Ile Aiye

untitled things

2011-03-22T23:09:00.001-05:00

quite old drawings

2011-03-22T19:33:00.001-05:00

night paintings

2011-01-26T18:22:00.000-06:00

new painting

2010-11-29T14:33:00.000-06:00

Views of a Fishing Village in Baja, Mexico

2010-04-18T17:28:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles (brush pen drawing, 2010)

2010-03-03T14:22:00.002-06:00

Poetry Chapbook Review

2010-01-19T16:50:00.005-06:00

“Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot”
by Kate Durbin

Rarely does a modern poet have a detail-oriented sense of history and a penchant for sparse personal verse. Packed with stark, mysterious lablike observations and existential questions, Durbin’s chapbook takes the reader on a journey to a place where there were only two travelers: pilot Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan. The narrative follows Earhart from preflight moments with George Putnam (referred to as “G”) to her voyage with Fred Noonan (referred to as “F”) and thirsty death on an “inhospitable island”.

Since Earhart and Noonan’s flight was lost and her radio communications were minimal, globally-informed historians have only recently been able to offer conjecture to tell their story. Perhaps you’ve read Gore Vidal’s character assessment of Noonan, indicting him for his reckless drinking and speculating that this made Noonan the tailspinner of the tragedy.

Durbin’s poems, which digest like haiku or pensées, explore Earhart’s privately held notions and impulses, ruminating on the pains and pangs of the senses. I will continue to pour through these innovative verses and look forward to Durbin's first collection of poetry, The Ravenous Audience.

Music Video!

2010-01-14T21:38:00.001-06:00

On the Road with Chris Hickey

2009-10-13T16:24:00.022-05:00

Chris Hickey – Razzmatazz

The music industry is driven by the desire to make money. A decade ago, the most universal of the American music companies (including Universal itself) were controlled by the likes of Seagram. Today, the honor goes to Vivendi. Perhaps Monsanto will be in control tomorrow.

“How does a music company become more profitable?”

This is the question that those that have the pocket change ask themselves occasionally. The answer is usually somewhere along the lowest common denominator. What do people already like? What is already selling? Let’s recreate that!

If music executives are profiteers, the music industry is just a game of swiping and rebranding merchandise that has already been manufactured. How exciting is that? Still, within this industry of economic virtues, there are some who are advocates of resilient music. These are the Good Samaritans who take the gains of a megahit and employ a portion of them to support genuine artists. You can only hope that Chris Hickey gets support for having written songs, such as these, that will find listeners for generations to come.

“…the questions lose their feel/nothing is real/we swim in great peace…” sings Hickey.

Chris Hickey has participated in the music industry as a uniquely gifted singer and is now a seasoned songwriter. Subversively and sublimely, he has managed to create songs that propel the listener to rethink ideas, reconsider past notions, and get moved in the process. The way Hickey creates songs as reckoning media can only be compared favorably to the work of the greatest living songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, Sufjan Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Mark Eitzel, Sam Phillips, and Tom Waits. Like these other artists, Hickey doesn’t censor himself and restrict his output to positive, uplifting songs. He focuses on questions and on the meaning of existence.

You don’t have to be in the Marcel Proust Club to find depth and raw sophistication in the unadorned timeless songs of Razzmatazz. In Razzmatazz, Hickey makes compact, sentient observations about life and death. He resurrects conundrums about restlessness and the human condition, describes the city from the ground up, ponders the role of the individual in society, taps into the desire to savor time and, consciously or not, reiterates the will to persevere.

“…maybe in the end, we all suffer the same…” sings Hickey in Down, a song that captures a pink pants-wearing ruffian spots “skid row luxury lofts” and bloomed after a five-hour trudge through the bowels of downtown Los Angeles.

In these 16 songs, the longest of which clocks in at just under two-and-a-half minutes, you might perceive traces of the influence of Hickey’s literary and literate idols, such as Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Langston Hughes, Loudon Wainwright III, Bob Dylan and Charles Bukowski. Even the casual listener will find echoes of family, of South Pasadena, and of nature—all the way down to the almost invisible swarms of insects you can only see if you are really looking.

Hickey on the origin of the album:

“My daughter asked me if I wanted to go with her to her church one day (Church of Religious Science), I did, and the speaker was talking about being nice to yourself as though you were being nice to someone else, like doing yourself favors... I thought it was a generic message but I witnessed my sort of cynical reaction and decided to take his advice, make the trip worthwhile, So, I offered myself about an hour a day to write and record a song (I'm out of the habit of writing much because no one is paying me to write - so it's a luxury which sometimes I don't know if I deserve or can afford when I'm always scrambling to pay the bills - and that is really just an excuse for not writing because i find time to read and walk...). I wrote the first one, recorded it, and e-mailed it to my old friend Scott Seskind and I called it the "song of the day". He liked it and was anxious to hear more - and that helped, to have someone to hear the recordings. He cheered me on. That went on for about three weeks - I stopped when I went out of town for a few days, and I was ready to stop at that point. Scott encouraged me to put it out. I was a little scared that people wouldn't like it but I knew I liked it, so I put it out there. And I'm glad I did.”

Hickey, a free thinker who was raised Catholic, learned to meditate at The Zen Center in Los Angeles during the same three-week period that he spent crafting these songs. The basic concept of Zen Buddhist meditation, according to the Zen Center is to “…forget the self, practice the precepts (of the Bodhisattva), and serve others”. When artists, such as Jack Kerouac, who was one of the few Americans to tackle haiku with any success, or Hiroshi Teshigahara, the Japanese filmmaker who spent much of his time doing ikebana (flower arrangements), allow Zen Buddhism to penetrate their craft, the resultant work seems to take on a greater dimension than would otherwise be produced. Zen meditation influences art by allowing the moment to be what it is. The enlightened artist sees the moment for what it is and seeks not to put a pretty pattern around it, but to reflect it. Being of the moment, the art becomes ephemeral and timeless all at once. Instead of bearing the signature of an auteur, a work of art resembles something of the natural world. This type of art reflects a state of meditation and, therefore, invites contemplation. When you encounter this kind of art, you may sense simplicity because the stylization isn’t there, but you will also sense a greater complexity because our understanding of the natural world is always in a state of development.

“I guess the basic philosophy here, and I'm just making this up right now, can be found on Charles Bukowski's gravestone: First, two words: "DON'T TRY". And right under that, the silhouette of a boxer - Bukowski was a real fighter who walked through the fire. See if you can reconcile "DON'T TRY" and "FIGHT" and that is the question. On "Places To Go" I say "I like to stay home but it's good to have places to go." And I wasn't even trying. It's effortless to be true,” said Hickey, “The records alternates between "daily existence" and "existence" - in a game of chess, "daily existence" would be, for example, I just moved my pawn, I'm losing... and "existence" would be that I'm playing chess. During this period that I made this record, I was learning how to meditate at the Zen Center in Los Angeles and reading lots of books about Buddhism. And I read a lot of Jack Kerouac books too, including "Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha" in which Kerouac talks about our senses as illusions. I tasted , or I think I tasted, some unknowable, unremark-on-able (hard to explain) things... and I endeavored (didn't try!) to the extent that it's possible to reflect that experience in some of these songs.”

Hickey on fulfillment:

“I remember waking up in early in a hotel closet in Montreal. I was on tour with Show of Hands and we had no place to stay on that night so we shared rooms with the Indigo Girls who we were opening for. I woke up at about five a.m. and tip-toed out of the hotel and walked around Montreal. I found an open bakery and got a fresh baked piece of sourdough wheat bread. That was fulfilling. Not fully filling – I guess I've never been fully filled - but many of my best memories involve freshly baked bread. I remember as a child getting a nice hot pretzel from a street vendor in New York City. I guess I'm trying to be funny, but I'm serious really. Or I could say that one day I realized that I'm already full. Did you ever buy a toy for your kid and think "I should get batteries" and you look at the package to see what kind of batteries and it says "batteries included”? I've come to realize that the batteries are included.”

And so it is with Chris Hickey’s Razzmatazz. It is pure, profound and unfettered songwriting. It is also a unified collection of phrases and perceptions that resonate with the clarity of seeing what hasn’t been perceived, even though it has already been there. Let’s hope that Hickey, who hopes to work with producer Rick Rubin, continues to forage a path on the road to simplicity. “…a man is rich whose needs are few…” he sings.

in bed

2009-09-25T12:31:00.003-05:00

late summer

2009-09-10T23:24:00.000-05:00

under water, you
gaze at my myopic eyes;
surfacing to laugh

September 10, 2009
Glendora, CA

northern light

2009-08-26T14:18:00.001-05:00

the water by my bed
for the campfire in my mouth
i'll check the damage

8/24/2009

emerging

2009-08-23T22:51:00.001-05:00

the frigid ocean
swallowed my wedding band
without touching us

8/24/09

reinforcement again

2009-08-19T17:28:00.001-05:00

in the end does it
matter which of the
story departments touches first?

second course

2009-08-16T22:56:00.000-05:00

this casserole is a perfect marriage of the leftovers
my culinary memories need not be conjured
crunching a walnut, i
forage the dressed raw greens
and our glorious little yellow tomatoes

but in this subsequent scavenging,
i meet you twitching,
unbruised and unpainted,
except for the mayonnaise.

a scream is how i greet you.

then i show you to my wife and son,
before escorting you out the door

i offer you the garden.

“you don’t have to finish that,” my wife says.

but, for some reason, i do.

and when i’ve finished eating a little more carefully,
i step out to see how you like the backyard.

ants are tickling your forklong torso
but you don’t seem to be laughing.

you are no longer moving.

when you cling to the purple cabbage,
it is only because you have spiny legs

you dry out on an asylum
and i fling you over the fence.

august 16, 2009
glendora, ca

dissolve

2009-08-09T11:37:00.001-05:00

waiting for the needle to
penetrate the skin,
i, the remedy, dissolve

landerland

2009-07-27T01:48:00.001-05:00

5/28/09

2009-05-28T23:08:00.000-05:00

in a riper room
turning the cookbook's pages
flour on my fingers

nesting hawk

2009-05-25T23:15:00.001-05:00

as I bowed to read
the scrawled orange cone warning a
nesting hawk attacked

5/25/2009
Glendora, CA

Red Rock Canyon

2009-05-18T03:52:00.001-05:00

Way down in Red Rock Canyon
There lived a six-gun man
Never had learned to read or write
Or much produce a clan

The law for years had tracked him
And no one remembers why
They say he was a half-breed
Who lost his whole half tribe

Some mildew morning Union men
Had rode into a camp
And shot all those inhabitants
That could not at all fight back

Now he lives on gin and shoots at cans
And the town nearby is gone
And the dust it echoes in the air
Like half-remembered songs.

He’d met a girl on a steamboat once
Playing poker before a fight
She’d been a nursing student who
Had pretty much saved his life

There wasn’t enough left in him though
To ask her for a dance
He had already lost his wife
In a massacred romance

And one day he will die at last
And his bones will stain the ground
And the spirit of some wild Indian
will at long last be unbound.

2009-05-06T00:02:00.003-05:00

back one day late

what happened?
back pain--
I was losing feeling
after the knife
sunk into my back

where did it happen?
middle school

it doesn't happen here
--nor did it there
he was disturbed
and it was the first case
over there

it's a good thing he missed!
yeah.
you could have lost
use of your legs
before entering high school

wake up monday

2009-04-06T23:40:00.000-05:00

haunted by a dying phone
summoned to be sure
that there is a future

the end of 2008

2008-12-31T23:09:00.000-06:00

three new plants breathe the night air
seeds scattered throughout the backyard
the diminished soap slips away
tomorrow must be new year's day

Los Angeles (brush pen drawing, 2008)

2008-11-30T21:16:00.002-06:00

Cafe Tropical, Echo Park, Los Angeles, November 30, 2008
(Brush Pens on Paper)

Los Angeles: Cement

2008-11-16T17:27:00.004-06:00

Los Angeles: Cement

Afternoon in Glendale
Cooler weather has finally arrived
Purposeful winds scour the basin
Driving malignant fumes west
Over the ridges
To the Mojave
Joshua trees and Las Vegas:
They say you can see it there –
The approaching smog from Los Angeles –
Like a furious cloud
Out of Heraclitus, like a black ship
Or pillar of doom on the desert’s horizon

The heat subsides
I take highway 2
Into the city
Onto Sunset Blvd.
Which is
A stuck parade of graffiti
And scarred cement
An open sore of progress so utterly awful
It cancels itself, somehow, out

Utility trucks, engines roaring,
Mopeds whizzing,
Yellow tools droning,
Electric cable carving out sky,
Cracked cement, cracked
Road, walls,
Chipped murals over abandoned subway stairs,
Buses thundershuddering by,
Everything conspires to raise noise
Beyond our capacity to ignore
And the concrete wants to crawl
Up and engulf everything

The unfortunate
Frames of variously uniform newspapers stands
Each likewise bedecked with ripped stickers
And illegible sprayed scrawl,
Casting their untouchable shadows over
Gum spot sidewalks

Somewhere, I think, beauty is floating around in the mess
There was someone who somehow once wrote
Beautifully about this, probably
Buried in a dismal closet notebook;
This reality, that expanded
Would burst the seams of the conflations that constrain it

Los Angeles is an unreal city which is to say that in the mind
Of the universal resident, the reality is not in the empirical,
But in the representation, in the reconfigured image, especially
As witnessed from a theater chair

Maybe it was the dawn of the automobile
And the swift devastation of other transit
Or maybe it began before that
With heavy industry that began the extinction
Of clean air, that killed the skies in the fifties,
Drove engineers and city planners and everyone
To a kind of aesthetic nihilism that
Deformed everything it touched

Now there is this strange
Paved surface of a city,
With neighborhoods that are only
Occasional protrusions
From that ridiculous asphalt flesh
False armor over the earth,
This heavy load of skin with which
We seem to be encasing the world
The more of it in an area,
The more ‘developed’ it is said to be

Those wide bituminous channels –
At night, try standing on one of those
Manhole covers in the center of an intersection
And you will see what kind of perspective we have given up:
It is a human one.
We build to the scale, first of the automobile,
Then there is the accounting world of finance
And paper shuffle
Technology construction and
Marketing.
Below the
High office windows of the demographics analyst
The particular, categorized
Individual, who
Statistically consumes
What was anticipated, budgeted,
And profited from,

At a bus stop,
The ordinary people stand under the shadow of a billboard
That advertises the extraordinary image of the ordinary.
The stars and celebrities, they say,
Never having met each other,
Behave as though they had:
Leading men and women greeting each other like old friends.
The aspirant actor behind the counter
Won’t even give me the time of day but
The Chilean immigrant woman who brought me this coffee
Smiles at me like I was her own son.

halloween

2008-10-31T23:55:00.005-05:00

We learned our lesson last year. One does not carve a pumpkin very far in front of this holiday in Southern California. And so we waited until last night to operate.

