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↑ Edward Hopper
Czesław Miłosz ↓
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Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.
Pardon the horrible pun in the title.
First of all, more important than all the anecdotal stuff that will follow, this guy is responsible for arguably the most heartbreaking video on the whole of Youtube.
Everything about this is pretty much perfect.
I remember, at Crossing Border 2009, a folk/indie-centered music festival in The Hague, I was walking around a little forlorn, until I stumbled into Steve Earle's acoustic set. I knew very little about that man, nor did I ever hear any of his music, I think I only went in for a short little peak.
It was his Townes Van Zandt tribute tour. He did a lot of covers of the man, and told touching stories. For instance, on Townes's yearly journey across the mountains by horse:
He had a horse named Amigo, he kept in the Bronco Newcomb stable in Aspen, Colorado. Every summer he’d pick him up and he’d ride him across the mountain at Crested Butte. I was 17 years old when I met Townes. I thought that was the coolest thing that I’d ever heard of. Actually, I’m fifty-four and a half now, and I still think that’s the coolest thing.
But it gets even beter:
Several winters back, I made the trip backwards, from Crested Butte over to Aspen. Fifty-eight miles as the crow flies, but I ain’t no crow. It’s a hundred seventy-five, a hundred eighty by the highway. But we ran into a particularly tenacious little snowstorm, you know the kind. It took us eight and a half hours to make the ride. I couldn’t sleep so I wound up in the shotgun seat. Whilst the snow was blowing across the highway and the headlights looked like low flying ghosts, I swear to God I saw Townes and Amigo come over the mountain five times that night.
Their friendship was star-crossed. In Be Here to Love Me, Steve Earle tells of a time when he and Townes were hanging out at his place, and Townes picked up a revolver with exactly one round in it, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger twice. Luckily he survived, but that's an incredible thing to do and have your best friend go through.
Finally, there is this song Steve wrote after Townes died in 1997. And I especially remember his own comments on the lyrics when he played this in The Hague. He'd said there were few of his own lines that he would call memorable or poetic, but the last lines of Fort Worth Blues, "Amsterdam was always good for grieving, and London never fails to leave me blue. Paris never was my kind of town, so I walked around with the Fort Worth Blues" he was really proud of, because Paris, on the contrary, was precisely his kind of town.
It is New Year's Eve. I see that I will arrive exactly on time, at 10PM, which means I'm too early. I'm on my way to a party, carrying a plastic bag holding a sixpack of beer and one skyrocket. There's different tints of green everywhere I look, trees and plants I cannot name. I'm in a park. The building materializes in front of me as in a vision. It is so out of place in these naturalistic surroundings that I feel like a time traveler from the 19th century. It's one of those post-war concrete blocks, when everything had to be resurrected fast. You only have to blink and it's there.
I go inside. David lives on the 12th floor so I head straight for the elevator. The red-and-white lint says broken. I say a dirty word. The stairs it is.
On the first floor, as I look up at the staircases spiralling upwards, feeling like Escher, I open my first can of beer.
On the second floor, I drain my first can of beer and open the second.
On the third floor, the funky sounds of Earth, Wind & Fire greet me. Sweet, a party! The door is open so I boogie my way in. I eye some sky-high widescreen-eyed widescreen-smiled teens doing drugs in the corner, so naturally I queue up. What looked like lines of coke from a distance are actually lined up pills. Each time, one open-mouthed kid kneels down to table height as the others shove the tablets in. As I still have some of my wits on me, I just take one. Joyously, I leave the party to the grooves of Chic's Good Times, and the good times do not leave me.
On the fourth floor, I drain my second beer while dancing my way around to the next staircase to the amused stares of the floor locals.
On the fifth floor, Nile Rodgers' wonderful bassline is still with me. Bewildered I look around me, but find no source. I settle the problem by opening a third can of beer.
On the sixth floor, more good times.
On the seventh floor I finish my fourth beer (something, somewhere went wrong), chuck it in an imaginary recycle bin, then follow the can's trajectory down, crashing into the floor. Embarrassed in case anyoned saw me fall, I decide to take a nap, making it look like a deliberate move.
On the eight floor I am still sound asleep.
