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.