I asked Ikuko if she would rather draw the pattern on the pumpkin or have me cut free style like I usually do. She opted for the former. Mizuki was thrilled to see the sprawl of newspaper and the chopping block and our tremendous meat cleaver gleaming.

He wanted to help with the cutting, but we thought it best for him to keep a full set of fingers for now.

Ikuko opted for the zig zag cranium crown cut. It was fun to try a different pattern. My utilitarian circulesque cut on the top never looked this good.

I enjoyed scaring Mizuki by plucking the guts of the pumpkin out and lurching them at him. I think he just was bothered by the sliminess. He asked for this fright, again and again.

One nice thing about our towering $2 farmer's market pumpkin is that it's a high rise. So the candle doesn't singe the "ceiling" of the interior, as it would a standard, rounded pumpkin.

Once the gutting and cutting had finished, we sorted the seeds for the cookie sheet and started burning the candle. I decided to get our mini fan to blow air in the pumpkin through the night, knowing that the pumpkin would otherwise cave in last night. The fan was an effective means of removing any threat of mush-making.

This evening, we combed through the candy that Mizuki had gathered in the downtown shops. Then we set out for round two.

It was Ikuko's first time to participate in trick-or-treating (though Mizuki was the only one getting candy). I hadn't been out since before MTV had been born.

We stopped at a few houses on the way to the park. I remembered that there is an unspoken rule that one should only visit houses with the lights on. We were surprised to see what efforts some people took to lure people into their homes. There were strobe lights, life-size witch cutouts, etc.

One house featured a bulge-eyed goon in a rocking chair. By the posture of this costume-clad host, he must have been an octagenarian. It was a long walk down the path to his rocking chair. My son, who was reticent to say "trick-or-treat", unless asked not to, accepted the candy from him, and accidentally dropped it, prompting the creaking candy man to lament droopily through his horrifying rubber down-to-the-neck creep mask, "it's a shame to come all this way for nothing."

Up the road a bit, past a big empty church, there were flashes and the densest crowd of the night.

One mom was carrying her 5-year-old. "She doesn't have any candy," we heard the mom tell a friend, "Every time she goes to a house, she eats the candy she gets on the way to the next house."

Dozens of onlookers were filing up the sidewalk, up the stairs, into a battle scene. We returned to a house that we had encountered a few nights before. Cannons were rolling and blasting with plumes of smoke bellowing from their turrets. Life-sized pirates were standing around the yard, or sitting on treasure chests. A 3-story mast was flying its sail between a fantasy island waterfall and the aquamarine door. Actually, the whole house seemed to be aquamarine--from the doormat to the lighthouse cone (with a mermaid coming out of the window). When we had visited this unsubtle establishment a few nights prior, the mastermind was out in front of the house explaining how he really wanted to dig a hole around the bottom of the mast so he could make the mast move (to go with the audio storm that was looping to the ostentatious scene).

Now my son walked up to the door, whose top half was open, revealing a piratey striped shirt and a smiling Snickers pusher. This resident was totally enraptured by his creation. His sappy grin begged approval and caused me to feel sorry for him as I smiled back.

On the way home, we watched a group of high school aged trick-or-treaters walk up to an apartment that was scary, not for its constant Michael Meyers "Halloween" soundtrack eminating from inside, but for the McCain/Palin sign next to it. The high school kids agreed and couldn't stop saying so.

By this time, Mizuki was quite thirsty. We knew this because he was requesting both milk and water. Ikuko and I both knew that we were going to make our son stop at one apartment on the way home. It was the one that had been most decorated in our complex. Complete with a scarecrow, several pumpkins, candles, and lights. We knew that this lady would be desperate to give candy to someone tonight. And, surprisingly, our son seemed to know it, too.

He ran up to the door, knocking, in spite of the glowing doorbell button next to the door. Within 10 seconds, the door pulled open. Our neighbor (whom we rarely converse with) was beaming. She reached into her bowl with both hands, bringing out 15 lollipops, sugar babies, and milk duds. It was about 8:30. Perhaps we were the only people to come to her door. She tried to reload and stuff another handful into our son's pumpkin basket, but we gratefully declined, smiled, thanked her and staggered home.

preparing a set list just got easier

2008-10-08T22:22:00.003-05:00

There are many downsides to writing songs every day. The untranscribed tapes now number in the hundreds. None of the digital recordings of the past 6 months, since I upgraded recording devices, have been processed by flesh and blood.

When it comes time to perform, as it will in a few days, I often consider my whole catalog, before deciding on a set list. Then, I need to make sure that I can perform the songs well enough to include them.

Lately, the litmus test has always been the singability of the song. Am I into singing that song? Does it excite me and incite comfort or questions? If so, it tends to find its way into the set list.

Then, there is the case of introducing previously unplayed songs, or sometimes learning to play them differently.

There is a song that I originally wrote and performed in regular EADGBE guitar tuning, which I now play in DADDAD guitar tuning. The drone seemed to fit the song better. The tuning hearkens to the banjo, which hearkens to the sheep bladder bagpipes of the Northern UK. This is why George Harrison got into the sitar--the drone. The drone is also present in Bach's music. That special ringing of the notes....

As I accidentally booked my Saturday gig on my son's 3rd birthday, we asked him if he wanted me to play on his birthday.

"YES!" he said, "I want to go to the concert."

Which he does. In fact, he performs his renditions of my concerts every day on his stool, calling himself "Daddy" and using our camera tripod as his microphone, and an old transistor radio as his "electric guitar". He also strums the nylon string guitar and the charango, as well as hits the drums with his plastic caterpillar sticks (that the Matamala's gave him).

So we decided to let him pick the songs for the concert.

He didn't really have an easy time, as he loves the tender ballads, as well as the upbeat songs. It was great to learn about his favorites (although I already knew about most of them). Strangely, they are among the most popular songs that I play.

And so I will perform the songs of my son's choice on Saturday night at Zephyr in Pasadena--for his pleasure.

dentist woes

2008-09-17T22:36:00.008-05:00

26 x-rays down.
millimeters of gum recession measured.
blood from the upper right quadrant during deep cleaning.

i guess the message is don't wait for 4 and a half years between check-ups.

fillings dissolved or broken.
a crown that the dentist can stick his probe into.
and an insurance policy to get most of the dirty work done before the end of the year.

it's a wonder we ever return to the dentist.
they act like they are all auditioning for ktla morning news.

i'd rather deduct this from the bill.

did i mention the hidden cost of paying someone to tell me to floss between my teeth?
i'd rather have them sever all of my nerves and leave the rest to time and decay.

my dentist was upset that i chew all of my food on the left side of my mouth.
"i can recommend you to an orthodontist in the building."
"well, actually, i went to a few orthodontists and they all told me that my tongue was too big."
later, he told me, "you're no gene simmons".

still later, the dentist went through my insurance policy and noticed i had no orthodontics coverage--perhaps because i am almost as old as a grandparent--or a Palin--or both.

and even later, in another room, the measurements of gum recession were taking place.

soon, the hygeinist was stabbing at my teeth, scrapped and splotched her gloves with my inner workings. i wondered how her stomach could conjure up such intractable rumblings with such a sorely-speckled view. Fifty gastric movements must have passed, but before they did, i told the hygeinist about my left-side exclusivity with chewing. she said, "well, a lot of people do it."

i asked, "do you?"

"yes", she said--the right side.

Chicago and a pig.

2008-09-12T01:03:00.004-05:00

Notes from Songwriting 101 - Class 1

2008-08-20T08:48:00.001-05:00

Notes from Songwriting 101 – an old-school interactive class in the art of creating songs

Pre-class assignment:

1) Bring in 3 songs that you are working on and are not finished with yet.
2) Make a list of your 20 favorite songs
3) Write 10 haiku
4) Read “The Haiku Year”

First Class: August 19, 2008
Guiding Questions:

1. Origin of songs—why compose?

2. What are the canonical topics of songs?

3. Songs are all around us. What were the first songs you heard? Where did you hear them? How did they affect your idea about what a song should be?

4. Think of a song that is like a story.
Think of a song that is like a poem.
Think of a song that is like an impression.
Are there other types of songs?
Which type of song seems the most powerful to you? Why?
Test your hypothesis by classifying your favorite songs as one of the above.

5. Is rhyming important for songs? Why or why not?

6. Is singing (or singability) important for a song? Explain.

7. What do you want to avoid in a song? (see homework).

8. Know thyself. What are the best times and conditions for you to write songs? (emotionally, physically, environmentally, literally). Have you tried writing under other conditions, in other states of mind, body or spirit?

9. Do any art forms or other stimuli (films, other songs, nature, stress, doubt, joy, love, death) influence your composition process? Which provide the best influence?

10. Recently I read this on Amazon.com:

Van Morrison (album review for his new album, “Keep it Simple”)

115 of 184 people found the following review helpful:
Average Van Still Better Than Most , April 2, 2008
By Steve Ford (Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keep It Simple (Audio CD)
Keep It Simple - like most latter day Van Morrison - is neither as brilliant as you might hope, nor as disappointing as you might fear.

The problem, for me, is the decline of Morrison's songwriting. While he was never a lyricist in the class of Dylan or Joni Mitchell, he could once conjure marvelous images and had a poet's ear. He also had the vocal chops - blending jazz, blues and soul - to create a unique style of music. Where immobile steel rims crack /And the ditch in the back roads stop /Could you find me? /Would you kiss-a my eyes? /To lay me down /In silence easy /To be born again (Astral Weeks) Those words read well off the page, but as performed by Van Morrison, they were magic. As a singer, he had no peer, and the combination of his words and music lifted Morrison into the highest echelon - alongside Dylan and Mitchell. His best songs were autobiographical but universal, beautifully crafted, tinged with mystery and ambiguity.

While he has had many ups and downs along the way, the deterioration of Morrison's lyrics might be traced to the otherwise triumphant Hymns to the Silence (1991). Since then, there have been a raft of songs about the woes of being Van Morrison in the music business - Professional Jealousy, Why Must I Always Explain?, Big Time Operators, Songwriter, They Sold Me Out, and now, School of Hard Knocks. Then there are the songs about the woes of simply being Van Morrison - Some Peace of Mind, Too Long In Exile, Melancholia, Underlying Depression. Now there's Don't Go the Nightclubs Anymore.

Morrison's response to criticism of his self-absorption is the title song of Keep It Simple: They mocked me 'cos I told it like it was/Wrote about disappointment and greed/Wrote about what we really didn't need in our lives/Make us feel alive and whole.

That brings us to the real problem, which is not so much Morrison's subject matter as his execution. Lyrically, Don't Go To Nightclubs Anymore and Keep It Simple (to give but two examples) are simply uninspired. They are too literal, like unedited diary entries. It's one thing to keep it simple, another to make it banal.

Too many recent Van Morrison songs lack any real insight or imagination, let alone the sparkling imagery and wordplay of which he is (or was) capable. At worst, they are little more than a pastiche of hackneyed phrases.

The biggest disappointment on Keep It Simple is Behind the Ritual, in which he literally sings blah blah blah blah. The effect, from the man who sang Madame George and made an art form of repetition (the loves to love/ the loves to love) is self-parody.

So why three stars? Because, lyrics aside, Keep It Simple is a fair collection of songs. They don't score highly for originality, but at this stage of Morrison's career, you wouldn't expect that. The arrangements hardly have a hair out of place. Sans horn section, the album has a consistent, intimate groove. Although there are a variety of song forms (blues, folk, pop) the album feels all of a piece. The band is excellent, especially long-time sideman John Allair on the B3, and the singer, he's Van Morrison for Christ's sake.

The radio-friendly That's Entrainment is the brightest moment - a simple three chords, an infectious underlying rhythm, and a clever play on words (entertainment/entrainment) make this a contender for future 'best of' compilations. Lover Come Back is a simple but effective song of yearning. Song of Home is a nostalgic, folky piece with a lovely sense of place, providing the welcome Celtic quota.

It's worth pondering what you'd make of Keep It Simple if you'd never heard of Van Morrison. My best guess is that I would regard the album as quite a find. (There aren't many unknowns, after all, who can sing like Van Morrison.) The point is that any new work by an artist of Morrison's stature will inevitably be assessed against the standards of the artist's best work.

A lot of new music is lightweight, blatantly derivative, gimmicky, or ephemeral in its appeal. Keep It Simple is none of those. It's better than most stuff that makes it onto, ummm, polycarbonate.

This CD is certainly worth a listen, and there's much to recommend it. Just don't pay too much attention to the words.

