I’m doing procedural things at eleven p.m. in the dim yellow light of the forward galley. It’s not sound-proofed. No carpets. Lots of kitchenware, metal and plastic. In the old days the gals wore heels in here. Clacked around. No longer. Elegance was lost in a world of foam rubber soles.
Tired, getting schitzy and ready to get back to base. It was crazy. My suicidal sister came to mind. Andrea. Annie. Turns out the all-Amerikan girl was a sweet con. A real shrewd homecoming queen. Had her babies before 21 and by forty was hell on wheels, super-pretty super-bitch looking out for numero uno. The new Andrea became Andréa. She put her legs in the air, earning her way up to status and money and then took a guy twenty years younger, someone like a builder, but with the reliable big equipment she craved. Married him. Got a place by the lake, a boat, extra places to live. Conspired profits. Laundered money from bad sources. Escalating fucked-up-ness.
It was all muy extravagante and a bit mafioso. The law came eventually.
Coke became a larger part of it. The lingerie got wilder. She went first-name basis with the handsome local cosmetic surgeon. Then the DA called one evening via detectives at the door. Then a grand jury. She battled until her money and luck ran out, then fled to Ireland and one foggy day said fuck extradition immunity anyway and jumped off a cliff.
I am her younger sis Janey, easy on the eyes as well. You may have run into me at the best places in New York. Or in a cantina in Mexico City. A cafe in Zurich or on the dance floor in Ibiza. Hey, I never hang out in Nowheresville.
OCUPADO sign goes on and off to my left. With the throw of a bolt. My agenda and my heart opens and shuts.
A shiny pot of burned Melita Colombian coarse-grind clicks off, still aromatic. The red light replacing the green. Below there are the usual rattles and flight-noises from the array of warming lockers, a comforting harmonic. The tray ovens are strac and lined up hup-two. They have been empty since the bankruptcy.
A bilingual dictionary is on the small formica counter, wrinkled from use and page-stained.
Lance found a bug in an oven earlier during the first-class cookie bake. He squealed. He does that. It’s funny to see a uniformed man freak out. We have pills and free mini-bottles to help all types.
Our engines changed pitch. We’re in the pattern. I notice the view changes in the Emer door porthole. I can see buildings, grids and blocks, and vast plains of lights. The view extends farther when the pilot banks, showing off this sentimental sight of Amerika after dark.
The smell of our cabin air changes from pressurized to real. The permeated odors of coffee and first-class chocolate chip cookies go away, and I begin to imagine I can smell the people. Sort of like canvas sneakers and overworked talc.
I grab the mike for a routine announcement, hesitant to step even two paces outside the warm galley, my Somewheresville.
pseudophed text
CIRCA 1956 IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Late summer. Bluejays squawked in bellicose tones distinctively bluejay, ganging up in trees in the median parkway of Florence Street.
Out back, chickens wandered in a pen, wheezy and trepidatious. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in his perfect way that chickens sound asthmatic)
A eucalyptus tree a century-old stood by a tall lawn spigot with brick splashguards. In the grass were faded sticks from an old croquet set. An antique gun workshop hid behind a bamboo grove. A homemade motor boat slept in a back shed. Broken-down polo mallets tacked up to bare studs. Farther away a defunct camper trailer, a wrecked rowboat, on flats of sandy dirt loaded with red ants.
After lunch Neapolitan ice cream out of the carton. The strawberry section had bits of fruit, tart to balance the sweet. Lots of infants and grade school cousins occupied the house. Among the adults, concerns about baby formula and potty training ran below their everyday kitchen conversations.
The uncles were comics. Midday meal, the big one, had prayer, ha ha.
Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.
An afternoon car ride in gramma’s Buick if you were nice. The heat pounding down on the way back. 8oz Coke bottles from the icebox. Rules required you read aloud the city of origin imprinted on the bottom. A sack of boiled peanuts, chilled, always on the top rack.
Nighttime we ate again but ate light, like leftover bread, biscuits, doctored-up casseroles. Sliced tomatoes from the yard.
Retiring to the family room, we saw the golden clocks that moved silently inside inverted glass jars. A floor fan hummed.
The night heat was heavy and still.
