non-fiction

The Fog of Recollection: What We Half Perceive and Half Create

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detail from Aydin Aghdashloo, Memories of Ice & Fire III

detail from Aydin Aghdashloo, Memories of Ice & Fire III

Even as a very young child, I sought escape through books, movies, television, and imagination.  Unlike my first best friend Bert Pearce, nature held no magic for me.   To Bert, a frog was a creature of wonder, something to stare at for fun even though it just sat there like a stone.  From him I learned that they arose from tadpoles, which was cool,  because it was mysterious with intimations of procreation.

I remember dreaming of a pond in kindergarten and being able to breathe while I swam underwater.

The window sill of the kitchen of Bert’s rambling clapboard house on Laurel Street served as a sort of laboratory, lined with prison jars of lizards and frogs and caterpillars, but to me, a frog was a creature likely to pee on you, a creature whose skin or hide or whatever you called it would feel bumpy or slimy or both.  In a word, yucky.

March 2011 018

This would have been 1957.  We were only five, but I remember that Bert, not his mother, made our lunches, always peanut and jelly sandwiches, and when he poured milk in glasses, he poured a bit in one, then the same amount in the other, repeating the process, carefully eyeing the levels, making sure they were absolutely even until they reached the top of the glass.

But with memories, especially distant memories, you never know.  Like dreams, they’re aery, unsubstantial, slippery, unreliable, dubious mental constructs that may bear very little resemblance of what transpired.

For example, maybe he only had one frog in one jar and only made lunch once.droppedImage

My family stared not at frogs or butterflies but at movie and television screens.  Before my youngest brother and sister were born, Mama and Daddy took my brother David and me to drive-in movies, the Magnolia and North-52, where I could experience the first half of adult movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8, and Vertigo before falling asleep from boredom.  Brother David and I also got to enjoy Winstons, which tasted good like cigarettes should, as we breathed in prodigious quantities of secondhand smoke, which no doubt provided better protection than the Pic insect coil repellent burning away on the dashboard.

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I recall one vivid memory of going to the concession stand during Vertigo and not being able to find the car on the way back because as Jimmy Stewart suffered his nightmare amid strobing colors on the distant screen, the projection/reflection kept changing the colors of the parked cars like a clicking kaleidoscope, a frightening Kafkaesque experience for a seven-year-old laden with Coca-Colas and popcorn

I’m much more confident of this memory, however, because it has been reinforced by many retellings.

The television stayed on at my house from the time we were up until the Star Spangled Banner signaled that Big Chief Test Pattern was about to appear with his high-pitched warning before the upcoming six-hour blizzard of snow on the screen.  I watched Elvis swivel on Sullivan and later the mop-headed Beatles in skinny pants stand stiffly and play music amid screams.  Watching Ed Sullivan was a sabbath ritual much more practiced than the two-minute drive to church.

Also, every Wednesday for a time my mother took me to Poppleton’s Five and Dime where she bought me cardboard bound reprints of classic novels that cost 59 cents. I can almost still smell the fresh, slightly burnt odor of the pages as I hung with the Swiss Family Robinson or watched Tom hoodwink his pals into whitewashing the fence.

So, unlike my friend Bert, who had left my life and moved to Mt. Pleasant, no doubt collecting samples in the backyard of his new brick home, I became a sedentary soul and traded the beauty of the outside world and its paragon of animals for the inner world of Alice’s Wonderland where playing cards could talk and falling down didn’t hurt.

Illustration by Pedro Campea

Illustration by Pedro Campea

Nature versus nurture?  Chicken or egg?  Was Bert’s fascination with flora and fauna innate or did his mother Carlotta instill his interest?  If Daddy had taken me hunting every Saturday, would I now have antlers holding camo-colored hats in my study rather than shelves stuffed with books?

William Wordsworth addresses this mystery in “Tintern Abbey” when he writes

. . . Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,–both what they half create,

And what perceive . . .

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Half-create . . . what perceive.  Do we essentially construct our own worlds, our malleable minds morphing like tadpoles into frogs – or, perhaps to employ a more pleasing image, caterpillars into a butterflies?  Do our predilections and experiences constantly reconstruct our minds to conform to their blueprints?

And does the Protean mind we possess at this instant reconstruct memories to adhere to its present decor, replacing the portrait of boring old Gertrude with glamorous, chain-smoking Aunt Sarah, who shot herself in the head with the door cracked open for her first cousin to see?

Get on it, neuroscientists.  I want to know.

