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... 

Man Called Aerodynamics

Both Voodoo, as it showed up in Otoliths in 2017, and the revised Emily's Voodoo and where it sits now, are an attempt to come to terms with Central Pennsylvania in the Nineties: what it meant and what it was like. Central Pa has built into it a certain amount of randomness, and also of obscurity: it's not that much of a national spotlight kind of locale. Penn State means football to most of the public. Yet, to people who love the place, and went through paces there that marked the hell out of them, the center of Philadelphia's state, Pennsylvania, will always have a sense of enchantment about it. As will Emily, who could also be called Maria, for germane, if skewered, reasons. And Guided By Voices, in Nineties State College, were knowable to the kids working the indie circuit, and became household gods as such. You can deduce from this that, yes, there was an indie rock scene in State College in the Nineties. The translation from GBV and Robyn Hitchcock disciples into world, or at least national, acclaim never happened. Small town life chewed up the State College indie scene and spit it out. I never myself got worked up about Bob Pollard and GBV that much. Neither did Emily. But that State College was ever that bum-fuck— not what I saw. And, as is in the piece, townies could be licentious in an unrepressed way. Central Pennsylvania breeds libertines, along with the sense that, if you keep the noise down, you can get away with murder. Licentious murder. Amidst the earth magic of the green stuff that lives & breathes. 

Drivin'

Drivin', indeed. Drivin' in a taxi cab from Dirty Frank's at 13th and Pine, all the way into the heart of Upper Darby. Paying $35 dollars for the ride, still a lot in 2026. Yup, folks, that's who I was in 2004: always assiduous about trying to do the things I deemed worthy to do. Dawn Ananda Hulton not only lived in Upper Darby, she bothered to live in what had been Todd Rundgren's house. So that, now that I've finally kicked For Dawn into shape, we can all start talking about rock music in Philadelphia without laughing or reaching for aspirin. Dawn Ananda was a musician, with a band called The Nooses. She also had a fetish for The Kinks and Arthur. Drunken, skittish, with a rich mother. Jane Fonda look-a-like: "What's your bag, Klute?" And on that drive, I had no idea I'd be sleeping on her living room couch, hiding beneath a blanket so her mother couldn't see who I was. The footsteps stopped, briefly, near the couch, then wandered away. In 2004, such incidents and situations revealed the primary laws of my nature. The infinite complexity of pain and pleasure. The Bean Cafe on South Street, where I wrote For Dawn, was also The Ween Cafe. The proprietor was Dean and Gene Ween's sister. So, randomly, this one has a rock insignia all over it. And a Philadelphia one. So there. 

Miracles

The intense craziness of my relationship with Jennifer Strawser, as is documented in Silly Putty, took much of its velocity from our being young, but also sprung from culture-shock, hot-wired into opposites attracting, then shaken and re-stirred without either of us being aware it was happening. Jen was clearly out to impress everyone in State College, especially the Daily Collegian crew, that she was from a solid lower middle-class background. She was not. Yet the headlong lunge into hard-core mattress-thumping calisthenics took Jen and I into a slanted, enchanted la la land where I hadn't bothered to venture with Kelly or Mandee. In the middle of our antics, Jen and I might as well have looked like Yellow Submarine cartoon versions of ourselves. Jefferson Starship catches Jennifer Strawser and I red-handed with what it means to, y'know, be able to handle things. We got lost. If Jen felt she had no choice but to lie, it all got busted when I visited Liverpool that summer of '96. At that point, I was occupying more than one la la land, owing to a dose fit for a Piper. Intense craziness. But the intensity is something, in retrospect, that I like. There was nothing tepid, bland, or insipid about who we were then, or what we did. The Marty Balin character in Miracles is about as pixilated as we were. And as horny. Jen visited Upper Merion, then, too, where I was stationed on semester breaks. We did a real roundelay routine. If I had trouble tying my own shoes at that particular juncture, so be it. Jen could tie them for me. 

Linger

I was in State College for the summer of '94, living in South Halls. It turned out to be uneventful. My first real semester was the Fall 1994 semester. I found myself living in North Halls, which, as a dormitory set, in the Nineties, was about artists and misfits. What is detailed about Kelly McCabe in Elegy's Ends is detailed with a great deal of affection. Mary and Abby were creative girls who could also come across as standoffish and pompous at any minute; Jen was amiable, usually, but displayed the hauteur of the beauty queen much of the time, too. Lo and behold: Kelly McCabe was not only genuine, she was what they call a nice person. She was good-natured, in a way that Mary, Abby, and Jen were not, exactly, or always. Kelly was also a gifted photographer, which would've received scoffs from Mary and Abby, but there it is. It remains strange that Linger, here, is such a plaintive song, because my memories of it, and of the fall of 1994, are so sanguine. Kelly was a Cranberries-head; not in least because Dolores O. seems to have lived for a while on her block in Lansdale. That feeling always happens when I hear The Cranberries: of the world opening up, of a bright new horizon set out before me, or a new expansive vista making itself known. Why I didn't stay with Kelly is that she only did one full semester at PSU, before disappearing into the mist. Her impact was, proved to be, indelible, as someone who, for me, was mostly about joy. 

Subterranean Homesick Alien

I always say that for the time I spent in State College in the Nineties, Smashing Pumpkins were the Chairmans of the Board for me and most of the people I knew, rock-wise. Radiohead were second in command. Yet when I look back at my time in Central Pennsylvania, it occurs to me that, towards the end, which for me was 1998, Radiohead had taken a lead over Corgan & Co. When OK Computer was released in the summer of 1997, it pushed Radiohead onto a new, lofty plateau. I cared enough to buy OK Computer the day it came out. This is a tune that illuminates my final year in State College. The environs of and around State College are full of country lanes. I also did have a way, first in '96 and then again in '97, of being abducted by aliens in State College. An uptight, hallucinatory scenario, indeed. This is a tune, also, that brings me back to one night, in the summer of '98, I stayed up all night with a friend of mine, doing random, meaningless tasks, as one might do in a small town in summertime. We wound up on the roof of the Weaver Building. At dawn, we got free donuts from a bakery where another one of our friends worked. Then I went back to my South Atherton Street sublet and crashed. Were aliens watching, and taking notes? Small town life sometimes does feel like living on the moon, or on another planet. Yet that's where I earned my stripes towards being the writer I am today, for whatever that's worth or not worth. What are all of these words worth? To small towns, aliens, donuts, and the Nineties. Peace. 

