Mick Jagger

Roll On, Roll On . . . 

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment
photograph by Wesley Moore, a.k.a. I-and-I, a.k.a. Yours Truly

The night before last, Caroline and I saw the Rolling Stones for the second time in three years, which, as we say in Summerville, ain’t nothing. We had lunch yesterday with Tom and Kathy Herman in Little Five Points, and Tom told me that the Atlanta show was the third show he’d seen in the current tour.[1]

For this concert, his tickets were in the pit to the right of the stage and ours smack dab in the middle, just beyond the end of the jutting runway. Not surprisingly, the closer the proximity of the performers, the more expensive the ticket, and, hence, the more geriactic the concert goer.  In fact, most of the people around us could have been cast in the movie Cocoon, though they sported Stones’ tee-shirts and knew the words to every song. The ashen old man in front of me smiled broadly, swaying feebly as he held his phone aloft to record “Midnight Rambler.”  Yet, he left early. Standing up for three straight hours was too much for him.

Not for seventy-eight-year-old Mick. He danced, clapped, dervished, sang, stuck his tongue out a la the logo, a lean but amiable Dionysian machine, his on-stage persona friendly, making sure to mention local landmarks, addressing the audience as if he appreciated their presence.  Of course, on this evening, he gave a shout-out to the World Champion Atlanta Braves. 

Keith, on the other hand, seemed – to put it mildly – less robust. Ronnie Wood took up most of the guitar duties and killed it while Keith slowly wandered around playing mostly rhythm. Occasionally, while Ronnie was screeching a solo, the jumbotron showed Keith.

Still, the cat also turns 78 in December, and it ain’t like he was propped on a stool. If Charley Watts is/was the heartbeat of the Stones, Keith is its soul, conveying the darkness of the blues, howling wolves, muddy Mississippi waters, hearts shattered like beer glasses on the floors of Delta juke joints.

Keith is a walking, talking memento mori.

The set list for this show featured rarely performed “Shattered” from Some Girls and “She’s a Rainbow,” a period piece from the Stones’ blessedly short-lived foray into psychedelia. Of course, you can’t always get what you want, but I would have rather heard “Beast of Burden” from Some Girls and, if you wanna go obscure, why not “The Spider and the Fly” from Out of Our Heads, a truly great album, which also features “Play With Fire,” which would have been more than a worthy substitute for “She’s a Rainbow.”

Flashback: I guess I was about sixteen when I first heard “The Spider and the Fly,” and, I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but I found the following lyrics disgusting:

She was common, flirty, she looked about thirty 
I would have run away but I was on my own 
She told me later she’s a machine operator 
She said she liked the way I held the microphone 
Then I said “hi” like a spider to a fly 
Jump right ahead in my web.

Yuk, thirty years old! Who would want to go home with a thirty-year old?

Yes, young readers, the cliches are accurate, a blink of the eye, calendar pages riffling, being torn off by the winds of time in a black-and-white movie that your great grandparents watched for a dime a second ago. 

However, to quote my man Andrew Marvell:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun 

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

In other words, after a Stones’ concert, you can either limp back to the hotel and retire, or hit the hotel bar, which at the Omni boasts a balcony overlooking the skyline, which on this particular night looked downright Boschian. As we sipped our drinks, Caroline regaled me with stories from her wanderings in North Viet Nam in the previous century as the sun dropped below the horizon of the British Empire.

And when we returned to the hotel room, we continued our conversation, talking about this and that, looking out over at another view of Atlanta, not wanting to go to sleep, yet looking forward to tomorrow, to our lunch with Kathy and Tom.

view from the hotel bar balcony

[1] By the way, Little Five Points is a funky, mural-rich blip of Bohemia in an otherwise seemingly staid state capital. Outside a vintage clothing shop, I ran into this fellow dressed up like Dr. John, complete with voodoo hat and tooth necklace, plus the male version of Dorthey’s ruby slippers from Oz.  I said something like, “Hey, mon, dig the Doctor John get-up.” His response, a blank contemptuous look.  I asked, “You’ve heard of Doctor, John, right?” He said no and asked me if I had ever heard of some bullshit name like ‘Magnifico, Light Bringer” and then proclaimed that he was Magnifico, Light Bringer, a magician, and then launched into this puffed-up Jesus spiel. I interrupted by saying “party on,” and split, though I felt like stealing the Tom Waits line and saying, “You know they ain’t no devil. That’s just God when he’s drunk.”

mural in Little Five Points, photograph by Caroline

The Curable Romantic

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment

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.

