'Bobby Halpern'

Googling for new work by Karlien Van den Beukel, I found the (new to me) Archive of the Now, a great collection of sound files and other info on writers at the more experimental, ‘Prynnish’ end of the U.K. poetry spectrum commissioned by Andrea Brady. Lots of listening ahead.

(Could Karlien's 'Bobby Halpern' be "our" Rob Halpern, reading at Tangent tonight in Portland? Could it not be?)

Do The Police

Differences are easy to call out, but it’s the uncanny synchronicity in Linda Russo and Joel Bettridge’s excellent readings at Spare Room on Sunday that stuck with me most. To wit:

JB: Opened with a love poem. (Opening line: “I don’t want children, ever.”)
LR: Opened with poem in dialogue with Ovid’s Art of Love. (“I am wounded and troubled and delighted and aroused and appalled.”)

JB: “California poems”
LR: “Oklahoma poems”

JB: Pre-Socratics sing the blues
LR: Roman speaks “low tech-like”

JB: “I’m Ready to Send Advanced Arms to India”
LR: “India needs more energy”

JB: Closing poem made from what sounded like symptom descriptions on the back of medicine bottles.
LR: Closing poem, “Pharmacopoeia”, made from what sounded like symptom descriptions and the language of current beauty therapies. (“life-affirming, non-invasive, tummy re-attach.”)

JB: First full-length poetry book due out in 2007: That Abrupt Here
LR: First full-length poetry book out in 2007: Mirth
(Linda’s also written the introduction for Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems, out this spring from the National [“Man and Poet”]ry Foundation.)

JB: Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo
LR: Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo

Those last two are kind of cheats, since I knew that going in and it didn’t affect what they read in any immediate way. It did tempt me though to wonder about the particular blend of humor, erudition, sex, colloquial swagger, and political unease that seemed a large part of their poems’ appeal, and whether there’s anything like a movement bubbling up from under it. I thought about the new/old sincerity, about the different strategies poets are using to assemble a speaking self that can talk about more than just the conditions of its own creation—can hit the big monosyllables like love and faith and death and Bush and Dow—without sidestepping a postmodern praxis where “prices fix like identities” (Russo) and writing is often a ‘writing-through’ of earlier movers-along of the discourse.

In his introduction, David Abel mentioned the “humor and romance” in both poets’ work, and what he called their “passionate detachment,” which seemed right on to me as a way of describing how Ovid and the blues and newspaper headlines and pharmaceutical argot were employed as a way to produce the kind of distance, the stutter, you need in order to talk about the range of subjects these poets tackle with anything like sincerity now, a quality that’s bestowed from the outside, a gift from your listeners, not drawn up via booze or therapy or languid mountain retreats from the deep within. “Botoxic” (Russo): not the lineless perfect surface, but the prick of the silver that pushes the toxins inside. Beauty like that, abrupt and aware and infinitely surprising: “a cross between a handgun and a tea towel.”

Chiseled**Ether

So Here Comes Everybody is finished? I thought they'd keep going till they'd done, well, everybody. There go my polished yet spontaneous word associations (Lemon**pledge) and killer quote on the relationship between text and body in my writing. (Both need to drop 10.) In just four years I'll have a 7-year-old and thought I could use that too. I was ready, Lance. It's a great archive of material and a creative use of the Internet that introduced me to a range of poets, especially of the "emerging" variety, I wouldn't have known so much about otherwise. Thanks for the **.

Good to see HCE's last interviewee, Paul Hoover, enjoying himself in the neighborhood recently. Subtext, Spare Room: What's with all the experimental collectives up here? Is there something especially 'Pacific Northwest' about that?

There's also Hoover's useful exchange (sort of interview-like, if you're jonesing) with Albert Flynn DeSilver in the "Letters to Poets" section of Jacket 31. Not much about lemons but a lot on the "near hysteria that results from repeated rejection" and how it never entirely goes away.

“Working My Way Toward the Groove"

Vincent Craig Wright and Kasey Mohammad read together at Powell’s on Hawthorne Saturday night, under a large psychedelic portrait of Phil Lesh (lysergically captioned “Searching for the Sound”) and flanked by a spinner rack of Monster Manuals, which felt weirdly right.