Fake Plastic Trees

Thirty years have past; thirty summers, with the length of thirty long winters, and all that jazz. The spirit in which I revised this one, now called The Rustic Inscrutable, was about the eternity of living through that time— the autumn of 1996 in State College— and recollecting it in a way or manner only semi-tranquil. Too many questions remain, even thirty years later. One thing is not in question— Carrie had the ops over Jen about music. As we drifted into our version of Nowheresville, Carrie set up The Bends as a mood-enhancing soundtrack. This was the Radiohead platter that had made them famous in the States. I heard it briefly in the spring of '95, then forgot it for eighteen months. Now, it lit up all the incidents and situations of that time for me— Jen and I united, then severed. Then, Jen herself disappeared off-campus into a foggy mist, after which she was never seen again in State College. Even as, unfortunately, bylines continued to appear with her name on them in The Daily Collegian. Carrie and I smearing our blood on various walls, groping towards real contact we couldn't make with each other. A brief anti-marriage. The fragility, the sense of alienation in The Bends was in us, too. The sense was, of course, that Jen's departure was planned to coincide with Carrie's arrival. I was a dummy-doll to be passed between them. Creepy stuff. It's all covered in Fake Plastic Trees, down to the fact that Carrie's physiology was famously an exhausted one. State College, and the drama department, wore her out. I happened to be stalled on the way to Outlaw Playwrights at that time. I tried the quaalude exuberance of Third/Sister Lovers with her, but that was (come on!) too extreme. Winter was coming. And spring. 

I Will Dare

For those of us who knew him, let's face facts: Andrew Lundwall was a punk. He was snotty, bratty, and a take-the-piss kind of dude. He was also extremely obsessive about rock, especially the avant or indie side of rock. The 'Mats, here, aren't exactly a punk band. Semi-punks. But when we picked him up in Beloit on a hot June day in 2007, Andrew Lundwall strutted into Steve's car in as completely an I Will Dare attitudinal fashion as was possible. He was ready to rock and roll in Chicago. The display of spontaneous virtuosity Andrew lucked into in Palatine, writing Chicago, as is here on P.F.S. Post, in Steve's living room, as Steve and I attempted to walk upright on a groggy morning, out-punked both of us about what it meant to be in the moment: alive, electric. Even if it's not like I didn't notice, then and now, that he seems to be aiming several pot-shots in my direction. Punk! But American poetry in the Aughts needed him, because poetry needed punks and punk energy: still does. Chicago may prove to be the central dare of Andrew's life fulfilled. It is the Keats-meets-Gordon Gano climax of what Amer-Indie could do around, or with, or among books. God bless you, Andrew. 

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)

Todd Swift on Simple Minds

 

Simple Minds were the band that moved me most as a teenager. I remember discovering them in 1982 or so— albums like Sister Feelings Call, Sons and Fascination, and then their masterpiece, New Gold Dream, seemed to reflect, for me, what it was to be young at a golden time. Their early work— before the commercial success of the second half of the 80s, post Don’t You (Forget About Me), their number one American hit— was both strident and exalted, purposeful and transcendent— in other words, very Scottish Protestant (half my roots).

Songs like 70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall, Wonderful In Young Life, Careful In Career, The American, and of course Love Song were, to me, the epitome of poetry— shimmering, cosmopolitan, political, anti-empire, and yet sexy— Jim Kerr’s voice flaunted a kind of arch-dandyism. I still think their work from twenty to twenty-five years ago matches and sometimes betters the work of U2 from that time, and, with Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure, and a few others, are the great New Wavers (you could add Depeche Mode and Duran Duran and Tears For Fears). Simple Minds were crypto-Christians, at a time when I enjoyed reading German theology in translation (Letters From Prison being my favorite), and I somehow managed to convince myself that they were singing just for me. This was when the spring came like thunder and ice cracked just like that and suddenly it wasn’t colder than Siberia, so all life was good and strange and hard then.

From a 2005 interview with Todd Swift on Art Recess 2

Everything Reminds Me Of Her

The bizarre journey of discovery towards the summer 2026 re-release of What Needs No Myth in Eratio I've already told elsewhere. The journey starts at Personal Mythologies II at KWH in 2003. Elliott Smith's life ended in 2003. Elliott Smith was a singer-songwriter from the Pacific-Northwest who lit up the Nineties into the early Aughts with a series of highly melodic, if melancholy, records. Everything Remind Me of Her, from Figure 8 from 2000, hits a note not far from Alex and Third/Sister Lovers. Musically detailed enough to satisfy purists, Elliott Smith was big enough to be a sizable cult star by the time of his 2003 suicide. Over twenty-three years, the records he made seem to be lost in the shuffle. All the records from the early Aughts- remember Conor Oberst? Jack White? Stephen Merritt?- have that quality now. The point of bringing up Elliott Smith is to do a Time Warp back to 2003, and announce that yes, like it or not, the Bush administration were just as hated as the Trump administration is now. Bush was NOT okay with everybody. The Elliott Smith records were heard by Mary and Abby and everyone in my circle. They, especially Figure 8, do a wash over my memories of Logan Square at the time, and color them. So, when we got home from KWH on September 20, 2003, this is a record we might've put on. And mourned, also, that the difference between the mythology of what the rock biz is supposed to be and what the rock biz actually is, is what killed Elliott Smith. The records themselves needed no myth. The music was there, and still is. 

