistic differences, although, like Kirby, his contribution to the storylines was often overlooked and he was paid a pittance for creating characters that ultimately brought the company a lot of money. A devotee of the right-wing philospher and writer Ayn Rand, he was less in tune with 60s liberalism than Lee. One memorable disagreement took place when Lee wanted Spider-Man to take the side of protesting students, whereas Ditko thought he should be breaking up the unrest.

He continued comics work for a number of other companies, like Warren, Creepy and Charlton, and some of his work developed his own political views, which were becoming increasingly a case of seeing the world in terms of wrong or right, notably Mr A, who scolds a robbery victim who expresses pity for her attacker: "To have any sympathy for a killer is an insult to their victims." In the late 70s and the mid 90s, he worked briefly for Marvel and appeared to be reurning to public prominence when he had a falling out with Fantagraphics, the independent comics company that had agreed to publish a series of new work.

Reclusive at the best of times, he was the subject 'In Search of Steve Ditko', a Jonathan Ross documentary for BBC4 in 2007; he still maintains an office in New York and is believed to be producing new work.
Self portrait

For more, see:
http://www.ditko.comics.org/

For the complete Collector's Edition story (featured above), see:
http://johnnybacardi.blogspot.com/2008/02/heres-that-steve-ditko-story-i.html