Tangled Rope

I’ve been a fan of The Wedding Present for quite a while (sorry, David, not 27 years–actually just since Cinerama), and had checked their tour dates from time to time on the off chance that they’d make it to my home state of Utah. No luck so far, but as I was browsing their site after the release of the excellent new album Valentina, I noticed they were scheduled for a brief tour of the West Coast, including San Francisco on the day I happen to fly into town for business in San Jose. What synchronicity!

I was staggered by the show.

Know first that, generally speaking, I am not a fan of live concerts. I hate the vibe of the crowd. I’d rather be at home. But some bands are able to deafen the influence of the audience on my feeble mind and harpoon their music into my thick hide. Dirty Three has done that more than any other band I’ve seen, but The Wedding Present pulled that off too last night. The strength and brilliance of their stage presence left the audience a faint distraction to the conscious mind.

Second, the Wedding Present just rocks live. Don’t let Cinerama or some of their more quiet offerings make you forget that they are, heart and soul, indy rock. Their music may not seem deliberately so to the casual listener, but on stage David Gedge makes it clear that these songs are a part of him, and ever chord and chorus is like the public unthreading of a cherished valentine, woven of ectoplasm from long gone romance, and swallowed whole to hide the shame until it is extracted, by force on stage. That’s about the only way I can describe his performance on songs such as Lovenest, Suck, Dare, and Heather (yes, they played the classic Seamonsters in its entirety; thanks to this performance Seamonsters has become my favorite TWP album, even overcoming the post-Cinerama excellence of Take Fountain).

The best live performances inspire me, and more: they physically and psychologically drive me away from the concert itself, with new motivation to create, to do, to aim for more. The Wedding Present managed this, despite the state I am in: neck-deep in travel, a fully invested family man, committed to a book contract, mid-way through another grad degree. In short, busy, distracted, and confused. This is good and bad; on the one hand, it pushes me towards more creative engagement; on the other hand, it’s quite depressing to have creative urges and longings when one can’t yet act on them.

The dream of a creative life I’ve given up on, but it’s allure persists, and performances like this remind me that there’s a reason for that: to connect with others, to give them something powerful and beautiful, something exciting and motivating, something that they carry with them during the concert, into the night, and, with a little luck, through the days and nights beyond.

This is a repost from last year’s NaPoWriMoNov Google Wave, for archival purposes.

A little free verse while I waited for the rain to come (it didn’t).

Sweep and Mop

Streams of wind scream and bleat,
sweep dust and vapours along the linoleum streets,
expunge the gutters of stick-mud timbers
clearing for the coming storm.

Inside a warm cafe we watch the dry firebolts crack
above the city skyline of kitchen appliances and tv sets.
We wait for the splash and dollop
of the great silver celestial mop
which, in wide washing swaths,
will push grit, screws and gears, loose tumbled robot sprockets
underneath the buildings' shadowy pockets
places we can forget and never clean.

----- half-mast
---- spear
--- arrow
-- pen
- needle

+ mug
++ fists
+++ cactus
++++ bed of nails
+++++ stars

-+ cross
--+ dagger
---+ sword
--++ mace
----+ shovel

• Just taught the worst class session of the course, on a topic that I knew inside and out. Blaming it on caffeine starvation. #
• Radiator too dirty and blocked to clean. It must be replaced. Is that all you got, day? #
• I don’t know how I lived without Pluckr on my Treo. #
• @opencontent Let me know if you put content or slides up. Sounded interesting. in reply to opencontent #
• @gsiemens Lucifer’s a rock star! in reply to gsiemens #
• @fncll @gsiemens So as not to be redundant, I’ll stamp my big elitist foot. in reply to fncll #
• Playing with Diigo –> Greader –> Plucker. There’s got to be an easier way. #
• GReader –> Folder –> Public –> Pluckr path is sort of fugly, but it works like a charm! #

I’m reading Nabokov’s “Ada” for the second time, and am struck by how authentically the author seems to love his characters, regardless of their flaws. To love a “round” character is to engage in an unconditional love, much like we often project upon God–a claim which, I understand, does nothing to reduce melodramatic conceptions of the author as god-like.

I’m working on a long work of fiction myself this year, and it is a frustrating and overwhelming experience. Nine days out of ten I sit down to write and must combat myself. I do not want to return to the story, do not want to smooth out the wrinkles as I go, untangle the knots that I’ve tied, or twist new rope and tie new knots for links. Part of the problem, I’m realizing, is that I may not love my characters as much as other authors do. I know them, I try to distinguish between them, I think I understand them, many of them I respect and admire, many of them I have just contempt for, and some I do feel a paternal love for, but do I love them all?