Ordinary Objects in the artist creative mind 1887 John Peto paintings

Ordinary Objects in the artist creative mind 1887
John Peto paintings

My TS Eliot Spring Break

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illustration by Wesley Moore

illustration by Wesley Moore

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu

TS Eliot, “The Waste Land”

Although Yeats gets quoted a lot in these traumatic days – things fall apart, the center cannot hold, etc. – TS Eliot was no slouch himself when it came to apocalyptic naysaying. For example, dig this ditty from “The Waste Land”:

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Because most of us Americans are consumed with the 24/7 Jerry Springer extravaganza that is the current presidential campaign, I doubt if your casual consumer of the news is aware that Europe’s political turmoil makes ours seem rather bland by comparison.

For example, on New Years Eve in Cologne, Germany, gangs of young males assaulted scores of females celebrating the holiday. Some blame newly arrived Muslim immigrants for the outrages while others suggest caution before jumping to conclusions.

Here’s a snippet from the conservative British paper the Spectator:

The German police made a similar point: they are used to handling drunks. But gangs of young men encircling and then groping women at large public gatherings: who has ever heard of such a thing?

In the Arab world, it’s something of a phenomenon. It has a name: ‘Taharrush gamea’. Sometimes the girls are teased and have their veils torn off by gangs of young men; sometimes it escalates into rape. Five years ago, this form of attack was the subject of an award-winning Egyptian film, 678. Instances of young men surrounding and attacking girls were reported throughout the Arab Spring protests in Cairo in 2011 and 2012. Lara Logan, a CNN journalist covering the fall of Hosni Mubarak, was raped in Tahrir Square. Taharrush gamea is a modern evil, and it’s being imported into Europe. Our authorities ought to be aware of it

On the other hand, here is Ishaan Tharoor from the Washington Post:

To be sure, there are legitimate security concerns posed both by the surge in new arrivals as well as the continuing instability and conflicts in the Middle East. The attacks in Cologne, writes the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, were a reminder to the West of the Muslim world’s “sick relationship with women” — a product both of patriarchal and religious norms as well as the stifling legacy of authoritarian rule.

But perverse, misogynist behavior is not the province of just one culture or society. And much of Europe’s anti-refugee hysteria, as my colleague Adam Taylor charted this week, has been overblown and fueled by often misleading innuendo and rumor circulating on social media.

Very few of the identified culprits in the Cologne attacks were themselves refugees. And countries like Poland and Hungary, while leading the conservative charge against E.U. policies that would allow in desperate Middle Eastern asylum seekers, still have minuscule Muslim populations of their own. The risk of a cultural invasion somehow contaminating their societies is, frankly, a phantasm conjured by fear-mongers.

Of course, this week, we Americans were treated to some man-on-woman physicality when police charged Donald Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski with battery after an encounter with “former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields.”

In this case, we have video, so you can make up your mind yourself.*

*My personal view is that by the standards of Summerville High School that encounter doesn’t approach “battery.”

The bottom line is that the big blinding, buzzing cacophony of computerized existence obliterates contemplation. The blitzkrieg of information, much of it contradictory, is harmful for a species who has spent most of its existence sitting in small groups on a savannah among birdsong and rustling leaves.

The ruling class – the Koch Bros, etc. – should know that oligarchies lead to revolutions, that the Occupy Movement was a Shakespearian comet of foreboding, but who has time to contemplate history or to think beyond tomorrow’s Dow Jones closing averages?

Then there’s Hillary trying to thread the needle between big business and young debt-ridden would-be socialists as she attempts to be all things to all people.

Meanwhile, followers of Bernard Sanders engage in magical thinking imaging 30+ redneck gerrymandered districts somehow going blue so that he’ll be able to break up the banks, overhaul our healthcare system, make college free while by creating the largest middle class tax hike in the history of our republic.

What we see here in the Republican Party – factionalism – is also playing out in Europe. Things are falling apart – perhaps most alarmingly, glaciers!

Oh, by the way, it’s my spring break, and we all know that April is the cruelest month, so I’ve been having a sort of TS Eliot holiday, riding around with the radio/cd player off, popping Ativans like M&Ms, reciting poetry out loud to myself:

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or is still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

As the Lone Ranger used to say, “Adios!”

 

Good Friday

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Today’s the day they nail him to a cross.

I wonder if arriving at Golgotha was actually a relief after being run through the stony streets barefooted and bearing a heavy, rough-hewn cross. Those streets lined with howling citizens mocking, spitting, guffawing.

Jheronimus_Bosch_or_follower_001

Despite the excruciating pain, as the cross was raised to its upright position, at least he could suffer in solitude as he looked out over the waste of the world.

