dreamers, readers, gators, and the Sprit of Radio

Gator attack!

Various, The American Mercury Reader 
Gram Parsons,  Grievous Angel
Arthur Russell, First Though Best Thought
Sufjan Stevens, All Delighted People 
Ed to Add: Rush, Permanent Waves

It is likely a blasphemy to say this, but I love Gram Parsons and his songs while only just liking the way he did them. The reason might lay in my introduction to them through a rather amazing compilation with Lucinda Williams and Crissie Hynde and the Mavericks implanting the "real" versions of his songs in my mind. Evan Dando with Juliana Hatfield doing "$1000 Wedding" seems to coy and obvious an idea to work, but he gets to the magma core of the song.



Anyway, I woke up Saturday with "I saw my devil/I saw my deep blue sea" in my head from a dream and its stayed there until the afternoon when I finally acknowledged and dealt with the presence of both. Lucinda sounds so drunk when she sings it on that compilation, but the mish-mash of a dream calls for the real thing when tackling its residuals.



I am still into the whole American Mercury thing and think I may have A Big Idea with which to inflate it. I'm lazily devouring the Reader like a gator does a grad student and just got into "We Rob a Bank" by actual bank robber Ernest Booth.  I love the little author bios included with each story:

ERNEST BOOTH, who has since been released, was serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison, Represa, Calif. , for the robbery he describes so graphically and with such profound psychological insight in this article. he was twenty-eight years old at the time, and had already been a professional robber and burglar for twelve years. His article was but one of many by prisoners, which appeared in this magazine. (September, 1927) 

On the one one that brung me here, they say:

JOHN FANTE, one of the most promising younger writers, first achieves a nation-wide audience in this magazine. His books include Dago Red and Ask the Dust. (August, 1932)

They have similarly pithy, self-congratulatory statements about William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This bit from their "AMERICANA" humor column - items snipped from dailies across the Republic - amused:

LOUISIANA

MORAL dictum of the Rev. H. J. Mc-
Cool, pastor of the Istrouma Baptist
Church, in the up-and-coming town of
Baton Rouge:

I am not against bathing. I believe that
we should at least take a bath once a
month. But. . . I am coming to believe
that mixed bathing is one of our future
problems. . . I doubt seriously if we can
retain virtuous thoughts when the whole
community is in bathing together. (October, 1925)

Check out old Istrouma now. Anyway, it's totally my kind of magazine and I'm into it. Happy weekend, dear readers. Watch the weeds for monsters while you might be otherwise occupied. I'm adding Rush in honor of  my friends' band almost playing "The Spirit of Radio" during a Television tribute night that I had to miss due to the lingering tendrils of the flu and the lull of NyQuil. Perhaps shattering the illusion of integrity would have fixed us all.



If you haven't read Skylaire Alfvegren's Grokking Rush" in the July/August issue of The Believer, you should. A tatse.

Prabhupada's towel

The sign above the hand towel reserved for ISKCON founder Prabhupada (who passed from this world in 1977) at the temple at New Talavan.

Kyle Bobby Dunn, A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn (his MySpace)
Arthur Russell, First Though Best Thought

The Kyle Bobby Dunn is the sun setting quiet on the river and the Arthur Russell is the cocktails that magically start appearing on little round trays as the night tightens its grasp.

The American Mercury

The frontispiece.

Various, The American Mercury Reader

In John Fante's sagas, a key piece of Arturo Bandini's character, the point on which his madness spins, is that he had a story published in the esteemed journal The American Phoenix by its editor H. L. Muller, based on Fante's own story "Altar Boy" published in H. L. Mencken's The American Mercury in 1929.

The story of Mencken's magazine portrayed in this Wikipedia article is riveting, how what once started as an means to inject intellectual discourse under the guise of popular journalism ended up almost sixty years later being a shriveled, shrill mouthpiece for anti-Semites and white supremacists when it finally shuttered in 1981.  It made me think about how that's how it always goes: things start out fiery and beautiful and daring and ate up with promise only to end up being railroaded into the base and the horrible. I don't know much about Mencken except that he's someone people like to use to justify classism, whereas I think he was more about a personal elitism. He seemed to want to surround himself with the types that turn into werewolves at night. I like the stripe of a guy that will lay this down about democracy:

[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. (from here)

Wikipedia exhibits is rare dry wit with this inclusion at the bottom of his entry

See also

• Bathtub hoax

which you should also see. It pleases me greatly.