Craig read a new piece, “Methford,” set in the Oregon town of the same nickname and at the Sonic Drive-Thru within it, along with the remarkable title story from his new book, Redemption Center. Both take place in a sharply observed world of Camel unfiltereds, punchclock employment, “carrying” Bibles, and the painful wait for the noontime beer. “Redemption Center” especially struck me for the way it doesn’t let the particulars of the setting—or the double meaning of the title—overwhelm the characters, a boy and his estranged parents in a subtle struggle over whether or not to get a computer with their redemption coupons. The story touches on class, opportunity, religion, technology, and labor in a direct and affecting way that avoids bracketing any of these as “issues,” just treats them as normal, like born again in-laws or asthma. Craig read fast in a warm Louisiana accent that gave a conversational immediacy to his richly detailed tales.

Kasey read a sampling from A Thousand Devils, Deer Head Nation, Monsters, and his forthcoming Breathalyzer, due this spring from Edge Books. I’m always astonished at the way Kasey’s poems manage to indulge in the intricate vowel music you get with more formal, ‘crafted’ verse, but with all this absurd 21st century detritus draped around it, so that you recognize it right away as poetry but can also forget it’s a poem and enjoy it more like you would a brilliant pop song or video or stand-up routine. I get a similar feeling sometimes reading Ashbery, where the skill is in diverting your attention from the fact that the writing’s so skilled, until the ‘finish’ feels purely reflective: no poem, all world. Kasey’s world is a wildly fractured and familiar one that draws as much from Elizabethan English as it does from the culture of the RSS feed. Maybe that’s the magic: his poems make information overload feel like artful intricacy.

Kasey and Craig were asked last-minute to do intros for each other, which no host of any reading should ever do. (Hosts of future readings: don’t ever do this.) They pulled it off though to an appreciative audience that left wishing Ashland was a lot closer to Portland.

Dept. of Weekend (Three Thumbs Up)

Big poetry weekend: Kasey and Craig Wright up from Ashland on Saturday to read at the Hawthorne Powell’s; Sunday, Linda Russo on her West Coast barnstorm with Joel Bettridge at Spare Room. Joel moved to Portland a month before I did and is helping me feel less new, & curiouser about Ronald Johnson.

If I could split myself in two and had one of those pixilating Star Trek transporters, I’d also make the Neo-Benshi Night of SPT’s annual Poets Theater, curated by San Francisco cineaste Konrad Steiner. That's tonight, so I guess I just need the transporter.

Against the Day

My good friend Cecil Vortex (birth certificate available upon request) is starting an Against the Day Deathmarch on Tuesday. 50 pages a week, group discussion via the comment boxes, prizes if you finish. I've been on earlier marches for Gravity's Rainbow, At Swim-Two-Birds, and To the Lighthouse; it's a fun, low-key, 'anacademic' way to get through a book you might not finish alone. Particulars here.

John Latta's been whetting my appetite at Isola di Rifiuti for weeks.

Addendum

But it helps.

Memo to Ezra

A syllabus does not equal a world.

On First Looking Into the Blurbs for Foster's Yeats

Pre-eminence disappears into its prizes.

Yaa-hooo!

The BBC quotes Jerry Yang as saying he was inspired to name Yahoo! Yahoo! by Shammi Kapoor's famously over-the-top "Chahe Mujhe Koi Junglee Kahe" (with its indelible refrain, half Himalayan mountain yodel, half free love orgasm—ya-hooo!) from Junglee (1961).

Technically I guess the credit should go to the songwriting team of Shankar-Jaikishen, the Leiber & Stoller of Bollywood.

I used to dream about being a Beatle. These days I wish I'd been the Stoller of Bollywood. Or Leiber. Which one did the lyrics?

Anyway, that cornpone high lonesome banjo wail Yahoo! uses in their TV spots? Don't buy it. It's all Shammi.

Monologue of Truth (3)

Another biographical circumstance that deepens Aag’s power is Raj Kapoor’s situation as a Hindu from the Punjab, which in 1947 saw perhaps the worst incidence of ethnic cleansing following the Holocaust as Pakistan and India tried to relocate over 15 million persons who had lived in the same region for centuries in order to accommodate a newly drawn border. Aag represents the Partition—and, by extension, the modern post-imperial Indian state created that same year—in the person of Nargis. In the process of auditioning leading actresses for his debut play (woman after woman turned down in a surreal montage of screen test-like close-ups), Kewal storms out of the theater in frustration after delivering a poetic rant about the qualities he needs to realize his vision for a new Indian theater. Hunched on a bench in dramatic chiaroscuro backlight is a mysterious woman looking for a job.