Jesus-Crucifixion

For a few years my mother forced us to attend a Good Friday vigil at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Summerville, SC. At the vigil the seven last words on the cross were spoken over a period of time, maybe three hours. We didn’t stay for the entire service, but dropped in for an hour or so and then left.

I recall in 1969 on Good Friday standing beneath a tree in our front yard in a coat and tie listening on a transistor radio to Jose Feliciano’s cover of “Light My Fire” hoping against hope that Mama would relent, but to no avail.

No time to wallow in the mire.

If I remember correctly (and it’s been over half a century), the ritual consisted of kneeling in silence in a darkened black-draped sanctuary – everything was black; even the cross was sheathed in black crepe. Occasionally, a bell would ring, and Father Skardon would say one of the seven last words, which were, strictly speaking, phrases like “I thirst” and “My God, my God, why have thou forsaken me?”

For me, it was impossible to think of anything but Jesus’s suffering. Of course, I wanted to leave, but there was something aesthetically powerful about the ritual that transcended the mundane. In other words, I was alive in there.

Eventually, Mama would look over and nod, and we would get up, reposition the kneeling bench, bow to the cross, and head out the door. Exiting through those doors from that darkened sanctuary into the bright sunshine of springtime was not unlike you were exiting a tomb yourself — happy, happy — not realizing that down the road somewhere that sorrow, grief, and suffering would be your lot as well.

ST Paul's Episcopal Church, Summerville, SC

ST Paul’s Episcopal Church, Summerville, SC

An Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction Type of Guy

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5+ Iconic Movies this so called cultural anthropologist has never seen:

Star Wars – When I saw the trailers in the mid-70’s, I knew I’d be bored stiff. The only sci-fi I ever watched was the old Buster Crabbe serials on TV when I was a kid and only because I was breastfed.

Dale Arden was hot, Princess Leia not so much.

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Plus, I hated the robot on Lost in Space, never took to Hal, ain’t got the hots for Siri, so I suspect Artoo Detoo  ain’t gonna elicit any chuckles. In fact, the most disappointing film I’ve ever seen, given expectations, is Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

ET – see above.

(By the way, special effects never fail to Hindenburg my suspension of disbelief)

 

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Love Story, The Brian Piccolo Story.

(I did, though, make it all the way through the Garbo/Gable Camille)

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Frankly, I prefer the more abstract unhappiness I get by reading the life stories of young, attractive people whose pictures appear on obituary pages.

Forest Gump – This nation is stupid enough (cf. Trump’s political success). We don’t need to be glamorizing the virtues of low IQs.

The Titanic – No way it could be better than the Thomas Hardy poem “The Convergence of the Twain” By the way, I did go see but hated Avatar. You can read the review here.

No Pixar film ever. What can I say? I’m allergic to wholesomeness.

 Nope, I reckon I’m just an Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction type of guy.

Trigger Warning:  Smack shooting, needles, i.e., drug use.

My-My-My Generation

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Poobah Savoring by Toni-Lee Sangastiano

Poobah Savoring by Toni-Lee Sangastiano

In this piece from 15 March 2013, I mock my generation for its greed and the younger generation for its political passivity.  Perhaps I was wrong.

I’ve never really been a fan of my generation, not even back in the so-called day. The turbulence of those times makes us seem somewhat interesting in retrospect because people tend to remember Abby Hoffman instead of Debby Boone. And sure, some of us were cool and contentious, took unpopular stands, let our freak flags fly, etc., but then, again, lots of hippies were assholes, self-righteously slinging blood on Viet Nam vets while ripping one another off in petty drug deals while mooching off parents.

Sing it, Mr. Lennon:

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”

Also, the so-called Silent Majority tended not to be all that silent, chanting “Nixon’s the One” or singing along to “Joy to World” while vociferously supporting bombing Cambodian villages. Not to mention South Carolina’s Early Seventies bumper crop of rednecks, never a taciturn group. Oh yeah, and the angry vibe of surly brothers on sidewalks sharing with you and your beloved what they’d love to do with her.

Hey, but back then, I, too, was an angry young man, a walking middle finger, a narcissistic nincomshit, not the serene old fellow you know and love, the human equivalent of an extended teacup pinky, the selfless sage, the kindly gentle man who shares his wisdom here free of charge.

then

then

now

now

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To wit, with no legacy of saving the world for democracy to our credit, we baby boomers will increasingly seem like an encumbrance to younger workers slaving away to pay off college loans while we direct deposit our Social Security checks and enjoy the peace of mind of Medicare. There are many more of us than there are of them, so we can out-vote them; however, who wants to spend his final years as a detested vampire sucking the life blood of the economy at the expense of his grandchildren?

The word entitlement comes to mind.