I found a copy of The American Mercury Reader from 1944 housed in the compressed storage section of the campus library and it sits now on my desk radiating with possibility. Fante's story is in there. I want to re-read Zora Neale Hurston's "High John the Conquerer" and the Faulkner story and the Edgar Lee Masters profile of Stephen A. Douglas and Herbert Ashbury's "Hatrack" about a prostitute seeking redemption, a story whose publication in the Mercury got them in a lot of trouble, and everything else. It makes me love magazines and writing and werewolves and bathtubs and America.

the root of existentialism is existence

Flood of 1938, Los Angeles Street, Anaheim, from Calisphere.

Southside Johnny, Havin' a Party with Southside Johnny
John Fante, Dreams From Bunker Hill
Bruce Springsteen, Greetings from Ashbury Park, N.J.
Ian Hunter, All the Good Ones Are Taken
John Hiatt, Two Bit Monsters
The Only Ones, Special View

Let's rock this week out with the wild, howling poets of crap bars and the vivid dreams hatched in the euphorias and doldrums therein. Saxophones at the ready. See you on the avenue.

God, John Fante is good. Dreams from Bunker Hill is not all that great by Fante standards - it's really three or so stories a little loosely strung together with all the causal logic of an I Love Lucy episode - but its still better than other books because the old legless and blind diabetic fucker could write a story and remind you that the root of existentialism is existence first and if you can get to that, the rest will fall in line. Incedentally, his books will make you overcome whatever ill-conceived notions you may have about the alleged placelessness of Los Angeles. There is a bit in here about the flood of 1938 that took my breath away, about sandbags buffeting Sunset Boulevard, but I can't find it now.

Here is a letter Arturo Bandini hastily dispatched to Sinclair Lewis after being snubbed by the writer in a restaurant.

Dear Sinclair Lewis,
      You were once a god, but now you are a swine. I once reverenced
you, admired you, and now you are nothing. I came to shake your hand
in adoration, you, Lewis, a giant among American writers, and you rejected
it. I swear I shall never read another line of yours again. You are an
ill-mannered boor. You betrayed me. I shall tell H. L. Muller about you,
and how you shamed me. I shall tell the world.

                                                                         Arturo Bandini

P.S. I hope you choke on your steak.

Flame on, you magnificent bastard.  Here is one of many calamitous departures:

I hit him in the face and knocked him down on the couch. He sat there nursing a nosebleed. I walked back to the car and drove away. I shouldn't have struck Edgington. He had been hospitable and friendly and generous and kind. But I couldn't bear his arrogance. He was too successful for me. He had it coming. I had no regrets. That was life. I was sorry for his nosebleed, but he deserved it. As for Velda van der Zee, fuck her. What was another director? This town was crawling with them.

Have you ever heard Bowie's discoed-up version of Springsteen's "It's Hard to be a Saint in the City"? It's a beautiful thing.

I am Arturo Bandini

The magnolias say "Hi!"

John Fante, Dreams from Bunker Hill
Dr. John, Tribal
Robert Plant, Band of Joy (from NPR)


I am Arturo Bandini, or at least this morning I was. Wrenched up in a panic. Inner compass pointing toward magnetic Everything. I got choked up over that stupid U2/Green day "The Saints are Coming" song. I'm as Go Saints as someone who really doesn't care about football can be but if I am undone by a U2 ballad and it's not 1987 and I haven't been sitting out all night in front of Paradise Records to buy tickets for their Thanksgiving show then something else is awry. I just need to wade out to the shore and shoot crabs with a pellet gun like Fante's (and literature's) greatest hero Arturo Bandini did in The Road to Los Angeles. Blow off a little steam. As much as I love that book and the other two from the Arturo Bandini saga (Ask the Dust and Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Is  Full of Life about him too, though?) I'm only now just getting to Bunker Hill. There is more sex and less ecstatic madness in our hero during the years Bandini (and Fante) spent writing for the movies, but the two to cross paths. In a Hollywood church, praying for work that will fulfill him:

I murmured a Hail Mary and found it interrupted by [his boss' secretary] Themla Farber. Hail Mary full of grace and Thelma Farber naked in my arms. Holy Mary, Mother of God, kissing Thelma Farber's breasts, groping at her body and running my hands along her thighs. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death and my lips moved to Thelma's loins and I kissed her ecstatically. I was lost, writhing. I felt my body kneeling there, the hardness in my loins, the fullness of an erection, the absurdity of it, the maddening dichotomy. I arose and dashed out of there, down to my car, and drove off, frightened, shaking, absurd.

It is maybe important to note that Fante had been four years blind and two years legless from diabetes when he dictated this book to his wife Joyce from his sickbed. It made me want to go back and read Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, a book hilariously commandeered by the maddening dichotomy of boners. That book weirdly came up in a Daily Show clip making the rounds, about the idiot in Florida who wants to burn Korans on 9/11.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Weekend at Burnies
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

To said idiot: if you do go through with it, can you at least stack them in a way to spell out the world hubris in flames?

