Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Wolves, Lower.

[Note: this piece was posted on May 13th, but one of Blogger's strange editing glitches moved it while I was editing it today.  Blogger's editing program is horrible.  8/31/11.]

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High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

--Hendrik Van Loon, The Story of Mankind.

I wasn't that into music when I was small. I grew up knowing a few select bands and singers, and they were mine owing to gut reflex, really, rather than because I knew what I liked. Some kids do. They learn what they're listening to and why, and so find themselves happily soaked in that instinct for something magically sonic and, what's more, something communal. Not I.

My tastes ran to the edgy and schizophrenically attractive to a kid's mind, but thoroughly puerile in retrospect -- They Might Be Giants -- or off the cliffedge genius -- Tori Amos, from who the theater geeks and high school divas got a first taste of dangerous sexuality as she rearranged our heads forever with lines that dove, bled or scraped through the mind like a rake on concrete... I... want to kill... this waaii-tress... she's worked here a year... longer than I... and all of this was roughly sewn together for me with some mass anthem, mass appeal: U2, Peter Gabriel. I'd like to say that I knew Sting, but I only knew Summoner's Tales, and I only knew that because of 'Shape of my Heart', the song that shows up at the end of The Professional, as a twelve-year old Natalie Portman tends to the houseplant of the hit man-cum-father figure who sacrificed himself for her life.

My first memory of music is set on Christmas Day, 1983. I'm six and playing with a slot-car track as Michael Stipe croons 'The One I Love' in the background. (Wikipedia tells me that the album Document was released in 1987. Do I care? Or even believe it? Not really. This vision of this song on Christmas has always been one of my clearest early memories.) Stipe doesn't mumble, which of course is not par for the course with him.

In high school I really gravitate toward R.E.M., to the disdain of my hipper friends who bliss out to Oingo Boingo, and while I'm well into a couple Boingo tracks -- 'Just Another Day' with its pitch-perfect optimism, 'Spider' and 'Can't See', Elfman's goth-lite pastoral scenes, even the eight-minute 'Insanity' (in my memory it's about twelve), which to a casual listener in a Pandora mix would mean nothing at all beyond "mid-nineties" -- it's R.E.M. that I always return to. Yes, I find 'Shiny Happy People' as revolting as everyone else does, but otherwise I love Out of Time, debatably the band's signature album to that point, certainly their commercial crossover. 'Low' defines mood music for me, and so when emo comes plodding along later I'm totally ready to trash it. 'Belong' somehow manages to assemble and invoke the spirit of ancient storytelling inside a tale that's driven by the very contemporary urge to heal something -- or someone -- broken. Somewhere in the late nineties, Tori Amos does an acoustic cover of 'Losing My Religion' that over the last decade has taken on a slow, indelible life of its own.

One year past Out of Time brought us to Automatic for the People, the title not communist slang, but the maxim of a diner in Athens, Georgia. The album opens with a guitar solo on an empty midnight road. Here's where someone music-savvier than myself might have pondered a hand-me-down Springsteen vibe in 'Drive', but the pulse is immediate, calm, centered and concerned with nothing but its own introspective dance, and I only ever knew that it felt the way I wanted to feel on the floor of a shitty Texarkanish club in Eugene, Oregon. The violin chorus plays haymaker to the guitar anyway. Portishead and GY!BE, I'm sure, were taking notes at a distance.

Four songs later we find 'New Orleans Instrumental #1' and 'Sweetness Follows', companion pieces in a way -- the former mellow where the latter is thunderous; the former a fast-flowing stream, the latter a tidal wave. All the best R.E.M. songs are unique, and while I wouldn't call 'Sweetness Follows' one of my favorites, there's really no dismissing its power. The band's name has always been somewhat of a misnomer, as R.E.M. has never been as concerned with dreams as with memory ('Maps and Legends', 'Second Guessing'); how it throws light on the past, how it twists. Life the way it looks in the rear-view mirror. Many, many trees gave their lives to produce the reams of essays that were produced about R.E.M.'s meanings once the band careened into the spotlight: the Joycean wordplay, the semiotics essay, "Metaphor as Mistake", that influenced Stipe at the University of Georgia. Later on, the approbation of the band's cult status by Hollywood for frenzied, postmodern shtick like Vanilla Sky

All of them lost their way in linguistic thrashing and missed the music. 'Sweetness Follows' is an almost painful melody about the distance in-between. It offers no answers. The oboe is brilliant.

