I never dream in black and white, so this would not be an image pulled out of one of my dreams, but I have definitely dreamed scenes that felt like this. Doesn’t it feel like this hallway is filled with 10,000 little kids in paper bunny ears, when it was probably more like 25? And that they are doing something more mystical than rolling Easter Eggs down a school hallway? And the only reason it feels that way because the lighting is murky and the photograph is damaged. It is a totally messed-up photo, but I can’t stop looking at it, even though it feels both mundane and mildly disturbing. This, ladies and gentleman, is evidence to the power of a badly archived vernacular photo!
In a little less than an hour, I’ll make the (insanely short) drive over to Firecracker Press, or rather Central Print, their nonprofit educational arm. I signed up for a letterpress class, and yes, it’s going to be really rudimentary. I have my hair pulled back in a ponytail, so that it doesn’t get caught in the press, and I’m wearing my grubbiest jeans. Tonight, we bring a picture of our favorite leaf – I don’t really have a favorite leaf, but one of my favorite trees is Mimosa pudica. If I had to pick a part of the plant I was most fond of, I’d pick the flowers, which are fuzzy and weird and bright pink, and smell like perfume and ginger ale. But the leaves are interesting, too – mimosa’s also known as sleepy plant or sensitive plant because the leaves shutter together when you touch them (they do the same thing when it gets dark). They are also ferny and prehistoric-looking, really beautiful, as you can see:
I’ve probably set myself up for failure by picking something complicated with lots of tiny fronds instead of, say, a catalpa leaf, which is just shaped like an upside-down heart. We’ll see if what I end up with looks less like a leaf and more like one big ink smudge, like a Rorschach card.
Postscript!
So here is my very first attempt at a woodblock (well, it’s a linoleum print; easier to carve than wood, so I got off easy). Yeah, I tackled something too complicated for a beginner. I was really panicking as we were all carving, because I couldn’t make the tools do quite what I wanted them to do. I didn’t get the background clean enough, ask there is a lot of what printmakers refer to as “noise.” Matty, our wonderful teacher, called this “rustic,” which maybe is a nice way to say “primitive,” but I feel happy that this actually turned out looking like something because I wasn’t so sure it would. I was trying to work from a drawing I’d brought, and got really frustrated because it didn’t look exactly like my source image. Then I realized I just had to trust my hand, and things went a bit more smoothly. I didn’t really like my final drawing, and so ended up almost re-drawing the image with the tools. Not ideal. I kind of lost my way, and I also wasn’t sure how my marks would translate to the final print. I have to say, though, as a left-handed person who mostly writes and hasn’t done any printmaking at all, I am very happy that my final prints did not look like schmutzy Rorschach bats. This looks more like a thistle or an Armistice poppy than a mimosa branch, but it looks like something, and a botanical something, too! So, I’m happy. My homework now is to track down linoleum blocks, carving tools, and to think up a big project and a little project. Getting the stuff will be easy. Trying to figure out what I want to do with those tools will not be easy…
In October, we moved into a house. It’s the first time I’ve ever had my name on a mortgage. This house is modest by average American standards – 1800 square feet – but it feels huge, because we’ve been living in a 625-sf apartment for the last two years. I guess I’m impressed that we managed, as two adult humans, to live in such a small space, but I’m relieved to have a bit more room to float around in. I wrote my last chapbook at the kitchen table; it doubled as my work desk. Though I got a running start on it in our apartment prior to that, which was in O’Fallon Park, and at 1,000 s.f., it was large enough to allow for two office spaces. This is me, figuring out where to hang stuff in that room:
As you can see, the walls were very red. It was one of those half-rooms you see at the top of the stairs in St. Louis two-family flats, pretty much just space for my desk and a chair. There was also a very, very small closet, which I outfitted with shelves and put my books inside it. For the six or so months we were there, I was insanely productive. The neighborhood leaked into my poems, high, low, and sideways; and I think maybe the poems I wrote during that period sound like they were written in a small, red room.