Y'know, the new Dr. John album is pretty tight, and I'm not enough a fan to categorically think that of his every recording. As is this from his 1971 album The Sun, Moon & Herbs.



The Robert Plant album isn't bad either - I believe Robert Plant will eventually do an album with Los Lobos and through that some eighth seal will be broken and it will all go Next Level on us - but NPR is probably the exact right place to listen to it, if you dig. Anyway, I feel much better now, Thanks, everybody.

how far-out Richard Fariña is

I met my librarian!

Media Announcement: Y'all go see Richard Buckner at the Shaw Center on Tuesday! Pay tribute to Television! Hail Harptallica! and other edicts can be found in this week's Record Crate.

William Parker, "The Inside Out" from I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield (via Destination:OUT )
Matthew Shipp, Harmony and Abyss
Pinckney Benedict, Town Smokes
John Fante, Dreams from Bunker Hill

I was going to check out Richard Fariña's mad, mad poem/novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me but the little kiosk said and then the desk clerk confirmed the copy of the book in my hands did non existent, so urgently did it not exist that someone was dispatched to see what supposed unfathomable void I had pulled it. I wonder if the lights flickered at the Hadron Collider, a sign of another near miss with the Singularity. That's how far-out Richard Fariña is.


That's Richard on the dulcimer, playing along with his wife Mimi and Pete Seeger for an appearance on Seeger's "Rainbow Quest" TV show.

Toward the end of the video, old Pete attempts to make time with Mimi by waxing rhapsodic about Carmel, California where Richard met his untimely end. From Wiki:

On April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his book, Fariña attended a book-signing at a Carmel Valley Village bookstore, the Thunderbird. Later that day, while at a party to celebrate Mimi's 21st birthday, Fariña saw a guest with a motorcycle and hitched a ride up Carmel Valley Road east toward Cachagua. At an S-turn the driver lost control. The motorcycle tipped over on the right side of the road, came back to the other side, and tore through a barbed wire fence into a field where there is now a small vineyard. The driver survived, but Fariña was killed instantly. According to Pynchon's preface to Been Down..., the police said the motorcycle must have been traveling at 90 miles per hour (140 km/h), even though "a prudent speed" would have been 30 miles per hour (48 km/h). He and his wife, Mimi, had quarreled before leaving for the bookstore signing because he hadn't given her a present on that day, her birthday. (Pictures of her at the signing show a strained smile on her face.) It was several days before she returned to their home to find flowers, dead now, that he had arranged to be delivered while they were at the book signing.^{[citation needed]}

There were librarians stationed with trays of cookies and a sign asking "Meet You Librarian" so I did. I told them I use the hell out of this library and they seemed to like that and gave me a cookie. They were less into me when I snagged a second one on the way out. Like I suspected, I am a pain in the ass to most librarians in the long run.

I've read the bindings off this very library's copies of Fante's  Ask the Dust and The Road to Los Angeles but never have I stepped into the last part of the Arturo Bandini saga. It remains to be seen if I take to Pinckney Benedict. It looks like bus reading.

goodness is holistic

These nervous cows were penned up and mooing in the CVS parking lot as I walked home from the bus yesterday, a stark contrast to the sweet one that walked right to meet me at the fence at the Hare Krishna farm. Just saying.

Breece D'J Pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
Thomas E. Douglass, A Room Forever: The Life, Work, and Letters of Breece D'J PancakeCharles Wuorien, Lepton
Mstislav Rostropovich, Britten: Cello Suites 1 & 2, Sonata for Cello and Piano

I'm listening to Charles Wuorien's Time's Euconium (for which he won a Pulitzer in 1970) because that's where we are, in time's rhetoric, in its praise for others, in its ambient teaching. Or where I am today anyway.

Also because Wuorien's music wanders in that exquisite way the early electronic composers work often does, half in love with sounds and half in love with the Rube Goldberg mechanisms that make them, and I'm kinda there as well.

My Breece period comes to a close with the skimming of Douglass' scholarly biography and I was tempted to dive headlong into Pickney Benedict, his name having come up a lot, but I'm also tempted to read that copy of The Corrections I got at the book fair last year. It has the Oprah book club logo on the dust jacket - printed, not a sticker; does that make it valuable in these times of Franzenfrenzy? Cuz, I mean, I can get it from the library if/when I do want to actually read it...

All this lofty music about my leisure time's activity means I will most likely once again play on my phone while watching more episodes of nip/tuck on Netflix while waiting for the NyQuil to take hold.

I can't really pinpont the essential goodness of Benjamin Britten  because his goodness is holistic.