Kewal: “What’s your name?”
(Nargis): “I have no name.”
Kewal: “Where do you come from?”
(Nargis): “Hell. What is Punjab but a hell? Hellfires everywhere. It took my parents, my three brothers, two innocent sisters. To the fires I lost my home, my name. You got anything else to ask?”
Kewal: “Come in.”

Nameless and homeless, Nargis becomes Kewal’s leading lady, a blank slate for his own artistic (and political) imaginings. He begins to call her Nimmi, the name of his lost childhood love. Meanwhile, his sexually ambiguous benefactor finds in ‘Nimmi’ the embodiment of the ideal woman he’s been struggling to capture in his paintings. As Nimmi falls for Kewal—and begins to morph into the missing person Kewal wishes her to be—his jealousy grows, culminating in a fit on opening night in which he slashes his pictures in a rage. Kewal, realizing too late that Nimmi is in love with him instead of his dashing patron, resolves to burn his own face in order to divert her affections. The torch falls, the theater catches fire, and Kewal stumbles out of the inferno with his face ‘partitioned’ by scars.

“Aag” is Hindi for “fire”, and by the end of the film Kapoor has managed to wring every ounce out of its symbolic potential. Pointing as it does to Kewal’s passion for the theater, his desire for his lost love Nimmi, the burning that marked the ethnic fighting between Muslims and Hindus in the Punjab, and the damage to Kewal’s eponymous theater and his person, Aag welds a highly personal manifesto on cinema’s social purpose to a political allegory of India’s baptism by fire as a modern state.

The film is structured as a flashback on Kewal’s wedding night. The final scene takes us back to the opening, where Kewal is lifting his new bride’s veil, letting her see for the first time his half-scarred face. The woman, horrified at first, hears Kewal’s history in the narration that is also the film, and begins to smile. “Don’t you recognize me?” she says. It’s Nimmi, not Nargis but the ‘primal’ Nimmi, his childhood love: the dream come true, art made life, the circle closed.

aaand ... scene.

Monologue of Truth (2)

Just as Kewal finishes his MONOLOGUE OF TRUTH, a handsome figure steps out from the shadows. Like us, he’s been eavesdropping on Kewal’s intimate ‘inner script’. Suddenly the moment of TRUTH, of authentic subjectivity, stands revealed as a performance: an audience has been there all along, listening in that no-place from which every movie audience surveils a film. Paradoxically, the stranger praises Kewal for his acting rather than his honesty; it’s not the “truth” of the monologue but the art he displays in delivering it that impresses Kewal’s fateful benefactor.

The stranger turns out to be a painter, which stretches the tension already implicit in the scene—theater vs. film—into a triangular struggle between three different visual media. (Later on in the movie, this gets mapped onto a psychosexual ménage). Impressed with the performance (the scene is one of Raj Kapoor’s stagiest), he declares his intention to help Kewal’s theatrical ambitions. Turns out he’s not only rich, he owns the abandoned theater and was waiting for a good reason to reopen it. Eventually it will be renamed the Kewal Theater for Kewal’s directorial debut, staffed by a ragtag group of down-on-their-luck college grads, unemployed theater folk, and refugees from the recent violence of The Partition: a miniature version of the nation Kapoor hopes the new India will become.

The real-life circumstances around the film add to the depth of the scene. A scion of sorts himself—the Kapoors are one of the most distinguished acting families in India, his father Prithviraj being the founder of the famed Prithvi Theater—the 24-year-old Raj casts the passing of the baton from theater to film as a father-son struggle that moves in a number of metaphoric directions. Aag is Raj Kapoor’s debut as a director, in a film about a wayward son struggling to ... make his debut as a director. The story also borrows heavily from Prithviraj’s bio. The son of a Punjabi police inspector who struck out for Bombay to make movies in his early ‘20s, Prithviraj would seem to be the prototype for his son’s portrait of Kewal. The parallel deepens when we see that the play Kewal has written to stage in his eponymous theater is a conventional village drama of the sort his father’s traveling Prithvi Theater performed around India from its inception in 1944. This apparently exemplary act of filial piety—Raj Kapoor assuming the role of his father in the character of Kewal—takes a darker turn though when, by the end of the film, as the result of a poisonous love triangle, the painter destroys all of his canvases and the thespian burns down his theater in the process of scorching his own face.

