Interlude
Library smut? Please.
I want to keep a secret, but (so many are the distractions) it may not happen for years. I timidly imagine whether X. remembers or cares. Do others, long remiss or forgotten, wonder this of me? At last, I've a copy of Discovery of Heaven. I want to read and dash as fast as I can, to leave to dust curiosity and loss and silly notions of honour. I want conversations at tea. (I am mired in wickedness.) Must this be finished because I am years late? It is known and steadfastly proven, I am slow as the world.
Indiana has been lemons and cherry cola. There are a handful of Korean shops in my city, which means I've finally tasted black black gum -- and much prefer aloe gum.
Do you fancy chocolate pearls? Once I stumbled upon pearl-dusted chocolate and was reminded of Issa's lamenting sordid men haggling over the prices of orchids. Or, that tribute to careless modernity, "Let's eat stars!"
I've still not seen the documentary Death of Kevin Carter. I will cry, because I am irritated at having to change a burnt-out lightbulb or run to the shop to fetch batteries, inconvenienced by the ordeal.
The thing about fire is, we think we control it: blow it out, start one. Simple. Yet our lungs starve in blackness with cigarettes. Lives are being stolen. Breathe slowly, or not at all.
Abigail Washburn plays classical Chinese banjo.
She of whiskyed voice, Charles Simic poems, and tidy electronic address (at times her site changes almost daily, so quickly I am left with but blurred impressions of bathing girl (featured above), blackbird, squares, mirror). I've spoken of her before, yes?
She composes earthy bluesy film noir spirituals -- and not without flinted humour. It would be easy to compare her with the likes of Tom Waits and Gustav BerthaHe was lost for years in who knows where owing to inferior map reading skills and a tendency to follow tangents to disasterous conclusions.
Jackboot available at website
Northern skies available at website
and, in fact, she has tackled "Clap Hands" (4 July 2004 @ Schubas Tavern).
Several weeks ago I drove to Ohio, to listen to Kim perform in a Cincinnati bookstore. Although I pre-ordered the album and expected to find it in the mail when I returned to Indiana, I bought another copy of I feel like a fading light for a) the ride home and b) to give to Desiree alongside the photographs I snapped, as mementos of her first witnessing of the marvel that is Kim Taylor, intimate and live. Oh, oh. How shall I deny the disappointment that crept into and strangled me? I had heard a handful of songs featured on Fading on little occasions, bare and in their sundry orchestrated incarnations. On the record, I thought Kim's voice too airy and sweet -- I did not want water and light, twinkly lights and chilly autumnal breezes. Where were the smoke and hailstone? Oh, oh. Approach the stagnant swampwater, swatting at the mosquitos which occasionally ripple the surface. Listen. Wait. The water is crocodile-roiled, as hunters begin the prowl. Alas!, it would be criminal to pigeon-hole Kim's work solely as melancholic lugubriousness ...but she captures ruin so eloquently. On this second full-length alone, there is turpentine, dirty Bo Peep, birds convening to fly away, bruises, Elvis and Jesus, Tiny Tim, an ivy wall and a magic key and the world afire. 'Narcotic dream pop,' indeed! Moulin Rouge and 1930s Berlin cabaret. A Kafkaesque nightmare, disturbed by clowns and cherries. More cryptic poet than sophisticated chanteuse, delivering stinging saltwounds in rain-ripened package, spilling messages of sultry nostalgic smoke and tied neatly with "a pretty bow of indifference." She may tire of sharing breath with Linford and Karin, but they conjured her out of the woods now in buckskin moccasins tall thin, she plays your mandolin so maudlin you begin to spin out of the woods now. We fumble for dark things in ink black, a trace of peeling rust left in our palm-hearts. O! absurdity -- there is something of Kim Taylor in Schopenhauer's Telescope -- or the sideway behind of the reverse.(Do you know the) troubled mind available at website
Who is golden available at website
Turpentine
The room above a nice surprise -- when you purchase the album :)
à la "Elm" (and to some extent "Green Bird" &c.) by Yoko Kanno
I don't understand (Demo) available at MySpace, sources say
Killingly familiar; a synthesis of Blossom Dearie + Dusty Springfield in 1970s lighting?
The animal trainer available at I See Sound website
Hit me - 15 July 2005 @ Southgate House
Maggie - 10 April 2005 @ Canal Street Tavern
A good man - 9 April 2005 @ Canal Street Tavern
Birds and the bees - 4 July 2004 @ Schubas Tavern
Ninety-five things - 15 July 2005 @ Southgate House
King of me - 4 July 2004 @ Schubas Tavern
Wrecked - 9 April 2005 @ Canal Street Tavern
The Drive - 27 August 2005 @ Coney Island
Down - 4 July 2004 @ Schubas Tavern
Buy her albums, see her live performances, perpetuate the cycle!
My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night pencilled in
--
My medicine
Has many contrasting flavours.
Engrossed in, or perplexed by
The differences between them,
The patient forgets to suffer.
--
It's going to happen very soon. The great event
that will end the horror. That will end the sorrow.
Next Tuesday, when the sun goes down, I will
play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will
reverse the effects of the world's mad plunge into
suffering for the last 200 million years. What a
lovely night that will be. What a sigh of relief, as
the senile robins become bright red again, and the
retired nightingales pick up their dusty tails, and
assert the majesty of creation!
--
Among my credentials, I am the creator of the Black Photograph. Ask some informed commuter on the subway and he might growl scornfully: Oh yeah, he's the guy who takes a lot of trouble setting up a picture and then holds his hand over the lens when he snaps it. I am truly amused by this fictitious traveller's conversation and I will let his description stand for the process of my art. My art, my eternity. I will be the delight of future eyes when this grotesque parody of humanity has evolved into something no doubt, worse. These future monsters of the unborn seed will pass many excellent vacations of intensity immersed in the emanations of my colourless rectangles. A few years back a clever New York art dealer attempted to capitalize on the most obvious aspects of my eternity, and for a few months I was a figure on Tenth Street, and the darling of a small clique of curiously small and thin people, who were devoted to a "new" form of human expression called ArtScience. Some of these fanatics tried to convince me that they understood what I was doing...Nothing anyone has ever said about the Black Photograph has ever meant a fig to me, except, of course, for Nico. She could read them. She knew what I was doing. She knew who I was. And I long for her still...My work, among other things, is a monument to Nico's eyes. That there was such a pair in my own time, and that I met them, forehead to forehead; that the Black Photograph sang to other irises, and yes, corneas, retinas and optic nerves, all the way down the foul leather bag to Nico's restless heart, another human heart; that this actually happened constitutes the sole assault on my loneliness that the Eternal has ever made, and it was her.
--
...they will not wait forever.
They are not even waiting now.
--
The sweetest little song
You go your way
I'll go your way too
--Leonard Cohen's words of longing