Any rational person should realize that Democrats and Republicans need to compromise, that revenues have to rise, probably in a more robust manner than merely closing tax loopholes for the super rich, but even that commonsensical, relatively painless option is in the current Congress a no-go.

Furthermore, Social Security and Medicare must be reformed, and that means need-testing and curbing benefits, raising the retirement age – you know, slaughtering a sacred Democratic cow or two.

Obama has signaled he’s willing to do so, but he’s so detested and mistrusted by the Right that the two parties coming together to enact meaningful legislation seems about as likely as Menachem Begin’s and Yasser Arafat’s great grandchildren falling in love, marrying, and serving pork barbecue at their wedding reception.

World temperatures plummet as hell freezes over

World temperatures plummet as hell freezes over

So what you gonna do, younger generation, sit back, tabulate your likes on Facebook while your standard of living erodes like the sands of Folly Beach? Maybe you could take a page out of Jonathan Swift and cook up some plan to cannibalize grandma. Or how about starting your own revolution?

Naw, that’ll never happen. Click away, O my brothers and sisters, click away.

chicks

 

In the Wind Somewhere

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photo red: Hamlet Cloud website

photo red: Hamlet Cloud website

The phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is a not so subtle suggestion that human beings don’t ultimately amount to much as far as corporeal matters go.

Just ask Hamlet. Here he is next to Ophelia’s freshly dug grave ruminating on what base uses we may return:

Alexander[1] died, Alexander was buried,

Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of

earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he

was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:

O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,

Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!

Yesterday, we disposed of Aunt Virginia’s cremains,[2] which, and I’m not making this up, smelled like cigarettes. My brother Fleming kept them in his car, and as soon as he opened the door, I could smell that distinctive Virginia smell.

Nothing dealing with Virginia was ever easy. We had planned to scatter the ashes in the Folly River via kayak from our dock, but when Fleming arrived, it was dead low tide, so we decided to try the dock at the Folly River Park instead, hoping on such a chilly day that at 5 o’clock it might be deserted.

The park is across from a Catholic church, which was celebrating mass, so parking was a problem. Nor was the dock deserted. Three young men, National Guardsmen as it turned out, were fishing. It occurred to me that dumping human remains in water where people were fishing would be a gross violation of the Golden Rule, but as luck would have it, they started packing up their gear to leave. As I glanced down the long dock, another man was approaching in the far distance with his dog.

“Look, fellows,” I said. “I want to give you a head’s up. We’re getting ready to scatter my aunt’s ashes, that is, if y’all don’t object.”

“Not at all,” the tallest one said. “Sorry about your loss.”

So Fleming opened the velvet bag, brother David cut open the plastic bag inside, and Fleming poured the contents over the rail and into the water. I had never seen human ashes before, and I was quite shocked how beautiful they were as they drifted down into the water, creating a cloud as they dispersed, as if matter cannot really be created nor destroyed, as if Virginia were getting a second chance via recycling.

As we made our way down the dock to Fleming’s car, as if on cue, the church bells began to chime as mass let out, a beautiful sound, and I thought of this poem by Richard Eberhart:

For a Lamb

I saw on the slant hill a putrid lamb

Propped with daisies. The sleep looked deep

The face nudged in the green pillow

But the guts were out for crows to eat.

 

Where’s the lamb? whose tender plaint

Said all for the mute breezes.

Say he’s in the wind somewhere,

Say, there’s a lamb in the daisies.

ashes to ashes

 

[1] I.e., Alexander the Great

[2] A word I learned from the presiding priest at her funeral.

Poor Dead Aunt Virginia, Missing Fingers, Kendrick Lamar’s Hero Journey, and I-and-I

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Backdrop

Sunday, I had the melancholy chore of driving from Folly Beach to Summerville to sign papers granting unsmiling folks at a funeral home permission to cremate my Aunt Virginia’s remains. It had been a strange weekend. Friday night, at the Jack of Cups Saloon, I ran into a woman just back from the emergency room after her husband had sacrificed his thumb and portions of two fingers to a buzz saw.

Jack of Cups 19 Feb 2016

Jack of Cups 19 Feb 2016

He was now home zonked out on painkillers, and she was downright giddy, maybe slightly hysterical, as she showed me images of his mangled hand on her phone. Under the influence of high gravity beer, I had found the spectacle somewhat amusing in a macabre Flannery O’Connor sort of way. At the time, the incongruence of her manic good mood and the awful image of the thumb stump on the screen of her iPhone struck me as paradoxically life affirming, but 36 hours later, on this overcast Sabbath morning, the incident seemed merely strange and sad.