Two years after Automatic, R.E.M. made a record with the giggly-clunker title New Adventures in Hi-Fi. This is not my favorite R.E.M. album (that's Document), might not even make my top five, but it contains what I have always considered to be their single finest piece of work. 'Leave' on the studio LP runs 7:18, and like a great movie deserves to be played without a break, though it's also a great song to drive to. It opens on a dripping guitar solo, slower than 'Drive', no dance floor in sight, just a ruminative, reflective strum. This plays for eight bars. Then the band hits up an air-raid siren -- this is not a metaphor -- that sounds without interruption for the rest of the song. It gets eight bars on its own and then the guitar joins it, the theme unchanged, but now somehow triumphant rather than sad. The lyrics are as elegant and seamlessly woven over the lone guitar (which is all the studio track uses) as anything Stipe has ever written.

Nothing can bring me closer...

Nothing can bring me near...

Where is the road I follow... to leave... leave...

When my high school goth friends sneered at my band, it was essentially because R.E.M. can seem too plain, too bald, if you're not really tuned in. These were, after all, southern boys who almost named their band Cans of Piss. The argument we had wasn't a stylistic difference about darkness or cynicism -- both R.E.M. and Oingo Boingo had heart to spare in their own ways, miles away from the autoerotic shock that NIN/Marilyn Manson tried to deliver in the same era. Where Boingo and Stipe's band parted ways was in their approach to showmanship: Elfman vamped like a white Prince, put midgets on stage banging drums and played dozens of different instruments like the musical prodigy he was, with a backup cast of dozens, whereas R.E.M. never grew past a four-man ensemble and rarely employed much instrumentally beyond the standard three-piece guitar/bass/drums set of Buck, Mills and Berry. But in 'Leave' they accomplished something I suspect they'd been methodically working up to for fifteen years: they crafted their awkward, inside-out sensibilities onto a rock anthem that revealed nothing less than a heart in motion, off and running in it own element. If a soul can be defined as that which universalizes experience, telling you not just my story but part of your own, then R.E.M. found the soul's notes here, even if they were nothing but signposts you might have seen once in a dream of a desert landscape.

Suffer the dreams of a world gone mad, I like it like that and I know it...

I know it well... ugly and sweet...

I temper madness with an even extreme...

In a 2005 performance of the song that's YouTubeable (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-TKqzlDy5I), Stipe looks as loose as I've ever seen him, hopping around the stage, tossing the mike from hand to hand, freaking out as far as the song requires and no further, cheerleadering the audience. It had been a long journey from the extreme self-consciousness of 'Radio Free Europe' on Murmur; from a first clumsy grab at big-time cool to an assured, steamrolling, vibing masterpiece.

Then they lost their drummer. Bill Berry had been feeling ready to leave the pop world behind, and made the break just before recording began on the new album. "Are we still R.E.M.?" Stipe wondered aloud. "I guess a three-legged dog is still a dog. It just has to learn to run differently." And so, like others were doing in the late nineties, they discovered electronica and made a record, Up, that many believe was a subtle influence on Radiohead's Kid A two years later -- and Radiohead, after all, is just R.E.M. turned British with a spinal cord that's ratcheted through a corkscrew. 'Lotus' was unlike anything the band had done before, except maybe Monster. 'The Apologist' seemed like a precursor to Accelerate while acting as a chorus for all the band's work up to that time. 'Walk Unafraid': the rhythm, the beat, even the title played to Radiohead's particular brand of urban gamesmanship. (Listen to the guitar intro and then listen to 'Airbag' again.) Stipe's lyrical flow in 'Walk Unafraid' is also much more classically R.E.M. than in 'Daysleeper', a concept song, or 'At My Most Beautiful', a Shiny-Happyish song I've never personally liked. Detractors of Up will call Stipe's words here a little too straightforward, a bit too plain, but I'd say the album possesses moments, as in 'Walk Unafraid', where they're just working the peak they found in 'Leave'.

I just want to hold my head up high...

I don't care what I have to step over...

I'm prepared to look you in the eye...

After Up came Reveal and Around the Sun, the latter probably the band's low point, with problems that fans understand well and which I don't feel the need to rehash here. Reveal, arguably a great album, is not one I've ever been drawn to, though it did have 'I'll Take The Rain', a stripped-down song that Stipe called "the big chick ballad" which, ironically enough, later found a place in the Goth, black-coats-and-anime subculture I've been contrasting R.E.M. with here.