Bang Endings

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

Barry-White-Soul-SeductionA while back, I posted a piece called “First Impressions,” which celebrated killer opening sentences from various novels like [cue Barry White] this here delicious, obsessive echo chamber of a love song from Mr Baddass himself, Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

However, as Franz Kafka once told me, “Starten eines Roman ist eine verdammt viel einfacher, als Abschluss einer“* so I decided to lay 5 of my favorite closing lines on you, lines that rat-a-tat-tat the novels’ themes in sound and sense. (BTW, the actual quotes themselves should be read aloud).

*Starting a novel is a helluva lot easier than finishing one.

1. The Sound and the Fury: “The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.”

If Mr. Faulkner were employed by SparkNotes, he might “summarize” that last sentence like this: A description of Benjy — christened Maury — Compson, idiot grandson of the Confederate General patriarch of that fallen family, the drooping and broken flower an emblem of Ben’s beloved lost sister’s honor, Maury/Benjamin just having gone apeshit because the black tween servant Luster had swung the wagon bearing the family on their ritualistic visit to the grave of General Compson’s alcoholic son Jason Sr. to the left of the monument, provoking sounds of ”horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless, just sound,” from the that thirty-three-year-old with the mind-of-a-three-year-old, bellowing until the “only sane” Compson brother, Jason Jr., catches the reins to swing the horse Queenie in the opposite direction, calming Benjy, the sentence itself capsuling the fall of the House of Compson, the disappearance of the Old South, its doomed fetish for tradition.

joyce mainUlysses: O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Riding the rapids of Mrs. Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness as she contemplates her hubby Leopold, heroic cuckold, who has come home again, home again, jiggedy jig, and who lies in bed next to her, his feet facing the headboard and his head facing the footboard, and what can you say to the life-affirming ending of that concluding sentence but yes sir ree bob tail– Yes!

Y’all ready now for a slow dance?

The portrait of Abert Camus by Haeree Choi

The portrait of Abert Camus by Haeree Choi

3. The Stranger: For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Mon Dieu, is smoking a cigarette during the absurd ritual of sitting up all night with your mother’s corpse or having casual sex the night after her funeral so wrong? How absurd! These acts by our narrator Meursault seem to shock his all-white Algerian jury more than the offing of a mere native (which in Colonial Africa is tantamount to jaywalking).  You might say that Meursault’s jail sentence has been a Godsend – i.e., you might say that if he didn’t exist in an arid, godless abyss of a universe — but the good news is that in the fleeting ever disappearing now in which he types the concluding paragraph, he has discovered that he and the indifferent universe are one. OM.

4. The Sun Also Rises: A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”fiesta-sun-also-rises-ernest-hemingway-paperback-cover-art

Who knows if Viagra would have worked on narrator Jake Barnes. Did his war injury render him a gelding or sever his penis? No crisp declarative sentences answer those questions. Certainly, as a man Jake is the opposite of what the vulgar call “dickless.”  Whatever, all I really care about is that mounted policeman raising his baton is an invaluable tool in convincing skeptical students that phallic symbols aren’t perverse illusions engendered by English teachers’ diseased minds .

5. “Midnight Rambler”: I’ll stick my knife right down your throat, baby, and it hurts!

Okay, as Condoleezza Rice’s and Colonel Kurtz’s lovechild might say, “Strictly speaking, ‘Midnight Rambler’ isn’t exactly a novel, but it is a narrative, sort of, and this post is getting too long, and goddammit, that last line of the Stones’ classic absolutely nails the sound and sense of the sort of narrative, and it‘s literally “killer”, so fuck you and your rigid mind-forged manacles.”  

Let_it_Bleed