Adding to my melancholia is the mournful state of our body politic. The Republican Party primary in my home state and the Democratic caucuses in Nevada had just gone down. Last week, the Hoodoo household suffered a relentless barrage of robo calls that could have driven even Stewart Smiley to suicide. A recorded message from the Cruz campaign, for example, featured one of the Duck Dynasty stars shilling for Ted, quoting none other than Thomas Jefferson himself. I could hear it blaring from our landline’s speaker as I worked on Saturday’s crossword puzzle.

Because we’re smack dab in the middle of the Roman spectacle of this campaign cycle, I doubt if we can fully appreciate just how surreal it actually is. The leading Republican candidate, who has won two of the first three contests, resembles Don Rickles more than John McCain or Mitt Romney. The Republican debates seem more like Hollywood Roasts than they do serious discussions of the profound problems facing our aging Republic – the threat of ISIS, grotesque economic inequality, an epidemic of mass murders, an aging population being supported by tax dollars siphoned from the paychecks of young people with massive student loans, the increasing unrest of a black population sick and tired of the status quo – of seeing their children murdered by suspicious white neighbors or gun downed/strangled by overzealous police officers. Then there’s the matter of Flint’s water supply being poisoned by misfeasance or worse.

Speaking of race, before I left for Summerville, I had downloaded Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, a rather melancholy piece of business itself.

Because of Butterfly’ s almost universal critical acclaim[1], I had listened to snippets via iTunes but decided to not purchase the album. However, a student  I’d turned onto Dr. John told me he thought I’d like the new rap music he was listening to, and the next day handed me a long handwritten list of songs, several of which were from the Lamar album.

So I decided to devote the two-hour round trip to checking out the record, listening to it once on the way to the funeral home, and once on the way back. That way I could avoid thinking about Virginia, who unlike Lamar, never made it our of her cocoon.

 To Pimp a Butterfly

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Okay, what we’re dealing with here is essentially narrative collage, a sonic novella akin to a not-all-that-positive LSD trip. Unlike most male-produced hip-hop, Butterfly doesn’t traffic in braggadocio; i.e., it is not an exercise in self-exaltation where a DJ catalogues his sexual conquests/treasure trove of top end cultural artifacts.[2] Instead, Butterfly explores Lamar’s guilt over what he sometimes perceives as the abandonment of his friends and family back in the ghetto of Compton after his entrance into the gilded realm of the rich and famous.

In a sense, it’s a classic Jungian battle between persona and self. Actually, it’s not so much like an LSD trip but more like a guided tour of someone’s unconscious with memory motifs periodically rising to the surface amid a dense swirl of background noises, bass riffs, horns, pianos, etc. Of course, the central theme is race – the difficulties urban African Americans face, shit, as Lamar would say, like teen pregnancy and gang warfare. Ultimately, the record can be seen as a parallel to the hero’s journey, a mannish boy leaves the circle of his home in the ghetto, endures a series of trials, and returns a Man with knowledge to share with his countrymen and women – in this case, his homies.

The record begins with “Wesley’s [as in Snipes] Theory,” what Greg Tate of Rolling Stone describes as “a disarming goof that’s also a lament for the starry-eyed innocence[3] lost to all winners of the game show known as Hip-Hop Idol.”

Unlike most instances of the hero’s journey, we begin in medias res, already outside the ghetto homeland and in the realm of celebrity. The track features both Dr. Dre and the great George Clinton.

Lamar describes his behavior after first getting signed to a record deal and the disillusionment that soon follows. He loses his “first girlfriend” and finds “[b]ridges burned, all across the board/Destroyed, but what for?”

He “hit[s] the dance floor,” goes predatory “snatch[ing] your little secretary bitch,” and then embarks on a spending spree with “platinum on everything.”

When I get signed homie I’mma buy a strap

Straight from the CIA, set it on my lap

Take a few M-16s to the hood

Pass ’em all out on the block, what’s good?

I’mma put the Compton swap meet by the White House

Republican, run up, get socked out

Hit the press with a Cuban link on my neck

Uneducated but I got a million dollar check, like that

Both Dr. Dre and George Clinton offer warnings. Dre’s practical:

But remember, anybody can get it

The hard part is keeping it, motherfucker

Clinton’s metaphysical:

Lookin’ down is quite a drop (It’s quite a drop, drop)

Lookin’ good when you’re on top (When you’re on top you got it)

A lot of metaphors, leavin’ miracles metaphysically in a state of euphoria

Look both ways before you cross my mind

Bad news for uneducated moguls:

Tax man comin’

Tax man comin’

Tax man comin’

Tax man comin’

Tax man comin’

George+Clinton+52nd+Annual+GRAMMY+Awards+Arrivals+QEt1sIkYnVsl

George Clinton

Musically, the next two cuts, “For Free” and “King Kunta” are my favorites, the former some serious bitchin’ rapped over a discordant, jazzy blend of drums, piano, bass, and horns.  It reminds me of toned down version of Tom Waits’ “Minute,” which, in turn, reminds me of the soundtrack of a manic car chase from a ’50’s TV crime drama.