So, this is my new office; the opposite, really. It’s not huge, but the ceilings are high and the walls are painted a very calm, meditative blue.
It’s the same desk that lived in the red room. And some of the ephemera over the desk is from that era, too; it survived two years in storage in a friend’s rehab. There’s also a closet, but one I can put spare clothes and art supplies in, because there is room for an actual bookcase.
This came with the house. It’s home to all of my poetry books now, including a bunch that I had not seen for two years, because they were taped inside plastic tubs and squirreled away in the back room of a third-story house (a room that had no windows, I might add…it’s a rehab, after all).
This is the wall behind my desk; the poster is by artist and herbalist Michael Ford, in memory of herbalist Juliette de Baïracli Levy, who is one of my heroes. On the little glass shelf over Juliette, there are three terra cotta pots, which I seeded today with valerian, white evening primrose, and calendula.
My tiny red office was a bit like an oven. (And yes, it was even hot like an oven – we were there in 2012, the summer that temps hovered around 107 for more than a week, and didn’t get much cooler from there.) This new space feels like what my imagination wants a cloud chamber or star chamber to be, like a room where clouds or stars park themselves for a bit. (Those two things, in actuality, are not places one would want to spend any time in at all.) The first week this room became functional, I turned out three poems (not bad ones, either, though they need more revision for sure). But this space seems to be more conducive to stories. Since I’ve moved in, I’ve found a growing chorus of characters appearing in my head; they seem to have no intention of leaving me alone. Apparently this calm, blue workspace is meant to be the place where I sit and transcribe what they tell me.
On Tuesday, I’m starting a class at Firecracker Press, so my hope is that I can figure out how to design and print covers in order to put out those stories as a series of linked, individual chapbooks. Sort of like how Dickens used to do it, in serial form, or like the old Penny Dreadfuls. I’ve even been looking around for tabletop platen presses on Ebay, but I need to learn how to use one first. And in the spirit of Juliette Levy I guess, I’ve been researching how to make ink out of shaggy mane mushrooms, pokeberries, and black walnuts. Those messy ink-making operations will have to take place in another room entirely…or maybe even out on the back porch.
The title of this post was stolen from a spammer in my comments. Which are the only kinds of comments I get. (Oh well.) I kind of like this phrase. It doesn’t mean much, but it does remind me, in a tangential way, of my latest dive down the rabbit warren: archivists who write about recipes and clothes. Speaking of: the photograph above is of my “peacock dress,” which just came back from the dry cleaners. (Eco-friendly dry cleaners. Proof of that on the paper slip on the hanger.)
I’ve had this dress since I was 14. My aunties gave it to me for Christmas, but I’d obsessed over it when it hung on an iron pipe rack in a low-lit, spartan vintage clothes store in downtown Salt Lake City. I saved for months to buy it, but then the guy who ran the shop realized that it had been designed by the couturier who made Elizabeth Taylor’s clothes, and hiked up the price accordingly. And that made it forever out of my price range as a 14-year-old. My aunties all had to pool their money to buy it for me – and these were auntie with day jobs. It’s too fragile to wear anymore, because I wore the hell out of it in high school and college, and a friend of mine with a bit more junk in the trunk borrowed it and blew out the lining in the derriere area. So now it’s an archival dress, but I keep it because it reminds me of being 14 and 15 and using it as my emotional flak jacket. When I wore this dress along with some red lipstick and black mascara, I could go into any social situation without my shyness eating me alive. Because if I happened to be in jeans and a frumpy sweater, sometimes that’s what happened. Anything that made me more self-conscious, made me embarrassed, just made my already pronounced introversion/shyness that much worse. So my peacock dress reminds me that as an adult, even though I have less time to think about clothes, that my psyche suffers when I have a lousy outer persona. When I’ve gotten lazy and defaulted to colorless-shapeless-dull-not-fitting-right, I sometimes find myself back to being that stuttering, embarrassed 15-year-old girl. Having your Joan of Arc suit is important, even if it’s a three-tiered peacock dress rather than damask steel armor.