Mark Rhodes says:
took longer to read than to listen to the album
________________________________________
Thomas B. Kiernan says:
Just finished listening to this for the first time. I was thinking about something missing all morning. Came in and read this review. It's spot on. Thanks for a thoughful review, Steve...I couldn't agree more. I like the album, by the way.
________________________________________
Jonathan Rickard says:
It's this kind of customer review-insightful, passionate, and above all, well-written-that makes the Amazon format so well thought-out.
________________________________________
G. Benson says:
I second that review of the review. It truly was helpful. I'd like to direct listeners to the great, tragically ignored "Days Like This" from around 1997.
________________________________________
Paul says:
Couldn't agree more with Steve's assessment of the industry-related songs and the last ten year's lyrics in general but I'm still going to buy the CD because I've given up listening too closely to Van's words. The arrangements, the feel, the voice and the bands (bring back Geraint Watkins!) are enough! A very helpful review but a trifle long perhaps due to the slower pace up there in the blue mountains.
________________________________________
Barbara Jeske says:
As a major fan of Van since he made the album (yes, album) Astral Weeks I can say I truly appreciate this review, Steve. I lived very near Van Morrison in Marin County for many years in the 70's and 80's, and had the pleasure of attending some of his gigs. For such a lovely life, his persistent melancholy was a bit disturbing to me, I'll admit. Nonetheless, it didn't diminish my love of his music - and I've always considered him one of the finest songwriters of all time. Not as good as Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell - but FINE. Recently watching the DVD of his live performances in 1974 and 1980 at the Montreaux Jazz Festival(s) I gained an even greater appreciation of his musicianship. What he lacks in vibrancy of expression with his own physicality (body) he more than makes up for with his expression via music. I will, as always, buy this CD. Thanks again for the articulate review, Steve.

According to these writers, Van Morrison has changed his approach to songwriting. Do you see your songwriting process as one that has changed or is changing? In what ways?

Food for thought:

http://www.calendarlive.com/music/pop/cl-ca-dylan04apr04,0,3583678.story
SONGWRITERS SERIES
Rock's enigmatic poet opens a long-private door
He learned from the Carter Family and Edgar Allan Poe, he confides. And he wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in 10 minutes.
By Robert Hilburn
Times Staff Writer

April 4, 2004

First in an occasional series studying the songwriter's art.

AMSTERDAM — "No, no, no," Bob Dylan says sharply when asked if aspiring songwriters should learn their craft by studying his albums, which is precisely what thousands have done for decades.

"It's only natural to pattern yourself after someone," he says, opening a door on a subject that has long been off-limits to reporters: his songwriting process. "If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there's Frank Gehry.

"But you can't just copy somebody. If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster."

For four decades, Dylan has been a grand American paradox: an artist who revolutionized popular songwriting with his nakedly personal yet challenging work but who keeps us at such distance from his private life — and his creative technique — that he didn't have to look far for the title of his recent movie: "Masked and Anonymous."

While fans and biographers might read his hundreds of songs as a chronicle of one man's love and loss, celebration and outrage, he doesn't revisit the stories behind the songs, per se, when he talks about his art this evening. What's more comfortable, and perhaps more interesting to him, is the way craft lets him turn life, ideas, observations and strings of poetic images into songs.

GUIDING PRINCIPAL
"There are many sides to us," says Dylan, pictured in 1966. "We can feel very generous one day and very selfish the next hour."
Camera Press / Retna Ltd.
As he sits in the quiet of a grand hotel overlooking one of the city's picturesque canals, he paints a very different picture of his evolution as a songwriter than you might expect of an artist who seemed to arrive on the pop scene in the '60s with his vision and skills fully intact. Dylan's lyrics to were printed in Broadside, the folk music magazine, in May 1962, the month he turned 21.

The story he tells is one of trial and error, false starts and hard work — a young man in a remote stretch of Minnesota finding such freedom in the music of folk songwriter Woody Guthrie that he felt he could spend his life just singing Guthrie songs — until he discovered his true calling through a simple twist of fate.

Dylan has often said that he never set out to change pop songwriting or society, but it's clear he was filled with the high purpose of living up to the ideals he saw in Guthrie's work. Unlike rock stars before him, his chief goal wasn't just making the charts.

"I always admired true artists who were dedicated, so I learned from them," Dylan says, rocking slowly in the hotel room chair. "Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown into the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt's paintings."

Even after all these years, his eyes still light up at the mention of Guthrie, the "Dust Bowl" poet, whose best songs, such as "This Land Is Your Land," spoke so eloquently about the gulf Guthrie saw between America's ideals and its practices.

"To me, Woody Guthrie was the be-all and end-all," says Dylan, 62, his curly hair still framing his head majestically as it did on album covers four decades ago. "Woody's songs were about everything at the same time. They were about rich and poor, black and white, the highs and lows of life, the contradictions between what they were teaching in school and what was really happening. He was saying everything in his songs that I felt but didn't know how to.

"It wasn't only the songs, though. It was his voice — it was like a stiletto — and his diction. I had never heard anybody sing like that. His guitar strumming was more intricate than it sounded. All I knew was I wanted to learn his songs."

Dylan played so much Guthrie during his early club and coffeehouse days that he was dubbed a Woody Guthrie "jukebox." So imagine the shock when someone told him another singer — Ramblin' Jack Elliott — was doing that too. "It's like being a doctor who has spent all these years discovering penicillin and suddenly [finding out] someone else had already done it," he recalls.
"But you can't just copy somebody. If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to."
— Bob Dylan
A less ambitious young man might have figured no big deal — there's plenty of room for two singers who admire Guthrie. But Dylan was too independent. "I knew I had something that Jack didn't have," he says, "though it took a while before I figured out what it was."

Songwriting, he finally realized, was what could set him apart. Dylan had toyed with the idea earlier, but he felt he didn't have enough vocabulary or life experience.

Scrambling to distinguish himself on the New York club scene in 1961, though, he tried again. The first song of his own that drew attention to him was "Song to Woody," which included the lines, "Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie ... I know that you know / All the things that I'm a-sayin' an' a-many times more."

Within two years, he had written and recorded songs, including "Girl of the North Country" and that helped lift the heart of pop music from sheer entertainment to art.

'Songs Are the Star'

Dylan, whose work and personal life have been dissected in enough books to fill a library wall, seems to welcome the chance to talk about his craft, not his persona or history. It's as if he wants to demystify himself.

"To me, the performer is here and gone," he once said. "The songs are the star of the show, not me."

He also hates focusing on the past. "I'm always trying to stay right square in the moment. I don't want to get nostalgic or narcissistic as a writer or a person. I think successful people don't dwell in the past. I think only losers do."

Yet his sense of tradition is strong. He likes to think of himself as part of a brotherhood of writers whose roots are in the raw country, blues and folk strains of Guthrie, the , Robert Johnson and scores of Scottish and English balladeers.

WORD CRAFT
"I don't spend a lot of time going over songs. I'll sometimes make changes, but the early songs, for instance, were mostly all first drafts."
Associated Press
Over the course of the evening, he offers glimpses into how his ear and eye put pieces of songs together using everything from Beat poetry and the daily news to lessons picked up from contemporaries.

He is so committed to talking about his craft that he has a guitar at his side in case he wants to demonstrate a point. When his road manager knocks on the door after 90 minutes to see if everything is OK, Dylan waves him off. After three hours, he volunteers to get together again after the next night's concert.

"There are so many ways you can go at something in a song," he says. "One thing is to give life to inanimate objects. Johnny Cash is good at that. He's got the line that goes, 'A freighter said, "She's been here, but she's gone, boy, she's gone." ' That's great. 'A freighter says ' "She's been here." ' That's high art. If you do that once in a song, you usually turn it on its head right then and there."

The process he describes is more workaday than capturing lightning in a bottle. In working on he says, "I'm not thinking about what I want to say, I'm just thinking 'Is this OK for the meter?' "

But there's an undeniable element of mystery too. "It's like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don't know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song."

Some listeners over the years have complained that Dylan's songs are too ambiguous — that they seem to be simply an exercise in narcissistic wordplay. But most critics say Dylan's sometimes competing images are his greatest strength.

Few in American pop have consistently written lines as hauntingly beautiful and richly challenging as his a song from the mid-'60s:
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does

She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does

And she aches just like a woman

But she breaks

just like a little girl.

Dylan stares impassively at a lyric sheet for "Just Like a Woman" when it is handed to him. As is true of so many of his works, the song seems to be about many things at once.

"I'm not good at defining things," he says. "Even if I could tell you what the song was about I wouldn't. It's up to the listener to figure out what it means to him."

As he stares at the page in the quiet of the room, however, he budges a little. "This is a very broad song. A line like, 'Breaks just like a little girl' is a metaphor. It's like a lot of blues-based songs. Someone may be talking about a woman, but they're not really talking about a woman at all. You can say a lot if you use metaphors."
Nobody feels any pain

Tonight as I stand inside

the rain

Ev'rybody knows

That Baby's got new clothes

But lately I see her ribbons and her bows

Have fallen from her curls.

After another pause, he adds: "It's a city song. It's like looking at something extremely powerful, say the shadow of a church or something like that. I don't think in lateral [sic] terms as a writer. That's a fault of a lot of the old Broadway writers. ... They are so lateral. There's no circular thing, nothing to be learned from the song, nothing to inspire you. I always try to turn a song on its head. Otherwise, I figure I'm wasting the listener's time."

Discovering Folk Music

Dylan's pop sensibilities were shaped long before he made his journey east in the winter of 1960-61.
"I'm always trying to stay right square in the moment.... I think successful people don't dwell in the past. I think only losers do. "
— Bob Dylan
Growing up in the icy isolation of Hibbing, Minn., Dylan, who was still Robert Allen Zimmerman then, found comfort in the country, blues and early rock 'n' roll that he heard at night on a Louisiana radio station whose signal came in strong and clear. It was worlds away from the local Hibbing station, which leaned toward mainstream pop like Perry Como, Frankie Laine and Doris Day.

Dylan has respect for many of the pre-rock songwriters, citing Cole Porter, whom he describes as a "fearless" rhymer, and Porter's "Don't Fence Me In" as a favorite. But he didn't feel most of the pre-rock writers were speaking to him.

"When you listened to [Porter's] songs and the Gershwins' and Rodgers and Hammerstein, who wrote some great songs, they were writing for their generation and it just didn't feel like mine," he says. "I realized at some point that the important thing isn't just how you write songs, but your subject matter, your point of view."

The music that did speak to him as a teenager in the '50s was rock 'n' roll — especially Elvis Presley. "When I got into rock 'n' roll, I didn't even think I had any other option or alternative," he says. "It showed me where my future was, just like some people know they are going to be doctors or lawyers or shortstop for the New York Yankees."

He became a student of what he heard.

" wrote amazing songs that spun words together in a remarkably complex way," he says. "Buddy Holly's songs were much more simplified, but what I got out of Buddy was that you can take influences from anywhere. Like his 'That'll Be the Day.' I read somewhere that it was a line he heard in a movie, and I started realizing you can take things from everyday life that you hear people say.

PLUGGED IN:After plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Dylan thrilled audiences around the world, including fans at this 1966 Paris show, with his new, harder sound.
Associated Press
"That I still find true. You can go anywhere in daily life and have your ears open and hear something, either something someone says to you or something you hear across the room. If it has resonance, you can use it in a song."

After rock took on a blander tone in the late '50s, Dylan looked for new inspiration. He began listening to the Kingston Trio, who helped popularize folk music with polished versions of "Tom Dooley" and "A Worried Man." Most folk purists felt the group was more "pop" than authentic, but Dylan, new to folk, responded to the messages in the songs.

He worked his way through such other folk heroes as Odetta and Leadbelly before fixating on Guthrie. Trading his electric guitar for an acoustic one, he spent months in Minneapolis, performing in clubs, preparing himself for the trip east.

Going to New York rather than rival music center Los Angeles was a given, he says, "because everything I knew came out of New York. I listened to the Yankees games on the radio, and the Giants and the Dodgers. All the radio programs, like 'The Fat Man,' the NBC chimes — would be from New York. So were all the record companies. It seemed like New York was the capital of the world."

Devouring Poetry

Dylan pursued his muse in New York with an appetite for anything he felt would help him improve his craft, whether it was learning old blues and folk songs or soaking up literature.

"I had read a lot of poetry by the time I wrote a lot of those early songs," he volunteers. "I was into the hard-core poets. I read them the way some people read Stephen King. I had also seen a lot of it growing up. Poe's stuff knocked me out in more ways than I could name. Byron and Keats and all those guys. John Donne.

"Byron's stuff goes on and on and on and you don't know half the things he's talking about or half the people he's addressing. But you could appreciate the language."

He found himself side by side with the Beat poets. "The idea that poetry was spoken in the streets and spoken publicly, you couldn't help but be excited by that," he says. "There would always be a poet in the clubs and you'd hear the rhymes, and [Allen] Ginsberg and [Gregory] Corso — those guys were highly influential."

Dylan once said he wrote songs so fast in the '60s that he didn't want to go to sleep at night because he was afraid he might miss one. Similarly, he soaked up influences so rapidly that it was hard to turn off the light at night. Why not read more?

"Someone gave me a book of Francois Villon poems and he was writing about hard-core street stuff and making it rhyme," Dylan says, still conveying the excitement of tapping into inspiration from 15th century France. "It was pretty staggering, and it made you wonder why you couldn't do the same thing in a song.

"I'd see Villon talking about visiting a prostitute and I would turn it around. I won't visit a prostitute, I'll talk about rescuing a prostitute. Again, it's turning stuff on its head, like 'vice is salvation and virtue will lead to ruin.' "

When you hear Dylan still marveling at lines such as the one above from Machiavelli or Shakespeare's "fair is foul and foul is fair," you can see why he would pepper his own songs with phrases that forever ask us to question our assumptions — classic lines such as "There's no success like failure and failure's no success at all," from 1965's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit."

