American Fez

Instruments of Torture

Musical education at my tone-deaf school was always a sort of "do-it-yourself" affair. Ushered into a cramped room crammed with glockenspiels, tambourines and broken dulcimers, we were forced to endure a scratchy vinyl recording of Holst's The Planets with our eyes closed, and told to conjure mental images of heavenly bodies prancing about in deep space as the music played. I suppose employing temporal lobe learning methods such as an imagination governed by a suggestive title to study sounds is all well and good, if the piece in question is called Appalachian Spring, Danse Macabre, or whatever, but not much help when faced with something called Opus Sixteen. What then? Should we simply daydream of fifteen yellowing parchment scrolls with a brand new one being put on top of the old ones?
These pertinent questions were never answered by my teachers. Instead, they flung open a Pandora's Musical Box of xylophones and marimbas and other assorted examples of percussive instrumentation bearing more resemblance to gigantic shiny insects than to proper elements of the orchestra. Occasionally we were cajoled into wheezing long, quavering notes through heavily sterilized wooden recorders, the cacophony produced sounding rather like a medieval festival after far too much mead has been drunk. How could anyone learn to appreciate anything under such conditions, let alone music? This is why I despise Mozart and Brahms. Berg? He's alright.

Choices

In the long, rectangular shadow of Park Street subway station, the city's professional vagrants have constructed a sort of stockade for themselves; a rusting palisade of shopping carts and polythene bags crammed with discarded cans and bottles; and within these greasy confines, shuffling back and forth from dreg to dreg like walking wounded, the detritus of the world go about their shambolic business. "The Homeless Community" we call them nowadays, not much different than the Gated kind, really, except they eschew the mortgage and the carriage clock. Their condition is no longer considered unusual. On nodding terms with all the other tradesmen, as if they were also beginning their average working day, the vagrants have become as much an accepted fixture of the street scene as the butcher, the baker and the insurance premium-maker. We would probably miss them should they vanish.
One smug bum had detached himself from his companions and commandeered a patch of ground adjacent to the pedestrian pathway where Sunday shoppers strolled along, squatting on his rough-woven blanket like a frog on a lily pad, flicking out his grimy hand for quarters and dimes like a long gray tongue in search of silvery flies.
"Spare change or a smile." he pleaded in the most affectedly unctious tone imaginable. I gave him fifty cents.

Friday Conjugations

I am a writer
You are a pundit
He is a blogger

I am informed
You are a know-it-all
He quotes Wikipedia

I link to 2Blowhards.com
You link to rollingstone.com
He links to myspace.com/goth_culture

I am a .org
You are a .com
He is blogspot.com/whatever

I am opinionated
You are a douchebag
He is the webmaster of the New York Times Online

Traffick In Theory & Practice

Every weekday evening, emerging from the Public Gardens after a brisk walk from Arlington subway station to a coordinate on the sidewalk opposite the Hampshire House, I recklessly attempt to ford the torrent of remorseless traffic that flows down Beacon Street. But the vicious automobiles merely blast by me like fiery metal sneezes expelled from the nose of some enormous mechanical cretin, completely oblivious to a sign beside the road that proclaims the State Law: "Stop For Pedestrians In Crosswalk." I often think it must be the single most ignored sign in the whole world, even more disregarded than "Please Keep Off The Grass" and "Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work." Perhaps the Department of Public Works could better serve pedestrians - and the city in general - if they were to erect romantic, ivy-clad Venetian bridges over busy streets, rather than painting and re-painting these ineffective crosswalks on the tarmac and placing worthless signs next to them. Just an idea, from the soul of a poet who wants to get to the other side.

A Box Within A Box

Thinking outside the box is such a thinking inside the box kind of thing to do. The last refuge of the non-creative nerd desperate to appear hip and funky. In fact, there is a good reason such thinking is outside the box and it is this: nobody cares about these kinds of thoughts enough to make sure that they don't get lost. If something is of value you put it in a box for safe keeping, you don't toss it around willy-nilly in the open air like a child's football. And besides, being actually inside the box adds an element of mystery to the thought. It is concealed. Hidden. Perhaps it will never be found again, lost forever amidst all the other strange and cobwebbed cloak-and-dagger thoughts that have been haunting the box for these countless, endless years past. The Philosopher's Stone! The Secret Key! The Sorcerer's Thingy! ... But why not just simply turn the box inside out? Indeed, one might just as well pretend that there is no box at all. Or, indeed, that the box itself is somehow an integral part of the thought process. In this last instance the box becomes that guiding, omniscient narrator familiar to readers of nineteenth-century novels, the authorative authorial voice that commands "This Way Up" and "Handle With Care." ... Oh I don't know. I wonder what James Joyce would have made of it all.