(By the way, I have to stop for a moment to explain the several weeks of silence here – between the events in Ferguson, buying a house and moving, and an increase in my workload, blogging was just not possible. So that’s that. Moving on…)
Okay. Onto archives, clothes, food. Robyn Schiff’s glorious book, Worth, is one of my favorite poetry collections, but also one of my favorite books about fashion. Here’s a blurb that describes it:
“These strong, multilayered poems test the transformative powers of dressmakers, jewelers, actors, and Darwin’s darkest finches as they adapt to a changing world where the same train hurtles past them toward marketplace and death camp both. Throughout, many of the poems use inherited forms to tell their stories, but the inheritance here comes down damaged and threadbare—yet full of power.
In Worth Robyn Schiff inquires about making, buying, selling, and stealing in the material world, the natural landscape, and the human soul. Opening with the renowned couture house of Charles Frederick Worth, the father of high fashion— “The dress was so big, / one’s hand is useless to take glass from table; / the skirt approaches while the hand is yet distanced” —and ending with the House of De Beers and a diamond thief named Adam Worth— “You’ll know me by my approach / I’m coming on foot with a diamond in my mouth” —Schiff moves from Cartier and Tiffany to the Shedd Aquarium, from Marie Antoinette to the Civil War, from Mary Pickford to Marilyn Monroe.”
The two blogs I’ve been reading and loving to pieces lately, Cooking in the Archives and Two Nerdy History Girls, have that same sort of sparkle and inventiveness when it come to writing about fashion (and food). I’m also a huge fan of Reay Tannahill’s Food in History, in part because she wasn’t a “foodie” – I’ve never been able to stand that word, for one thing, and another thing, fetishizing food is really boring to me; I’d rather know why people cooked what they cooked, how it reflects how they lived, what they believed, etc. Same goes for clothes. I find them interesting and useful, but I’ll never be on a handbag waiting list. It’s an interesting thing to note that all these women are (or in Tannahill’s case, were) academics who also write historical fiction. They see and write about their topics through the lens of the imagination, versus dry facts.
The women behind Cooking in the Archives, Alyssa Connell and Marissa Nicosia, pull recipes (or “receipts,” as they used to be known) from the archives at UPenn. They work from codices, and I love the thought of updating a receipt from a codex into a modern-day recipe on a blog. Also, at least to my eye/ear, the texts they are working with read like poems. Here’s a recent example:
To make a tarte of green pease Take green peas & seeth them tender then poure them out into a cullender, season them with safron, salt & sweet butter & sugar, then close him then bake itt almost an houre, then draw itt forth & ice itt, putt in a litle wergice; & shake itt well, then scrape on sugar & serve itt.
Apparently “wergice,” is “verjuice,” an acidic grape vinegar concoction; they substituted lemon. They’ve also made fish tarts (not great, from all reports), and lemonade, prepared from another fairly lyrical receipt/recipe:
Boil One Quart of Spring Water, let it stand ’till it is Milk Warm. Pare five clear Lemons very thin and put the parings in the warm water. Let it stand all Night, the next Morning strain off the peel thro’ a fine Lawn Sieve, Squeeze the Juice of the five Lemons. Strain it and put it in the Water, put in Eleven Ounces of double Refin’d Sugar, One Spoonfull of Orange flower water. Mix these well together, it will be fit for use.
And apparently this one’s a winner on the taste front as well.