As always, he's quick to give credit to the tradition.

"I didn't invent this, you know," he stresses. "Robert Johnson would sing some song and out of nowhere there would be some kind of Confucius saying that would make you go, 'Wow, where did that come from?' It's important to always turn things around in some fashion."

Exploring His Themes

Some writers sit down every day for two or three hours, at least, to write, whether they are in the mood or not. Others wait for inspiration. Dylan scoffs at the discipline of daily writing.

"Oh, I'm not that serious a songwriter," he says, a smile on his lips. "Songs don't just come to me. They'll usually brew for a while, and you'll learn that it's important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together."

CONCERT FOR BANGLADESH
The 1971 benefit in New York City, with George Harrison, left, featured a surprise performance by Dylan, rare for him during that era.
UPI
He sometimes writes on a typewriter but usually picks up a pen because he says he can write faster than he can type. "I don't spend a lot of time going over songs," Dylan says. "I'll sometimes make changes, but the early songs, for instance, were mostly all first drafts."

He doesn't insist that his rhymes be perfect. "What I do that a lot of other writers don't do is take a concept and line I really want to get into a song and if I can't figure out for the life of me how to simplify it, I'll just take it all — lock, stock and barrel — and figure out how to sing it so it fits the rhyming scheme. I would prefer to do that rather than bust it down or lose it because I can't rhyme it."

Themes, he says, have never been a problem. When he started out, the Korean War had just ended. "That was a heavy cloud over everyone's head," he says. "The communist thing was still big, and the civil rights movement was coming on. So there was lots to write about.

"But I never set out to write politics. I didn't want to be a political moralist. There were people who just did that. Phil Ochs focused on political things, but there are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all. We can feel very generous one day and very selfish the next hour."

Dylan found subject matter in newspapers. He points to 1964's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," the story of a wealthy Baltimore man who was given only a six-month sentence for killing a maid with a cane. "I just let the story tell itself in that song," he says. "Who wouldn't be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death and just getting a slap on the wrist?"

Other times, he was reacting to his own anxieties.

helped define his place in pop with an apocalyptic tale of a society being torn apart on many levels.
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'

Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.

Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'

Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin' ...

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

The song has captured the imagination of listeners for generations, and like most of Dylan's songs, it has lyrics rich and poetic enough to defy age. Dylan scholars have often said the song was inspired by the Cuban missile crisis.

"All I remember about the missile crisis is there were bulletins coming across on the radio, people listening in bars and cafes, and the scariest thing was that cities, like Houston and Atlanta, would have to be evacuated. That was pretty heavy.

"Someone pointed out it was written before the missile crisis, but it doesn't really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you."

His Constant Changes

Dylan's career path hasn't been smooth. During an unprecedented creative spree that resulted in three landmark albums ("Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde") being released in 15 months, Dylan reconnected with the rock 'n' roll of his youth. Impressed by the energy he felt in the Beatles and desiring to speak in the musical language of his generation, he declared his independence from folk by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

His music soon became a new standard of rock achievement, influencing not only his contemporaries, including the Beatles, but almost everyone to follow.

GRAMMY AWARDS
Dylan performs during the 2002 ceremony at Staples Center, where his "Love and Theft" was nominated for best album. His songwriting energy dwindled in the early '90s but reemerged later in the decade.
Ken Hively / LAT
The pressure on him was soon so intense that he went underground for a while in 1966, not fully resuming his career until the mid-'70s when he did a celebrated tour with the Band and then recorded one of his most hailed albums, "Blood on the Tracks." By the end of the decade, he confused some old fans by turning to brimstone gospel music.

There were gems throughout the '70s and '80s, but Dylan seemed for much of the '90s to be tired of songwriting, or, maybe, just tired of always being measured against the standards he set in the '60s.

In the early '90s he seemed to find comfort only in the rhythm of the road, losing himself in the troubadour tradition, not even wanting to talk about songwriting or his future. "Maybe I've written enough songs," he said then. "Maybe it's someone else's turn."

Somehow, however, all those shows reignited the songwriting spark — as demonstrated in his Grammy-winning "Time Out of Mind" album in 1997; the bittersweet song from the movie "Wonder Boys," "Things Have Changed," that won an Oscar in 2001 for best original song; and his heralded 2001 album, "Love and Theft." He spent much of last year working on a series of autobiographical chronicles. The first installment is due this fall from Simon & Schuster.

But nowhere, perhaps, is Dylan's regained passion more evident than in his live show, where he has switched primarily from guitar to electric keyboard and now leads his four-piece band with the intensity of a young punk auteur.

Dylan — who has lived in Southern California since he and ex-wife Sara Lowndes moved to Malibu in the mid-'70s with their five children — was in Amsterdam to headline two sold-out concerts at a 6,000-seat hall. He does more than 100 shows a year.

The audience on the chilly winter night after our first conversation is divided among people Dylan's age who have been following his career since the '60s and young people drawn to him by his classic body of work, and they call out for new songs, not just the classics.

Refiguring the Melodies

Back at the hotel afterward, Dylan looks about as satisfied as a man with his restless creative spirit can be.

It's nearly 2 a.m. by now and another pot of coffee cools. He rubs his hand through his curly hair. After all these hours, I realize I haven't asked the most obvious question: Which comes first, the words or the music?

Dylan leans over and picks up the acoustic guitar.

"Well, you have to understand that I'm not a melodist," he says. "My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or songs or variations of the blues form.

"What happens is, I'll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That's the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it's a proven fact that it'll help them relax. I don't meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song.

"I'll be playing Bob Nolan's 'Tumbling Tumbleweeds,' for instance, in my head constantly — while I'm driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I'm talking back, but I'm not. I'm listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I'll start writing a song."

He's slowly strumming the guitar, but it's hard to pick out the tune.

"I wrote in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That's the folk music tradition. You use what's been handed down. 'The Times They Are A-Changin' is probably from an old Scottish folk song."

As he keeps playing, the song starts sounding vaguely familiar.

I want to know about one of his most radical songs. The 1965 number fused folk and blues in a way that made everyone who heard it listen to it over and over. John Lennon once said the song was so captivating on every level that it made him wonder how he could ever compete with it.

The lyrics, again, were about a society in revolution, a tale of drugs and misuse of authority and trying to figure out everything when little seemed to make sense:
Johnny's in the basement

Mixing up the medicine

I'm on the pavement

Thinking about the government

The music too reflected the paranoia of the time — roaring out of the speakers at the time with a cannonball force.

Where did that come from?

Without pause, Dylan says, almost with a wink, that the inspiration dates to his teens. "It's from Chuck Berry, a bit of and some of the scat songs of the '40s."

As the music from the guitar gets louder, you realize Dylan is playing one of the most famous songs of the 20th century, Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies."

You look into his eyes for a sign.

Is he writing a new song as we speak?

"No," he says with a smile. "I'm just showing you what I do."

SONGWRITERS SERIES
Hard times, truth and inspiration
Merle Haggard's string of country classics captures the common man with uncommon grace.
By Robert Hilburn
Times Staff Writer

June 20, 2004

Merle Haggard, the country music star who really did turn 21 in prison, just like it says in one of his songs, figures it cost the IRS nearly $100,000 the day an agent came to his ranch near here to try to figure out what goes into writing a hit.

Haggard's tax return was apparently kicked out by the computer for too many business deductions and the agent wanted the songwriter to show him how the 200-acre spread in the mountains helped him do his work.

During a walk around the grounds, Haggard explained how a creek inspired one song, a flower bed led to another and a bulldog jump-started a third.

"Finally, this fellow looks at me and says, 'Why, Mr. Haggard, everything you do is a write-off,' and he started pointing out other things I should have declared," the songwriter says, laughing so hard his whole body shakes.

"What he saw was that writing for me is an impulse. I don't sit down with a pencil and paper and try to come up with songs. I look for songs in the world around me."

That world runs through Haggard's songs.

Listen to his "White Line Fever" and you can picture being on the bus with him night after night, watching the highway lines roll by, or listen to and you can relive with him the longing a boy in the San Joaquin Valley had for the glamour of the big city. Then listen to the gritty and you understand why he retreated to the calm countryside.

In his early album cover photos, Haggard had the rugged good looks and charisma of a young Johnny Cash. Now he's 67, and lines cross his face like stretches of barbed wire, and there is a story behind each of them. Restlessness and home, lust and devotion, heartache and good times, protest and patriotism — all have etched his life, and his songs.
TRUTH, UNVARNISHED: Haggard prizes musical honesty. "Every word fits in the song. Nothing is in there just for show. That's one of the most important lessons a writer can learn." He sits in Studio City's Muddy Moose Bar at the Sportsmen's Lodge Event Center.
Genaro Molina / LAT
Country music tends to be so sentimental and homespun it's easy to stumble into self-parody, but Haggard has brought a freshness to the themes that places him alongside Hank Williams and Willie Nelson as one of the greatest country music writers.

"There are lots of people who have written hits, but most songs don't stick with us because you know and I know and the songwriter knows he's just telling us about something that never really happened. But then you listen to Hank Williams' 'I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You),' and everybody knows this ol' boy had his heart stepped on more than a few times. That's what I've always wanted people to feel when they hear my songs."

Haggard estimates he has written 10,000 songs, but finds only a fraction of them worth recording. Most of the great ones didn't start flowing until he got a tip from one of his musical heroes, Johnny Cash.

He first saw Cash when the Man in Black played San Quentin prison in the late '50s while Haggard was a prisoner there. Years later, when Haggard started turning out country hits himself, he met Cash and mentioned he had seen him at San Quentin.

"John looked at me and said, 'That's funny, Merle, because I don't remember you being on the show,' " Haggard says with a grin.

"So, I told him, 'I wasn't on the show. I was in the audience.' "

They had a good laugh, but Haggard says Cash gave him advice that changed his life.

The young singer told Cash his greatest fear was that some tabloid would reveal his prison background and kill his career. Write a song about those days yourself, Cash told him, and fans will love your honesty.

That led to "Mama Tried," which spent four weeks at No. 1 on the country charts in 1968 and remains a signature song. It's a salute to his mother and a lament about how he, as a restless teenager, refused to follow her advice.

Like so many Haggard songs, it tells its story so simply that it's hard to see the craft involved.
And I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole.

No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.

Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied.

That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried.
Every line in the song is true except "life without parole."

"I guess I was just trying to make it all a bit more dramatic," Haggard says over a late lunch of black-eyed peas with his wife and two children.

"But there was a bit of truth to it. When they sent me to prison, they sent me to maximum security. On my papers, they wrote 'incorrigible.' I didn't know if I would ever get out. That's a feeling you never forget, so it came to me when I was writing the song."

When young songwriters today ask for advice, Haggard passes along Cash's suggestion to write from experience.
COUNTRY COMPADRES: Haggard and Nelson, shown in 1981, are longtime friends and recording partners. Among their duets is a memorable 1983 rendition of Townes Van Zandt's enigmatic "Pancho and Lefty."
File photo
"The most important thing in a song is simplicity," Haggard tells them. "You've got to remember songs are meant to be sung. You are not writing poetry. The best songs feel like they've always been here."

Lyrical grist

Haggard didn't come into this world with many advantages, but his background gave him a head start when it came to writing country songs. He knew what it was like to struggle.

His Dust Bowl-era parents, James and Flossie Haggard, drove to California from Oklahoma in 1935 with all their possessions in a homemade trailer attached to the back of a battered 1926 Chevy.

During his early years, Haggard lived in a converted refrigerator car alongside the Santa Fe Railway tracks in Oildale, a weed patch near Bakersfield. His father, who worked as a carpenter for the railroad, died when Merle was 9, and his mother took a job as a bookkeeper for a meat-packing firm. Not wanting to be a burden, a teenage Haggard ran away from home. He hopped freights, picked hay and got into lots of trouble.

By 17, Merle had spent two years in reform school. Three years later he and a friend were arrested during an attempted burglary in which they were so "juiced up" they didn't realize the café was still open the night they tried to break in the back door. He aggravated things by fleeing the jail, though he maintains he was encouraged by guards to think he was free to go.

The judge sentenced him to San Quentin for a maximum of 15 years. He began to realize that he was going to spend his entire life behind bars if he didn't change his ways. And when he saw how the inmates went wild for Johnny Cash at that fabled prison concert, he began to remember how he'd daydreamed of a music career.

Learning to duck trouble, Haggard was paroled after three years (later pardoned by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan) and began following up on those dreams.

As a child, Haggard had been exposed to a lot of music, from Bing Crosby to Hank Williams. He later fell under the spell of the rock 'n' roll of Elvis Presley, the country blues of Jimmie Rodgers, the western swing of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and, most important, Lefty Frizzell, one of the most influential of all country music singers. Haggard taught himself to play guitar on an instrument handed down by an older brother and became so good after his prison days, he got jobs in Bakersfield and Las Vegas clubs. Singing was the next step. Even as a teenager, when he sang songs he'd heard on the radio, adults complimented him, suggesting he sounded "just like the record."

Once he started singing in clubs, he realized the best way to distinguish himself was to write his own material. And he says the years of playing guitar helped him greatly in doing that.
CHARISMA TO BURN: A stylish Haggard, early in his career.
File photo
"I'd recommend anyone who wants to write songs to learn to play an instrument because if you only know three chords, you can only write a song with three chords and that's fine, but if you want to compete with the Willie Nelsons and the Hoagy Carmichaels, you're going to have to know more than three chords. The more chords you know the more choices you have when you start to write melodies."

Writing came naturally to young Haggard, who recalls teachers scolding him in grade school because he'd often just gaze out the window during class. One wrote on his report card, "If he would pay attention in class and not look out the window, he might do well in school." But he wasn't just woolgathering, he says. "I was thinking about songs."

