Femme Fatale

Cards on the table: when things got icy in Center City Philly in 2009, and it became clear that the Center City cultural scene was not going to regain its wits anytime soon, a part of me fell apart. As of the early and mid-Aughts, I was simply too young to understand that the party in Philly would or could end that painfully. Stands to reason that Third/Sister Lovers became my anthem album for the second half of 2009. It is an album about pain. In this case, legendary pain, i.e. Steve Cropper shows up to lay down a guitar track, and they have to run a cable to him standing in the hallway. Cropper couldn't enter the studio, because Alex was being weird. The emergence of Dani at the Last Drop in 2009, as is documented in Flaming Red Hair, was also weird. It was the first icicle summer I ever spent at the Drop. Dani and I were weird together. I moved towards writing Apparition Poems, amidst a fractured, suddenly listless landscape. Abby Heller-Burnham at the time wouldn't talk about anything but wanting to die. Rough stuff. The Great Recession itself was almost over. We would all have to live in its aftermath. The encounter with Dani was my final Aughts encounter. No starlit idealism at all. Just a sense of being willing to junk things up to express what needs to be expressed. So there's Alex, again. And the ice in the music was palliative for me at the time, because I was living through something similar. Starlit idealism is still difficult to come by.  

The Narrow Way

I've fallen out of touch with what people are saying about the Teens these days. In the early-to-mid Teens, it was commonplace that the media refer to the 2007-2009 recession as "The Great Recession." The Occupy movement was massive, and has now managed to disappear completely. The Teens were recession-aftermath years. Slow, lugubrious, and about a society that had lost a huge chunk of population. In the early Teens, after my time at Temple was done, and my final academic appointment at U of Sciences, I struggled to find a balance. Times were lean and mean. I was suddenly out in the 'burbs, in Conshohocken, on a purgatorial wavelength about the Aughts. During the Teens, Pink Floyd were constant companions. The Narrow Way is one I leaned on, because I did feel that, if I was going to survive what I was going through, it would have to be The Narrow Way. Echoes was big, too. As was the idea that Abby Heller-Burnham, willy-nilly, would loom largely over the rest of my life. People can say what they want: the Aughts in Philadelphia were really not normal, at all. If a fire was going to be started around Aughts Philly, it would have to be me that did it. And I did. The Narrow Way. But it's a good one, as of '26, feeding on its own energy the right way, avoiding the right pitfalls, filling in the right spaces. The years living by the river were a congeries of all these issues. As is the sense that ultimately, whether a fire starts from narrow circumstances or not doesn't matter. Come on, baby, light it. And now we'll wait for the world to catch up. 

Beast of Burden

As has been established: play-lists at McGlinchey's in the mid-Aughts were dominated by two rock albums: Some Girls and London Calling. It's also been established that McGlinchey's is where the game started for myself and Hannah M. The revamped version of The Wilderness Sequence leaves no stone unturned (so to speak) about understanding that the whole underwater vibe for me then was about wandering in a wilderness space. I didn't really understand where I was going or how I got there. Hannah, from Santa Cruz, was used to a sense of vagueness about her life. Californian vagueness. The hard-edged sense of East Coast precision I was used to received a lesson in what underwater life is really like. The underwater sights I saw were ones I only sort-of ever regained my wits from having seen. Hannah's Ocean Queen persona could really only be revealed when, indeed, the curtains were drawn. Yet, when precision and punctiliousness are dropped at the door, the emotions eventually generated can be uneasy ones. The whole underwater ride had to be at least slightly uneasy. But I went through it, like anyone could go through anything, and lived to tell the tale. Even if it's still difficult for me to ascertain who was being who's Beast of Burden. After this many years, I suppose it doesn't matter. All we need to know is that the Ocean will be there forever. 

Pale Blue Eyes

Point of interest: I've been discussing this book I'm writing, Something Solid, as though everything about the book is available to be discussed. I've also suggested that there's a good deal of transparency inhering in the book itself. Fair. But I'd like to say, about Side-Armed, here's a story that, for all sorts of contingent and not-contingent reasons, can only be half-told, or not told at all. So I'll ask those watching who might be watching to reject closure, in the Hejinian mold, and understand that a lot of things about this piece involve realities you'll just have to imagine. This one does signify The Death of the Author, in Something Solid, and The Birth of the Reader. The Velvets, like Smashing Pumpkins, seem to have disappeared off a lot of maps over the last twenty years. Worth noting that when I played DJ for the ladies in Logan Square, the third Velvets album was a perennial fave. Sin and salvation would seem to be the subtext in most of the lyrics, even if the music is primitive stuff. It's also worth noting that, as Aughts Philadelphia emerges as culturally stalwart, for every worthwhile story that reaches the airwaves, a few equally worthwhile ones will be lost. The principle of waste, of things being wasted for no good reason, is a big impinging shadow on human existence. So, Side-Armed side-arms you a half-story, and we'll see if you think that's good enough. 