One of the things I love best about Two Nerdy History Girls is that they challenge what we think we know about historical dress. That corsets made women faint (wrong); that big hair in the 17th century was not hygienic (not anymore true than it is now!); and that there were only two dresses in the average 18th century woman’s closet. (I guess, because we’re in thrall to that myth of infinite progress, we have to view the generations before us as stupider, dirtier, grosser, and more miserable. Yes, their life expectancy was a bit shorter, though often the way most Americans last 5 to 10 years of their lives often isn’t much an improvement on being dead, so…)
My favorite posts are the offbeat ones, like this one about a dress sewn from seaweed-patterned calico at the RISD Museum, the multiple connotations of “The French Lady,” in 18th-century England, and “The Victorian Hair-Guard.” Bradford & Chase have even inspired me to pull out these patterns, which I bought online, gosh, only about six years ago from the Vintage Pattern Lending Library. I suspect I will have to get my sister’s help with the opera cape (Alison sewed her own wedding dress this summer – a reproduction of a 1920s drop-waist with lots of embellishment and detail) but I’ll try the fabric flowers myself. If they turn out to look like anything at all, I plan to tack them to my winter coat. Not sure I can expect them to function as full-fledged magic garment like my peacock dress, but perhaps they can be as a sort of protective talisman; or just a reminder that even if I can’t sew an opera cape, I am competent enough to sew flowers.
I could post for days about Public Domain Review. Yes, I’m a photo and art database nerd, and actually enjoy the treasure-hunting process of looking at thousands of tiny thumbnails, but that drives most people crazy. Like Open Culture, PDR’s editors do the digging for you, and post the best, most striking stuff from a number of really terrific collections in the public domain, including images, sounds, and film. PDR’s essays about the meaning of specific paintings, photos, films or pieces of music are beyond excellent, too. They are poetic in that they “tell it slant,” like Emily encouraged us to do, but they’re very practical in that they also explain cultural contexts that have disappeared over time (these recent posts on laughing gas and 17th century English coffee houses are great examples of that).
This Windsor McKay sketch for an animated movie about centaurs is magical:
One of my favorite posts, though, is about Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater’s 1901 book, Thought-Forms. PDR’s essay, “Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synaesthesia,” invokes Yeats, who was a member of the Theosophical Society with Besant and Leadbeter, and mentions Yeats’ movement to champion the soul over the intellect. It also traces this kind of work to Modernism, which is fascinating, and rings true. I also agree with the author’s opinion that “color is the biggest takeaway from Thought-Forms. While the prose is baroque, clumsy and hard to follow, the visuals that accompany it are simply enchanting, suffused with mellow blues, misty purples, and brilliant ochres and oranges.”
Here are few of my favorites (“The music of Mendelssohn,” above, is in that category as well):
Roy Kasten played this last Wednesday morning, chased with some Jens Lenkman. It’s a great little song, and after I heard it on KDHX, I ran to go look it up on Spotify. The video isn’t what I was expecting (a tennis match, umpired by a Bob Dylan lookalike) but it’s charming. I think this song is about the epiphany that the mundane isn’t all bad, but as an asthma sufferer, I can also say it’s the most accurate description of an asthma attack I’ve ever heard. (Or maybe Courtney Barnett just has existential asthma attacks like I do?)
This is just a plain old-fashioned list; images, links, and topics I am thinking about this week, cut and pasted in no particular order.
Self-Care for Poets, Part 1 (How To Be a Better Sacred Monster) Poetry mag’s Harriet blog pointed to this last week; it’s a guest post for Drunken Boat, written by Bay Area poet Lindsey Boldt. She does give advice on diet (more on that in a moment) but It’s actually about how to safely go into trance. All poets (actually, I’d say all artists) do this when they work, whether they know it or not. It’s not exactly the same thing as mediation. It’s about dissolving the membrane between the unconscious and the ego. Carl Jung stated that in artists, the wall between those two things is much more permeable than in non-artists. When I read studies about artists and poets being more prone to alcoholism and mental illness, I always think about this – my take is that what makes artists more vulnerable is not so much genetic inheritance, but failing to take care when handling pure archetypal content straight from the unconscious, which is a bit like handling uranium ore with one’s bare hands. Because we are in such a material, reason-driven culture, we do not pay proper due to the real power of language and imagination. We have zero rituals around working with the material of the unconscious, as older cultures did (see the Oracle at Delphi, above). But the imagination, and just pure images, are POWERFUL. I think this is why so many artists and writers have to concoct rituals around their practice – it’s like their HazMat suit, the thing that keeps their psyche safe when they are working, and bombarded with the strong rays of pure imagination. Any fiction writer will tell you that when they are in the middle of a novel, the characters take on a life of their own. Any poet will tell you that some lines just feel like they were beamed into the skull. That’s working with the unconscious. I was happy to see Boldt acknowledge that. And much of her advice is practical: when you are drifting around on the ceiling, eat something! There is no better cure for drifting-away soul than a big, sloppy, peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Oh, how I love thee, Open Culture! And jeez, I love Dante with a big arrow-pierced heart, for all of my days. How big was my swoon over this? It was like this:
!!!SWOON!!!!