Badlands

Big statements are a big deal. It's something I just said, in Poets and Prophecy. Or, rather, I said it on September 20, 2003, and it's just seeing the light of day now. But that's part of the point. It's big to understand what time means around culture, and to understand that real culture takes real time to see the light of day. And Poets and Prophecy seeing the light of day made me think about rock, and what the moments are in rock that have in-built real bigness, real largesse. I often do say that Springsteen is my favorite lyricist in rock music, for the simple reason that, for my money, he's the best at making the Big Statements that will hold up the best over long periods of time, starting from the East Coast. Badlands is a case in point. I'm not going to say too much about where America is in 2026. Except to say that it's an awfully strange time, ensconced in a strange decade. Badlands is strange, too, because the lyrics express stern resolve, but the music expresses triumphant release. The narrator is getting something big off his chest, that has needed saying for a long time. He doesn't mince words; he gets directly to the point swiftly. Where we find ourself is in the big terrain in which an individual looks at the whole of human life and earth and lays down his own set of laws. Here's how things are. Not, of course, what we want things to be. And all the steely resolve is just about telling the truth, being real. Sounds simple, but it's not. That's one reason to put some chips down on Badlands to last a long time. The other is that the sound of triumphant release, of truth springing forward, never gets old. Time will tell us. 

Love Reign O'er Me

Because it took me a number of years to piece together what became Frequencies, it was a slow build-up to understand that, in Frequencies, I might have something extraordinary. The night, in the summer of 2005, was hot and black as ink, indeed. So much was to come from what happened that night, in so many directions, some straightforward, some bizarre, that I thought only The Who in full flight could do it justice. The Who, who emerge, over a long period of time, for many of us, as the undisputed champions of rock. You play this kind of music, you don't beat The Who. So much of what seems big in popular culture is just regional in the end. Understand the map, understand The Who. And back to New Hampshire, and a piece at least partially steeped in sex and sexuality, which The Who tend not to be. Just as there is no critique which can do justice to the transcendental sturm und drang of Roger Daltrey at Live Aid, how many ways the different crescendos which built up both Mary and I as individuals in the world can hardly be counted. In the end, all of it will only matter to people who care about writing and books. The Who do, indeed, reach more people. It's also arguable that if you don't know Parts of a Story, you cannot understand this story, either. But the most special reason to pimp out a Who Live Aid video, is just to say, as I do not often say, that here's something I've done that really is itself, special, and deserves special regard. The sweat of lovers. It was dramatic that this happened, and if Frequencies doesn't announce itself in a dramatic, Who-crescendo sort of way, then I did something wrong. The ricochet inheres— 1985 to 2005, then unevenly up to 2026. The sense of the uneven there is blessed. Something a priori built into the universe, and art at its best. And rock. 

Ardent EP re-pub

That our Philly scene was no stranger to Brett Anderson and the London Suede— that's one subtext of the Matt Stevenson-created Ardent cover. Mary was in on that too, without knowing it. So, here 'tis— the re-pubbed seven-song Ardent EP, un-stunted rock from the bowels of South Philadelphia. Shake off the jinx, let in the minx.

Bullett
El Goodo
Brown Eyes Like His
Ardent
Fortis Green
Streetlakes
4 Elliott

Mix Upload: Third/Sister Lovers

Feel (I saw) remix: Eris Temple lore

In 2008, Natalie Weyes Blood performed at the Eris Temple, where I'd recorded Feel. 

Acid Dropping EP

 

A keepsake of a time and a place, and of possibilities.

Acid Dropping EP is:

I. A Clangorous Din— Speck

II. Stone the Devil— Speck

III. Viaje entre las luces— Vince El Mejor

IV. Driving Home— MalreDeszik

V. Hipsters— Falki Hoz

VI. Feel (I saw) remix— Zenboy1955

Various Positions:

On the Soundclick Jazz Overall chart, A Clangorous Din reached #15, Stone the Devil #12, Viaje entre las luces #18, and Driving Home #29.

On the Soundclick Electronic Overall chart, Hipsters, a.k.a. Ode On Jazz (3, with Falki Hoz), reached #20. Feel (I saw) remix reached #8, making it a national hit. 

Featured on Things You Heard When You Were Dead (shane p).

All tracks feature spoken word by Adam Fieled, from (respectively) Opera Bufa, This Charming Lab, When You Bit..., Ode On Jazz, and Curiosities. 

From Funtime Records, and Jamendo.  

Produced/engineered by respective artists, Eris Temple, and the Kelly Writers House. 

A Clangorous Din re-pub

Speck, in Cali, took some of the nicer passages in Opera Bufa and went to town with them. This was in '21. A Clangorous Din made a top 15 showing in the Soundclick Jazz Overall chart, and a top 10 showing in hearthis.at Electronica. Here: Jamendo's re-pub. 

For Bloomsday. and Christmas

7 Chinese Brothers

Assimilating the spots of time we all live through, some people are lucky enough to spots of time that either are, or become, holy to them. I have a few. The spring of 1998 in State College, Pennsylvania was a holy time for me then, and remains one to me now. Odd, because I should’ve been graduating, and was not. Yet I was graduating— from a realm of confusion and discomfort, a perpetual inability to express myself in writing, into a new, expansive realm where I could take language and go wherever I wanted to with it. The French Symbolists were with me. I still had the Beats around. Eliot I was just starting to grok. Yeats and Romanticism were still in the future. But when I got picked up by a writing whirligig or virus, living in a bedsit flat in North Halls, a little slice of a room, I got dropped into a place where I felt the earth move with my pen. Clean was my first masterpiece. Absurdist, bizarre, but a masterpiece nonetheless. All brought on by extensive donning of black leather pants. Daddio. Don’t keep ‘em on for three months. Clean heralded a sense of absolute rebirth. Enhanced by the extremely intense, bewitching sense of earth magic in central Pennsylvania. Great weather, in the spring of ’98, Centre County. Seventy-five and sunny all the time. I moved into yet another South Atherton Street sublet. The daily writing jags were about a task I could do, from a sense of manhood earned. R.E.M. is, of course, perfect to hear in a little college town. Holy. And my choice for the spring of ’98 happened to be Reckoning. So that the best of my time in State College was always spent floating slightly above the ground. If you can earn that sense of floatation with serious creativity, you have gained religion.