A Dearth of Dearth

Global Swarming
My Speech To The United Nations

As every observant person must surely have observed, there is currently a complete dearth of dearth in the world today. In other words, there is far too much.
Personally, I find myself continually knee deep in a lack of dearth. Surely there ought to be some sort of Dearth Watchdog to ensure this abundant situation does not reoccur without warning. Sailing the seas of plenty is one thing, but the average citizen should be able to circumnavigate the vast oceans of glut without running aground on the dangerous dearths of dearth.
And it is not just in the overstuffed public spaces that this nefarious dearth of dearth can be experienced. Even in the private sanctuary we call home, once a model of spartan monasticism, things are budgeoning.
For instance, as I stepped into my bath this morning, filled to the brim it was, I discovered that I would have to share this once soothing watery glade with a flotilla, nay a navy, nay an armada of floating rubber ducks. I counted four hundred and thirty eight of these yellow squeaky invaders before I had even finished washing my numerous private parts. Where had they come from? I asked all four thousand of my wives if they had bought them - and they all denied it! So. Yet another mushrooming example of Global Swarming. Yet another overcrowded indication of the mysterious dearth of dearth that threatens to engulf this department store bargain basement we call Planet D'Earth.

Important Work Of Mine

For the past fifteen minutes or so, my entire life's work has been entirely devoted to the cryo-preservation of dead ants. Scientists of the future will undoubtedly discover a cure for being stepped on and squashed and then my frozen ants can be defrosted and revived, alive once more to crawl into people's pants and generally make themselves a nuisance at picnics.
Imagine the horror on the face of the Mrs Jetson of tomorrow when she hovers over to her gleaming teleport system, only to realize that it has been infested by an army of thawing carpenter ants. Ha ha ha. That'll teach the future to be so beatifically smug about its glass-domed cities, flying cars, silver clothes and giant edible mushrooms.

Hard Times at the Hardware Store

His elbows sprawled across the counter like two big bags of concrete. His face was an empty cement mixer, defunct and abandoned beside the half-built ruin of his enormous head,
"Can I help you?" he spat, as if the whole idea of helping another person were some vague and foreign concept he'd once heard his grandfather mutter something about in a dark and desperate moment many years before.
"Do you copy keys here?" I asked him.
The sweat stains under his armpits expanded like pale ink blots. A gleaming tiara of perspiration formed on his forehead. In the distance a stock boy farted and a clumsy customer knocked over a row of mops. Then there was silence except for the intense mastication of gum.
"Oh, you know, just forget about it." I said, turning on my heel and leaving, suddenly overcome with the feeling that I didn't really need to unlock that door that badly anyway.

Media Game Show Ideas

Here are the media-based TV game show ideas for Fall that I am pitching to the networks and celebrity Op-Ed writers. Hopefully one is coming to a TV set near you soon!

1. Al Frankenstein: Two celebrity teams take it in turns to replace Al's brain with a random one ifrom a jar on the shelf. The team that can actually bring Al back to life gets 10 points deducted.

2. Colder With Coulter:  Ann Coulter picks four victims of 9/11 to be thrown into the snow. The last one to freeze to death wins a copy of Ann's latest ravings.

3. A Hitch In Time Saves Nine!: Christopher Hitchens must beat the clock by drinking 100 martinis in 30 seconds  - or else nine Iraqis will be killed by a road side bomb.

4. The Zinn Bin: Prominent panelists are invited to discuss issues of the day with Howard. Anyone that Howard disagrees with is thrown into the "Zinn Bin" and left there until they starve to death.

5. Bumrush Rush Limbaugh: Rush's show is bumrushed by a pack of rabid dogs who attmpt to tear the jovial right wing host limb from limb. The owner of the most vicious rabid dog wins $100.

Sweet Poetry

The Irish genius Flann O'Brien, writing as Myles na Gopaleen, once proclaimed that the ancient art of poetry was a waste of paper since its margins were too wide and the poems themselves were often only fourteen lines long. Personally, I have always felt there was a certain degree of grim truth to Flann's spurious assessment. However, here are five verses of note that I do enjoy reading from time to time.