I'd Have You Anytime

What got spun in Mary's room at 4325 Baltimore Avenue was various. George Harrison's All Things Must Pass was one of her faves. It stands there, after all these years, being, for my money, the nicest music a Beatle ever made, and the most durable. It's also about the idea that, in Mary's room, we could get a timeless ambience going, and make everything we did as festive as possible. The big months in that room were the last four months of 2002. In early 2003, Mary moved down Baltimore Avenue to live in a flat with Abby, while I remained in Logan Square. Those last four months of 2002 were notable, not only because I wrote Ode On Jazz then, but because the whole neighborhood was in a celebratory mood. The first night I spent in the room, early in 2002, the pieces hadn't really come together to make the neighborhood take off into space. The fall of 2002 was a gift given to us, precociously about a vision of cultural Philadelphia taking back some of what it was owed.  The universe leant us a little bit of the sweet stuff, so that the daunting nature of what we would have to accomplish over a long period of time to really redeem cultural Philadelphia, wasn't too cold or intimidating. Almost a quarter of a century later, I do an intense worker bee routine so that our version of cultural Philadelphia cannot be misplaced. And remember George's slide-guitar riffs, and how they sounded on the nights we had everything harmonized and in balance. 

A Sort Of Homecoming

In the book I'm writing, Something Solid, different characters emerge, with different degrees of distinctness. Chris (DeFranco), a childhood friend of mine, has emerged as one of the less distinct characters. There were things about Chris, it is true, that could be considered generic. His main cultural pursuit was sports, and sports betting. He was a betting ring kind of dude. On the other hand, it was quirky about Chris that he had an odd, unexpected sympathy with art and creativity, and often attracted unexpected friends, like myself. His extensive connections to Abington in the Nineties became mine, too. Cheltenham to Abington then was Nineties revolution, all over again. Chris was a diehard U2 guy, as well. We went to see the Zoo TV show at Veterans Stadium in '92— incidentally, still the best rock show I've ever seen. Even if Bono speaking at my Penn graduation resembled Tom Waits himself covering Jeff Buckley. As per New Year's Eve, the one in question is '97 into '98. Most of the piece is reportage. The house I return to here is on Lindley Road, in Glenside, which followed on the heels of Upper Merion. When I returned to State College, I bought a Celtic Cross, black leather pants, and occupied a bedsit in North Halls. As of April, I would finally crack the code towards emerging as the writer I wanted to be. Manhattan would lay in wait, in the distance. Sublets would be themselves. And 1998 would become a year I would remember very fondly indeed. The last year I saw or heard from Chris with frequency. 

Lover, You Should've Come Over

Did half of Manhattan, at one point, decide that I was Jeff Buckley? In the Nineties, my resemblance to Mr. Buckley was widely noted. I hung out with scenesters who had been his friends and bandmates, too. So: this one's about Jeremy, but I've decided it would be too boring just to do The Smiths or Morrissey again, as usual. The twist is that this piece takes place in the autumn of 1997, in Manayunk. Some the action happens at the La Tazza Coffee-house, a base of operations for Jeremy, 'd' magazine, and the entire Villanova-Manayunk Nineties revolution crowd. The rumor in Manayunk at that time, related to me by an authority, is that, a few months before his untimely death in May 1997, Jeff Buckley showed up at precisely La Tazza to play, unaccompanied, for a few hours. Buckley died in Memphis. Hmm. The whole thing was even more el bizarro because, again on semester break, I myself had shown up at La Tazza to play unaccompanied, in about March 1997. Play I did. Was the whole Jeff Buckley Manayunk thing an urban legend? In any case, the night in question in the piece, Chris and I probably played some of Grace while we were car-bound. Grace, and Jeff Buckley, did take off in the world once Jeff passed. Whether La Tazza really had Jeff there, co-terminous with myself, thirty-odd years later, we may never know. Or whether people in Manhattan called me "Jeff" behind my back. Thank you, Briana and Gina...