The last man standing turns out to be the one behind the camera; celluloid is the only medium in Aag that doesn’t burn.

"Monologue of Truth"

AAG (1948)
Raj Kapoor plays Kewal, pampered scion of a Hindi legal family whose members have served the British since the first proconsul debarked. Determined to buck tradition and be an artist, Kewal flunks out of college, splits with his imperious father, and wanders the streets of Bombay without a rupee in his pocket, preferring to “create his own fate” rather than repeat history’s.

Taking shelter in an abandoned theater, Kewal finds himself alone on a stage cluttered with dusty props, disused stage lights, fallen arrases, and other paraphernalia of the actor’s craft. What follows is among the greatest six minutes Raj Kapoor ever committed to film. The DVD menu identifies the scene as “Monologue of Truth,” so you don’t have to take my word for it that it’s MUY IMPORTANTE.

Kewal picks up a flute from a tangle of dancer’s anklets—we hear a traditional skirl as he lifts it, a heavy shake of bells—and begins to replay in his head the argument with his parents on his last night at home. First the claims of the father (respectability, security, family honor), then the mother (love, devotion, incomprehension). The dialogue comes verbatim from an earlier scene, which creates a curious meta-moment where the re-presentation of a prior event, filmed this time on a theater stage, relies on purely ‘a-theatrical’ cinematic techniques like voiceovers and multiple cuts to depict Kewal’s interior thoughts and memories. The viewer is placed in the bizarre position of being inside and outside the scene at once. Having seen the earlier argument and being privy to the voiceover, you’re right there inside Kewal’s head, hearing what he hears; this being a monologue (a MONOLOGUE OF TRUTH, no less) on a theater stage, you’re also positioned visually as if you were in the audience, filling the empty seats which the camera creepily rakes at least three or four times during the speech.

Monologue is already one of the more bizarre theatrical conventions—a presumably authentic (because private) expression of subjectivity premised on the fiction that the audience for whom it exists ISN’T REALLY THERE. Kapoor amplifies the artifice by having Kewal answer the voices in his head out loud. So there are some parts of the monologue we catch only in our capacity as filmgoers, enjoying the intimacy of the voiceover, and others we’re hearing as invisible eavesdroppers in the theater audience. The line between the two starts to blur as Kapoor introduces the sound of applause while the camera pans the empty seats, and turns up the theater lights. Is this happening in Kewal’s head, in the theater itself, or is it for our benefit, a symbolic anticipation of his future success as a dramatist?

The substance of Kewal’s MONOLOGUE OF TRUTH is that despite the pain he’s causing his parents, he needs to follow his own vision of the future, which is also by implication a vision for cinema and its role in a post-imperial India. He insists this isn’t just his story, but that of “youth in every home.” “Why don’t we make a life for ourselves,” he asks, instead of being clay for our parents’ hands to mold? The flute and anklets at the beginning of the scene help to clue us in to the evolutionary cycle Kapoor wants to close: traditional dance to modern theater to film, offered here as the new popular art form for the new Indian nation.

Anniverse

Yesterday was a 'soft' first birthday for this blog. It started as a group blog for a Modern American Poetry class at Mills College, took a long hiatus while we waited to see if it could survive as a collective endeavor, then at last overcame my handwringing about blogging to rise back up into the blogosphere, the move to Portland being the necessary kick in the pants. That's at least three metaphors mixed in one inelegant sentence, folks.

Are any of the original 'Modern Americans' still out there? Hope you're all thriving.

Ride the Meme

I asked Lesley what, if she had a blog and were tagged, would be the Five Little-Known Things about her. Hers are much better than mine, plus it's her birthday, so today Modern Americans is hers and she's borrowing one of Nada's open tags.

Most people who know Lesley already know she auditioned for the (never-to-be-filled) bass part in Hole and fronted the (IMHO) much better band, Glitter Mini 9. Five lesser-known things are:

1) Won Carrier of the Month for the Davis Daily Democrat in her first month on the job. We still have the trophy.

2) Went on a date with the guy who played the bodyguard in "My Bodyguard" while he was filming "Full Metal Jacket" in London. (Bonus Little-Known Thing: the guy from My Bodyguard was in Full Metal Jacket??)

3) Was scared into being a born-again Christian from ages 12 to 15.

4) Let Anton Newcombe from The Brian Jonestown Massacre join her band for several months in the mid-Nineties, then kicked him out. (See DiG! & you'll probably guess why.)