Haggard says the melodies often arrive along with the words. The key is finding something — an emotion, a scene, a memory — that triggers the flow.

"When young musicians ask for songwriting hints, I know it must frustrate them when I tell them, 'The songs just come to me, at any time and any place,' " he says. (He once wrote a song in the 150 yards it took to walk from the limousine to the back of the stage.)

Every step in a Haggard song feels like one he has taken himself, and he recalls the story behind each song the way most of us remember first dates.

Memories and promise

For someone who has spent thousands of nights on stages around the world, maybe it's natural to live on a ranch so far off the interstate that you pass five "no trespassing" signs and several cattle guards before arriving at the unmarked driveway.

Haggard has sold tens of millions of records, but there is little about his modest ranch house or its furnishings to suggest he handled his money well. As his two autobiographies outline, his life has been filled with gambling, drugs, breakups and bankruptcy.

Like so many other country veterans, he has been plagued for years by the ache of pretty much being put out to pasture by commercial radio, even though he continues to do absorbing work. His last Top 10 country single was 15 years ago.

There is an air of melancholy in the air as Haggard sits in a chair in his den and stares at the TV, which is tuned most of the day to CNN. The two things that brighten Haggard's mood are his family (he and his fifth wife, Theresa, have two school-age children, Jenessa and Ben) and songwriting.
"The most important thing. . .is simplicity. You've got to remember that songs are meant to be sung. You are not writing poetry. The best songs feel like they've always been here."
— Merle Haggard
Sifting through a stack of his hit lyrics that's been handed to him, he downplays the idea there is science or even art involved in writing. As he talks about individual songs, however, you see the principles that guide him.

He nods as he thumbs through the pages — looking casually at the words to lots of his No. 1 hits, including "Workin' Man Blues," "Branded Man" and "I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am." He stops at "Swinging Doors," his first big success as a writer.

With its mix of rowdy, honky-tonk music and sentimental lyrics, 1966's "Swinging Doors" defines barroom loneliness.
This old smoke-filled bar is something I'm not used to.

But I gave up my home to see you satisfied.

And I just called to let you know where I'll be living.

It's not much, but I feel welcome here inside.
Haggard studies the lyrics. "That song was written to make money," he says, almost apologetically. "I just tried to write something I thought people who were coming to see me in bars and clubs would relate to.

"That's the way a lot of writers start out. You are concerned about getting enough money for your family, so you try to figure out what people are going to like. You should never really forget that someone is going to be listening to a song, but you eventually start looking beyond just your audience to find something that also speaks to you."

He picks up another piece of paper. It's "House of Memories," a slow, haunting ballad also written in the mid-'60s but not one of his biggest hits.

"Now, here's a song I still like," he says. "It feels a little more me. To me, every word fits in the song. Nothing is in there just for show. That's one of the most important lessons a writer can learn. You can't fall in love with a $50 word or what you think is a clever rhyme and try to squeeze it into a song if it doesn't work."

Love rekindled
Today, I started loving you again.

I'm right back where I've really always been.

I got over you just long enough

To let my heartache mend.

Then today I started loving you again.
—"I Started Loving You Again," 1968

The odd thing about this ballad is that it was never a hit single for Haggard, simply an album track. Yet it has been recorded by more than 400 artists, including Willie Nelson and Buddy Jewel, last year's winner in the country version of "American Idol."

The tune is considered a classic country ballad, a song with such a ring of authenticity and truth that it makes listeners feel it's their own story.

Here's how it came about.

At one point in the late '60s, Haggard had spent three months on tour, a young country star who was so hot that he'd end up with 65 consecutive Top 10 singles.

He was so drained he lost track of everything around him — even his wife at the time, Bonnie Owens, a singer with his band. All of his energy went into getting to the next town and through the next show.

Back in California on the first day of a week's break, a tired Haggard looked at his wife and felt a warmth he had lost along the road. "It's like today I started loving you again," he told her tenderly.

Owens, who knew a good song title when she heard it, urged him to write the thought down. Sure enough, Haggard, recalling the line a few days later, wrote "I Started Loving You Again" in 10 minutes on hotel stationery.

Songs spilling out
If we make it through December

Everything's gonna be all right I know.

It's the coldest time of winter

And I shiver when I see the fallin' snow.
— 1973
There was a lot of economic hardship in the country in the early '70s, but Haggard didn't think of writing a song about it until he sat down with Roy Nichols during a coffee break at a recording session.
WHAT A FORCE FIELD: Influential and celebrated well beyond the country music realm, Haggard has performed with a wide range of artists. He teamed with Keith Richards for Willie Nelson's TV special last month in L.A.
Genaro Molina / LAT
Nichols was the lead guitarist in Haggard's band, the Strangers, and he had just gotten married for the sixth time. "So I just kinda turned to him and said, 'Roy, what's the chances of this being the real deal for you?' and he said, 'If we make it through December, I think we'll be all right.' "

Haggard was intrigued by the answer and asked his friend to explain.

"He looked at me and said something like, 'Merle, you've got to remember, you've kind of made it big time and you forget how hard it is around December for the average guy making a paycheck. It's a tough month with Christmas and all.'

"And I got to thinking even while he was talking about the gas wars going on back then and the troubles with the auto industry and the problems in the country, and I also thought back to when I had a young daughter and no job and it was hard to find one because I had this criminal record. And I started writing the song, but it never would have happened without Roy's remarks."

The ballad, written with the softness of a prayer, spent four weeks at No. 1 on the country charts and even crossed over to the pop Top 30.

another evocative Haggard tune from the early '80s, also grew out of a casual conversation.

Haggard was in Los Angeles recording a new album. He already had 22 tracks down when he went out to the tour bus to pick up something. His longtime driver, Dean Holloway, was in a funk.

"I asked him what was wrong and he said, 'I hate this,' and I thought he was talking about the bus, but he was talking about the town.

"In trying to make him feel better, I said, 'You just gave me an idea for a song. Let's write a song called "Big City," ' and that's what we did. I actually wrote 99% of it, but I gave him half the royalties because he inspired it. And he deserved it because he unleashed all that energy in me. It takes a lot of energy to write a song, I don't know why. But you can't be lazy and be a songwriter."

The song, the title of one of Haggard's most popular albums, was one of his 38 No. 1 hits — more than pals Cash and Nelson combined. It's a midtempo tune, propelled by a loping country shuffle.

Haggard frowns, however, when he looks at the song's lyrics on the paper in front of him.

"I'll go over lines before I record a song, but I don't do a lot of editing," he says. "I'm lucky, I guess, but the songs pretty much come out the way I want them to be. But there's something in 'Big City' that I know I got wrong."

He points to the opening lines:
I'm tired of this dirty old city,

Entirely too much work and never enough play.

And I'm tired of these dirty old sidewalks

Think I'll walk off my steady job today.
"That is the way I wrote it, but it shouldn't have been 'play,' it should have been 'pay.' 'Play' works as a rhyme, but 'pay' is a more substantial image, and that's how I sing it now. I like but I always sing 'pay,' never 'play.' "

Courting controversy
I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,

A place where even squares can have a ball.

We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,

And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all.
— 1969
Thirty-five years after he wrote what is probably his best-known song, Haggard still has trouble explaining his feelings about it.

In some interviews, he has said he wrote it for his father. "Dad was proud of being an Okie. That's where 'Okie From Muskogee' came from. He was the guy in the song." In others, however, Haggard has maintained that it was just a joke that he came up with one night while riding the bus through Oklahoma.
CLEAN SLATE: As governor in 1972, Ronald Reagan pardoned Haggard for crimes committed years earlier, leading the singer to proclaim, "I had outlived my past." Haggard joined the then president and Nancy Reagan at a 1982 event.
AP
Haggard continues to sing the hit, which is so infectious that it was easy to embrace even if the commentary seemed extreme. He was invited by the Nixons to sing it at the White House (which he did) and invited by the liberal-leaning Smothers Brothers to sing it on their TV show (which he did).

Haggard still seems so mistrustful of authority that it's easy to imagine the attitude reaches back to the sadistic treatment he says he regularly encountered in youth authority camps and prison.

But for all his wariness, Haggard is fiercely proud of the country and its troops overseas.

His "That's the News" early last year was the most compelling of the many songs about the Iraq war. Long before criticism of the war became widespread, Haggard chided the government and the media for declaring that the war was over when American soldiers were still dying in Iraq.

"Sometimes you've got to trust what you write, even if you don't fully know what it's about," Haggard says, going back to the "Okie" song. "Even though I talk about subject matter being important, the most important thing is feeling … a feeling of truth.

"That's why I recorded it. I knew I was writing something controversial, that it was going to kill a lot of the leftist fans I had going. But I felt something truthful in there. It was a confusing time, and I think I was just asking some questions about where we were going. It was more that than trying to be some redneck statement."

Home fires beckon

From the highest point on Haggard's hillside property, you can see Lake Shasta, where he has spent hundreds of hours fishing, and it's just a short stroll from the house to one of the many ponds and creeks. He doesn't hunt on the property, so deer and other animals come from miles around for sanctuary.

"Someday soon, I'm going to make a decision and break away and just spend all my time with my family," Haggard says, as he heads down a path to a picnic table a few hundred feet from the house. It's sunset and his family is waiting with dinner. "But that doesn't mean I'll ever stop writing. The great thing is I can do that right here."

Even if the country music world doesn't seem to be waiting for new Haggard songs the way it once did, he is still driven to express himself.

"It gets harder the longer you write to find something fresh to say. When you finish a song, you don't just ask yourself if you like it but if it is something you haven't said before.

"The thing that keeps you going is that you think your next song may be your 'Stardust.' People ask me how are you going to top 'Mama Tried' or 'House of Memories'? Well, that's the challenge, isn't it?"

Homework:

1. Identify 20 songs that never should have been written. They do not have to be famous songs. They can even be songs that you or someone you know has written. Our point is not to ridicule, but to identify the reasons that these songs have failed to be great. Next to each song title, please identify 1 or more reasons that the song is a failure (too trite, too convoluted, unsingable lyrics, too timely, etc.)
2. From your favorite songs, or recent favorites, write down 20 couplets that are valuable to you (ironic, deep, well sung, etc.). Think about why you like these and be ready to discuss.
3. Karaoke. If you were forced at gunpoint to sing in a karaoke bar, what are 5 songs you might order up. Be prepared to sing them. Bring the lyrics to the next class.
4. Bring in 3 references about songwriting that are important to you. Prepare a “soundbyte synopsis” or quote for each reference.

selected impressions from japan

2008-07-24T09:44:00.003-05:00

I just returned from Japan. Whenever I go, I tend to use the pen more than a camera. My preferred medium is something like haiku, but not really so worried about getting 17 syllables. Most of these were written on or about being on the main island of Shikoku, which is a minor island famous for 88 Shingon Buddhist Temples and do-it-yourself (thick) udon noodles shops. It is not famous for being the home of my wife's family, but that is why I was there. So here are my impressions:

a spider rides at rest
holding on to home
this close to shore
july 8, 2008

for the tempo of birds
your song starts with
a whole note
july 8, 2008

let us frolic outside
so that your interior manners
can be set
july 8, 2008

a refrigerator
that hasn't been turned on
is not an icebox
july 8, 2008

songs in the air
your son finds them
another composer
july 15, 2008

i wouldn't be smooth
if i could move
like a drying shirt in the breeze
july 15, 2008

the experimental station hides under a clenched roof
making industrious sounds,
the motors above the garden
july 15, 2008

the influence of
the stone on the garden
is heavier than light
july 15, 2008

do i tie it up
let it bend
or decapitate?
july 15, 2008

before the sun
sets its blaze on the dwelling
i green the garden
july 15, 2008

your grandfather's picture
below his ashes
inside his shrine
looks at us
july 15, 2008

your grandmother can tolerate
the worst roommate in the hospital
she guards her medicine
july 15, 2008

you study the songs
insisting that the book
be in your lap
july 15, 2008

our singed plants
might ask for a parasol
or a real rain
july 15, 2008

a slight breeze and
a present humidity
carry a long conversation
july 15, 2008

when will your films be made?
your actors are aging
our orbit has changed
july 15, 2008

gaudy colors
the antiques needed
their own light
july 15, 2008

resounding from your flowered pillow
is your call
smoke from this bowl,
my unburnt memory
july 15, 2008

in Japan
you sleep
between the fan
and your grandfather's ashes
july 15, 2008

the femininte figure
in the garden
a sweltering stone lantern
july 15, 2008

by night
the tigers outdo the dragons
and nagoya loosens its shirts
july 19, 2008

outsiders made up
and singing middle-of-the-road pop
on national television
my son falls asleep
july 19, 2008

it is still before nine
face east and you melt
swim in your daydreams
july 20, 2008

your breath through a straw
forget about the heat
with bubbles
july 20, 2008

dancing sparks from an ember
you approach them almost unafraid
until the final splash
july 20, 2008

i'm behind the hidden windows
watching you blow bubbles
now you're here writing on my page
july 20, 2008

fried chicken from China
frostbite from Japan
your relatives approach
july 20, 2008

connect the dots
you work outside
for these mosquito bites
july 20, 2008

your feet took you
from Kyushu to Hokkaido
stopping only for your stomach
july 20, 2008

you need a bell
to remind you of
the summer breeze
july 20, 2008

what was your sunshield
five hundred years ago?
did you sleep by day?
july 20, 2008

echolocation
you know where your daughter is
by her vocalizations
july 20, 2008

here to see our son
the promise of youth
the everyday miracle of nature
july 20, 2008

bow to the construction worker
tell him that your grandson admires his work
hear him advise against it
july 20, 2008

thirteen pages
left to consume
amidst past impressions
july 20, 2008

she gave birth and declared that she should never have had a child,
thus began the chores, the labor, the disconnect,
this is the lot that the children were born into
july 20, 2008

i walked to the shrine of the local haiku club
inside--more a collection
than a garden
july 20, 2008

by moonlight
born to suck your blood
and trill in your ear
july 20, 2008

on the same pole
two mornings in a row
the same dragonfly
july 20, 2008

within every moment
many movements
stung in the garden
july 22, 2008

we walk in the wilderness,
tame or untame,
taxed through transitions
july 22, 2008

we will fly over rain
we wouldn't have touched
and miss the cicada's song
july 22, 2008

today in the fish market
you asked a question to someone you barely knew
fourty years ago
july 22, 2008

we cross the most familiar bridge
once more
every character, a picture
july 24, 2008

the plight of a sandcrab

2008-06-27T09:20:00.003-05:00

We went to the beach again this week. It was Venice, the strip just west of Venice Beach Blvd. My son is getting more bold in his ventures into the water. Unlike Hermosa Beach, where we were a week ago, the sand on Venice is more powdery. Where the water meets the land, we let the ocean rush over us. My son requested that I dig for sandcrabs again. They had been just below the sand surface and were rampant in Hermosa. But they seemed to be obsolete in Venice.

