War On War

Another one from the Stacy files: Mobiles. Another one, also, begun in 2009, finished in 2026. Proving, again, that the road goes on forever. Chicago, a road-place for me, by which I was marked, among others, also of mine: New York, New England, Central Pennsylvania, Montreal. A quirky map, to be sure. And other places that might need to be rejuvenated at any moment: Pittsburgh, Florida, New Jersey. Back to Chicago, and the sense that through the latest two rewrites here presented in The Stacy Saga, I've done justice to everything Chicago meant to me in the Aughts. Also an acknowledgement, especially regarding Pittsburgh, that there must be more work to be done, because roads can develop out of old situations, and time creates strange loops whereby time past that wasn't, or didn't seem, relevant, imposes on time present to revivify, reinstate, even electrify it into awareness. So we can all live and die as Emperors of Eternity. Including Wilco. Also noting that the summer of 2026 for me was about time loops. The Time Warp. And if the process of creating time loops does have Rocky Horror-ish dimensions (come up to the Lab, and see what's on the slab), it is amazing to me that time, which is really only matter eternally changing form (there is no time) really can be looped, and moments exist inside each other in uncanny ways. And it's worth the fight it takes to make this happen. A War on War. This shoots back to the late Aughts.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

The love poem To Stacy Blair begins, of course, in Chicago, Illinois. Whatever else you might say about a piece supposed to be that intimate, I can only say that Stacy, who was a critical genius, remains the number one reader of my books, even now. There are top tier reviews I've received as substantial by other people; but nobody means it like Stacy does. And the many letters she wrote me did break my heart. After that, it's all best left to the imagination. Except to say that, in a way experiences can have of marking or not marking an individual, I was, indeed, marked by the time I spent in Chicago and the Midwest in the Aughts. The world I felt open up then was about boundlessness, and about dreams coming true. A poet who was truly on the road, was always who I wanted to be. When I walked around the Loop, or hung out in bars in Bucktown, it was not worth questioning anymore whether I was on the road. I was. Chicago and the Midwest will always mean the road to me. Maybe an uncommon association (nowhere near New York, where I also did plenty of road-time, or San Francisco, where I did not), but so what. And To Stacy Blair brings home to roost that most effectual time I spent on the road, with the most sense of hinges to the roads that are, or could be, the eternal ones. The choice of Wilco is an obvious one. So what. As a gag in Chicago, I took a replicant picture of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot cover. Everyone's road-place is full of gags for them, and anything else that could make it memorable. So, the poem linked here is one I began in the late Aughts and never finished. In 2026, it's now finished, ready to be aired. The road goes on forever. I am trying to break your heart. 

The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get

As I risk dragging us into the realm of Halloween and Friday the 13th, and initiate Dominique III, a word about 1994. The Nineties were, in some places, in some ways, a revolutionary time. Cheltenham and Abington dropped their respective battlements and became friends. Kurt Cobain expressed something for a lot of us that couldn't be hidden. Pop culture got more real, as the Alternative Revolution and Lollapalooza made all the changes communal (I went to '93). Morrissey had his first real hit in the United States, in Philadelphia, from WDRE on out (who themselves emanated from Jenkintown, right next to Cheltenham). The center of Pennsylvania was set to be more revolutionary, too. But Morrissey's first bona fide hit was a source of comic relief for Chris and I, who did have moods in which we were completely fed up with Dominque's posturing antics. The song is funny on the surface, but even more funny for Chris and I, who understood that that was something true about Dominique: she liked jokes, but intensely disliked when the joke was at her expense. After all the antics were said and done, a real self-serious broad. And a master, she'd be happy to tell you, of human psychology, of why people say what they say and do what they do. Yet, in the spring of '94, we watched Dominique make a flaming fucktard of herself, as victims or semi-victims, and were happy to engage in the catharsis, through Morrissey, of a good laugh. The revolution was on. 