From the cabinet TV, Adlai Stevenson’s summer convention speech played loud. Mixed support. An ancient magnolia tree loomed outside like a giant.
Windows were opened cautiously. Everyone was afraid of black people.
Advisable International Travel Wear
Houston Nightspots 1980-1986
Over the years, I’ve had a lot of traffic coming to read my article called “A Look Back at Gilley’s 1980.”
Here are some of the other bars I remember from the early 80s in Houston. Those were great days. If you were there, you’ll recall some of them. Though quite a few I can’t remember their names, so help if you like.
Contributions about the history of nightspots during this time are welcome. Send to -> wpmfla at gmail.
Todd’s – Richmond Avenue area. Had the feel of a neighborhood bar, usually a good crowd, polite, well-to-do, and above all looking for love. Todds was one of the best meet markets on the Southwest Side. The dancing was full throttle by 5 pm. For the less energetic, there was backgammon.
Shanghai Red’s – Red-hot happy hour with dancing and a free buffet, all with a great view right on the Ship Channel. Disadvantaged locals ate for free and left, like a community service.
San Antone Rose – Cold longnecks, mixed crowd with C/W and Top 40, a little for everyone. On San Felipe, West Side. The Rose had a free happy hour buffet too. Their tamales were delicious, but you tasted them for three days.
Cowboys – A crowded sort of upscale C/W bar. I think it was on Westheimer or Richmond, out west. I was there when a fight broke out. A friend of mine got clobbered.
Spats – A high-end bar and dance place in an office plaza near the Galleria. You had to know where it was. Beautiful people, heavy druggy amorous glamorous and booze-soaked. A paragon of disco’s.
Confetti’s – a very loud dancing place. Somewhere on the SW side. It’s a blur.
Munchies – an artsy ice-house on Bissonett near Rice with string quartet music and mimes. There was another great ice-house closer to Bellaire but I can’t recall its name.
Yesterday Once More – best I remember it was located in South Houston. Lots of line dancing in an atmosphere of mostly Carpenter tunes ranging from the romantic to the morose. The place had a separate “Mood Room” with glass partitions and couches.
Chaucer’s – an Arts Museum area bar on Bissonett and Montrose in the basement of the old Plaza Hotel. My favorite after-work hangout. I was fond of Vivian the bartender. She’d have a Johnny Walker Black and water ready before I got down the stairs.
Marfreless – in River Oaks, an unmarked and eclectic bar for couples. Superb ambience, great mixologists behind the bar. Marf’s had sofas and curtained nooks, a great place for lovers.
Sillouhette Lounge – a cozy neighborhood nudie club on the unfashionable side of Bellaire Blvd. Friendly, non-threatening. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
Rockefellers – in the Heights, an old bank turned into a mini concert hall with big name shows and retro nightclub tables. I went on invitation from friends who were gay. Those guys were always tuned in to the trendier places in town.
Cooters – I think that was the name, anyway. A large dance club and saloon on the opposite end of the shopping plaza from Todd’s, on Richmond Avenue. Had the reputation of over-served customers. Some of the baseball Astros drank there. Some of the visiting rival Mets were arrested there.
Shamrock Hilton – The hottest place in town on March 17th. Great ballroom drunken mix. Lots of random kissing. One eventually learned to book a room far in advance.
I (still) Like Lucinda Williams
2/25/17: Saw her last night in concert at the Parker Playhouse in Ft. Lauderdale, where she and her band Buick 6 rocked the joint with 21 songs. Her lyrics are memorable and vivid. She brings a dash of politics along and is no fan of “liars and fear-mongers,” directed currently to you-know-who. Standing ovations by a largely sixty-ish crowd of 1200, a great show.
She has her own label now and can be more like Dylan, producing records without limitations, like making long double albums in the spirit of Blonde on Blonde.
below from post on 11/16/2012
Folks in my immediate circle thought it odd that I liked Lucinda Williams so much.
She’s so…country, they said.
This was in 1998 when the “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” album caught my attention.
She is country, I’d answer, but much more.
The “Car Wheels “album is a poetry chapbook. Each piece tries to outdo the other, though they all are cut from the same thematic cloth and connect in the end. Behind excellent guitar work, she lays the Southern Delta twang on thick. The songs are about the chaos of love but they are tidily produced. Some, as it turns out, sound even better in future performances, especially with a minimalized band.