“Kin Kunta,” killer funk, owes an awful lot to James Brown’s “Payback.”

He’s mad:

Got a bone to pick

I don’t want you monkey mouth motherfuckers sittin’ in my throne again

(Aye aye nigga whats happenin’ nigga, K Dot back in the hood nigga)

I’m mad (He mad), but I ain’t stressin’

True friends, one question

Kendrick’s Mr. Big Shot:

I was contemplatin’ gettin’ on stage

Just to go back to the hood see my enemies and say

Bitch where you when I was walkin’?

Now I run the game got the whole world talkin’, King Kunta

Everybody wanna cut the legs off him, Kunta

Black man taking no losses

Bitch where you when I was walkin’?

Now I run the game, got the whole world talkin’, King Kunta

Everybody wanna cut the legs off him

This inauthenticity can’t last. Repeated throughout the narrative is a memory of a breakdown:

I remember you was conflicted

Misusing your influence

Sometimes I did the same

Abusing my power full of resentment

Resentment that turned into a deep depression

Found myself screaming in a hotel room

The 6th track corresponds to the “belly of the whale” stage of the hero’s journey, deep depression, Odysseus in the Underworld. It’s a powerful, raw, authentic confession of self-contempt.

Jonah/Kendrick

Jonah/Kendrick

And you the reason why mama and them leavin’

No you ain’t shit, you say you love them, I know you don’t mean it

I know you’re irresponsible, selfish, in denial, can’t help it

Your trials and tribulations a burden, everyone felt it

Everyone heard it, multiple shots, corners cryin’ out

You was deserted, where was your antennas again?

Where was your presence, where was your support that you pretend?

You ain’t no brother, you ain’t no disciple, you ain’t no friend

A friend never leave Compton for profit, or leave his best friend

Little brother, you promised you’d watch him before they shot him

Where was your antennas, on the road, bottles and bitches

You faced time the one time, that’s unforgiven

You even faced time instead of a hospital visit

You should thought he would recover, well

The surgery couldn’t stop the bleeding for real

Then he died, God himself will say “you fuckin’ failed”

You ain’t try.

In the ten tracks that follow, the hero begins his ascent. God provides the Supernatural Aid universally present in the hero’s journey. The protagonist’s focus becomes less egocentric and more visionary.

On the track “i” we get apotheosis:

I done been through a whole lot

Trial, tribulations, but I know God

Satan wanna put me in a bow-tie

Praying that the holy water don’t go dry, yeah yeah

As I look around me

So many motherfuckers wanna down me

But ain’t no nigga never drown me

In front of a dirty double-mirror they found me

 

And I love myself

(The world is a ghetto with guns and picket signs)

I love myself

(But it can do what it want whenever it wants and I don’t mind)

I love myself

(He said I gotta get up, life is more than suicide)

I love myself

(One day at the time, sun gone shine)

Some of these latter cuts bring to mind Gil Scott Heron.  The record ends with  Lamar interviewing poor old dead Tupac (thanks to an old radio interview) and an oral SparkNotes-like explanation of the caterpillar/butterfly motif.

I’m, of course, not doing the record justice. I can’t come even remotely close to conveying the magical meld of sound and sense and image that is the record.  Plus, I’ve left out Lucy (Lucifer) and all kinds of political subtexts, but, just leave it at this: I give it an A+++++ going on masterpiece.

Conclusion

On the morning after the Charleston massacre, I had to go to the cleaners to pick up a tux for my son’s wedding and go buy some black shoes.  I reckoned I’d encounter anger among African Americans given that I was angry myself.  The first black man I saw was sitting in a lawn chair drinking a beer on the edge of the parking lot of the laundry.  I waved, and he waved back.  A black woman rang me up at the shoe store, and when she asked me how it was going, I said that all this hatred had me feeling really low, and she said things would get better. I don’t know if she had made the connection to the shootings that had taken place about five miles away.  Probably she thought it was just some kind of personal trauma, even though I was sporting all my fingers and both thumbs as I handed her the credit card.

