Dreamtime

I never thought I'd care about football... but raising a sports-minded son, as a single parent, I had to indulge in his passions.  For a boy without a father, athletes are family-- role-models, personal legends. The recent near-tragedy of Damar Hamlin was world news.  As a family friend told me years ago, part of the appeal of sport is that it is among the few things in life with a clear winner and loser; games are black and white.  

Politics used to be similar, but no longer.  Election results have become arguable and not absolute.  Plus I am learning from Shadi Hamid's recent book that democracy is not the guarantee of human rights and freedoms, but just a majority vote which we all know can be manipulated, debated, miscounted.  The obscene number of voters who do not go to polls guarantees that winning candidates do not necessarily even reflect popular preference. And of course, our electoral college system allows that the winner does not necessarily have the popular majority.

Yes, there were some bad calls and replays tonight, but the Chiefs outplayed the Bengals.  The margin does not count.  There will be one winner in the end. Billions of dollars will be spent on this; Super Bowl Sunday is close to being an American holiday.  The morning after, there is a letdown... some of us watch the Grammys and others dive back into March Madness basketball. And there are statistics. Unlike other realms of entertainment, record-breakers keep their status.  We all remember Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Michael Jordan.  

Fame and celebrity is a tough business.  There is not always a statistic or a hierarchy.  Musicians-- even award-winning ones-- do not always stay current.  We watch documentaries, discover and rediscover, but in this instantaneous minute-culture, we have short memories.  Song-plays are often interrupted and brief; gone are the days of album-listening, lying on window seats and reading liner notes, absorbing into our being these landmark creations which linked with our personal history.

No sooner have we swept up the confetti of New Year's Eve, than the deaths begin to accumulate.  January always seems the cruelest month.  The litany goes on and on.  Jeff Beck was a wound... Lisa Marie Presley a shock... people like Gina Lollobrigida, hardly known by my son's generation, passes and is compared to Marilyn Monroe. We listen and listen to the Yardbirds, to every Beck performance on album and YouTube-- there are millions.  We mourn and celebrate, celebrate and mourn.  Lisa Marie-- well, I'd scarcely listened to her music, but now I have. Sadly, in a culture where things are quickly processed and discarded, death is like a second chance. It makes one relevant.

The horrific and culture-shaking death of Tyre Nichols eclipsed all others.  For us mothers of boys who have misbehaved and wandered, who have been misapprehended and misunderstood, this is the most terrible of all griefs.  Heartbreaking were his mother's words that her son assured her he would be famous. Murder makes one not just relevant but unforgettable.  The victim of a brutal inhuman event is historic.  People will wear his face and name on their shirts; they will take these into the streets and try to reckon with justice.  It's all wrong.  All we want is to wake up and have our sons beside us, spilling their food on the sofa, trekking mud on our floors... smashing up the car... giving us a birthday bear-hug.

On top of the book on democracy, and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling which will be the slow/constant literary under-accompaniment of winter-spring 2023, I have borrowed the new Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger.  I get only a week with this, so I am binge-reading. The hallucinatory passages entwine with the Marguerite Young in a unique way-- like an opium dream or an ectoplasmic swim in an alternate reality.  But the death theme is relentless.  The longing for family... the absence or presence of God, or his alternate-- Quantum Physics, the esoteric explanations of reality-- it is another McCarthy expedition through a nostalgic geography and endless descriptions. Empty people, sad people.  People with souls who are alone, people who are legendary and forgotten, people who are brilliant and suffering, tough and heroic and poignant and terse.  

