Seven Red

Bloglect. Been busy here with a million different things. she tells me that they don’t pay me like a lawyer, so I shouldn’t be working until 2:30 every morning, then getting up at 6:30. But she knows I secretly like to, and I can’t really sleep anyway. But since the bloglect has been going on pretty long now, I thought I’d just update with some random stuff.

I stumbled out of bed; I got ready for the struggle
I smoked a cigarette, and I tightened up my gut
I said “This can’t be me, must be my double.”
And I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what…
-Leonard Cohen, I Can’t Forget

On Tuesday we trekked down to the Chicago Theater for our Big Night Out, and this time it went perfectly. The sitter got here at 6:30 or so, and we drove into the Loop. There wasn’t a spot of inbound traffic on Lakeshore Drive, and then we actually got a free parking spot on LaSalle. And then there was the show itself. Wow. I guess it helps if you are an uber-devoted Leonard Cohen fan (are there any non-zealot Cohen fans?), but I think even the uninitiated would have appreciated the artistry of the show. It was just beautiful and wonderful, and, as she said somewhere, made you forget your cynicism for just a little while. I was particularly drawn to Dino Soldo, who played, as Cohen said, “all the instruments of wind.” It was kind of a bonus that he was a little bit hip hop, rockin’ the Kangol and banging it out to Take this Waltz like it was thumping in a club. The guy had stage presence, for sure. I also liked that they played a few songs from Cohen’s 2001 album Ten New Songs, which I consider one of the great unappreciated albums of the decade, and underappreciated within Cohen’s corpus (it’s hard to compete with I’m Your Man, sure). It was just a perfect evening. And three hours. You felt like you got your money’s worth and then some. Hell, I left wanting to pay more. I would show the DVD that they’re selling of the London live show as an example of creating ethos. You can’t but be drawn to this kind of funny, humble and graceful, yet remarkable performance. Easily in the top ten live shows I’ve seen. Top five. Of course, I’m a zealot.

One of the great things about this concert, we noticed, is that nobody quite knew how to dress for it. Or, to put it another way, the variety in dress was just off the charts. You had people there looking like they were going to opera, and people there who look like they just stumbled out of a Virginia Beach knock-off of Margaritaville. It was pretty hilarious. I was also reminded of this line from Simon Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music: “I sometimes suspect that it is at such sit-down shows – for Leonard Cohen, say, or the Cure, or P.J. Harvey – that one best gets a sense of what the mid-nineteenth century battles over classical concert behavior were like, as the listening and the dancing sections of the crowd get equally annoyed with each other, and as the attendants struggle to keep everyone seated” (125). He can pretty much scratch Leonard Coehn off that list.

But graceful and humble is not me. Here is a snippet, pretty close to direct quotes, of a conversation we were having today. The subject: should we seriously look into this condo in a borderline dicey neighborhood. The issue is, of course, not the neighborhood itself but the schools. When they require uniforms in elementary schools to discourage gang activity (yes, elementary schools), it’s a bit much, even for me. So, I say, “yes, well, we’d then have to roll the dice on these application-only public schools.”

she: Or we might have to face up to sending them to private school.
topspun (who walks around saying things like “I went to New York City Public Schools, public university, all the way through…ain’t a damn thing wrong with public schools”): Fuck it. I’ll drive ‘em down here to Saint Matthias and hand ‘em over to the goddamn nuns.
she: …
topspun: They’re like Polish over here, y’know? That’s good Catholic.
she: So it has to be like ethnic Catholic?
topspun: Of course.
she (laughing): It can’t be American Catholics?
topspun: American Catholics are like fucking Protestants.
she: Heh.

Mind you, I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone knew the parish borders down to the street level, as in “You live on the other side of 26th Avenue: that’s Saint Luke’s.” But it was still largely immigrant or first generation Catholics: Italian, Irish, Croatians, etc. And I’ve got it into my head that this is reasonable Catholicism, where nobody really cares that much about the performance; the church is a place to get your bearings rather than run your life. Plus, there’s booze. Of course there’s still the guilt and all that, but it’s really paganism with some moral structure thrown on for show. I’m not talking about the 60′s and 70′s Catholicism, with the hippies playing the guitar in church and all that. Saw that whole bit a little in college, and I was like “No thank you.” But neither is it this totally weirdo suburban American Catholicism. When we lived in State College, I saw a Catholicism I was totally unfamiliar with. The whole practice resembled one of these evangelical  churches, and the people were real zealots, all hyper-conservative politically and just deadly serious about the teachings. It was unnerving. Needless to say, she and I are both atheists, but if we have to pack the kids off to a Catholic school, it would have to be the kind that includes the wink and nod.