Stone the Devil

The Twenties for me started exactly when they were supposed to: January 2020. It so happens that that month, Speck released the acid-jazz track Stone the Devil. The piece features a fragment from Stoning the Devil, which came out on Synch Chaos yesterday. All the musical issues behind acid-jazz are built into Stone the Devil, as is the sense that this is a creepy version of acid-jazz, and also one with resonance towards cities, the urban, Center City and West Philadelphia for example, or Los Angeles, where Speck is partly from. Not that I can forget the night in January 2020 when I had the song in my head as I crossed the bridge from West Conshohocken back into Conshohocken, onto Fayette Street. And Stone the Devil, with other tracks from the CC Mixter crew, have seen some reasonable chart action around the Net, and enfranchisement onto the Acid Dropping EP. The early Twenties for me were partly about this issue: here's what to do if they use you in music. To the extent that I've flexed what muscle I have in the direction of the CC Mixter tracks, I've also, as someone mostly self-taught who plays and writes rock music, learned how much I don't know. And the eerie glow of Stone the Devil rings down the ages, from This Charming Lab into the Twenties, about sophistication and sophisticated marriages of literature and music, and about the possibility of new, attendant worlds opening up all the time. 

The Walk

Dominique Part 2.And if The Cure do manifest as Dominique (Dominique) Part 2, it's because they're the band Dominique chose to front with when we were kids. Chris fronted with U2. Consequently, we went (sans D) to see the Zoo TV tour at the Vet in late summer 1992. By the time Paul Hewson spoke at my Penn commencement in the Aughts, the whole adolescent adventure of band-fronting, individual by individual, was over. I myself never fronted with any one band. My front at any given time depended on my mood. Could be classic rock or Alt-Revolution. When Chris and Dominique visited me in State College during my first summer there ('94), I was fronting with Nirvana, and being Kurt, who was Holden Caulfield for tons of kids in America then. The Catcher in the Rye. By the end of '94, the Pumpkins replaced Nirvana. Dominique to The Cure in the 90s was easy to understand. Dominique's whole posture had a wide streak of being Goth down the middle of it. No black eyeliner, just a sense of drama around darkness, the night, and a steady devotion to serious, brooding gravity. Being heavy. I always thought black eyeliner would look good on D, and boutique/fetish attire, and piercings, but she never took it that far. I had been through The Cure when I was younger. People forget: The Cure in the Nineties were for sociologists as much as they were for music fans. They themselves fronted for an entire social movement. The Cure meant, on a semiology level, Goth, and Goth meant what it meant. Dominique in State College maintained her dyed-blonde hair, and managed to look, herself, like Kurt Cobain. We were like half-siblings. She hid in the closet of my room in South Halls, where I was briefly ensconced. Being Goth. The Cure is something worth knowing about her, and the Nineties. Black eyeliner or not.

Couldn't Cause Me Harm

It's astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll. It's time to do the Time Warp again. The time and place: Manhattan, 1999. Not a smart-phone in sight. Not even too many cell-phones yet. Pay-phones are still operative. Compact discs and DVDs rule a bunch of commercial, cultural roosts. Bubba survived his impeachment trial with a little time left. And, in the middle of doing my dance with Dominique, who was eventually to be Dominique, Manhattan indie hipsters found time to go gaga over Beth Orton. The album Central Reservation became a staple one for the hot months in 1999, and it was said Beth Orton kept popping up at different places in Manhattan to bedazzle the natives. The song here offered itself, Couldn't Cause Me Harm, was my favorite tune on her definitive '99 platter, and I can't hear it accept to travel back to the places I lived then. Right next to Brownie's on Avenue A, for example, and Park Slope into Bay Ridge, where I was transfixed by the Night Fever of how Ms. Orton was More Than A Woman. By August, I was gone, and by the August 20s had set up shop in Logan Square. But the singing version of Dominique that would have to be Beth Orton will always be about what Manhattan means, and how its inhabitants stab the city in the back and get close against social distancing mores. Manhattan, as an enterprise, is a stiff challenge against human impulses, emotions, and predilections. Dominique and I had the guts to rise to the occasion, and Ms. Orton, as the indie Queen of the moment, did too. 

To Bruce Nauman (Live at the Writers House)