Farthest Field
Friday, May 11, 2012 at 12:42PM A bit of calm before the storm of the weekend...
On Tuesday I went to Shake It to see Sub Pop's Daniel Martin Moore and Joan Shelley perform in-store for the release of their collaborative album, Farthest Field, the fifth album to come out from DMM's own label, Ol Kentuck. I'll let the beauty of their music speak for itself; you can listen to the whole album on the Ol Kentuck site. (Ol Kentuck also released Joan Shelley's solo album, Ginko, earlier this spring.)
When you're done listening to Farthest Field, give a listen to Vashti Bunyan, whom DMM & Joan Shelley credit for inspiring their collaborative album.
(The DMM/Joan Shelley video was recorded at the beautiful Emery Theatre — not far from where I grabbed this shot — by photographer Michael Wilson.)
cincinnati, music Ephemera
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 05:20PM Every week I volunteer at an organization that sorts through donated books and decides what's salvagable in used book sales to benefit the public library, and what can be recycled. We open boxes of donations, never knowing what will be inside, and then begin sorting. Usually it's stacks upon stacks of ex-library Danielle Steele, Clive Cussler, and Tom Clancy, the airbrushed faces multiplying as they stare out at me from the blue boxes. But there are some real treasures in those boxes, too. We get first dibs on the books before they go on the shelf, a good exercise in restraint knowing I can't buy every single book that passes through my fingers.
Last night, I was especially lucky, and especially weak. Some I didn't buy: an old set of Salinger books (The Catcher In The Rye with its original dustjacket, a first edition of Raise High the Roof Beam) and first edition of Daniel Moore's Dawn Visions, put in pride of place on the "rare" shelf in the warehouse. I did buy a few titles, though at bargain prices: The Next Whole Earth Catalog, with its instructions for what to do with roadkill and how to make musical instruments and the best punk zines. Seymour Krim's The Beats, John Gruen's The New Bohemians, and a 1962 issue of the Evergreen Review with an introduction from and review of Naked Lunch just before it was published in the States for the first time. (Also, in a strange moment of prescience, one of the volunteers nearly recycled Where The Wild Things Are [it was an old, beat-up ex-library copy] before another volunteer removed it from the bin and handed it back to him, saying "THIS is a CLASSIC." Rest in peace, Mr. Sendak. Your books will find their rightful place under our watch.)
But the most precious to me are the bits of ephemera we find in the books. Little slips of paper used as bookmarks: a letter written in French from daughter to father, a negative of a religious ceremony, an old receipt from The Rollman & Sons Co. for two dollars and fifty-three cents (May 16, year unknown, though definitely pre-1960, when the store closed), a photograph of a suburban house. Last night, I even found a handwritten poem.
The consensus among the volunteers was that it was written by a teenager, taped inside his or her (though the handwriting suggests it was a female) copy of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Written in ballpoint pen on a sheet of paper ripped from a stenopad. Maybe by a young girl who'd just read The Colossus and figured herself a Sylvia Plath. Maybe by someone who was trying to talk herself out of something; maybe even by someone who lost someone herself. The poem isn't anything special, the stuff of teenage journals, but it seems to go with the "angry at death" theme I can't seem to escape here, and so I thought I might share it with you.
Lines For One About To Turn On The Gas
Death is so definite.
What I don't like about Death is
You can't change your mind.
Suppose you drank a great drink
And took so many sleeping pills
And lay down with your head on a pillow
On the kitchen floor;
Having turned on all five jets
Which after all would be an efficient
And comparatively tidy exit.
Then suppose just as you crossed the line between
Here + There
The telephone rang.
Someone caling to say:
"Darling, I am sorry — "
Or: "Your Grandmother's will just probated —
You inherit five hundred thousand."
Or even: "Will you come in for cocktails Sunday?"
Life might then seem lovely.
Might then seem desirable.
Life is like that.
And there you would be — out of reach.
No more moons.
No more late spring. However late it comes.
Spring is still a miracle.
There you would be, quiet + cold + stiff...
Ready for the mortician.
What is there underground so good as what's over it?
Do you like moles + worms + black beetles
Better than apple blossoms + cider?
Do you like a mouth stopped with clay
Better than singing — even if off-key?
Think of all the ways out you haven't yet tried.
Death is so definite.
What I don't like about Death is
You can't change your mind.
Never to have another chance...?
God — not yet!Anonymous, 4/13/61
Dark, I know; forgive me. But it was either this, or the mimeographed copy of a science class handout titled "Investigating the Excretory Structures of a Fish." (Would you expect the arrangement of tubules for the removal of nitrogen wastes in humans to be more like that of a fish or of the earthworm? Explain.)