1. Ovid's "Fasti" - a reasonably lengthy poem about the Roman calendar dedicated to Germanicus, written during the poet's exile on the Black Sea

2. Ivor Cutler's "Life In A Scotch Sitting Room Vol.2" - also available as a long-playing record. Volume One does not exist.

3. Taliesin's "The Spoils of Annwn" - From the breath of nine maidens it was kindled, and you can't argue with that.

4. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" - Oh yes the Modern Age is upon us, constantly quoting the old age.

5. Edward Williams' "The Fated Warrior" - The author comments here quite frequently and makes good verses.

Coffee Nicolò

Sunday, the Ides of October, and I have burnt my left forefinger on the espresso maker. It is one of those dangerous Italianate stove top models; the sort of coffee maker that Machiavelli might have given as a gift to people he didn't like. If you turn to page 46 of The Prince you will discover detailed instructions for brewing caffè nell'anima fredda. Still, my booby trap of a percolator produces an aromatic and richly flavored cup, and I would rather set fire to my own flesh than ask some pimply youth in a green baseball cap to sell me a quick Starbuck. The choice is plain: burnt finger or burnt bean? Alas, I am already reduced to the last scoopfuls of my souvenir Roman espresso and so must return to purchasing cans of the iffy Illy brand from my local Whole Foods Market, but, nonetheless, burnt finger wins everytime.

Remembering Mussolini

Despite the rather disturbing fact that my first recollection of Mussolini is of him hanging upside down like a bat and being kicked in the head like a dog, he has always seemed very approachable to me. Not as unequivocally evil as Hitler, not as wretchedly grim as Franco, not as viciously bitter as Mosley, Mussolini seems almost chummy by comparison. History has always referred to him by nickname: in the past it was as "Il Duce," with an audible smirk and an absurdly operatic Italian accent; nowadays it has become convention to call him simply "Musso" with a nudge, nudge and a wink, wink. If you ask me, Fellini has the last word on Mussolini in "Amacord." The Roman emperor wannabe appears as a sort of Pantomime Horse in a stuffed shirt and a frown pulling a wagon of bullies. That is pretty much what I remember about Mussolini, memories inspired by the sight of a fat man in a black shirt shouting at nobody in particular.

Logos

"In the beginning was the word," and the word was ... Pardon?
Words are the foundation stones in the cathedral of being. They also from the flying buttresses and soaring towers, and quite often the gargoyles too. According to Egyptian mythology, Ra had to scream his own name into the void before he could begin to exist. "Know thyself" we are constantly told. But how can the congenital idiot know that he is a congenital idiot if he does not know what the word "congenital" means? In short, the more expansive your vocabulary is the more accurately you can describe and understand yourself and the world you inhabit. Your very brain should become a veritable library of rare and common words... oh, that reminds me, "Cease" is overdue. I'll probably have to pay a fine now.

Mrs Minerva

It has become increasingly apparent to me that if there is a God, then She is a woman. And She is a very typical woman at that. Such a conclusion, it seems to me, answers the most burning of metaphysical questions: Why does God never manifest Herself on Earth? .... obviously because She is taking far, far too long standing in front of Her bloody mirror trying to get ready!

This doesn't mean, of course, that you'll find me dancing nude on Silbury Hill with a cauldron balanced on my head and a rowan twig tied to my private pink druid. Oh no. I just sacrifice Ritz crackers to the owl that lives in the tree outside my bedroom window. So far I've been blessed by a twit. I'm still waiting for the twoo.

Desert Island Truth

Of course, intellectually, we all have our fastidiously compiled list of Desert Island Discs, that impressive roster of timeless and cultured tunes that we have deceived ourselves into believing we would wish to be washed ashore with. However, if you consume music via iTunes, your "most frequently played" option will present an often embarrassingly more accurate alternative playlist to that carefully chosen selection of sounds you think you love the most. So, according to iTunes, my "real" desert discs are apparently these:

1. Planet Queen - T Rex

2. Who Knows Where The Time Goes - Fairport Convention

3. Maybe The People Could Be The Times - Love

4. Space Oddity - David Bowie

5. When I Get To the Border - Richard & Linda Thompson

6. Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush

7. Kid Charlemagne - Steely Dan

8. Frederick - Patti Smith Group

9. Ride A White Swan - T Rex

10. Moscow Olympics - Orange Juice

I suppose these are exactly the sorts of songs that an average guy like me would appreciate. They are almost generic in their obviousness, which must be why we spend so much time trying to rack our brains for a mix of Desert Island music that we feel more fully represents our personality - even if we don't really listen to them all that often.