5) Her father once owned the five-and-dime in downtown Lyndon, KS; her grandmother danced for John Philip Sousa at a school assembly in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LESLEY! And Nada, and all the magnificent Capricorns who surround me.

Indie Anger

There was a time I would would have given my left arm to the elbow to be in an indie rock band; now I can hardly listen to the stuff. Everything sounds like a mashup to me: Joy Division crossed with Brian Wilson, late Pavement meets Nick Drake. The inner rock critic refuses to shut up. I thought maybe I could dig Devendra until I got the first three Tyrannosaurus Rex CDs.

The problem is broader than the bands; I’m feeling betrayed by the genre, which stranded me at 35 with no other means of musical support. If I’d put the same amount of time into, say, swing bands, there’d probably be weird conventions I could still go to. Experimental jazz? A long happy life of online discussion groups and eldritch discographies. But with indie, as I nosed into my thirties the context that once made the music so important to me just sort of receded. My love for it grew in the petri dish of suburban ennui, regret for missing the ‘60s, and a postgraduate identity crisis that delivered me to the outskirts of middle age with no meaningful career pattern in sight. That’s alright, I was staying true to the music, or anyway the life the music seemed to promise, faithfully waiting for the NEXT BIG THING. Then, almost imperceptibly, old radio formats created in Nirvana’s wake disappeared (somehow I didn’t bother to find new ones); band names in the weekly listings started to blur together, even the starred ones; the prospect of staying up till 1 a.m. on a weeknight to see almost anyone in a room where conversation’s impossible and the liquor comes in plastic cups came to feel like an archaic form of torture.

I tried to stay excited via Pitchfork, took a couple of magazines, but no use: the core of the thing had died. The music had resolved for me into a way of talking about the music; I didn’t see bands anymore, but the field they occurred in—the network of labels, review outlets, and rhetorical gestures that seemed to conspire to make every next big thing sound interchangeable with the last big thing. I came to feel like Ulrich does in The Man Without Qualities, when he sees the term “genius” applied in a newspaper to a racehorse. In a world where a racehorse of genius is possible, what’s the point of the concept anymore?

This makes it sound like the bands somehow betrayed me (less original), or the business conspired to kill off the magic (too greedy), and while I thought that for a long time, I realize now the change was essentially in me, in the shifting role you ask art to play in your life as you move through it. It’s hard to deny the intensity of the feelings I once had for my favorite bands, but I see now too how much of my passion was really for the context in which their music occurred. I liked the Rocky Horror feeling of being in a small room late at night with a select group of devotees. I liked being able to listen alone, without the hassles of a community or formal academic program. I liked to drink, and I liked the ever-present possibility of an indie savior appearing—because it is a kind of savior industry—that would gather all my reasons for drinking into a form of devotion. I hadn’t sold out; I was witness to this; I was saved.

My dad likes country music. He’s liked it all his life. There’s a way it fits into his particular version of late-middle age that I envy. I don’t think he was ever “into” music the way I was, but he’s left with sounds he can use—BBQs, wedding receptions, sonic wallpaper for any occasion. It makes him feel good, it makes him feel Kansas, in some inchoate way I imagine it validates his view of the world as it was and still ought to be. “My” music hasn’t weathered so well outside the milieu of overinky hand stamps and Talmudic readings of where Stephen Malkmus’s career is headed that I no longer have the time or focus for. It’s not that I’m looking for new sounds so much as a new platform for delivering sound into a life that no longer needs to be so tightly wound around music. Without really noticing, I've slipped out of that key “18 to 35” demographic, don’t care so much anymore if what I’m listening to is new or cool. What I’m after now I guess is a music that will last me to senescence.

Hindi Conversation

I begin my Hindi Conversation class tonight at Portland Community College. I'm taking it because I'm mad at myself for understanding so little of the dialogue in Bollywood movies, even when the subtitles give you a proper name or place name to listen for, and because the course description was so succinct and disarming:

"Most popular language of the Indic Family. Has over 350 million native speakers. Learn to converse and enjoy colorful Bollywood movies and music."

California Dreamin'

Big '07 thanks to John Sakkis for sending me three stunning CDs: one of rembetika, two by the Bay Area's own Ziyia. John, the laser's going to burn a hole through these by August.

And how great to see Suzanne Stein—and to read her and read what friends have to say about her work—every time I stop by PhillySound.

Today I'm officially homesick.