When You Sleep

There are situations we all live through that become compelling specifically because they never resolve. Situations that remain open sores. When I met Becky Hilliker for the first time in 2004, it was casual. It stayed casual, too, for the years I knew her. Yet there was always an underlying sense of unease, because I either knew, or thought I knew, that we had more business together than our shared surface suggested. When I wrote Becky Grace for Beams in the mid-Aughts, I was poking gentle fun at Becky being a Boston Brahmin princess. In retrospect, the moment, in the autumn of 2005, she sent me Catch and I placed it on a then-fledgling P.F.S. Post, a beneath-the-surface monster was created which began its appointed task of lumbering around looking for prey later. My life in 2005 was moving too rapidly, and I was still too young, to understand the full import, and potentiality, of Catch in the world. If the whole scenario makes me think of My Bloody Valentine, it's because I will always have had the suspicion that beneath the Brahmin-ite surface, Becky was torn apart, when she wrote Catch, by internal conflicts and internal imperatives not being fulfilled. Her life, thus, was not any easier than anyone else's. The whole Loveless scenario, in all its goriness, is also a Boston one too. 

Leave Me Alone

There is the fluidity through which theory and theoretical apparatuses tie-in to books; and, also, the fluidity through which theories tie-in to popular culture. The argument I make, in the new piece on the Jeffrey Side blog, for Mary Walker Graham, Stacy Blair, and Rebecca Hilliker, has to do with isolation. The poet is happy to put out a leave me alone vibe. A strong stance, even if it is a suffering stance, too. Stronger, I feel, then the standardized feminist stance-in-verse. More about a sense of earned entitlement owing to superior imagination, metaphoric daring, and the rest. The reason I tie the new piece, which I actually worked on for a very long time, to the final track on New Order's Power, Corruption, and Lies, is that the three poets do establish a new order within themselves. An order about self-containment, self-sufficiency, and self-possession. About a possible connection between the three and post-punk, as we have here, sort of. The sense that feminists do think of themselves as punks, but often grandstand and play to crowds and crowd formations, means putting post-punk in front of the three written-about names is not complete nonsense. I would also like to say that I am now a convert to the religion of Power, Corruption, and Lies, and understand that, if I missed New Order when I was younger, it would be foolhardy to so do now.

Feel (I saw) remix re-pub

Jamendo has re-pubbed a large cross-section of their site on archive. org. This includes Zenboy1955's Feel (I saw) remix, which reached #8 on Soundclick's Electronic Overall chart a few years back, and was thus a national hit. The Feel (I saw) remix starts with the PennSound version of my long narrative poem Feel, written from mid-Aughts Philly, not published until X-Peri in 2018, by which time the dust had still not settled. All facilitated by the California site CC Mixter.

Promised You A Miracle

While we were growing up, no one promised Mary, Abby, or I a miracle. When we stumbled onto the miracle of the whole Live Forever period, we grasped onto it with both hands for as long as we could. Twenty years ago, in an interview setting, Canadian poet Todd Swift promised me a miracle, if I took the time to listen to Simple Minds in depth. Chris McCabe, who also spent time in Montreal, had a way of saying the same thing. And let's not forget the crystalline John Hughes vision of Ferris Bueller's bedroom, with a Simple Minds poster prominently displayed. So, the Live Forever vibe continues, as I delve into New Gold Dream and voyage to a new place I always should have been. The muse for this video looks so disturbingly like Mary Evelyn, and appears to be a visual artist to boot, that it seems providential, at this point in '26, to stumble onto it. Also because I get backed up with straight rock on here and forget the glories of post-punk. An important precursor, also, to Depeche Mode, and the Violator album Mary and I used to imbibe all the time. So, this one's for Chicago and Montreal, and the sense that the road, for those on it to see as many real sights as possible, never ends.  

Almost Blue

With all the exuberance in the air, the early Aughts in Philadelphia have their darkness, too. Even as I ran around Center City, and Mary, Abby, and I did our famous jaunts from Logan Square to West Philadelphia and back, I was a haunted man. The progress I was making as a writer was slow, and labored. All the fluency I'd manifested in my last year in State College (1998) was still taking its sweet time making a transition into being the something else I needed it to be. This, I have discussed on Art Recess 2. The blue-balled and/or Almost Blue scenario has to do with the Heavenly literary Muses. When bathed in the starlight of all of our nights together, Almost Blue didn't matter. But at odd moments, it caught up to me that my actual creative life was very slow. The Costello tune is funny to throw in, because the way being creative on high levels works as not contrapuntal to a kind of intercourse, sexual intercourse, is very real. Things did not really get Blue again until 2005. Rather than a Rimbaud persona, I developed a tangent textual face, generated from a congeries of avant-garde related influences: Deconstructionism, Language Poetry, Surrealism, while earlier touchstones remained. As of '05, I was on fire again. But it did take seven years of slopping around in the mud of textual insolvency to get there. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, I will never get those seven years back again, but I don't need to. There may be no murder in our cathedral. And the city that makes a religion of E.C. is: Los Angeles. 