If you look at the hi-res versions of these images from the British Library, you will see why. As Open Culture notes, “The names Priamo della Quercia and Giovanni di Paolo may mean relatively little to you right now, but they’ll mean much more once you’ve taken a look at the illustrations featured here and at The World of Dante, which come from an illuminated manuscript of the Divine Comedy at the British Library known as Yates Thompson 36.” Other artists – Dore, Blake, Dali – have done some amazing interpretations of the Divine Comedy. (I think Blake is my favorite, followed by Dore.) But these are true to Dante’s poem, true to the time period, and just stunningly beautiful – and you can view them in super hi-res.
So, I know about Bang on a Can, but I’ve never investigated the work of David Lang (who is a BoaC member). Today one of my writers did a piece on the Mizzou New Music Festival; they’re hosting two terrific world-class composers, Nico Muhly and Zhou Long. Muhly collaborates quite a bit, including with rock/indie folks and David Lang too, and when I typed Muhly into the Spotify search box, Lang’s Death Speaks popped up. The vocalist on these tracks is Shana Worden of My Brightest Diamond. She is amazing – I once saw her open for Devotcha. I never get excited about opening acts, but I thought, “Bloody hell! Who is this human?” She’s pretty amazing. This whole record is a remarkable piece of work, though apparently the album to hear is Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, which I’ll be checking out tout suite.
Earlier this year I started a blog over at Ghost. I called it Green Violet. My track record there is pretty sad; I only managed to get three posts up in the past six months. (They were lengthy posts, though!) I think I’m going to keep it alive, but the whole thing runs on Markdown, and having to write my posts in code really slows me down. The image-imbed process is kind of burdensome also. I think it will be good for strange, essay-length posts – sort of the digital version of a closet for weird ballgowns. But the more day-to-day writing will be posted here, if only because I’m lazy and don’t want to have to code all my own blog posts. That is all.
My father plays trumpet, harmonica, and guitar, and some days I think that my musical fixations are inherited from him. But my mother is the second most fervid music superfan I know (the first would be my sister), so maybe I inherited it from her; I listen, and intently, but I can’t play or compose. Maybe this is why I write poetry; it’s the closest I can get to writing and playing music without having to, you know, write or play music.
Music is also a large part of how I deal with the world, whether retreating from its intensity with my headphones or using it as incidental music for my internal life. I build playlists to explain to myself how I feel, because sometimes it is easier to do it in sounds than in thoughts or words. I write letters to people in mix CDs (though I send very few of those to the intended recipient). And music always seems to be my synchronicity container. Dvorak’s New World Symphony coincidentally shows up (like it does for my auntie) when something big is going to go down in my life, good or bad. It was my great-grandmother Annie’s favorite piece of music, so my auntie usually interprets it as a sign that ancestors are near, and so you’d better pay attention to what’s going on. The last three months have been quite intense, so I’ve been thinking about Dvorak. In fact, I even found an old piano roll of New World Symphony at the thrift store a few months ago. So I thought maybe I could process it all a bit better by building a playlist, a narrative in music. Here is my digital mixtape describing how my summer’s gone – like the weather this year, it’s been up and down and all over the place.