I like to think that someone asked her in for cocktails on Sunday. Or she called her darling to say she was sorry. Or, heck, she started reading Daniel Moore, moved to a commune, and learned how to make musical instruments from a book she ordered out of The Whole Earth Catalog. However her story ended, wouldn't the precious time I spend coming up with endings to other people's stories — apple blossoms? or black beetles? — surely be better spent working on the material for the middle of mine?
Oh poo on this endless navel-directed philosophizing. Should have just posted the durned fish shit handout.
(Previously: Executive's Data Book, 1964)
© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.
angry at death, books 
Driving Around With The Windows Rolled Down: Three Songs and a Coda
Friday, May 4, 2012 at 01:56PM 1. Sara
I'd just been visiting family when I got a text from my friend Sara. "Do u have time for a visit?" There were tree frogs singing in my parents' yard as I hopped into my car to head over to Sara's house. The Sound of Summer, like the summers we used to spend in cut-off denim and cotton tank tops, driving along cornfields with the windows rolled down, listening to Patsy Cline, dangling forbidden cigarettes out the window.
She was putting her kids to bed when I arrived; she offered me watermelon and sunflower seeds and a beer she'd been chilling in the freezer. We sat at the kitchen table and talked about things, about writing and relationships, about our parents getting older, about the fear of death. We apologized for not having anything new to report from our lives in the last week, and then laughed and realized that not having anything new to report was what let us talk about the bigger things.
When I was tired and ready to drive home, I got in the car and flipped to a random radio station ("FLY 92.9: we'll play ANYTHING") and just past the bend near Shady Nook, Fleetwood Mac's "Sara" came on. You're the poet in my heart. I started singing and at the same time I started getting weepy thinking about how good it is to have Saras. Or Sarahs. They often go by other names entirely, too; but I'm glad I've got poets like them in my heart.
(And then I told myself, shut up, you sound like a frickin' yoghurt commercial.)
2. Gold Soundz (August, 1995)
pulled up to K Food Stores and looked at Teen mags as Karen chatted up the tattooed shaggy black-haired cashier. Brandon hobbled around on a sore knee looking at the lunch meats and Poppie guzzled a Mountain Dew. Karen left a flyer for the Muzzies show with the guy at the counter, Brandon bought Doritos, and we sat outside in the lot as they finished their cigarettes.
I sat on top of the Razmobile with my legs dangling through the sun roof as the cops pulled over a speeding 15 year old. We decided to get home.
drove home with the windows down and Pavement on the stereo. the moment we had walked out of Canal St. Tavern, we all saw a shooting star.
3. Gold Soundz (May, 2012)
It's horribly unenvironmental of me to love driving my car, but I do. Fortunately for the planet, working from home, we don't actually drive that much, and it's never just for the sake of going for a drive. But when I do... I love singing in my car, I love driving with the windows rolled down*, even on highways, I love the moment at the stop light when my Gerry Rafferty blends seamlessly with the Young Jeezy coming from the car next to me.**
Like Maria Wyeth, without all the breakdowns.
I do yoga in an old church. When I say "I do yoga" I mean once every few months I decide my body needs a stretch and I go to the most passive yoga class possible. I'm not very good at (as evidenced by the instructor's need to whisper-shout "RELAX" when he does his adjustments), and yet I still come out of it feeling warm and relaxed and open to the world. No longer averse to feeling like a total hippie. Last night, as I left the old church feeling like a total hippie, I rolled down the windows, watching the sun setting over manicured lawns, and "Gold Soundz" came on the stereo (stereo-oh). I pulled up to a stop light, and damned if my music didn't blend just right with the guy who had his windows rolled down next to me.
Bikers have this thing they do when they pass each other on the road, a gesture of solidarity where they stick out their arm closest to the other rider at a 45-degree angle from their body, like a contactless high five. J and I call it the biker low five; we see it a lot on warm days.
Yesterday, when the music was right and the grass was green and the breeze was perfect and I was there in my car feeling like a total hippie, I wanted to biker low five the whole world.
*YOGHURT COMMERCIAL.
**I know, I know: noise pollution. My grandpa already scolded me on Facebook for my contribution to it when I first mentioned this on Twitter. But the volume only goes up when it's really good. Though I realize this probably makes me just as reprehensible as the thirty-something dude I rolled my eyes at the other day for pumping his gas while blasting Phoenix.
Coda: Sabotage
This post was (mostly carelessly) written and headed for (probably still unadvisable) publication when I read the sad news of Adam Yauch's passing. And I couldn't leave it like it was, not without mentioning the man who helped bring us "Sabotage," which, in the 90s, was the unofficial anthem of driving around with the windows rolled down, feeling like a bad ass in your '86 Scirocco.
Damn, this one just sucks. As Alex Navarro said on Twitter: "I don't know if I want to live in a world where a Beastie Boy can die." Or as they say in yoga: नमस्ते, MCA.
© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.
music