Her songs have pieces that can be transformed and unleashed anew.
Her “Essence” album is raw and sensual. The rock elements of blues and hard surf guitar heavy with reverb foreshadow her later days to come with Buick 6.
I like her albums “Blessed” and “West.” They have their own milieu and style, and she explores worlds beyond her Delta roots. She pushes the envelope stylistically without spinning out of character.
She’s a Dylan figure in the sense that she’s an original, the real deal, ragged edges be damned. Her twang is similar to Bob singing though his nose, and similarly her voice was sweeter and less torn up when she was younger. Both are poets (Lucinda’s father, Miller Williams, is a noted national poet and teacher who read at Clinton’s inauguration). They are individualists who eschew the usual media PR mill. Lucinda’s been down the road and has wisdom to add to all that born talent for writing. Just as you can’t lock Dylan into the folk category, you can’t label her either. They never sing the same song the same way twice. They’re artists and rebels.
In the French Quarter one morning I had breakfast at a beer and eggs dive. Someone put Lucinda on the jukebox, and the universe felt complete.
A younger Lucinda performance from 1989.
No one I’ve heard can do a sad songs about love and loss like Lucinda can.
“Copenhagen,” (audio on YouTube)
I’d recommend anyone trying out Lucinda to try the Fillmore concert double album. It has a good cross-sampling of her work, and the band that is with her that night is both sublime and red hot, perfectly in sync with her. She sings the best ever, her twang toned down, and the guitars complement her. Some fans (and she has her own cult) prefer watching her DVD performances. Lucinda on video is okay by me too, but I find it distracting whenever she refers to a three-ring binder for lyrics. Yet who can expect a poet to remember the volume of their work, word for word?
Better yet, follow her tour and get a ticket to see her live.
Nobel Prize for Literature
bravo
Looking Back at La Valse (inspired by Christine)
Some Background Stuff paraphrased from Wiki:
Ravel originally wrote La Valse as a ballet piece that celebrates Johann Strauss and the waltz form. Unsure what to say of its new and radical form, critics described the piece as a metaphor, one that made socio-political statements about deconstruction and decline. Ravel said otherwise, that “one should only see in it what the music expresses: an ascending progression of sonority, to which the stage comes along to add light and movement.”
The composer’s preface notes say: “Through swirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter…one sees an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo…”
Some Stuff from Me:
I imagine to hear it played live by a symphony in New York or Paris or Vienna must be an out of body experience. I can only speak to the one time I saw it live, which was on a summer evening in Houston. I was still a young man then, and an even younger woman was in my company. We were one of the couples, for a brief time existing more in the swirling clouds than grounded.
The music at first had a traditional aesthetic and was beautiful and idyllic. Then rebellion seized the melody. The rhythm halted and skipped, and an unexpected dissonance took hold. The sections of order and beauty volleyed with sections of discord.
During the concert, an explosive electrical storm took place over downtown Houston. Lightning flashed through the concert hall windows. If the chandeliers inside amped up, I doubt anyone noticed. When all the high musical tension was over, I felt a sense of relief. Through the doors the air smelled of fresh rain and carried a promise. Time stood still yet flew by. As part of the illusion, I was in the company of the most beautiful and most likely to disappear gal in town.
A version by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France:
On the Road (the movie)
Expecting some other mood to the presentation, I was distracted during the first half. The screenplay emphasis is on free beatnik love, I suppose. Anyone with everyone, we get it. After repeated scenes like “Dean does Denver” the movie was beginning to seem like the Kristen Stewart SkinFlick Hour. It sells tickets, they say. And there’s no doubt she is nice looking.
I wondered why the opening half didn’t have more emphasis on Sal (Kerouac) the writer and his paradoxical visions of beauty and anguish, of life and the American culture, the countryside and its soul. Instead we get endless cigarettes and a repetitious display of Dean’s (Neal Cassady’s) fancy for nose inhalers. They gave us bebop music scenes but that was only one facet of Beat. Beat was about absorbing everything, living in the moment, not just Dean’s capacity for getting laid.