What can be said about Accelerate? That it was their most secure album since Berry's departure? It was. That it was the closest they've ever come to flat-out rock and roll? It was that too. That live on tour, Stipe sounded like a different person, talking about black periods and depressions as if he'd never had any? He did. That's all. That's enough.

This year brought us Collapse Into Now, their fifteenth album. As with a lot of their albums, it's got a few songs -- 'Dicoverer' and 'Uberlin' -- that I love, a few more I appreciate -- 'Oh My Heart', 'Blue' with Patti Smith, 'Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I' -- and several that I'm indifferent about. 'Marlon Brando' harkens back to 'New Adventures', which in its best moments off from 'Leave' was a kind of lullaby. 'Oh My Heart' is a very simple song that showcases, if anything, Stipe and Co.'s maturity. 'Uberlin' shows you how far their ability to transform the mundane into the profound has come; the rhythm sounds a lot like the eighties R.E.M., Document and what they were jamming on prior to it, but it's now measured and settled: less a journey than a stroll. 'Discoverer' is another one they could never have made thirty years ago -- it's just an up-tempo geek-out about the world and how cooool it all is, with these computers and technology and all, boasting a deceptively simple verse that leads into a classically majestic R.E.M. chorus. It's only what they've been doing throughout their career, and yet each time they do it again it takes you by surprise.

The other surprise is the way the guys look these days -- middle-aged. Stipe looks like a college professor. As a young band, in the struggle to write about what they were writing about, to marry craft to passion, Stipe, the grandson of a preacher, found in his songwriting an innate simplicity to life and love that's never been matched in the alt. rock landscape. They'd show you something, tell you something, make sure you knew it, and then take a step back and think awhile. In the 1980s, in a world of white noise and infinitives split down the middle, it was a rare thing to encounter. It still is.

Singer, sing me a given...

Singer, sing me a song...

Sunday, August 21, 2011

The Newborn

This was my entry for round #1 of the 2011 NYCMidnight Flash Fiction Contest.  The contest puts writers in groups of 23 or 24, each group given a Genre, a Primary Location the story must be set in and an object that has to appear at some point.  Max length a story can be is 1000 words.  My group's assignments were: Comedy, a mansion, a saxophone. 



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“It can’t be open.”

“Turn the knob and see.”

“Gonna turn your knob if you don’t stop this bullshit.”

“Cowards die many times, ma Cherie.  The valiant taste of death but once.”

“Fuck you, Jack,” but she sighed and reached for the doorknob.

And it opened, at the merest glance from her knuckles.  Beyond stood three floors of an opulent Louisiana chateau, empty as daybreak, proud with slats of ancient, honorable light.  They peered over the threshold and a gage of keen curiosity tugged them inexorably inward.

Somewhere in the recesses of her imagination, she felt a Cheshire-like smile flickering out and in.
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They met, her freshman year of high school; shrunken deep within a pea-green coat, all vestiges of baby fat packed beneath her jeans, belying the sharper angles her frame would soon grow into; bent over cigs in the yard, she was, she thought that fall, doing well at alienating the wash of humanity she was so horribly fated to contend with for the forseeable ever, until the day this one freakish dude had the audacity to sit uninvited on the limestone bench she staked out every lunch hour.

“If you must smoke cloves, hide the logo between your fingers and sit edgier.  Not hunched like a cripple.”  He demonstrated, leaning off the bench and smiling politely at her.

“I’m not smoking cloves.”  A raised eyebrow: he popped a pack of Camels and waved it at her.  She flinched and he quivered with contained laughter.  The cloves were symbolic – a habit born when Kurt Cobain had shuffled off this mortal coil, two years previous.

“Jack.”  He extended a hand: she stared at it.  His fingers were wrapped in spiraling flesh-toned bandages, all torn at the first joint.  He followed her gaze down.  “Ah, they’re makeshift.  Protection when digging.”

“What’re you, an archaeologist?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m Anndrea.  My… some people… call me Andy.”

“So?  Which?”

“Andy.”

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Très gothic, Jack…” she rapped on a bannister, nodding as the sound reverberated through the space.  The echoes were mellifluous, and she caught her breath before doing it again to be sure she’d heard right.  “Oh, sweetness!  The acoustics in here are…”

“Yes.”  Below, in the spacious entryway, Jack prowled thoughtfully, skidding his boots on the hardwood floor for similar audial effect.  “The walls are… oak?  At least: maybe much richer than oak.”