IMG_0006

[1] E.g., this from Rolling Stones’ Greg Tate: “To Pimp a Butterfly” is a densely packed, dizzying rush of unfiltered rage and unapologetic romanticism, true-crime confessionals, come-to-Jesus sidebars, blunted-swing sophistication, scathing self-critique and rap-quotable riot acts. Roll over Beethoven, tell Thomas Jefferson and his overseer Bull Connor the news: Kendrick Lamar and his jazzy guerrilla hands just mob-deeped the new Jim Crow, then stomped a mud hole out that ass.”

[2] He does, however, by my count twice boast of the size of his dick, claiming nine inches at one point.

[3] “Starry-eyed innocence in Compton?

The Curable Romantic

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Dark blues make me frantic

Black jazz brings me down.

Once I was romantic.

Now I stay uptown.

“Harlem Madness” – Fletcher Henderson, Ned Williams, and Irving Mills

519aMi139BL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_I was eaten up with Romanticism when I was a boy growing up in Summerville, SC. On any number of bright, sunny spring days, perfect for playing outside, you could find me in the cave of my bottom bunk reading The Count of Monte Cristo or The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

I was especially a sucker for doomed protagonists who suffered the perpetual ache of unrequited love, sardonic swashbucklers like Cyrano de Bergerac or Poe’s gloom-devoured intellectuals forever grieving for their lost Lenores. Of course, I didn’t share these somewhat pathological predilections with my friends or family. Maybe if I had, some kind soul might have pointed out that celebrating heartache is unhealthy and Darwinianly ineffective when competing for mates.

A consequence of this peculiar focus is that I developed an anachronistic, almost Victorian, appreciation of females as icons worthy of worship, practicing what Yeats describes in his poem “Adam’s Curse” as “the old high way of love.”*

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.

“Idle” as in non-productive. In those days, snagging a touchdown pass or smacking a double was a more reliable pathway to a young girl’s heart than penning cliché-ridden verse that doesn’t scan — still is, as a matter of fact.

So I had a string of crushes I worshipped from afar, for example, the beautiful Joanne Elder, whom I would escort around the circumference of Dogwood Circle never daring to clasp her hand and confess my adoration. I had cultivated an ideal medieval maiden in my psyche and projected her onto this not intellectually curious but practical girl. Meanwhile, in any number of carport utility rooms and out in the still abundant woods around the subdivision of Twin Oaks, other less literary 7th graders were learning how to French kiss. I still can clearly remember one day on an overcrowded school bus Joanne’s writing in the dust on the back door’s window the name of Steve Hoates.

[cue funereal violins]

stones-65Puberty itself was a great help in overcoming the blight of romanticism. I began reading less and listening to music more, Mick Jagger replacing Edmond Dantès as a role model, and despite singles like “As Tears Go By,” many Stones songs like “Under My Thumb” and “Stupid Girl” were openly dismissive of “the fair sex,” if not downright misogynistic.

My attitude coarsened a bit.

A couple of real live heartbreaks made me realize that the Marvelettes were right about the vast number of fish teeming in the sea of love. I came to realize that when you “got a heartache,” you’re much better off using your fingers to punch in jukebox selections rather than manipulating typewriter keys.

I figured out that the old Yeats was wiser than younger Yeats. Take it away, Crazy Jane:

A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.

Cyrano and Me

Cyrano and Me

*Of course, over a half-a-century later, I realize this attitude of placing females on pedestals is sexist, a byproduct of the patriarchy, etc, but look up at that less-than-ninety- pound weakling right above this note.  He didn’t know any better.

Quaint, Twitter-Ready Insults

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Michael J O'Donoghue

Michael J O’Donoghue

In the ‘70’s, the late great Michael O’Donoghue published a hilarious piece in the National Lampoon entitled “The Churchill Wit” in which he replaced those time-honored, oft-quoted Churchillian zingers with-

Well, I don’t want to step on his punchline. Here’s the original anecdote.

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend … if you have one.”

— George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill)

“Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”

— Churchill’s response”

And O’Donoghue’s version

When the noted playwright George Bernard Shaw sent [Churchill] two tickets to the opening night of his new play with a note that read: “Bring a friend, if you have one,” Churchill, not to be outdone, promptly wired back: “You and your play can go fuck yourselves.”

Alas, it seems, as least when it comes to social media, O’Donoghue was prescient in that vulgarity is now to the go-to response in verbal battle, especially on Twitter.

Of course, exhibiting wit in 140 characters – much less waging an argument – is challenging, so it makes sense that the un-clever resort to shit-slinging.

Obviously, trying to out-Andrew-Dice-Clay Andrew Dice Clay makes you look like a psychopath yourself, so, of course, the judicious adult response to scatological insults is no response.