Lady Midnight

Nights spent in a foreign country have a sense, sometimes, of counting more than nights spent on familiar turf, don't they? The days and nights of Mary and I in Montreal were purgatorial ones. Being alone in a foreign country, we had no recourse, cut off from our usual routines, but to face exactly who we were, to ourselves, and reciprocally, to each other. We also fulfilled a Manifest Destiny impulse to being ex-pats, albeit brief ex-pats. Montreal being half-French language, half- English language, we kept stumbling into situations that called for us to know more than we did. Saint Catherine Street, where we stayed in Montreal, is a rough equivalent to South Street in Philadelphia, or St. Mark's Place in Manhattan. Lots of action, but action which tends to be of a rough or raunchy variety. So it was no surprise that Mary and I witnessed an actual barroom brawl. I was non-plussed but also not moved, but Mary was very upset. A foreign country will expose delicate nerves. As I bothered to document on Art Recess 2, our purgatorial means out, that particular night, was a kinky one. The emergence, probably not for the first time, of the occult conferring benediction on Saint Catherine Street. Mary just missing the beckoning gesture of Lady Midnight, as Leonard Cohen assays here, who hovered over us in Montreal, with a distinct, mixed, enchantment/damnation vibe. May I say we also bothered to spend a few hours on the McGill campus, took some pictures there, and were rewarded by a sense of liberation past our personal Purgatorio, Dantean Double Dutch. When we arrived back in Philadelphia, we knew ourselves better. 

Shazam!

 Thanks to Falki Hoz and Hipsters, the KWH Ode on Jazz is planted on Shazam. 

Dangerous Type

Ricochets. Ricochets and chiasmus relationships. It should be obvious by now, that within the Aughts Philly posse I tend to stick to, which extends to Boston (where The Cars are from) and Chicago, if not Montreal and Central Pa, all kinds of similitude in dissimilitude raises its intriguing head and makes comparison-contrast a fun game. Like the issue of Jenny Kanzler-as-Temptress, as she appears here in P.F.S. Post, sashaying into a seduction steel-cage match with Hannah Miller. Both dangerous types. Quienes mas peligroso? An honest appraisal would throw me, Toonces-the-Driving-Cat like, over the cliff of understanding that Ms. Miller has a slight lead over Ms. Kanzler. Jenny is moored to the shore, as a painter, of a kind of wholesome earnestness about serious creation that offsets her kinkiness. Hannah, in the relevant days, was pure kink. Substitute politics for art to make the souffle, and up rises an absolute monster of seductive fluency. How about the seduction Carl Yastrzemski of Boston herself, enfranchised alongside The Cars? Same basic idea. Too rooted in the idea of Creation-not-Destruction, with something earnest to express. What Hannah expressed was inchoate, in whole, except to say that she played hardball even if the game was badminton. But back to the Divine Miss K, and the sense that in this piece, our two primordial Overlord Heroines have not been forgotten. Jenny (Diana), as can be seen, used kinkiness to try to teach them a lesson. Unfortunately, we were all too young and stoned to notice much but who was opped to pack the next bowl. Kids.  And a bunch of Dangerous Types, as it were. Worth remembering, in the end, because we did mean it about art. So there, Hannah.     

Gregg Foreman 1972-2026

 Someone else I knew in the mix. 

She's the One

After a hiatus, here it is— a new way to do Undulant. This time, a novel manner of backing up print, specifically Vlad Pogorelov's Monday Journal, on perma.cc. Of course, PennSound doesn't hurt, either. All to back up the unlikely chiasmus of Bruce Springsteen to Federico Garcia Lorca. Hear me out. This tune, one that's not been emphasized much, does a gut-level trick, or slug-in-the-guts trick, that consolidates a good amount of shock and awe. There's fear and trembling, joy and ecstasy all together, danger and safety, etc. Lorca names this assemblage of fiery passion the duende.  What I tie Lorca and Springsteen into is myself, and Undulant, also into Hannah Miller, the mid-Aughts, and the rest. Just something to know about Hannah: she was dangerous. She was wild. She meant danger. The night being described in the piece is June 16, 2005. Bloomsday, fer chrissakes. Hannah is Molly, who meant danger, too. The first night it was, of not too many nights, but nonetheless some of the most memorable nights of my life. Like a bullfight, touched for the very first time. And the crowning moment of the Aughts for me, who didn't even expect, until Hannah showed up, that the Aughts would or could be crowned. Philadelphia had the power to let it happen. 

The Core

So, then there's the idea of the partnership I had going with Mary H— as equals, as artists. That's the essential idea— we were partners. All the early Aughts ecstasy, as we see in Starlight, Ink Pantry and PennSound, was not just about finding kindred spirits, but precise kindred spirits. Another you, that just happens to be opposite sexed. That's why we were so at home, and all those nights could pass in a spirit, deeply felt, of all for one and one for all. Abby slots in the same way— as an equal, as an artist. A precise kindred spirit. Abby's a fucking Virgo— it better be precise. We were all perfect together enough that even Abby could accept, for a while. And when we could get the right starlit mood going, starting in West Philly, all of Philadelphia joined in with us. This, Manhattan can never do. The Clapton song thus works as a paean to me dialoging back and forth with Mary and Abby. The nights that went on and on, with everything in them, including the kitchen sink. We held nothing back at all. Our entire souls were allowed and encouraged to come to the surface and express themselves. All because the essential human pact was fulfilled— we were finally among people who were like us. At home. That's The Core. Amnesty from the stupid surface of things, forever, babes. 

Rock and Roll

At a key moment here, I'm not going to be afraid to call a spade a spade and name P.F.S. for what it was in the Aughts: a pagan scene. When I say pagan scene, I mean a scene about earth magic(k), in all its manifestations— no point belaboring them, y'all know what they are. Everything that was righteous among us was a pagan rite fulfilled, a pagan ritual fulfilled, even, at times, a pagan sacrifice fulfilled. What just went up on P.F.S. Post, and has been on PennSound for a while, is about Philadelphia getting in tune with the cosmos the right way, even after all the humiliations it suffered towards the end of the twentieth century. By pagan voodoo it was, and by any means necessary. Also, a triumph against oppression and potential oppressors by pure Joy of Earth. So: read the piece. And just come to an understanding, about our pagan scene, that religion was got, and religion was had. Starting with Mary, Abby, and I, and then out to Jenny, Hannah, Gaetan, and the rest. Philadelphia not a down place, but a get-down place. As we would ask: are you gonna fuck up, or are you gonna get down. So, Zeppelin might be rock's ultimate pagans, and may they be right there with us. Philly will always get real in the end. That's my prediction. Because it's been a long time since...