The death of Tom Verlaine wove itself into my insomniac literary hallucination yesterday in a way he might have appreciated.  He was mysterious and evasive, shunning the spotlight but often haunting the same stacks of books as I.  I worshipped his playing; I have every vinyl... saw every performance I could, back in the 70's.  His personal exploration of guitar was gutting and somehow familiar.  It was tasteful and edgy, deeply musical and poetic.  For years I fantasized about his collaborative blessing to my songwriting, but never approached.  I think he did have one or two of my poetry volumes, not that he might have cared.  Once or twice I shared a cigarette with him, exploring the dirty piles of books outside the Strand.  We brushed shoulders often in the 90's, Friday nights in the Proofs section, in the Strand basement.  My son was small and liked making piles of things.  It was dusty and mice often appeared behind the shelves. We almost never spoke but occasionally Tom would make a small stack of things for me on a Friday... once or twice there was even a note.  I've kept them all.

I've brought his name up with some young guitarists-- the kind that know about Hendrix but not that much... his recent occasional personal appearances in Chelsea were unremarkable.  He had lost his relevance to the current generation.  He was probably glad of that. His death, as he might have known, brought a certain celebrity he'd never enjoyed.  The name-dropping of other more conspicuous peers and admirers piqued interest with those who had perhaps forgotten his music.  His assumed name rings a bell, of course... there are those who went back and looked at the poetry.  Once he left me a book--   

So I wept all night-- as we do, sometimes, for ourselves, at the loss of someone.  Dreamtime-- that album-- it is not yet bearable for me to listen.  But I stayed awake reading... thinking perhaps being the reader he was, that he'd taken the same recent trip through the McCarthy.  I know he knew about Marguerite Young... few people have read this one; he might have.  I'm sure it is there among the piles and piles of books in his place.  When music is unbearably emotional and difficult, books are less painful.  

There was a quotation I read this morning-- something about having read a quantity of books in common with someone creates a bond stronger than blood.  There is a certain generational commonality in the literary requisites of the old New York music scene... I was less obsessed, post-college, with the French poets and more into the New York School-- like Frank O'Hara, whose personal charisma maybe helped cement his literary legend.  These people haunt my rooms at night-- their words, the memory of the ringing guitar of Tom Verlaine, the person he created to protect the fragile musical soul he was.  His death was shattering... but it occurs that his absence was well-anticipated.  He prepared us, with his elusive presence... and as I wander still down the dark hallways of the literature we had in common, his melodies accompany my dreams like living ghosts.  

You Say You Want a Resolution

The year is one week old.  If it were a newborn, it would be home from the hospital by now, adjusting to the quiet of a room, bonding with a mother, trying out its voice and perhaps discovering its own tiny hands. As a segment of time, it has already grown familiar and we forget to light candles or say prayers and simply let the hours accommodate football and leftovers and bad habits.  Work.  We are as we were, most of us, carrying our resolutions in our pockets or wearing them like bracelets, or setting them free like balloons in the unseasonably warm January wind.

Digitally speaking, or relating to photography, resolution has to do with clarity of image-- the distinction of objects against a background.  New Year' s Day for me seems sharp... it is deceptively new and manageable and stands out.  I usually hoard alone-time, visit the same bookshop or church... I walk in the evening clarity and replay things.  It occurred to me this year that my memories are vertical-- they stack, by date or event... and while distant recalls are blurry-- I can flip through past December 31sts like a box of postcards.  The early ones-- middle school and teenage nights--- I'd tag along with my older sister to a movie... or we'd be grouped in some neighbor's home-- whoever had a live-in babysitter or nanny... while our parents went out en masse and celebrated or got drunk. But as we grew older-- this night was well-planned and meaningful. We anticipated it.  I had a dress-- an early Betsey Johnson slinky black thing-- I wore it year after year... I felt tall and grown up and sexy and photographable.  Boys wrapped me in their arms and danced... spilled champagne on it... I closed my eyes and held the moment.  

In college I often traveled during Christmas break and ended up in El Salvador watching beach-fireworks or in Stockholm with the Auroras and explosions against the freezing black Scandinavian sky. My first year in Manhattan after graduation, I partied at an apartment on the Upper West side... it belonged to some preppy drug dealer and it was fantastically crowded with all kinds of bohemians and art students and the sound of classic soul blasting through a spectacular stereo system.  Someone popped a champagne cork in their eye... after an ER visit some of us ended up at the Corso on East 86th Street, dancing to Tito Puente until past noon on the 1st.  We all vowed we would spend every New Year's Eve together--- forever. I never saw most of those people again, despite the best intentions... 