Broadcast, “Black Cat”
Tender Buttons may be one of my favorite albums of all time, even though I only heard it for the first time in early May. I was embarrassed that this record hadn’t registered on my radar when it came out in 2005; I verified that it’d been played a lot on KDHX then, and I just hadn’t heard it! Strange. I did a little more research and was totally dismayed to discover that Broadcast’s singer, Trish Keenen, died in 2010. She was only 43—she died of swine flu.
Here is the odd thing, my synchronicity-container moment: A few weeks after hearing Broadcast for the first time, I realized that I had not seen any posts from my dear old friend Kris on Facebook. For a minute I almost wondered if I’d said something to offend him, and he’d defriended me. So I checked; there he was. I clicked and brought up his page and immediately realized something was wrong. All the posts were from other people, with a tone witty but melancholy, talking about Kris like he wasn’t here—it turns out Kris died from swine flu in January, when I’d been off Facebook. I’d missed it completely. I put my head into my hands and just sobbed. And then I had all these weird feelings I always have had when a friend dies; I panic, and think strange things like, well, maybe if I send him a note on Facebook exactly at 11:11, he will get it. Maybe I can bend time! Maybe I am magic. I was also completely crumpled up, realizing I had not taken the opportunity to really talk to him after we’d reconnected, after years of not even knowing what city he lived in. He’d even invited me into a sub rosa Facebook group for people he considered smart and interesting, which was hugely flattering to me (you see, Kris was kind of a genius. And when I say that, I mean he was a music prodigy, and also helped build Mac OS X. Compared to him, I’m a huge dummy). When I read about Trish Keenan’s death I had been just flooded with a terrible sorrow. Maybe some part of my unconscious was trying to tell me about Kris? I found out I had missed Kris’ memorial in Salt Lake by a month, too. So now when I listen to Broadcast I feel sad, but it also makes me feel closer to my friend. I first met Kris when I was 14. He was a bit older than me, and was working in a record store—a lot of my musical tastes were shaped by his advice on what to listen to. He was a music superfan, too. I think if he knew Broadcast, he probably liked ’em. But I’ll never know.
Amen Dunes, “Splits Are Parted”
I work as an arts journalist during the day, and when AD came out with a new record, Love, I got an email about it. I get so damn many music emails I can only listen to a few, but for some reason I clicked on it and watched the video for “Lilac in Hand.” And then I went and found Through Donkey Jaw and all of their other weird early stuff. My favorite song so far, though, is “Splits Are Parted.” It starts out so simply, and then just blows up. That refrain of Oh, I could love you, that’d be easy… Once you move past the age of 25, you get fewer and fewer of those charged oxytocin moments where you fall in love with someone and are almost seasick with longing and it makes everything feel like you are walking through beautifully drawn comic book panels. Those moments leave you with this feeling that something huge is about to happen, and that the rest of your life is going to unroll like some strange and epic movie. And then of course two years later it’s contracted into this endless cycle of workdays and Saturdays at Target shopping for mopheads and socks. Thornton Wilder would tell us that the essence of a life, the preciousness of it, exists in those banal shopping trips (or in 12th birthdays). Not being dead like the protagonist of Our Town, I guess I’m still sort of a sucker for big sweeping moments, even if they come via MP3.
Silver Apples, “Oscillations”
This is another band I discovered only recently (I didn’t feel as stupid about that, because they’re way before my era, and apparently their records were out of print; not sure how I would’ve found them before now). Another wonderful coincidence was that after being totally knocked flat and listening to Silver Apples and Contact and The Garden over again for a week straight, I went to their website. I learned that the drummer, Danny Taylor, had died, but that the founder Simeon Coxe was still around, and playing gigs. AND he was going to be in Chicago playing at the Bohemian National Cemetery on Friday, June 13. (Do I seem morbid? I’m not really; I’ll admit to being a little gothy in high school, though.)