Stay

Not to neglect the obvious— if I chose to write a book like Equations, it's partly because the Aughts in Philadelphia were a highly charged time around sex and sexuality. When the Aughts Philly Zeitgeist dictated actual bacchanals followed by actual orgies, it couldn't be that a writer weaned on introspection and deep interrogation would neglect an imperative to ascertain, if it could be ascertained, what it all meant. Hannah, of course, left a major thumbprint on Equations, and on Something Solid, too. The sonnet Undulant, as it appears in P.F.S. Post and on PennSound, hopefully catches a lot of the craziness of what we were living through then. For those with imaginations, it helps to remember that the fun in those days started when you left, were willing to leave, inner-room scruples aside. Then, you could participate in the decadence without being plagued with self-consciousness, if it was in you to do that trick. It was, for better or for much much worse, in me to do that trick. Bowie here investigates the insanity of a Moody Blues mellotron overlay over a George Clinton backing track. Sounds like Syd, right? But the equation is clearly a carnal one. Sounds like the Philly Free School.  

We Gotta Get You A Woman

As I just said in TAS, and as is also visible in the 2025 Buffalo 8 page: the book Equations was written by me, to attempt to answer a question. The question— whether our relationship to sex and sexuality is what makes us most human— is one that some find interesting, some don't. Why not God, for instance, rather than sex, or work? In any case, for all the sex prevalent in Aughts Philly, Philly is still, also, the City of Brotherly Love. The idea of friendship had to be huge, too. So, also for instance, Gaetan Spurgin's vaunted bros before hos refrain was one he carried around, for all occasions. It worked between me and my other Free School cohorts while that scene was going on, too. And, of course, it worked with Todd, who begins in Upper Darby, where lives, incidentally, the Trixie Belle character in Equations. Upper Darby, btw, is not all working class, as many would assume. Up close, it's half working class, half posh. Trixie Belle lived on the posh side of Upper Darby. And did leave me with sunken eyes, and full of sighs. As was duly noted by Mike Land... so that all the games could begin again. And again. 

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

Was In Rainbows the last great rock album? It's difficult, in 2026, not to think of rock as having decayed and decomposed, from supermarket tabloids on out, into nostalgia-land, rather than being a present-tense reality. My first listen, turns out, to In Rainbows, was an extremely memorable one. It was a car ride from Midway Airport in Chicago (after my first visit to Chicago, I avoided O'Hare) into the South Side of Chicago. Steve Halle's car. And we were going to visit the enfranchised, Eric Elshtain assembled bookstore on the U of Chicago campus, wacky poetry section and all. The time was January 2008. In Rainbows is a spectacular winter album. Memories are made of this. I had time to remember Chicago in the TAS interview that just came out, along with the sense that Chicago is an investment I don't regret. So it goes, that day, with In Rainbows hot off the press, there wasn't that much need yet to think that rock had kicked the bucket. It's Blitz held down the fort in 2009. But, from the Teens forward, pretty slim pickins for those raised on rock. Funny, that day, to note that Chicago's South Side mirrors Philadelphia's North Side. Where Temple University is. Memories are made of this. 

Kamera

Aughts Philly was long on glamour, indeed. Was the city glamour market necessarily cornered for that time period? Not from what I saw. Part of the attraction of Chicago in the Aughts was that you could see from a distance, right there online, all kinds of glamour bleeding out in different directions. So many presses, journals, reading series, so much dynamism, and the online presence was, indeed, immense. Once I got a taste of Aughts Chicago, I went slightly crazy with it. First, I was going to be there, then I was there. The second of four visits, in the summer of 2007, when I was still hitched to Mary H, was well documented. Mary H and Abby, as they had been in the early Aughts, had glamour-puss rivals in Simone and Kristy, as is seen here. The fact that Simone and Kristy were also powerful heads-of-state made it so that I could not not feel, that second visit, that I had securely arrived, even as I had done Myopic the first visit, met other heads-of-state. What do Philadelphia and Chicago have in common? They both happen to be big, real cities. That's a deceptively simple thing to say, but seasoned city-watchers will know what I mean. Through Wilco, Chi-Town also had an Aughts rock record of note, which Philly did not. I like to hear Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as Tweedy & Co's answer to Third/Sister Lovers. Decomposition and decay. Even as a walk down North Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park does something so Main Street Manayunk, and Bucktown does something so Roxborough, that people watching closely, about Philly-Chi-Town, would not be surprised that something had to give, and it did. Against decay.

More Than A Woman

So, the Bee Gees aren't supposed to be creepy, right? Yet, I've always heard & seen both Saturday Night Fever and the adjacent soundtrack as creepy. The songs are written ass-backwards, with all those loopy strings on them. Mid-Aughts Philly was also written ass-backwards, so to speak. Plenty of loopy strings, too. The sense that when Hannah Miller showed up, so many antes got upped among us, that we might as well all been hanging out, so to speak, and hanging loose, on the Verrazano Bridge. This, I documented in '24 on PennSound. Hannah Miller's Lady Godiva-ish sense of drama, and intensity, made everything around here pick up a macabre tinge. It was all life and death. That's why the political types she often ran with were, I felt, an odd choice for her. They affirmed her need for relevance, but denied the primordial sense that she needed to be dramatically backlit for intrigue and romance. The Saturday Night Fever level of the mid-Aughts was about fooling around on the Eternity version of the Verrazano Bridge. That's where Hannah and I did our dance. Within the sphere of danger. Also like Lorca's duende. And Hannah carried so much gut-level danger with her that everything she did and said could make your own guts drop. More than a woman to me, indeed. Even if it all had to happen hit-and-run style. The opposite, I would think, of the political. 