Back to grading. Oh, and we’re on the quarter system, so I still have 4 weeks of class left. It hurts at this time of year. But then again…

Two of the most perfectly crafted rock/pop songs of the 1980′s, one now a staple on NPR Market Place, the other virtually forgotten outside a rather odd collection of hardcore fans. But still. I was in my favorite bar in Queens over the holidays, and I told my brother that New Order’s “Ceremony” was one of my picks for most brilliant rock songs ever recorded. He made the usual face people make when you say something preposterous. But still. Of course, it was initially written when New Order was still Joy Division and Ian Curtis hadn’t yet fashioned himself a noose, but the New Order version – their first single release – is far better. I read somewhere that Bernard Sumner was still taking voice lessons at the time, learning how to breath while singing, a point that I didn’t know whether to take as mischievously ironic given the former lead singer’s fate. But you can hear the halting ineptitude of it, which is really what makes it perfect. The Ceremony video appearing here, too, some amateur hour film student job, chosen because only slightly better than the other option, the heartwarmingly despicable Kirsten Dunst vehicle Marie Antoinette, the 80′s party girl soundtrack of which was ostensibly meant to signify something: I’ll take cheap film school sentimentality of the (post)industrial structure crashing into the organic over that any day. The second is a favorite of mine that I’m almost embarrassed by, and I think the black screen YouTube is just about right. It’s a radio song, 1987 or thereabouts, written by Stephen Duffy, perhaps the most exquisite craftsmen of the 80′s English rock/pop song, just torn up by class ennui and joyful about it. I thought about it recently after seeing a flyer for a “poetry night commemorating the inauguration of Barack Obama.” Despite my open support of Obama since I announced to my students in October of 2004 that he would be President “one day” (we read his convention speech in honors comp two days after he delivered it – I wonder if they remember…), the flyer made me recoil a bit, left a bad taste, and all that. Certainly, I’m not “opposed” (as if one could be!) of the admixture of poetry and politics, but I do raise an eyebrow at poetry “celebrating” any fixture of the State – Obama or not. By all means, I wish him well in his job – and the notion of McCain/Palin was just too grisly to contemplate. And breakthroughs in something like a collective consciousness are of course wonderful. Yes. But poetry celebrating the elevation to Power? It’s unseemly. And so I was brought back to the lines Duffy used to capture the Event of working class England in shambles, destroyed by the Tory ascension, sure, but far more by a kind of global enthusiasm. It need not go the same way, but this is how many people that I feel far more comfortable with usually experience these “dramatic” social changes:

We’ll face this new England
Like we always have
In a fury of denial
We’ll go out dancing on the tiles
Help me down, but don’t take me back…

That’s perfect to me. Unproductive life, as the sociologist Michel Maffesoli might call it. But here we are now with Reaganism and Thatcherism in smithereens, their underlying economic philosophies exposed as fraud and sham (never once and for all, of course: it can always get worse). But the global enthusiasm lingers, even if mixed with dread. (And we know there was dread then, too. Perhaps the best scene in 24-Hour Party People has Ian Curtis dead-panning the lyrics of Transmission to a bunch of boinking skinheads, as the news of capitalist crisis – unemployment, war, oil shortage – gets spliced into the act; the Joy Division/New Order solution to the Thatcherite darkness was, moreover, much the same as Duffy’s: “we would have a fine time living in the night…so dance dance dance dance dance to the radio.” This response is not without cultural consequences: the dim outlines of a coming techno can be heard in Stephen Morris’ frenetic high hat, even then, the trip from Warsaw to Blue Monday as bound up in the history of neoliberalism as in the technology of the drum machine). So the global enthusiasm lingers, in any case: We’ll face this new America, like we always have, in a fury of denial, we’ll go out dancing on the tiles…

I know. I know. Too much youtube. In a few weeks, back to more writing on this here Seven Red. Been kept away by circumstance. Until then, I’ll continue my fanboy lobbying for “Dear Science,” as a must have record for 2008 (and maybe this year’s In Rainbows). Is there a better lyric than “Angry young mannequin/ American, apparently/ Still to the rhythm/ Better get to the back of me” out there? I can’t find it.

Radiohead does Headmaster Ritual

“…spineless swine, cemented minds…”

Indeed. A story that will need telling later.

Because babygirl wants me to tell her pirate/mermaid stories every night before bedtime (and these are terribly difficult to come up with on the fly), Okkervil River’s Lost Coastlines…