Tuesday History Lesson

According to the eminent war apologist and part-time cabaret artiste Victor Raving Chanson, the roots of democracy can be found in the alliances formed between the Apathetic and Pervert city states of what is modern day Gross. Indeed, the word democracy itself is actually an Apathetic word meaning "The best of a bad lot." And it is from the ancient Pervert system of government that we have inherited the famous phrase "Don't kill the instant messenger."
When the warlike King Media, ruler of what is modern day Cyberspace, marched his enormous armies against Apathy and Pervert, the leaders of the two Gross cities - the Senabores and Donglessmen - bravely shut their eyes and cried "Nanananana. We can't hear you." Thus was democracy born.

Ye Who Are Now As I Once Was, Etc ..

Perhaps you can recall a classic "Tale of Terror" concerning a gentleman who, whilst strolling through a country village, chances upon his gravestone being engraved by the local stone mason? Well, I thought I'd update the story somewhat. My new version is about a regular guy who walks into a convenience store and discovers cheap, mass-produced, rubber Hallowe'en mask of his own face hanging on a rack amongst all the Draculas, Satans and Frankenstein's Monsters ... but only his has been reduced for clearance. The re-write idea of this old Supernatural Fiction anthology staple occurred to me while I was browsing the merchandise in just such a convenience store. I was buying bleach, though, not shopping for a costume. This is what happens when you are in the planning stages of performing household chores. Now there is inspiration for an absolutely spine-chillingly real Tale of Terror, especially the chapter wherein Charlotte must unlock the door and scrub the area behind the toilet at the end of the corridor where nobody ,,, etc.

The Starlit Mire

"It is better to have no future than to be anxious about one." I'm not so sure; but it's a tough argument. Would the artist Austin Osman Spare still be remembered if he had not followed this edict? Would his work still demand the prices it does if he had remained a conventional painter, rather than devoting his life to writing and illustrating books of hocus pocus? I doubt it.
Today he is a cult figure whose Beardsleyesque sketchbooks sell for thousands and thousands of pounds, thanks largely to his associations with Aleister Crowley and other such charlatan shaman. Without this occult influence it's likely that his art might have developed into "School of John Minton" or something like that. Here is a Before and After example, a picture from Spare's days as an official war artist in 1918 shown beside a later work depicting his impressions of the Astral Plane:

Is it possible to become a cult without first being a dead failure? Before he died, Spare passed through a phase of selling doodles in London pubs and scribbling rather dense books about the "Death Posture" that he considered so apparently essential for receiving wisdom from his Elder Gods. Like Crowley, who died alone in an out-of-season English coastal resort town, Spare endured an extremely obscure existence during this period. He was certainly ignored and forgotten by the traditional art world. Only after his death did Spare's work emerge from the trenches of the Starlit Mire, regaining the recognition and prestige it deserves, thanks mostly to those occultists who began collecting his pictures and publishing his books again.
Nutter or not, I enjoy his pictures very much.

Jane Austen Wrote 'Northanger Abby' in 1798

It is an immense tragedy that, during the course of the last century, the fantasy figure of the Vampire has been transformed from a potent myth into an effete Anime character who enjoys a little light S&M every other Thursday. There has been an irreversibly sad decline from Undead to Uninteresting. Indeed, why bother thrusting a stake through the heart of the modern Dracula, when one may merely kick sand in his face and watch him cry.
But, of course, the greatest problem facing Fantasy today is that, by and large, its exponents have no imagination. Forced to scavenge whatever is easily reproducible from the consensus slag heap of popular culture, 21st century Fantasy subsists in an old and depressing petri-dish of cross-eyed bacteria feeding off Special Edition DVD vocabulary and Internet Identikit costumes: in other words, Star Dreck.
Observe the uninspiring and insipid collection of sterile, stereotyped vampires, werewolves and assorted nerds that congregate on the banal Second Life site, recent subject of a gushing "how-to" article in Wired magazine "Third-rate Life" would be a more appropriate name. It is like a Zoo for losers. It is not surprising that such conventional washouts don't have any real friends. It is astonishing that such sad-sacks always claim to be expressing their individuality when they are quite evidently all the same.
Restore those fiery, art deco rocket ships to real man Flash Gordon. Bring back the evocative Nosferatu of silent cinema; proper Draculi don't wear glasses and listen to indie pop music.