Once I became a musician there were the gigs-- many, many- -some in dive bars, some in fancy venues and hotels... Chinese restaurants, the Tribeca Grill with Hiram Bullock, a Led Zeppelin tribute set once with some society orchestra... one at Caroline's, many at BB King's... and I would wheel equipment home in the early hours, my pockets stuffed with cash which seemed all wrong, because it was I who'd had the fun.  Or I'd take a subway with wilting revelers, exhausted waitresses and bus-boys... way past all closing time, watching new couples succumbing to passion among the drunks and vomiters...  At home there would be either a sleeping child or quiet rooms to welcome me-- maybe a message from my mother, and I indulged in what I perceived as the religion of January 1-- the resolution of day from year.  It seemed sacred and fragile.

In Sweden on New Year's Day, the whole country in unison watches Walt Disney.  Huddled and hungover under blankets, you can see in every candled window the television sets in synch.  Rituals. Breakfasts-- special pastries in Italy, and fish courses.  

This year, as the last two, I missed Alan Merrill.  Not only were we bandmates and spectators at our own revelry, but we were like brother and sister... we could wink or blink and the other would understand.  I saluted him as I stacked the vertical layers of the holiday one on top of the other, and things bled out.  The 'odds', the tiny movies of our lives which escape but remain at these moments-- they come back like fairy smoke and deceive us with their narcotic aura.  Modeling, as a child in a frock on some runway in the Catskills... or wearing a narrow skirt and a tank top later in a photo session, realizing I am not a model...  I don't belong here.  The perfect romance I had once in an elevator trip in the old music building at 3 AM... the laundry room at college one magical night... these deviations or vacations from our life-narrative that we have neither integrated nor fully dismissed.  Like an 8-ball, these moments enter the glass octagon window of our vision with a kind of clarity, and then disappear.  

I read a definition of music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color."  It made sense to me... what I do needs to have some kind of idea, or emotion.  How to use 'music' in a sentence?  One cannot.  I remember when I arrived in the UK, with my pop-hooks and predictable lyrics... realizing it was all useless and meaningless.  I talked with Lou Reed, I watched young bands smash one another until they bled... I slept with punks, I tore my clothes-- I smoked and used a plectrum.  I read, I dismantled myself and examined the pieces by the neon light of a pub across from my London flat.  

Gradually I began to become who I am.  My bass playing was characterized not by the way I struck the strings but the way I released them.  Music wrapped itself around my limbs like a lover.  It bled.  

I realize I am aging but I am still becoming.  I stack the movies of my days-- the lyrics and the pictures... like vertical chapters of some continuum that relentlessly goes forward.  One week-- like a thin slice of layer cake, the rest of which will be devoured, while it sags and grows stale and the icing melts and discolors.  Memories occupy more space than my present or my future... I wander among these columns of my life... I visit scenes of passion-- of birth, of pain, of joy... most of all the tiny narratives that were discarded from the essential manuscript but seem to have special 'resolution' among the privileged moments of one's life.  As we accumulate time, we peel off as well... the irony of gaining days and losing time.  

Once again I enter the third year without Alan, the sixth without my mother, the 28th without my baby girl; the losses mount as we gather a dwindling future.  We grow old and cannot make new life; we cannot replace. Someone at this ungodly hour is composing, someone is painting, someone is inventing.  These things go on in the city-- beneath the digital webs and networks-- the texts and signals... we are human, we are wounded and vulnerable.  We weep and we love, we mourn and we pray.  I am determined to discover something this year, even if it is myself in yet a new decade, should I be so lucky. I will leave some poetry and some music as defined and hope it will resolve into a life beyond mine, that it will find resolution.