I sat and dug, but to no avail. Before and after, I did some bodysurfing. I missed the waves of last Friday, for these were not really waves at all.

On the way home, we stopped by Trader Joe's. On the way out, I reached in my pocket for my wallet. When I took it out, a live sandcrab fell to the floor and started wriggling. My son was pleased. We were all surprised. My son held it and we talked about how it was a sad time for the sandcrab. As it was living out of its habitat, it didn't have much time left. I wanted to put it out of its misery. And then after we had moved into the car, it disappeared with a left turn.

making music

2008-05-20T07:32:00.003-05:00

I'm going to the studio this afternoon to mix a song ("ikebana project") for "artists for a free tibet", a compilation cd produced by "puddlegum magazine/records" Kevin Flick.

Flick's in Indiana. I'm near Pasadena. Robert Deeble of Seattle recorded some parts for the song (wurlitzer, piano and vocals) in Seattle. Istvan B'Racz recorded some piano for it in Connecticut. JD Carnes recorded his guitar part and Rosamond Finley's violin part in Tuscon, AZ. It's an odd runt. Zeus Alvarez and I did our parts at Tonemesa West in Sunland. We will be mixing Daniel McCoy's new "OceanView Studio" in Montrose.

Listened to Schubert yesterday. Leider, as well as Masses. My favorite are his piano impromptus, but I love most of what he produced in his short life. Nothing substantial, just transcendental and ecstatic.

I will be singing at Zephyr in Pasadena from 8-10 and will be back to play there on June 21 with the band.

Be well.

John

Work in Progress

2008-05-16T16:03:00.004-05:00

Oil paint on Masonite board. Worked on it five separate days. Still a work in progress.

Winter, Michigan

2008-04-26T13:12:00.001-05:00

a little Montreal in photos

2008-02-29T20:22:00.003-06:00

2/17/08

2008-02-18T00:54:00.002-06:00

winter pear
the succulence of summer
is within you

Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John

2008-01-04T08:44:00.000-06:00

Peter Case
Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John
Produced by Ian Brennan
Mastered by Gavin Lurssen
Yep Rock Records - 2007

Now in his 50’s, Peter Case has made the perfect album. It sings because he sings. It breathes as he breathes. How pure it is. This isn’t a stretch for the well-traveled Case, whose live shows are the best solo shows of any singer out there. It’s a matter of having put the right songs down in the right order. Case’s wizened voice and guitar is the central thread of the album. This is rugged, stark and windswept music. Monument Valley for the mind. Here a question from the epic homeless ballad of the album:

"Underneath the stars
who will crack the seal?”

17 years ago, I remember listening to tapes of Case performing on the radio (Snap was the show with the late Deidre O’Donohue on KCRW, Santa Monica) with just a guitar. It may have been a 12-string. It definitely was a Gibson acoustic. Those recordings were treasures. My friends and I loved them because they were tangible and the essence of what Case was as a performer and singer. The album that Case was then recording came out as a pastiche of derivative music; it was the stinker of Mitchell Froom’s production career, Six Pack of Love. Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John is a Case of Case doing everything right and making a better album than he probably would have made during those years.

The songs on Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John (including the sole cover, Robert Wilkin’s “Get Away Blues”) are stunning compositions to be savored and enjoyed. The tasteful accompaniment comes along in the manner of a duo train with seasoned, complementary backing by Richard Thompson (singing and guitar), Carlos Guitarlos (singing and guitar), Stranger Norm Hamlet (on pedal steel), Lysa Flores (singing), and Duane Jarvis (on guitar and percussion). What we have here is the anti-computer-virus, the kind of album that trumps all of Case’s other magnificent work (such as The Man with the Blue Post Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar) and sets a new standard for music. I will listen to this album as I do Bach’s Goldberg variations, with peace, intention, and pleasure.

sunrise

2007-12-31T09:24:00.000-06:00

sunrise at home again
with every millisecond
more light

Interviewing my wife

2007-12-20T23:52:00.000-06:00

Interview with Ikuko Miyai Williamson

Ikuko was born (1975) and raised in Japan. She spent most of her life in the city of Ayauta, which is close to Takematsu, the capitol city of Kagawa prefecture on the island of Shikoku. When she was 19 years old, she went on her first international trip—a 10 day excursion to northern Australia. After that, she traveled through Europe and Fiji. For Japanese people, it is actually cheaper to vacation abroad than it is to vacation at home. In 1998, she came to study at ASPECT International Language Academy on the campus of Whittier College. I was one of the teachers at the time. That is where we met.

After she returned to Japan, we continued to be devoted to one another. We visited each other several times, talked on the phone, sent e-mail and letters. In December of 2002, I went to Japan to get married. We attended a family reception at a nice hotel that included a banquet and karaoke. Then we went to Tokyo to get the marriage certificate at the city hall (on January 6) and register at the US embassy (that same busy day). Finally, we had a honeymoon in Kyoto for a few days. After that, I came back to the US by myself, as it took some months for the paperwork to come through. I searched for an apartment. On March first, Ikuko arrived in the US and we moved into our Sierra Madre apartment that day.

Ikuko misses her family, friends, and the seasons. The flowers and changing leaves in her part of Japan are more nuanced than those we encounter in this part of California. The atmosphere of Japan is different than the atmosphere here. When you go shopping in Japan, clerks are more attentive. You can see people bowing and serving people at the store. There are dozens of ways to wrap packages in Japan. The easiest and least used method (the “caramel method”) is that which we most often use in the United States. Japanese customer service extends down to every worker who encounters a customer. One of the main creeds for these workers is never making assumptions about what someone wants. Ikuko misses this aspect of Japanese culture.

The comforts of home are different, too. In the winter in Japan, Ikuko’s family spends every evening around a small living room table called a kotatsu. The kotatsu contains a heater under the table top and is surrounded by a blanket. Families read, eat, drink tea (or alcohol) and watch tv while seated at this floor-level table. In their house, the table is in front of their couch. I can vouch that in the winter, the table sees more action than the couch.

m. ward

2007-12-05T01:08:00.000-06:00

M. Ward “End of Amnesia” (2001), “Transfiguration of Vincent” (2003) and “Transistor Radio” (2005)
Future Farmer (1) and Merge Records (2 and 3)

It comes in like a storm front, echoing from the bridges of Portland. M. Ward’s singing overtakes you. The second listen is more charming than the first. Then the third listen turns us all into captives. Powered by starlight and having that vulnerable charm that feels like a splinter of our collective psyche, his voice is cunning, diabolical, innocent and alive.

When his first album, “The End of Amnesia” was sent to me, I shrugged, I oscillated, and eventually I embraced it. The songs were subtle and there was a gradual coming to terms. If you are a painter, this is an album to roll with.

Upon hearing “Transfiguration of Vincent”, I felt transported to a new land, learning a new language. It’s timeless, classic, and the songs are more fixating, the production complements his voice even better than the first venture. I start to wonder if this is the best album I’ve heard since Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”. It just might be. All I know is that soon after people first vibed to this album, they were playing it at their best friend’s wedding receptions.

So I put “Transistor Radio” on my Christmas wish list and lo and behold my wife bought it for me. The first listen was like walking with new shoes, but soon after that, I was spinning it on a regular basis. It is now like a member of our family. There is something to say for an album that has more quiet and more loud moments than the previous one. I feel sheer delight when I hear the new songs, the pacing, the groove. M. Ward is a sad mellow soul, and his journey is our journey.

alabama haiku

2007-10-21T19:54:00.000-05:00

great grandfather’s box
disassembled ten times
on account of the corroded nails

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

Lilllye, Hazel and Charles
three out of nine
sunset’s radiance

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

cattle herding in 4-wheel drive
across creeks bumping back down
we left the gate open

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

that was not a photo op
the 70-year-old driver clutched
a newborn

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

in Washington Valley
for fear of development
you cannibalize your neighbors

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

summers so hot you curse
springs so green you unload
you’re back for some reason

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

secretly, I delighted in their choice
to pay the cabinet maker
and do something without precedent

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

my great uncle wears hats well
you don’t recognize
his post-natal head

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

the horses approach us
for our touch,
our resilience

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

your baby waits, engaged
for her darling,
her continuum

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

nineteen eighty one
your divorce; her birth
you realize

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

cow’s feet sinking in the mud
you’d rather that they not visit
during the rainy season

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

every family member
at odds with the Bush regime;
why not our entire country?

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

some dogs can swallow fruit
this one eats banana trees
and mace-painted light bulbs

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

we step on anthills
we watch them
we stamp our feet

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

twice my brother tried
to commit suicide
and I wasn’t told

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

swallow’s nests:
we must be
near a creek

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

Mizuki is like Houdini:
without his blanket
within a heartbeat

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

from Washington Valley
both directions
take you home

5/7/6 Birmingham, Alabama

2007-10-02T19:54:00.000-05:00

Man is Wolf to Man

Eastern Promises Reviewed

by Brian Bork

The House of Meetings, Martin Amis' recent novel, is a glimpse into the conflicted lives of two brothers who spent a portion of their youth in Soviet labor camps. The experience of these camps - brief though it may be when compared to the span of an entire life – lingers, and defines the remaining days of the novel's two main characters. The reader quickly learns that it's futile to think that anyone “gets over” the gulag. Instead, lives are immeasurably wrenched, distorted, and refashioned by it. The malnutrition, the toil, and the frostbite ensure its victims emerge as wraiths. But the real damage – the permanent affliction - is left for the soul, for human nature. The hunger, terror, and “violent boredom” of the camps instill, or at least augment, human savagery; they are places, says the novel's narrator, where “man is wolf to man.”

These sorts of wolves abound in David Cronenberg's latest film, Eastern Promises. The story centers around the activity of the Vory V Zakone (Thieves in Law), an organized crime syndicate born in the grindhouse of Stalin's labor camps. These are expatriate gangsters; they've set up shop in London as human traffickers, promoters of a sex trade between London and former Eastern Bloc countries. This insidious business is conducted out of the back of “The Trans-Siberian Restaurant,” owned by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the godfather of the outfit, and his lunatic son Kirill (Vincent Cassil). Escorting this pack of wolves through the London night is Nikolai, an icy threat of a man played by Viggo Mortensen. Ostensibly little more than a laconic limousine driver, at least as far as mob hierarchy goes, Nikolai is far more chilling than his superiors, and he's more than willing to take care of some especially morbid business.

This underworld comes into contact with the “regular” world when Anna (Naomi Watts), a hospital midwife, delivers the baby of a hemorrhaging Georgian girl named Tatiana. The baby lives, but the mother doesn't make it; she leaves behind on the hospital gurney a small diary which Anna snatches up. The diary is all in Russian, so Anna brings it home to her uncle, a “wodka”-soaked old Russian coot. Uncle Stepan has something of a moment of clarity upon paging through the journal – he's not going to translate it for Anna, under no uncertain terms. Deciding to outsource the translation, Anna tracks down “The Trans-Siberian Restaurant” from a business card left in the journal, and meets up with Semyon, who puts on his kindest grandfatherly countenance for her. Anna's demeanor is not exactly one of trepidation, but of caution and intense bravery – it's as if she doesn't trust Semyon right from the start, but her desire to protect the newborn causes her to willfully walk into the wolf's lair. It's concern that is well placed, though, as she realizes in horrifying detail when she returns home to find out that Uncle Stepan has had a change of heart and translated the journal. The journal is at once a plea and an indictment: we learn that Tatiana was an unwitting prostitute from Semyon's fold, a recipient of powerful narcotic injections, and that her child is genetic proof of the wanton criminality of the highest ranking members of Semyon's outfit.

It's not long, of course, before the Vory learn about the words in the diary, and come around looking for Anna. The chase is on, through the rain-slicked nighttime of a London that Cronenberg has painted with sickly green and jaundiced hues. It's one of bone-bending tension, which is to be expected of Cronenberg, whose early career was spent suturing together horror flicks. Though his skill as a director places him many orders of magnitude beyond that genre, many of its tropes remain, right down to the way in which the ignition in Anna's motorcycle fails with perfect and horrible timing, allowing Mortensen's Nikolai to sidle up to her with glacial menace. Despite such menace, Nikolai is strangely softened when he interacts with Anna, and the viewer hopes that his violent and chilly exterior is a facade.