Sugar and Spice

Two commercial pictures that I never grow weary of looking at: from eighteenth century France, Fragonard's fashionably romantic "The Souvenir," featuring a lush depiction of a faithful spaniel watching its headstrong and quixotic mistress carving the initial 'S' into a tree trunk; and, snapped in London circa 1960, Bruce Davidson's famous black and white photograph of an affectedly elfin beatnik chick with her emblematic little kitten.

I often think that the subjects could be two separate incarnations of the same naif young girl, divided by a couple of hundred years and changing fashions in hairstyle. Fragonard's picture shows our girl ala ancien regime, just before her kind will vanish in a bloodbath of guillotines and pitchfork-inspired revolutions. Davidson, on the other hand, presents her in the vanguard of a new breed: flowery kaftans, phoney Eastern philosophy and earth shoes await this proto-bohemian - perhaps a fate worse than death? Although, as the great author Anthony Powell once confided, there is always something quite beguiling about a girl who looks like she's slept under a hedge.

Outbound From Arlington Street

"All the lonely people, where do they all come from?" once enquired the Beatles. Well, it seems to me they come from those isolated, distant islands of Sony Walkman and iPod. The private worlds of personal stereo systems that invite you to spend hours listening to the Beatles rather than conversing with your neighbor. There was a rainbow, mostly pink, of such iPods on the subway this morning. An electric tram full of bobbleheads behind dark sunglasses. I was reading J. A. Baker's brilliant book The Peregrine for the second time, which, I suppose, at least in misanthropic terms, is just as bad. Everyone looked depressed and miserable.
Beside me there was an extremely attractive woman, a work of art made of flesh and hair, who by rights ought to have been descending from heaven instead of traveling by underground railroad. So self-conscious was she of being examined by the men on the train that she maintained a stiff and awkward posture for the entire journey, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular concentrating on her iTunes selections. Further along the car, about four or five seats away from Venus, a young African-American male in voluminous clothes slumped in a corner niche, his head double covered by a hood and low-brimmed baseball hat. Eyes downcast, staring fixedly at the floor, he quietly rapped along to his music, as if he were an exhausted monk saying his rosary, or a druid chanting some sacred charm of self-protection. Our fellow passengers either stared into their coffee cups, ruffled their newspapers, or stared into the blackness that sped by like a long, rich seam of coal in a mine.
We all resembled a collection of spiders, or so I decided, gathered together in a rusty drainpipe to hear the proceeding of some arachnid parliament. Because spiders are lonley creatures too. I don't recall ever witnessing two spiders together in the same web. As a rule, they are a solitary species. Unless, of course, I remembered, one of them is a Black Widow. Distracted too much by these thoughts and observations, I closed my book, slyly glancing over at the extremely attractive woman next to me, thinking: Black Widow or Itsy-Bitsy Spider, I wonder which is she?

Monday ... Again!

Anyone who claims he understands that hoary old swindler Time obviously doesn't understand that hoary old swindler Time. The scythe-wielding graybeard exhibits strange and devious psychology. His motivations remain obscure. It is always a case of the sleight of hand of the clock. Frankly, one might just as well study the shadows at Stonehenge as purchase an expensive Rolex chronometer. what for me evaporates in a flash lasts an eternity and a day for you. How long can we weary travelers on the road of history endure the deceptive mileage indicators on those half-buried finger posts that point nowhere?
Yesterday, an especially rainy and sluggish Sunday, I traversed the damp confines of the alfresco shopping mall that was once Harvard Square; making my way across the franchised streets flanked by chain stores and Starbucks to the relative sanctuary of the Brattle Street Theater, on whose screens refugees from the rain could enjoy John Huston's sublime motion picture "Night of the Iguana" starring Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner. Afterwards, I taxied back home, drank half a bottle of Margaux and devoured a thing of chicken liver mousse. Then I went to bed and dreamt that there was a baboon slouching cross-legged in the corner of my room, lazily picking its toenails and asking me what I thought ... about what, baboon, about what?
I don't know: it's only Monday morning but should already be Tuesday afternoon by now, surely.