It may be that as I am only 1/3 of the way through the writing, and I am dealing with 6 protagonists and just as many antagonists, the characters have not developed enough on the pages yet to allow for a recognition of them as authentic, independent beings. And how can one love a thing of mere fiction; one can only love fictional things that represent and mean real things.

Hmm, hmm.

A Summer Foot

Five toes, uncannily fat and even,
   wide her foot
   span of a sandal.
She stretches
showing dark brown impressions beneath,
sweet cushions from toe prints.
Her big toe, unstirred by my glance,
points it’s convex nail up
   a devil’s horn.

She has rye bread eyes, strawberry yogurt lips,
hair like hong cha, too;
but I can not bear to catch that beauty–
safer to stare towards the floor,
dissembling digits that end her limb.

She stands, and I foresee how she
     steps sandled through sudden summer rain,
    dips in to test the tub,
   extends from the water when shaving,
  drips to the rug when leaving, and
 slides slightly cold and alone
toes-first inside the sheets.

I dug this out of a moleskine I’d used on the ferry from Plymouth to Santander in 2007. I revised it as I typed it.

How the rainy years do vaporize!
Each day more translucent than the others!
We ache across the fog of gaping love
like estranged brothers,
throwing breadcrumbs to the midnight skies.

April 30th

Snow runs straight across the road parallel and pale gray,
plankton on the unseen currents.
Normally Summer upstages Spring here,
but this time April ends with this howl,
having inhaled numberless seasons of mockery.

A magician, before diving in the tank
to break his breath against death,
first fills his blood with euphoria,
and stores it.

Everything is backwards.
I’ve wakened from the walking sleep of day
ending the warmest April in this freezing Spring fool’s night;
The heater in my car feels cold like a vacuum;
Classical plays on the punk rock radio station;
Twenty minutes ago my head rested on my wife’s warm ribs,
who scratched my hair-thick head.
My nose whistled, a mewing puppy,
comfortably quiet despite echoes of laughter
from the universal joke whispered every day.
I’ve never caught the punchline, but I’ve heard enough;
even though they get the details wrong,
the details don’t matter.

The universe, they say, will contract like an elastic band,
and with itself bury itself,
or it will expand until the elastic breaks.
And if it contracts, it will expand.
either way it must have somewhere to go;
oblivion or persistence—involuntary either way.

And now the snow has stopped, on the road:
remnants of a light Spring rain.
And the car has warmed.
And the green light grins, Go.
Go to a place you never go
for a hot drink and a cinnamon roll.
The light licks it’s green lips,
Go,
and,
There’s nothing you’ve forgotten,
nothing left at home,
except the funny passing moments
you call love.

Eventually the puppy will begin
to dig holes for his bones;
not out of practicality, but because they are so precious
he knows not what else to do.
He’ll plan to come back,
but never will,
having forgotten the holes and the bones, and any
way, having
somewhere better else to go.

An English sonnet wherein any resemblances to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Inspired, of course, by Richard Lovelace’s Song (To Lucasta, Going to the Wars).

Going Out

Yes, dear, I’m going out, though it’s past ten–
But don’t wait up; relax your aching head,
stay: watch TV, or chatter to a friend,
sleep and warm our sanctimonious bed.

Where? Though any answer can’t suffice
or satisfy this pure, protective question
let’s say the store to fetch a bag of ice
a prop to freeze my firey intention.

An affair? What could that offer me?
Besides furtive eyes and red smiling lips,
besides impulsive sex, and mystery–
these toys can’t touch our anchored, wedded ships.

Don’t say a word; parting is sweet sorrow!
I’ll return by twelve, or, at worst, tomorrow.

A bref double, using one of Turco’s identified forms.

Clacks and Clatters

Foreign matter clatters hard on the floor.
Sleep is broken in a crashing instant–
–listening to waking, nakedly prone…
It’s just the cat, strutting her distemper.

But there’s something else: silence, a knock
I stumbled to, and answering the door
I found a bare-boned, calcite skeleton
clacking his jaw, and waiting to enter.

I offered it a chair, left it alone
returned with tea, but poured out slick, dull clay.
Clack. He said. So I applied and shaped it,
fleshing a clay mask out from the center.

My own was mirrored in the face it wore
I tore at my hair but found only bone