“You think the owners…”

“Whoever owned this abode, Cherie, has clearly forsaken it for other pastures,” he said, plucking a cobweb from his coat to contemplate in the mid-morning light.  She rolled her eyes.  He’d been calling her “Cherie” for two months, while they set up shop in the French Quarter, telling their first clients that his name was Gambit.  He didn’t have a word of French, but New Orleans was giving his extravagant leanings full rein.  He spread his arms wide, now, intoning a few lines of magic:

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree.
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea...” 

She shook her head and walked away before he could start in on the House of Usher.

She wandered the second floor hallway, tracing dust-lines as she went, wondering about the décor in here.  Roaring Twenties, she guessed, only because something of the quaint elegance in the surroundings suggested a flapper party, everybody Gatsby-ied out to the nines, Fitzgerald in the corner muttering something drunkenly witty to Dorothy Parker as a swing band mowed through Miles Davis numbers… wait, Miles wasn’t around then… who was…? 

Dad or Nana would’ve known…

(“Anndrea Torday, this will be new to you.  Not quite what your father crafted, but what he knew of music: of pitch, of mood, of tempo, of true musicality, he learned from me.” 

“He never said…”

“Which surprises me not in the least.  Your father was a complicated man.  But hush, now.”  The girl sat motionless as Nana carefully removed her violin from an elegant, flowered case.  Grandame’s sonatas rippled, slipping through her memory as she wound absently down the hallway…

“Daddy…?” 

He turned, in the doorway, adjusting his cap.  “Pops got a brand-new gig to-night, sweetness.  You know?  Told you once, fo’ sho’.”

She shuffled her feet.  “Those men came again, didn't they?  I heard.”

“Heard what, babe?” he drawled, all nonchalance.

Her tummy hurt, but she still looked up at him.  “They said, ‘pay or you gonna pay.’”

He looked away, exhaled, then crouched to meet her face.  “Andy, you listen up to me.  You listenin’?” 

She nodded silently: he only called her that when he was serious.

“I know these cowboys.  They know what I got, know what I’m good for.  This gig tonight?  Gonna leave it square, and then we gon’ leave all that babble in the dust.”  He smiled.  “Get us a fancy big car, you and me, and we’ll go, you dig, Andy?  We’ll roam the wide world and see what we can see.  Be explorers.”

It was a good speech; she knew far too well how good it was.  Nary a word had ever left her memory. 

Seven year-old Anndrea looked at her father doubtfully, and her mouth quirked up.  “For real?” she said.

“For real.  Only new frontiers for us.  Now gimme a hug.”  He swept her up, ruffled her hair once and was gone forever.)

…the music left in a bright, gentle flash as her fingers slid along the wall, catching suddenly on a closet frame, jerking her out of reverie.  The sweet wind of dad’s sax caught an upcurrent and evanesced; the music swept out and out, to the rafters, leaving her alone in the hall.

But something told her it was only awaiting its next cue to enter.

She looked at the closet door, and a rhythm nestled in her bones told her what she would find inside.

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Jack was in the kitchen, inspecting pots which he'd wager good money were last cleaned during Nixon’s presidency when she stumbled in, crying, cradling something in her arms.

“Whoa – Andy?  Something happen…?” but she shook her head; with the most radiant smile he’d ever seen, she held out the saxophone. 

And after a moment, he understood.

“We’ll name it after your father…”

                                                    Finis.





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Hope you enjoyed it.  And hey, BONUS if you read down to here: Last week I participated in the NYCMidnight Micro Fiction Challenge, in which everyone had 12 hours to write a 100 CHARACTER story -- that's 100 characters including spaces -- using a given word.  My group's word was "crowd".  Here's my entries.



1): In gleam slipt hatchlings, nibbling at moss. So drawn, sinking, soundless, ran a crowd of blue bass.




2): Ahem: Abandoned limbs, loin of Michaelangelo, mexically neck on the plain, nickeling the sour crowd.


(And in poetic lines, which I like better, but in prose this is still my favorite of the three):


Ahem:

Abandoned limbs, loins of Michaelangelo
Mexically neck on the plain
Nickeling at the sour crowd.




3): Time’s coded sweat slipt west of the Appalachians in a child’s still sleigh, fallowed for the crowd.