Drown

As may be a pressing question for interested parties: does State College bear out its existence from the heart of Pennsyltucky? Even more important: is Jen a Pennsyltucky Princess? The answer is no and yes. State College, like Philadelphia itself, subsists surrounded on all sides by Pennsyltucky territories. But the influx, in the small college town, of students and faculty from Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere renders the place cosmopolitan enough not to fall prey to Pennsyltucky syndromes. Where Jen was from, Liverpool, in the Harrisburg 'burbs, really is el primo Pennsyltucky real estate. Which means that, between being a city suburbs kid and being high as a kite on crack, I was destined for a big culture shock when I crashed there in '96. I felt strongly at the time: I could either channel Johnny Cash or Arthur Rimbaud. I chose Rimbaud. Back, also, to the Nineties. The cultural Nineties in America have a long and short version for me. In the compressed narrative form: the Nineties let popular culture get much more real than it usually does. This, I watched from State College. But The Pumpkins were a Zeitgeist band about the issue of real musical reality impinging on corporate third-world-ism and death-emphasis. With a soundtrack like The Pumpkins, it was easy to get transcendental. And ride the Nineties roller-coaster and appreciate it for all it was worth. 

Obscured

Springtime always makes me think of State College. Worth saying that, where writing is concerned, my years in State College were my apprentice years. Seriously creative people know— to get to the point where you can create what you want to create, years have to be ploughed through of churning out garbage. From 1994 until the spring, specifically, of 1998, I did, in fact, churn out my fair share of garbage in State College. I witnessed the Alternative Revolution tempest at the same time, from State College. The Pumpkins were, also in fact, demi-gods in State College. They were everywhere. Even the football guys. And when To Happy Valley appeared on PennSound in 2024, it got lost in the shuffle a little bit. It shouldn't have, because, in the spring of 1998, I had the most profound creative breakthrough I ever had, at least until Apparition Poems. Over a succession of days in April, I found myself using language to pierce through reality-holes in a way I never had before. The right forms appeared at the right times. My last increment of time in State College, April to Novemeber 1998, was thus, by far the happiest. I passed my own self-imposed Comp Exams. And this is a Pumpkins tune I heard at a party in someone's flat in May, that sent me into a paroxysm of ecstasy. Earth magic and rock magic together. The spring that arrives, and never really leaves. 

Jeepster

When Blazevox re-released the e-book Beams in 2025, I had no recourse but to revisit the fall of 2007, when the e-book initially appeared. I had just broken up with Mary H, again. Temple was Temple. At the Last Drop, Annie Daley, who appears as Dana Blasconi in Letters to Dead Masters, was documenting a bunch of heavy situations in a heavy-handed fashion. Thus, we had not only Electric Warrior, as is seen here, but Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and In the Court of the Crimson King. Records were never spun lightly at the Last Drop. You might or might not know the purpose, at any given time, but the not-casual approach to hipster-ism was their stock in trade. The moodiness, kinkiness, and sexiness of the T. Rex formed, as of the fall of 2007, a nice power block against the ogre stuff. Did the crowd notice I suddenly had books out? Some of them did. But the situation, me against an array of people in books, all in a line, was a congested one. It was a time when I relied on Chicago to really get my kicks, and feel like I was breaking new ground. The early and mid-Aughts were the really magical Philadelphia years. Even as the Last Drop remained a solid anchor-place, a place that mattered. 

Miss You

The reason I had for having to hear Some Girls, and "Miss You," interminably in the mid-Aughts, is a typical one. McGlinchey's was a bar, on 15th Street between Locust and Spruce in Center City, that served as a night-by-night base of operations for the Philly Free School then. McGlinchey's in the mid-Aughts had two flagship albums filling up the nightly music roster— Some Girls and London Calling— so The Clash and The Stones were an imperious presence there. What I say about Mary Evelyn Harju in Buffalo 8 is the truth— for personal reasons, she wanted to be absolutely still, absolutely quiet in East Falls then. But what that meant in practice for me, is that with all the riotous drunkenness, there was still a quiet space in me somewhere that was lonesome for the sense of solid connectedness I'd had with her. Hannah was another tornado, but with the juggernaut her life was, no real space remained that I could see to bond with her in a marriage-like way, as I had done with Mary H. Abby similar, and the rest. I missed Mary. So that the deep-in-your-cups version of hearing The Stones, who I'd seen on their Steel Wheels tour as a kid, was the dominant version here, as the long, long drunken nights of the mid-Aughts in Philly played themselves out.   

Peg

Peg, in this song, is, or appears to be an aspiring actress, Jade, from Equations, as is seen here in Scud, is an established actress. However, in presenting the two of them, however much I might value Scud, or Equations, I myself am acting, and with an ulterior motive. You see, the drama in the mid-Aughts was around Syd, but it was also around these guys. Nights of drama, in which, phone-call by phone-call, e-mail by e-mail, Mike Land and  I planned our next move, always with Steely Dan being spun on the side. Not to mention taking the Dan stuff to Henniker and making it resonate with Henniker Heat. So, with Syd first on the list, the second thing to be spun at the Highwire was Steely Dan. The real-life Jade to emerge in the mid-Aughts was like to tangent to the Jade in the book. "Didn't mean to get scarlet on your hands, son." There it was— the entire period of wanton mid-Aughts excess in Philadelphia was shaken loose with a sense that all that session-musician slickness, artfully obfuscating all that intense warpage, put us on the surface the right way. Then, all the quicksand beneath us could stay manageable for a while. And back to Peg, and the sense that Syd with a Donald Fagen chaser might seem like an odd bet, but everything in Aughts Philly was an odd bet, wasn't it?