The not quite-tenderness of the relationship between Anna and Nikolai is really a brief respite in a film that has some pretty spectacular brutality. It'd be easy to identify this tendency as arising from Cronenberg's past as an auteur of horror movies, for which a lurid fascination with sliced and diced body parts is part of the job description. That would be too easy of an assessment, too dismissive of what Cronenberg is trying to do here, though. His prior film, A History of Violence (also starring Mortensen), was an exploration of the vagaries of violence in American culture: in its history, in its myths, and in its entertainment. Eastern Promises is no different in its aims, it has just broadened the scope of its examination; it goes past London, through Russia, and toward human nature in general. On a very visceral level, the violence in Eastern Promises is an indictment of our taste in films: the brutal summer blockbusters with their violent saturnalia. The logic of 300 or Die Hard or V for Vendetta is that there is redemption to be found in lethal violence, especially if that violence is in collusion with a surplus of wisecracking machismo. But Hollywood knows that we're not always interested in redemption, and we just want a little sex and violence, so they combine the two: firearms look much more appealing when they're holstered to the lithe haunch of Angelina Jolie. The violence of Eastern Promises functions in a completely opposite way – its aesthetic is not one of seduction or pyrotechnic action-film savvy – it is swift, graphic and brutal. It is cinematic barbarity that exposes just how awful violence is; it's not something to hoot and holler at over a tub of popcorn, but something from which we recoil.

Man's wolfish traits are certainly under scrutiny amid this violence, but Cronenberg isn't just interested in showing us how man is wolf to man. Man is also wolf to woman, as is obvious from the subject matter here, and the perils of masculinity get their due exposure. The female characters in Eastern Promises aren't developed like their male counterparts are, and they inhabit what could be considered to be stereotypical roles: the noble prostitute, the maternal nurse, the concerned mother. They all have angelic characteristics, too, visible in the innocence of Semyon's granddaughters, the soft and lovely singing of a Ukrainian girl, and in the way Anna's golden locks cascade out of her black motorcycle helmet. It could be argued that the thinness of the female characters here is a result of some quasi-sexist oversight on Cronenberg's part, or that Watts' performance is simply overshadowed by Mortensen's (the latter is certainly true; the former, not so much). These “woman on a pedestal” characterizations aren't the result of some subtle sexism in the film; instead, they're in place to help illustrate just how male the problem of physical violence is. Semyon and Kirill dwell excessively on their macho heterosexuality, and Nikolai's late father's masculinity is called into question, simply for not participating in the gangland lifestyle.

Physical violence may be a mostly male problem, but that's not to say that men are inherently violent creatures. Instead, this is violence that has been amplified and extended far beyond what we expect of normally functioning men, and it's because of the horrors that lie in their past that they behave this way. In a soliloquy regarding the death of his family before a group of high-ranking Vory, Nikolai describes how his existence is one that is in a perpetual “dead zone.” The death of his family came in the labor camps, under the soil of Russia (to repeat one of the film's refrains), where Nikolai did his own share of hard time. It was in this morbid servitude that his human nature devolved and was stripped down to reptilian brass tacks (or, as in the penultimate scene, down to bare flesh and gangster tattoos). Even in scenes where his full humanity is in better focus there is a pallor, a brooding darkness that can't be dispelled.

This is where the film's chief theme comes to the fore: when we are in slavery, our joy, civility and compassion become moribund, and we turn into spiritual and emotional ciphers, creatures stripped of what it is that makes us who we are. This film, though perhaps not overtly humanistic, is one that is deeply concerned with this affliction on the human condition. It demands an answer to the question: what happens to people when they are enslaved to each other, when they are offered up as oblations to ideology, to politics, to grinding poverty or war? It is a question that moves deeply into the darker regions of human nature, which makes it difficult to ponder, even for people who know something about light prevailing in the darkness. But it's one that we need to reckon with, sent out, as we are, as “sheep among the wolves.”

Originally published in The Kerux (kerux.org)

Reckoning with the Film Industry

2007-09-28T00:04:00.000-05:00

...For this reason the demise of individualist art is no justification for one that deports itself as if its subject and its archaic reactions were natural, whereas its real subject is the syndicate, unconscious certainly, of a few big firms. Even if the masses have, as customers, an influence on the cinema, it remains as abstract as the box-office returns which have replaced discriminating applause: the mere choice between Yes and No to what is offered, an integral part of the disproportion between concentrated power and dispersed impotence. The fact, finally, that in the making of a film numerous experts, and also simple technicians, have a say, no more guarantees its humanity than decisions by qualified scientific advisory boards ensure that of bombs and poison gas.
-Theodor Adorno, ‘Minima Moralia’, page 204.

Why do people watch films? It has been suggested that it is for time. Time lost or hoped for. Maybe it is the experience of others. Perhaps what we want is to connect with each other through art. If art has a function, it is probably spiritual (spiritual: of, relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things) – and if this is also the ‘point’ of existence, then the task of the artist has powerful implications.

If meditative, poetical, or operatic films which attempt the use the elements of sound and image to tell a story in a way that exercises the full extent of a medium (crowded as it is with countless and perpetual ‘innovation’ and quick cutting – the techniques of constant distraction) has no viewers among a public perhaps looking to film purely for means of ‘entertainment’ and for ‘zoning out’, then poetical films have no place. For that matter, the efforts of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky (to name just two) do not have a place either. However there are those who label these as among the greatest auteurs of the form – whether out of snobbish elitism or genuine taste these artists remain supported by a body of critical opinion. Although we might argue that ‘critical’ opinion is on the way out, since, as Adorno rather scathingly puts it, ‘intellectual debility, affirmed as a universal principle, appears as a vital force’.

Not to be discouraged, it is out of appreciation for such mastery of this presently most powerful art form and out of near disinterest for the ‘innovations’ and the logic of most Hollywood style production that a few filmmakers work to tell a story they feel is relevant not only in terms of basic content, but (style being a part of content itself) in style as well. Some even attempt the poetical, approaching film as an art form. But this approach is more rarified than talk about film as an art, which, to quote Adorno again, ‘doubtless befits hacks wishing to recommend themselves’.

The great Russian realisateur, Andrei Tarkovsky, described his process in contrast to purely linear plot development as poetic logic. Film, he insists, need not follow a linear structure the way a novel does, always reasserting the element of time. Since film is already a record of time itself, it is almost insulting to an audience to remind them of the fact of linearity. Although a film usually creates a narrative for the most part as a direct path through ‘real’ time, some have chosen to connect the past, dreams and imagination to a character’s experiences, thought and emotion. The capacity of a film is much different from other mediums but has scarcely been recognized so. Instead it is merely used to do what books already do better. One might suggest the film ‘Memento’ as an exception. It has been heralded by many as a touchstone of innovation. Aleksandr Sukurov once stated that innovation is only valuable if it helps to tell a story better, if it doesn’t call attention to itself and thereby retard the progress of the film. And in the end, what ‘Memento’ is really about is its own plot device – not the story, not the characters, but non-linearity itself. (For a book doing better, see Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow) Just as the jump-cut, the shaky camera, a new lens filter or a series of cuts momentarily distracts, so a clever plot device excites the bad critic to proclaim virtuosity. But these devices do nothing to make up for lack of content.

It is also a great mistake to use artistic medium for instruction. That is to say, a film like ‘Crash’, which attempts to ‘instruct’ its audience on how to behave, actually gives up the real function of art and becomes little more than an eighth grader’s paper on race relations. The characters cease to have real depth, becoming instead illustrations or instruments in the lesson the filmmaker is going to give. (Ironically, that film’s main lesson is that stereotypes degrade a person’s uniqueness – but a ‘lesson’ here requires turning characters into facsimiles). The film ‘Crash’ is facile, a point I bring up only because so many other films today suffer from this same weakness. Another feature is that the film constantly reveals what it imagines to be the public’s faults or misconceptions. What an insult to the audience – to be constantly reminded that you are considered a dupe and in need of correction. How tedious! Nevertheless, that film was warmly received, and mainly because there is enough of an audience who would like to give the same lesson. It is like agreeing with someone’s polemics. You just happen to agree, and that’s it. But the function of art is not the same as politics; it has a higher order of business, or so it is hoped.

Filmmaking, or a potential film, is usually approached as a company might approach a new recipe for a cookie. It hopes to sell millions, and therefore considers a recipe in the pragmatic terms of a venture capitalist. What kind of film has ‘sold’ before, what kind of formula has ‘worked’ before. What stands to offend, what stands to titillate, what would most likely keep an audience amused long enough or strongly enough to acquire a fortune. This approach is as true of studio executives as it is of most independent filmmakers. From personal experience I know that although the advent of digital technology has ‘opened the door’, most of the independent films I’ve worked on are even more in line with the formulaic than their multi-million dollar studio counterparts. Mimetic regression characterizes the film industry.

As we know, the ‘success’ of a film is now demonstrated only economically. The first weekend gross, printed in a magazine is more confirmation of the ‘quality’ of the project to a potential viewer than the most insightful or tedious review. Just as the mere fact of consumption of a product like cigarettes is offered as proof of value, so the ‘take’ of a film is taken as confirmation of its worth being seen. (Not to shirk from the fact that seeing a film ought to be a worthwhile experience. Nor that a good film might reap a monetary reward. But a lot of viewers does not mean the film is worth seeing or even good – especially since what is available to see are only studio productions).

Besides, we might contend that entertainment is not the exclusive function of any art form. A storyteller takes very seriously the need to tell the story well, with integrity, always respecting the audience as most likely more intelligent, and making no apologies to those who ‘do not get it’ or, as an online reviewer of Tarkovsky’s masterpiece ‘Stalker’ put it:

“One of the worst films I have ever seen. I am a film fan. I love indie films, foreign films, ancient, b&w, sepia, full color, silent, latest blockbuster. Everything. This film is very slow to unfold. Each scene consists of essentially 1-3 camera shots, each held steady what seems an eternity (1-2 minutes/shot). An endless series of medium two shots. This film is really more a presentation of pictures. I had to fast forward with subtitles on to keep from falling asleep, this film moves SO SLOWLY. Rent at your own risk. You have been warned.”

Perhaps a spectator like this is worth trying to ‘reach’, but it would be a mistake to bow to the frailty of short attention spans and the perseverance of the bored personality. An artistic film made in earnest usually creates a space for the intellect of the viewer (a space not provided in most film and therefore unexpected by most viewers). Or, in other words, the film will demand the intellectual involvement of the spectator. It will not, with hundreds of cuts, plot twists, special effects, sex, explosions, etc. distract them from brain activity until it is over and, because they’ve been distracted from consciousness for the whole while, declare triumphantly (perhaps without understanding why): “That was great!”

Since for so long now films have pushed towards a single formula, what an audience expects from a film has become less and less. Paradoxically, what is demanded is more nothingness – excitement and thrills, distractions and new tricks, but less intellectual stimuli. Recently, a friend of mine said that watching Tarkovsky’s films was like experiencing an entirely different medium. That is how far we are from the possible bounty of film.

We make art in reaction to an imperfect world. And it is out of hope that honesty about human imperfection, coupled with our capacity to imagine – the quality of the world we can imagine – will make us honest in our work; and will make our art a service to people. Poetical films do have a place, at least for those exhausted from being disgusted with the built-in-demand-for-disposal type of films being pumped out daily. Hopefully good cinema will survive as an art. We know that the world would be less well off if masters of the English language, like Chaucer or Shakespeare, had laid down their pens because the bookstores were already crowded with copies of harlequin romances and pulp fiction.

Cinema is an unhappy art as it depends on money. Not only because film is very expensive, but it is then also marketed, like cigarettes, etc.

A film is good if it sells well. But if cinema is art, such an approach is absurd: it would mean art is only good if it sells well. Knowing this very well, I don't complain. I can't demand special terms for my films since these terms don't exist.

The film for the large audience cannot be poetical. Some films have been seen by millions of people. But this happened at the dawn of silent cinema, when each new film attracted people's curiosity. Now it's difficult to surprise the spectator and good films are not seen by the masses.

-Andrei Tarkovsky

An Urban Poem by Mark Dixon

2007-09-18T23:08:00.000-05:00

EYE CONTACT
by Mark Dixon

Grim black skull
over crossed guitars
neatly stenciled
on her Hot Topic hoodie
wires from earbuds
disappearing inside
she sits in a huddled lotus
of leotard and Chucks
one knee pressing dirt-smeared glass
reading Nick Cave
by harsh flourescence
of a Union Station phone booth
her bangs shriek neon magenta
snakebite rings
curl her lower lip

Suit man, immaculate
Brooks Brothers wool
Zero Halliburton aluminum case
striding toward the booth
to fetch a downtown cab
doesn't spot her
till a second too late:
he stops an inch
inside the accordion door

She looks up
from the dog-eared paperback
takes in his power tie
and pinstripes
two worlds, two cultures
meet in a heartbeat of eyes:

"The fuck do you want?"

Mark Dixon: Sunrise on Cesar Chavez - Los Angeles Through The Eyes Of A Poet

2007-09-08T23:39:00.000-05:00

Mark Dixon has been known to drive at night through the streets of Los Angeles with his windows down. He’s a benefactor, a restorer, a thinker, a photographer, an activist, a sympathizer. He’s also the kind of person who prides himself on being able to complete his projects in the most exquisite and stunning way possible. This noir literary offering is an impeccable delicacy, full of rich insight and magnificent arcs. It is instantly essential and rewards with every rereading.

Though they may seem like a streak of unknowns, these poems are no strangers to me. In my 15-year friendship with Mr. Dixon, I have heard his sonorous, rich readings, delivered with the care that he somehow affords everything he delivers. To his credit, Mr. Dixon, holds a tight focus with this remarkable collection, centering on the streets and communities of Los Angeles, most unswervingly detailing the naked night of Central Los Angeles, as well as visiting the vanquished in Hollywood, Wilshire, The West Side and the Coast.

