Music Write-Ups
How do you know Chris Earley?
How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive?
My car and I follow the gradual shaded curves.
From the radio, familiar voices talk about the Red Sox game.
The milk shake sweats its waxed cup and sticks in the straw.
In a few moments, I’ll be knee deep in Thoreau’s pond, reading aloud, “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious…”
Later, my friend and I will float eyes closed in the clear cool water.
Months later, he and my ex-girlfriend will move in together, maybe get engaged.
Now, I see only summer driving and pause breathless as this song looks back and runs forward.
-Fango
There are many accounts of heaven, some in writing or film or music. Most place the individual amongst a group of loved ones, friends and families from earthly life. Choirs of angels singing, bands of angels, the heavenly feast – no one is alone in heaven, I think, unless maybe they want to take a quiet walk along a cloud river or sit still like a mountain on a mountain. This song, though it is about heaven and getting there, reminds me of loneliness. I remember the closing scene and rolling credits of Jesus’ Son, and the living room where I watched it by myself on the third floor of a building in part of Brooklyn that could be sad at night especially.
Woody Guthrie wrote the words but never heard this music. He died alone on the edge of one of the world’s largest cities.
Listening to the song again, I feel my feet begin to tap and remember also the lift the chorus sends of seeing and hearing when so often we’re blind and deaf. Who has the tickets? Where can I get in line?
St. Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to Heaven is Heaven.”
-Fango
“How do you spell wild?” the young girl asks her grandmother, pausing from her illustrated journal writing. Two rows back, I look down at the clouds below that bleed drip swish fog light like brush strokes. North-facing slopes hiding quiet hollers, early shadows in late winter afternoon, pockets of snow, resilient hangers-on hanging on, like Frost’s remnant patches, newsprint blown up against gnarled trunks, under dense thickets. A February flight, south to North Carolina.
Flying into Oakland one August, I saw an outrigger canoe pushing hard into the wind, a nature walk looping out into the bay like a cursive g, a solitary biker crossing a bridge from one dirt road to another on the periphery of marshes, and the undulating hills lined with serpentine fire roads and folding in pockets of green in vales water-fed on the proper side of the angle of repose, surrounded by sun-browned grasses and the growing Spanish tile tall and glinting glass of two-car garage houses.
On trains, ferries, and especially planes, I find my mind more easily takes a long view. Thoughts freed from rooms of consciousness infrequently aired out, somehow breathed new life at altitude. A suggested meditation, with complimentary pretzels and ginger ale.
-Fango
In the first chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an alien construction crew destroys the earth to run an interstellar highway through our solar system. The book’s protagonist, Arthur Dent, learns of this the same day that he discovers a bulldozer parked in front of his house. “Yep. It’s gotta come down. Eminent domain. Didn’t you get a notice or something?” The operator of the bulldozer is sympathetic, but not very.
It has been over two years since I lived in Brooklyn. I no longer live in New York City either. Just as someone left her heart at Wounded Knee or San Francisco or Amarillo, I left part of my heart in Brooklyn. I thought of my Brooklyn today when I was reading up on the Sad Song Discussion of February Aught Seven. In my Brooklyn, there is a bar where the singer of many sad songs Elliot Smith used to go. Supposedly, he wrote his name on one of the tables, though I never found it. I never really looked. The bar was formed in a timeless and dated dive bar factory, built of archetypal materials like neon and nameless faded awning and painted mirrors advertising beer and flimsy chairs and bathrooms tiled with graffiti. And a jukebox.
The jukebox has hand written or typed labels and a glow that makes the bar less sad. The bar could use a cleaning, a paint job, maybe a firebomb by some standards. Those who would raze it hold more reins of power than those who like to drink their whiskey cheap in a place that could change but doesn’t. Those reins of power are connected to courts that issue proclamations with words like “Urban Renewal” and “Eminent Domain” and also to construction companies with bulldozers and unsympathetic operators. It’s only one dive bar but it’s a good one and I think it’s going under.
“She said the prettiest place on Earth is Baltimore at night.” I have never heard that sentiment expressed outside of song, but perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My Brooklyn is not beautiful by many standards, and that is why a Gehry-designed spaceship is scheduled to land there, with its attendant service roads and lots and displacement. My Brooklyn may not be beautiful but it was mine and that makes it harder to let go. The last time I was at the bar, my friend requested two songs from the jukebox while I bought us bourbon. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” by Bill Monroe, because it’s a good song and she’s from Kentucky. And “The Streets of Baltimore” by Gram Parsons & the Fallen Angels, which is a beautiful, sad song, that is now tied up in memories with a place that is… was?…
Espresso shot through a syringe straight into your eardrum. Melancholic brass accompaniment can spark adrenaline fires in limbs and chests, synapses to thrumming, and the paces of feet and heart and thought to quicken. Especially when I am running uphill, in the snow (oxen and molasses nowhere to be seen).
When running, when sitting, when standing, when walking, when I hear this song, I feel whirled in time and place, like watching my life flash before my eyes, only it’s not my life but a fast-forwarded slide show like in A Clockwork Orange of flies and fires and pianos and graves and bombs falling over Holland. My brother studied in a small Dutch city where, during World War II, U.S. Air Force accidentally bombed civilians, thinking it was a German city. The location is now a public plaza with a memorial off to the side; a flea market frequently sets up shop there and there I was able to buy the 10cc record “Bloody Tourists.” There has to be a message in there somewhere.
There are sometimes fire alarms going off in our lives that we do not hear. We know we are sick but don’t know why. We are feeling lucky but can’t pinpoint the cause. We sense that something is missing but don’t know what. Dr. Eugene Gendlin, in his book Focusing, called these unconscious awarenesses felt senses – understandings about our lives that are known in the body but not yet in the mind. The messages, the stories from 1945 resound but I can’t translate them, yet.
-Fango
Recently, riding a train beside a lake, a song stops me in my tracks, but not the train. It keeps rolling. A shadow thrown by a passing train relieves the heat a moment – the song like a sunrise, like glacial melt, like Mozart builds slow, adding elements like a sonic chef, then pauses as if the whole world were perched on the edge of a cliff. The wind follows us in fragments, parcels, breezes slipped from moorings, to tickle the water (dapple says the great Jesuit poet) – a few fish rise and show in white – the lakeshore is steep enough below for a small private diving board above, at the foot of walled terraced vineyards – the terroir alongside clear lake water. Terroir, from the French, special characteristics bestowed by geography, loosely a sense of place. The song grows from pleasant familiarity to pain redolent of misguided trysts – Stephen Merritt in the background echoing the disappointment of Tom taking you to the prom. Sprouting wings of distorted whispers, it leaves off, out into the darkness where it was born.
“It’s over. I have seen it all before.”