Hold On, Hold On

And we can thank the supreme girl magus warrior of Aughts Philadelphia, for leaving us no pictures whatsoever. Plenty of paintings, no pictures. Thanks, Jenny Kanzler. Who, btw, if anyone is wondering, does deserve to be a pin-up next to Mary and Abby. Another looker. But, as I was saying— 2008 was the big joker in the pack year for Aughts Philly, as far as I could see. The party was still going on— sort of. And when Jenny Kanzler showed up in 2008, we were just to be friends. And sparring partners. This, after all the indeterminacy of the early Aughts. Doom and gloom rhetoric, heart-of-darkness alibis, javelins waiting to be hurled— this painter had turned abrasive. Had always been— sort of. What got published in 2025 in Talking About Strawberries is about someone who, like Neko Case in this song, loves the Devil. Neko Case herself being relevant as another Aughts talisman person who was just around. Someone I discovered, in fact, in 2008, after Mary and I had bitten the fucking dust, man. Abby was running around loose somewhere, and I didn't know where. Neko Case— country noir. For those around the country to understand— Philly, beneath the patina of East Coast-ishness, does have a country streak. Philly happens to be surrounded by Pennsyltucky territories on all sides, including Reading, which is Taylor Swift. Neko Case works in Philly. And Jenny Kanzler loved us enough to leave us no pictures. Sympathy for the Devil?

Astronomy Domine

Craziness. Telekinetic powers. A Tintoretto-ish sense of ascension/descension (moving the music, moving the audience). But, most of all, Syd Barrett, as a signifier in rock music, had and has so much to do with mind expansion, over and above anything else. Syd Barrett: a human conduit for expanding your mental, or hyper-mental, parameters. The Philly Free School wanted that energy around us. The shows at the Highwire Gallery we staged, as I have written about, were meant to be as mind-expanding, awareness-expanding, as possible, and by any means necessary. Spectacles. So that, helps to understand that as the initial audience began to shuffle in, what they would hear, more often than not, is Syd. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This embedded, is the first track from the album. And this is relevant to what just went up on P.F.S. Post, and elsewhere, about the incredible debauched ambience of the shows, because we put the right talismans out, like Syd, and bang! Presto! They worked! Syd was what was most representatively spun at the Highwire. The Khyber, btw, didn't give us enough control to spin anything. You couldn't do that there. But the Highwire was boundlessly about what we boundlessly wanted it to be about. Some people took that energy, Tintoretto-style, and ascended, some, like Anastasia in the piece, went into descent mode. Odd intervals. Chromatics. Our translation of UFO in 1967. There aren't many authentic ways to recreate that energy, if anyone is interested in doing so. This song is one. 

I'm Waiting For The Man

About New York in the Nineties, there could be a lot to say. There could be, if Manhattan for me was more than a series of near-misses. Something big almost happened for me in Manhattan, a number of times, as a writer and an artist, but in the end, nothing really coalesced. All of which means that I have to cut against a number of conventional grains to tell my story the right way. Where and how it was that, over the course of the twentieth century, New York was able to take a formidable lead over Philadelphia culturally on the East Coast, I know. It's a tangled story, and it involves the government, the racier, nastier parts of Europe, and the will of the founding fathers. Not to mention, also, what has been built into New York as an ultimate purpose from the beginning. It's not a nice purpose. But suffice it to say, the true-blue writer, uncorrupted by willingness to dilute himself in any way to express himself, has always been persona non grata in New York. That's me. Whatever ground was broken for me in Manhattan at the end of the Nineties, would have to be the kind of sideways and backwards ground that expressed something inessential, incidental, if also intriguing to some. Thus, what I now have on Art Recess 2. Abby has to come up, but here I speak for myself, not Abby. Time will tell what records were kept to really understand what Abby thought of her home town. My home town too, sort of: I was born in Manhattan. Or, rather, I arrived in New York, on February 7, 1976.

Alright

If you were wondering if there ever would or could be a Philadelphia riposte to Sex and the City, you need look no further than the Philly Free School. A little coyness would seem to be appropriate, because we  were always about doing serious work, and having our work be taken seriously. But as I have written about Mary on Art Recess 2, we were all extremely serious about playing, being players, too. If you want to stick us with the geek mold for having been classicists, you are going to have to get the fuck out of our way. We played, played for real, and played for keeps. About matters of the flesh, Mary was a gaming avatar. The city that gave some real kids, like Mary and I, a stage on which to really play happens to be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, babes. New York up close is a chastity belt kind of place. We spent the Aughts with steam coming off the streets, out of the bars, issuing even from the galleries. The whole game, as this piece addresses, starts for Mary and I in the Nineties. As we learned the ropes, subconsciously we knew we would be ready for each other. And for whoever else came along.   

Hungry Like The Wolf

Not much to say that what Abby & I do relates to Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. It doesn't. Yet I call us Neo-Romantics, and the aegis thing we have going for the Aughts Neo-Romanticism, for complicated reasons. Then, there were the New Romantics in pop music in the early-to-mid-Eighties. They are worth bringing up here, because, on both musical and fashion levels, they were Gaetan Spurgin's bag. Gaetan, as I have written about in The Seattle Star and Scud, resembled Mary H in that he cared very much about self-presentation. His clothes were a part of who he was, and he related to them as such. The band he was in when I met him as of 1999, Metro, played music more tilted to straight rock, but their fashion moves were a Goth-ed out version of the Neo-Romantics. Not the posh side of the New Romantics, as it were, the racy side of them. A heavy emphasis on Eighties fashion meant that Gaetan's studio, as was later established, always had the New Romantics lined up to be played at key times. Gaetan's thing with glam meant, along with other things, that he was often the most elegantly wasted human being on the East Coast. Nineties grunge passed him by, and he had nothing to say to indie rockers either. Watching Gaetan share venue space with indie rockers was always amusing, because he was a stickler for sharp dressing and indie rock dudes in those days dressed down. Also interesting to understand that Gaetan was real, human, and had some depth to him. He could turn off the New Romantic persona whenever he needed to. Mercurial. And, with lots of European experience, an interesting contrast to the rest of Aughts Philadelphia.