These poems take you where few have ever ventured. They spiral somewhat like what Robert Altman might were he to import the moods of Lee Strand. They give off an emergency air. They awaken in you the desire to turn on the lights, say your prayers more earnestly, kiss your loved ones, park your car and walk for once. Mr. Dixon has brought a bunch of strangers into your room. Moreover, he has given you a tour of the real Los Angeles.

Mark Dixon: An interview with the urban poet

John R. Williamson interviews Mark Dixon:

1) Describe how you arrived at your subjects. Your book feels a bit like a cab ride sometimes.

That is the implicit metaphor of the book. I drove a taxi at night when I was in college, and the images of prowling those dark streets with one headlight out and the dispatcher muttering softly on the two-way radio have stayed with me all these years. The book is a late-night tour of the Los Angeles you won’t see on television, viewed from the back seat of my taxicab. You meet the broke film school student who steals across the alley with his biracial girlfriend late at night to explore the long-abandoned Ambassador Hotel. You witness the birth of a baby in the bucket seat of a stalled Ford Pinto in the tow-away zone outside County General Hospital, or a trumpet player stepping out the stage door for a smoke after the last show.

2) How long have you been writing poetry? Who or what led you to become a poet? How have your approach to your subject matter and your style changed through the years?

I’ve been writing poetry off and on since high school, but became what I’d call a serious poet about seven years ago when I started attending a local poetry reading. I met three very talented poets and formed a small poetry collective with them called the Furniture Guild, and since then I’ve done readings all over southern California, have discussed my work with English classes at several colleges, and of course published my first book. I’d say my poetry has been heavily influenced by the film noir genre, those great black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movies like “The Big Sleep”, and authors like Raymond Chandler who wrote the Philip Marlowe potboilers, Dashiell Hammett who wrote the Sam Spade series, and Erle Stanley Gardner who created Perry Mason. You’ll find a lot of the same kinds of imagery in my poetry:
the two-bit waterfront bar, the seedy motel, the shadows of Mulholland Drive, the hustlers and hookers and pimps that line the boulevards of Hollywood.

3) Tell us about the causes you are involved in.

I’m an activist for urban farming and community agriculture, and created a website and blog called New Farm City. I was involved in the struggle of the South Central Farmers to hold on to the two city blocks of land near downtown Los Angeles that they had cultivated as an urban farm for fourteen years. Sadly they lost the battle and ended up being forcibly evicted and their beautiful farm destroyed.
I’m a follower of Jesus, and am interested in starting a movement toward a more Jesus-based Christianity, showing today’s Christians a better path away from the ultra-conservative, politically charged belief system that marks much of evangelical Christianity today and is contrary to the compassion, tolerance and concern for the poor and outcast that Jesus himself taught and stood for. I have also been active in the gay and lesbian community, working to eliminate homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and was recently invited to participate in a book project for the city of West Hollywood.

4) Where do you see justice in the world today?

I see efforts like American Apparel, a new sweatshop-free line of clothing being made in downtown Los Angeles. They’re providing affordable healthcare for the workers and their families, company-subsidized lunches, bus passes and classes inEnglish as a second language, as well as a working environment that is well lit, well ventilated and with safe, up-to-date equipment. They’re doing all that while also paying the highest wages in the local garment industry, and the clothing they sell is attractive, high quality and affordable. And successful — sales were over $250 million last year. It can be done.

5) Recommend a few books for us and tell us why we might enjoy them.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Her essays capture the mood of the Sixties with images that literally imprint themselves on your mind, introducing you to larger-than-life individuals that Dan Wakefield once described as “alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful.” Didion’s descriptions of life in America have never been far from my day-to-day thoughts ever since I first read that book.
I’m currently reading The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip Foner, it’s an astonishingly clear-eyed and brutally honest account of the origins of the Black Panther Party in the words of the men who created it — Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver. It shatters the current revisionist portrayal of the Panthers as armed thugs bent on destruction of the American way of life, and also takes you beyond the Party’s own self-serving political rhetoric into the heart of a movement that created free breakfast programs, neighborhood clinics and liberation schools, and where men quite honestly believed they were gearing up for a revolution.

6) Do you see any positive changes that are taking place in society?

Several large cities on the west coast have created special courts where homeless people charged with crimes can be diverted into programs to help them get off the streets and get cleaned up and rehabilitated instead of just doing another month or two in jail. That’s hopeful.

7) How do you expect your work to change in the future?

I’ve been talking with a couple of very talented friends about creating a media production and publishing collective that would take a stand and basically do action/advocacy media for causes and organizations that are too far left for everyone else. I imagine us fearlessly in everyone’s face, communicating.

Los Angeles (brush pen drawing, 2005)

2007-08-30T16:35:00.001-05:00

http://BenjaminHoekstra.imagekind.com

Supplemental education

2007-08-09T22:33:00.000-05:00

Max was an austere outdoorsman. His gait was the trotting glide that kept our lives in order. When Max came to live with us, we were living in the rectory of All Saints’, which was then an Episcopal church. Max used to jump up and chat with congregation members on Sundays, as well as with the smoking anonymous alcoholics who met there on Monday nights:
“How’s it hanging?”
“I’ve been better.”
“Why the long face?”
“Well, I just got a DUI and lost my license. Now I have to walk everywhere.”
“Oh yeah. That’s a drag for you, but I’d love to bust out of here and press my paws to the pavement again.”
In spite of Max’s ineptitude as a therapist, our reputation was not ransacked by this canine. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had been sipping mint juleps through those Long Beach summers.

Max and I shared the same hair color. Whether or not anyone was watching, we enjoyed playing the hound of heaven—boomerang version. I would follow him around the corner behind our house; then he would pivot and pursue me back around the horn. I cackled at the realization that we were auburn-haired dolls who had switched heads.

In the early days, before I went off to college, it was my job to feed Max and remove his “landmines” from our So-Cal-size backyard--lest it become one monumental pile. Following the tradition that my father had imparted to me for our first dog, Cuddles, I was to mix dry dog food with wet dog food and warm tap water—preferably with my bare hands. That’s right, we Williamsons were methodical about this dog fodder, and we knew that it would be the closest our dogs got to eating stew for dinner. For this dinner, Max was a reserved, innocuous participant:
“Dear Lord, Thank Thee for Thy gracious bounty. Bless this hand-mixed meal to Thy servant’s nourishment and bless this servant to labor in Thy service. Amen. …tchip, tchip, tchip, tchip…a splendid evening, isn’t it? Did you have a chance to swing by the Caspian Sea for some Osetra Gold?”

But when he came through the threshold, he was the ultimate tempest. The whites of his eyes were all that we could see, along with leaping, lunging and foaming at the mouth. The slobber could have been patented for its dense stickiness—perhaps it could have been converted to blood and given to sufferers of anemia. Or it could have become the new pine tar for baseball players. Maybe it could have been shipped to third world countries as a fast-fix staple food.

Max’s indoor persona was that of a hungry hooligan: swiping a loaf of bread here, toppling a vase of flowers there. Our efforts to wrangle him back out seemed futile. Just as we were about to grab him, he would bound out of our grasp. When we seized him, he was a demon of bared teeth. When I saw those teeth, I lost all desire to pick him up. I only knew that he was a carnivore and I was meat.

We struggled—at first individually and then collectively—to get this lunatic back out to his pastoral domain. Following the protocol established by our patriarch, our hands would seize his undainty ears, our heads brought back by the odor of his refusals. At times, I saw my father’s temporal veins protruding, portents of his upcoming heart attack. We took caution, as we went in and out of the back door, as if we were stealth intelligencia, determined not to let that reckless canine come in. It was as if we all knew that a certain switch in his brain would click over as he entered, and he would surge with bestial belligerence.

Several years after we had all resigned to the fact that Max was an “outside only” dog, and that the interior version of Max would only be tamed by sheer force, we received a supplemental education in the art of dog training. Her name was Maria. Like a Shakespearean wanderer, she came without a professor’s qualifications. She was a member of our church, and she was a professional housekeeper.

What is it that keeps a house tidy? What makes the dirt go away? What brings refreshment to even a teenager’s ripe bedroom? It is not the whip, nor is it the brush. It is more the wisdom of having learned.

On her very first day on the job, Maria taught us the zen method of swiftly evicting Max. I know about it intimately, because I was hiding in the closet, still wearing a towel, waiting for Maria to be done so that I could take an undisturbed shower. I heard Maria open the sliding glass door, closely followed by choke chain clamor. It was a sound much more frightening than that of Marley’s ghost.

Maria didn’t bother to reason with Max, nor did she place a finger on him. She simply swept in to the kitchen, untrundled the meat drawer and held a hot dog between her index finger and her thumb. This is what separated us from the monkeys. This is why Maria was such a dog whisperer. She went back to the screen door (which was still open) and said, “Max, come and have a hot dog.” Max followed her out, with an eagerness, we had not thought possible. She waved her hand. With the other hand, she slid the door closed.

That night around the dinner table, we began talking about Maria’s slight-of-hand dog training. We chortled, up among the decibels, knowing that we had been taught by someone who was not paid to “use her brain”.

2007-08-07T23:26:00.000-05:00

the irregular light
remembers the night
and we awaken

On Getting Up at the Buttcrack of Dawn to Write

2007-08-03T08:24:00.000-05:00

My life is marked by two simultaneous, seemingly irreconcilable tendencies: I regularly, though with frequent backslidings and interruptions, get up at 5AM in order to write. And I am lazy.

I read about writers who work at night and I sigh with envy. To sit up till near-dawn, as James Baldwin is reputed to have done, or from 10PM till 3AM, as Michael Chabon does--there is something sexy about living your life on a schedule like that. You imagine that people who do their most productive work when everybody else is sleeping must be transgressive in other ways. They must certainly be having more sex than you, probably during the very times when you, you poor productive sap, are doing laundry or prettifying the lawn--all those chores that seem to extort us into doing them, that nickel-and-dime us to death. And of course there is the folk association of early rising with cheerful hard work, preparedness, ants vs. grasshoppers, etc., and the further folk association of these things with capitalism, gloom, iron cages, and poor John Calvin, our goateed scapegoat. I think these associations are mere voodoo sociology, but I live in this culture too, so on some primitive level I buy them, so the night worker becomes the furtive rebel against capitalism, advertising, forced cheerfulness, neighborhood associations, the PTA. You imagine a shadow population of night writers, linked in silent Pynchonian resistance. All you have to do to join them is to stay up late, behavior well within the range of any 12-year-old, and certainly easy enough, you'd think, for an anxiety-prone melancholiac.

However, I can't do it. The thought of working all day, then coming home and working some more, is just intolerable. Up late writing, I get brain-fatigue and forget perfectly simple words, like "fatigue," like "I." Also, I get googly-hearted and sentimental at night, and my night writing sessions have usually ended with me tearing up over my laptop, singing along with old Go-Betweens and Tom Waits albums and shuffling through the photos in my head. Nothing wrong with that, but why complicate it with writing?

Meanwhile, afternoons are out. In the afternoon people think they have a claim on you; they sidle up to you and say, "Mr. Christman, I don't understand this assignment," or "Phil, let's go get coffee," or "Your balance is overdrawn," or "Three million Darfuri need you to sign this petition right now!" And you go along with it, because, yeah, they do have a claim on you. Daytime is one big collusion, in which I, too, instinctively participate. When it gets to be much past 9AM I start inching toward the door, whether or not I have a reason to. Locking yourself in a room at such a time is counterintuitive. If it were a choice between writing in little fragments of afternoon time, and not writing at all, I'd choose the former, but the prospect is daunting.

Getting up early is a brutally easy, elegant solution to all these problems. Nobody buttonholes you at 5AM, and your brain is less likely to get up and walk away. You tell it to write and it obeys you. It has no other other options, it being, after all, 5AM. Learning to wake up at that hour is a pain, of course, but once you do it it's like riding a bicycle. Even now when I fall out of the habit it only takes one miserable day to snap back in. Coffee tastes better at 5, and when I have to face the world later on--when I have to teach or go to church--I can feel like I've got a secret, as if I just spent several hours at a communist cell meeting planning to sink a boat. And finally, I'm obsessive-compulsive--if I fail to do the first thing on my agenda for the day I start feeling that the whole day is ruined. If I get up at five, I feel like I've earned bonus points simply by getting out of bed, and the gravity of minor failures weakens considerably.

But when I try to explain myself, I sound like I've turned into a Student Council president. I sound like the Prodigal Son's older brother, that sad-faced, virtuous pain in the ass. I got up at 5AM to write, I say, and it sounds as if the next words should be and then I made myself an oat-bran muffin from scratch. I jogged, meditated, journalled, and flossed. I always use coasters, and I love my supervisor. Would you like to see how I've organized all my memos?

Worse, I sound more virtuous and strong-minded than I am, and start feeling like I've represented myself falsely. To get a whole picture of how hard-working I am (not), you need to factor in all the days when I don't get up at 5AM, when I half-ass it for a few hours at most. You need to factor in that I can spend whole days watching "Buffy," and that these days tend to warp the days adjacent to them, so that I can fall completely out of discipline for a week. You need to factor in the obsessive-compulsiveness, mentioned above, which makes getting up early to write actually easier than trying to wrench a day when I've gotten up late back into shape. My weird working habits are a compromise forced on me as much by my own weird personality as by the circumstances of my life.

Of course I get tired of waking up at the buttcrack of dawn in order to write. Sometimes, as I get ready for bed, I think of the person somewhere who will sit up till midnight with a glass of wine, watching the Daily Show and Colbert. But then I remember that I'm not allowed to drink a lot of wine, and I don't have cable anyway. That is to say, the regime of minor self-denials would probably continue under any imaginable circumstances. (Michael Chabon writes at night because he's taking care of kids all day.) Life is compromise, and it's time, not the laundry, that nickel-and-dimes us to death. It helps to be reminded of this.

(Crossposted at philsmfastory.blogspot.com)