They were the headliners—or I should say he, since it’s now just Simeon and his oscillators. Wrekmeister Harmonies and Majik Markers played too. Originally I had planned to book out of St. Louis around noon, because the show started at 6:30. That would’ve required me to drive up by myself. I’d bought T. a ticket, but he was dragging his feet as far as going; he had some obligation at the community garden. Eventually he decided he wanted to go, but taking two cars to Chicago bordered on insane, since one is enough of a pain in the ass. So, I waited for him to get off work, and we drove together, taking all the toll roads because they were faster. We pulled up to the gates of the cemetery at 10:15, which was supposed to be when the show was about over, but it wasn’t quite. We parked by the cemetery gates. A bunch of hip kids had hung their bikes on the fence; they were loitering and smoking. It was cold outside, and I was still dressed for a humid St. Louis summer. I could hear echoes of music, and I knew Simeon was still playing. T. had to pee, and would’ve preferred to go straight to the motel. But I thought, when am I going to see this guy play again, even if it’s only one song?
I felt embarrassed to go in, but finally got over myself and went up to the table and got a wristband. “We drove up from St. Louis,” I explained to the rock and roll guys at the front gates. “I know it’s almost over, but I still want to go in.” They seemed impressed in a cynical rock and roll guy way. T. ran off to the Porta-Potties, and I went up to the U-shaped garden in front of the mausoleum, where Simeon had his oscillators, and an old-fashioned 1960s light show set up. He played “Oscillations,” and “I Don’t Care What the People Say,” and “You and I.” You know what? It was worth the drive. I doubt T. would agree, because he was still standing in line for the john up till the time that the crowd began dissolving away from the stage after the last encore.
We stayed in Chicago for another 48 hours. I pondered going to Record Breakers to see Simeon Coxe’s new band, Amphibian Lark, but when we drove by, I felt too shy to go in. We went to Intuit instead. When I walked into the main gallery, the first thing I saw was a photograph of a middle-aged lady in cat-eyed glasses and a sparkly yellow ball gown, posing in front of a grove of pine trees on a Christmas tree farm, and I realized we’d made the right decision. It turns out the lady’s name was Edna, and she and her husband, Harry, lived in St. Louis in the 1950s! A Chicago photographer bought their vacation slides at an estate sale and was so struck by the images he curated a show, Lost and Found. They weren’t marked; he didn’t know the couple’s name or history, so he set up a Facebook page called “Is This Your Mother?” to track down the family. He says he was disappointed when the mystery was solved two weeks later. (And it turns out Harry and Edna were childless; she was no one’s mother.) Apparently he’d shown them at The Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, and I have friends who know him! So, that was the St. Louis Magnetic Weirdness Field in play there. I also got to see a re-created version of Henry Darger’s room in the back of the museum, which was a profoundly emotional experience—people forget that pain is often a huge ingredient when it comes to making art. You can really feel it in that room. But it also has the same feeling I have picked up in every true artist’s studio, where you feel like you are in an peculiar ecosystem of colors and textures and images; it always has its own very strong, very individual emotional field. Stepping into that field always makes me feel like William Blake’s Glad Day guy, where I’m marinating in rainbows.
Swell Maps, “Real Shocks”
Swell Maps is another band I only found out about this year; the epiphanies will never end, I guess. I have found I’d better not start listening to their catalog on a day when I have to transcribe, because I won’t want to click over to my interview files. Anyway, not much to say here, other than that grubby, scuzzy, late 1970s proto-punkness of it, the bleakness and the white-hot anger of it, was the perfect soundtrack post-Chicago partly because it was such a shock to come back to the heat and humidity. Among other things.