Andrew Dice Clay

Andrew Dice Clay

Unfortunately, judiciousness and I-and-I don’t even have a passing acquaintance. I’ll admit my skin is lens-cleaner thin. For the world of me, I cannot stand to let some cretin tripping on the Kool Aid reduce me to some emblematic body part. Being compelled to respond, I’ve come up with a system to counter foul-fingered trolls who call me “a pussy” or invite me to “suck their dicks.”

Rather than going Medieval on them in the Pulp Fiction sense, I go what you might call “quaint,” wielding minced, old-fashioned oaths inspired by (but not lifted from) those Shakespearean Insult Kits you can find on-line.

For example, let’s say I tweet something like “Does America really want a 79-year-old President in the situation room during a massive cyber attack?” and some Oscar Wilde wannabe responds with “Fuck you, pussy. Hillary’s a liar. It’s proven.”

Instead, of tooth-for-tooth vulgarity, I might respond with “Clever use of synecdoche, you ear-wax-witted nincompoop.”

The key is to throw the assailant off guard. Chances he doesn’t know what synecdoche is, which should give him pause, and even if he does, whatever he responds is going to make him seem ridiculous.

Here’s a quick list of quaint pejoratives: pettifogging, rapscallion, miscreant, bobolyne, scullion, lubberwort, jackanapes, scapegrace, ninnyhammer, poltroon, blatherskite, fopdoodle

Hey, I’m a school teacher, look them up, you lubberwort-eating jackanapes. It’s Friday, going on happy hour, so I’m off to Chico Feo to banter with the wits and all that jazz.

 

Art v. Life

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climax_salomecroppedWhen aesthetes like Oscar Wilde or critics like Harold Bloom proclaim that “life imitates art” or “Shakespeare invented the human,” I imagine people rolling their eyes and thinking, “Puh-leez!”

Of course, their adopting these mannerisms confirms Wilde’s and Bloom’s claims. No doubt cinema popularized eye-rolling as a fetching way to express exasperated contempt, and “puh-leez” as in “give me a break,” probably can trace its origins from somewhere in Sitcomland.

What Wilde meant is that artists’ rendering of what they perceive provides the inartistic with images they project onto world, and in the case of characters from literature, models for imitation:

Consider [Wilde writes] the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence. At present people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist until Art invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method give dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch a cold.
“The Influence of the Impressionists on Climate”

Claude Monet: Le Parlement, effet de brouillard

Claude Monet: Le Parlement, effet de brouillard

To follow up on the second point, from the Renaissance on, literature has provided models for imitation for playgoers and readers eager to customize their personas. For example, males for 4+ centuries have channeled Hamlet, donned black and parroted his depressive wit; clever girls, in turn, have modeled their personalities on Elizabeth Bennet, that arch, articulate social critic. Perhaps the most copied “type” for males of my generation is the Hemingway code hero. Nick Adams and Jake Barnes wannabes around the world have embraced wounded, stoic, epicureanism for going on a century. On a less grandiose scale, Bogart as Sam Spade, John Wayne as, well, John Wayne, and Aubrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly have also offered archetypes for imitation.

Come to think of it, perhaps exotic Papa Hemingway deserves some praise/blame for our current culinary obsessions.

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy, and to make plans.”
                                                              A Moveable Feast

2010-02-25-Blackmarket-oysters

In the late Victorian era, the aestheticism of Pater and Wilde reeked of decadence. Who could take Pater’s advice “[t]o burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy” if employed as a grocery boy, seamstress, coal miner, or pedagogue?

No, you had to loll your days away reading the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” in exquisitely decorated gardenia-scented rooms (while across town some tailor pricked his finger hand crafting the smoking jacket you had commissioned).

Hidden by the Sleeve of Night and Morn by Edmund Dulac

Hidden by the Sleeve of Night and Morn by Edmund Dulac

Nowadays, few folk perceive decoration as decadent, though decorators have been conspicuously gay, as have been hair-dressers, fashion designers, and at least nowadays on King Street, male salesclerks in clothing stores. The effeminacy of caring about what flowers to place where perhaps only occurs in Late Empire cultures. (I don’t see Dan Boone fussing over container of black-eyed susans). And, yes, many grandsons of D-Day GIs are now uncloseted metrosexuals, and I say this is a good thing.

Certainly, I’d prefer to imbibe my afternoon Colt 45 Malt Liquor pinot in James T Crow’s pleasant arts-and-craft cottage overlooking the Folly River than seated upon motel-like furnishings in a condo overlooking the Mount Pleasant Bypass.

So, excuse me as I slip down to to snip some begonias from the garden. We might disagree about what is beautiful, but we can all agree that beauty beats its alternatives.

Hoodoo Living Quarters

Hoodoo Living Quarters