I’ve read the book more than twice, and never saw in it things the director included. I barely remember reading parts about Jack’s mom, and the movie showed her several times. The movie says Sal met Dean “after his father died” which is conveniently inconsistent with the book, in which Sal meets Dean right after Sal and his wife have split up.
OTR has no real compelling storyline. It must have driven the screenwriters crazy. Other parts are great: the visuals, the editing, the building interest in the guys as they journeyed through their passages. Good actors appear in bit parts. When Jack K’s writing was quoted, those narrations raised the hair on the back of my neck. The Ginsberg quotes did the same.
Once Dean’s unhappy wives leave the script, the movie improves. The road scenes are good, the William Burroughs scenes are vivid, and the Mexico sequence artfully depicts a drunken nightmare of a trip. From that point, the novel (slash movie) hits its stride and pushes to a conclusion. At the end I felt like I had watched a movie of some merit, and one Francis Ford Coppola’s name is rightfully attached to.
Note on casting….the actor who played Sal didn’t look like Kerouac, but more like Rory McElroy.
I WAS A ZOMBIE COMMUNIST WEREWOLF BLOGGER WHOSE BLOGGING ADDICTION ENDED; WELL, IN THE TRADITIONAL SENSE OF BLOGS ANYWAY
An article I read recently about the state of blogs, i.e., the current condition thereof – dead or alive – uses the term “convergence” to explain the diminishment of blog popularity. Convergence as in the mass uniform movement of users into a web world dominated by the conformist communities of Facebook and Twitter.
I wonder. If people have time for hourly chitchat in Immediacy Land, they also have the time to read blogs. But I don’t think they have the interest in spending it on blogs anymore. Everyone’s capacity for attention is stretched. Better to exchange a fast word or two (often vanities-based) than read or write an article where argument or story is developed.
There is a quality dilution factor to blogs. It’s difficult to blog every day. Especially when your audience dwindles to accidental passers-by. Blogs are also susceptible to the sameness that comes with convergence. Few stand out, and few are remembered. Their purpose is blurry. Some do stand out because the bloggers themselves are willing to work at ensuring their visibility and pageview counts. Or they specialize and cater their posts to a niche audience. Otherwise blogs are hobbyist or small business or family affairs or exchanges within a circle of friends and fellow bloggers, and any or all of those scenarios can fail too.
The diehards (I am likely one) blog for blogging sake. It is a writing compulsion (or more gently, a call to write) that brings me back to blogs. Do bloggers run on conceit? Or need or both?
Some blogs eventually wind down or gray out into archive status. For example, I’ll blow up my oldest one like a bomb. It will feel satisfying, like waving bye to an old car you drove too long.
That doesn’t preclude doing another one if ever the urge arises. But it won’t ever again be like writing a blog of yore. We’ve all thought about it too much and ascribe creepy reasons for doing it. We are our own enemies. It’s not as fun and immune from asking Why? as it once was.
wpm
Brother Bill’s Social Network Prayer Rap
God spare us Mugbook and ratchetjaw Twitter
All that stuff’s going straight in the shitter.
Grant us real writing
amid the weblog smog, where
the language radiates
and imaginates,
pontificates and
metaphoriates –
Seems to me
at sixty-three
the other’s got no arts,
just me-me dope from mundane charts,
benign and fine
for those who like that line,
but to me at sixty-three
the table talk chatter
lacks substance and matter –
So bury me not
on the Mugbook wall,
I prefer my lot
on lonely blogspot:
Land of the blog,
dog,
Blessed is the blog,
dog;
Blessed is the blog.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Dios nos libre Mugbook y Twitter ratchetjaw
Todo eso va directamente en el cagadero.
Concédenos la escritura real
en medio de la niebla blog, donde
el lenguaje irradia
y imaginates,
pontificados y
metaphoriates –
Me parece que
en el sesenta y tres
la otra tiene ni artes,
sólo yo-yo la droga de las cartas mundanas,
benigna y fino
para aquellos que gustan de esa línea,
pero para mí en el sesenta y tres
la charla conversación en la mesa
carece de sustancia y la materia –
Así que no me entierres
en la pared Mugbook,
Yo prefiero mi suerte
en blogspot solitaria:
Tierra del blog,
perro,
Bendito sea el blog,
perro;
Bendito sea el blog.
williampelotmoore.com 