James Brown, “Hot Pants”*
The last week of June 2014, was not just one of the worst weeks of this year, but one of the worst weeks of my life. I’m going to spare you the details, but it was only at moments when I had to function in public that I was not a sniveling, weeping mess with under-eye mascara rings to beat Charo’s, though I don’t carry it off quite as coquettishly as she does. The only good things that happened that week: 1. I had the honor of publishing Aaron Belz’s Q&A with Tricia Lockwood; and 2. Some DJ on KDHX played “Hot Pants.” It’s hard to hate the world when James Brown is on the radio. That’s all. I got my tarot cards read on my birthday earlier in June, and the reader told me that late June was going to be fucking awful. She was right, and I’d say that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, except the awfulness was 89 percent awfulness out of my control. I was shoved into the athanor. Last week I felt so much better, almost like Supergirl; this week, maybe somewhere between those two poles, still a little bitchy around the edges, but not weird and funky and disassociated and unable to eat or sleep. “This too shall pass.”
Martin Newell, “Goodbye Dreaming Fields”
The proper Martin Newell track for a music geek to post would be “Wivenhoe Bells II,” which was actually a Cleaners from Venus song, but same difference maybe. (That song’s a bit of genius; it’s sort of the English version of Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”) But the mood of “Wivenhoe Bells” doesn’t quite fit my list. This song does. It’s about the countryside in Britain, but reminds me of driving down Route 3, past all of the rolling green hills and busted-down, dried-out Midwestern cornfields. Perhaps some will fault me for going with a big, expansive, fat pop song. Listen close, there is an undercurrent of wistfulness to it, a kind of “Goddamit, I’m happy and I’m sad! But look at how big and gorgeous and weird the world is…I’m just going to have to start singing, and playing some jangly riffs!”
Beach House, “Silver Soul”
Beach House: a band name so bleh, I never bothered with them. Then, they do THIS. (Which has been made all the more poignant in the midst of all this World Cup madness, I think.) Sweat trickles running down my back, the heat of sun rays bouncing off the chrome of rear-view mirrors, opaque sunglasses – summer’s always seemed very humid and silvery to me, and those are two words I would use to describe this song. The first scenes of the video even show a silver lady emerging from silver shower curtains, which are billowing open with steam clouds. If they called themselves Fishhouse not Beach House, this song could not sound less like June, July, August. But it’s summer in its most languorous and dysthymic mode.
New Order, “Ceremony”
This went over the transom and became a New Order song, too, and even though I can’t stand much of what New Order did after their first record or two, I find their version of this song just as poignant. Still, side by side, I think I prefer the more raw version, with Ian Curtis’ vocals, but I can’t find a good version of it online. Maybe because it was a crossover song , it’s always sounded like endings and beginnings to me, all at once.
Alice Coltrane, “Ohnedaruth”
Alice Coltrane is jazz and she’s not jazz. She’s devotional, but she still shreds. Never have I had a stomach for treacly New Age music (though *space* music is another thing altogether – I am an unabashed and unapologetic fan of the stuff – it’s too abstract and cold to be sentimental and gooey, in fact it’s the opposite of treacly). Alice’s song here is for the Fourth of July weekend, and the experience of standing out in the Nineteenth Street Garden compound last night, watching lightning bugs spark up from the bushes, and lighting flashing behind all the brick buildings, and kids running down the street with bottle rockets in their hands. Peace but great energy, brewing around the far edges of the horizon.
The Oldest Song in the World…Played on MIDI
So apparently the oldest song in the world is “a Sumerian hymn, written 3,400 years ago.” (Gosh, I love Open Culture, who saw fit to publish a post on this topic.) The musical notation was transcribed off clay tablets, and interpreted via MIDI files, which I find wonderfully strange, like hearing Kraftwerk interpret ancient Roman tunes. And, at the end of the day and the end of the summer, the fact that this little scrap of music has survived for almost 4,000 years is a reminder that beauty is resilient. In the ancient world, music was considered a kind of medicine. I think Kraftwerk, and definitely Alice Coltrane, Martin Newell, Dvorak, James Brown, and everyone else assembled here would say: yeah. That’s true. So I’m done here, and heading back to my headphones, which is to say drinking the soul’s sarsaparilla, and applying the psychic poultice.
*IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: a friend reminded me that this exists, too.
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