On the ninth floor I wake to the sound of voices very close to my ear. Laughter, mostly. Boisterous. These are the good times, good times still droning on in my head. I open my eyes to fireworks. These sober me. It must be midnight already. I say another dirty word, ruminating on how I ruined the night. I get up to a dizzying array of the most beautiful colors, writing their ciphered codes in the sky, competing for one night with the stars. Synaesthetic, I see yellow laughter and the fiery orange of the firework blasts, and, ad nauseam, Nile Rodgers' bass line, which is solid gold. The red is the guilt towards David and my other friends. There's a lot of red.
On the tenth floor I find out my plastic bag is empty. All the more reason to hurry upstairs.
On the eleventh floor, I head straight for the final stairs and realize in sad relief that Good Times is no more. A single tear rolls down my face, down the stairs, and down all the ones below that. I watch it cascade down in quiet fascination.
On the twelfth floor, finally! I quickly locate the door to David's apartment. In front of this door the guilt accumulates. David opens cheerily, holding a nearly full bottle of white wine. I start my plea, “I'm sorry I'm sorry oh my god I'm so sorry I really was on time but took a detour oh and hey happy new year!” David looks both confused and amused, and shouts something over his shoulder. The rest of the gang joins to enjoy my ongoing harangue. Finally, David, good-hearted David, gives me a hug and points at the clock above him. It's only 10:30. The real party is yet to begin.
A second New York is being built
a little west of the old one.
Why another, no one asks,
just build it, and they do.The city is still closed off
to all but the work crews
who claim its a perfect mirror image.Truthfully, each man works on the replica
of the apartment building he lives in,
adding new touches,
like cologne dispensers, rock gardens,
and doorknobs marked for the grand hotels.Improvements here and there, done secretly
and off the books. None of the supervisors
notice or mind. Everyones in a wonderful mood,
joking, taking walks through the still streets
that the single reporter allowed inside has described asunleavened with remainders of the old city's complicated past,
but giving off some blue perfume from the early years on earth.The men grow to love the peaceful town.
It becomes more difficult to return home at night,
which sets the wives to worrying.
The yellow soups are cold, the sunsets quick.The men take long breaks on the fire escapes,
waving across the quiet spaces to other workers
meditating on their perches.Until one day
The sky fills with charred clouds.
Toolbelts rattle in the rising wind.Something is wrong.
A foreman stands in the avenue
pointing binoculars at a massive gray mark
moving towards us in the eastern sky.Several voices, What, What is it?
Pigeons, he yells through the wind.
Capitalism is the most barbaric of all religions
Department stores are our new cathedrals
Our cars are martyrs to the cause
The Guardian: Forget the gym. Head for the shopping centre:
"And it might not be long before even the supermarket is transformed into an exercise emporium. A hi-tech trolley has been developed to transform the typical supermarket shop into a gentle workout. Shoppers are thought to burn up about 150 calories during a typical 40-minute visit to the supermarket (provided they walk pretty quickly and carry their bags to the boot of their car afterwards), but pushing the Trim Trolley for the same time with the resistance level set at seven - with 10 being the hardest - the average person would use up 280 calories, the equivalent of a 20-minute swim. It was tested in stores by Tesco a couple of years ago and other supermarket chains are looking into similar equipment."
The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
So long, farewell, good-bye
Stroke of midnight. Maddy the skyscraper comes riding up in a tailor-made cabrio Chevrolet. Flash of metal. Intrigued, she stops, switches on a few of her lights. On the side of the road, there's a Ferris wheel on rollerskates smoking a cigarette.
“What you doing there?” flickers the skyscraper.
“Getting a little static time,” rolls the Ferris wheel. “Nothing better than a little quiet.” He spins a fraction counterclockwise, flicks away the cigarette stub.
“I agree,” flicker Maddy's lights.
They share a little quiet.
“You?” asks Ferris finally. He does a few laps to keep warm.
Maddy feels stiff and haughty. “Moving. Getting sick of the same old view. Bet that's a problem you never have.”
Ferris tries sighing, creaks a little. “Perhaps. It's true I've seen all corners of this country. It's true I lived a full life. But you know what, I'm ready to settle down. I can't handle this constant arousal anymore.”
Maddy's lights flash an audacious smile. “I know this is a bit sudden but...”
Ferris interrupts, spins uncontrollably, skates up to the back of the cabrio, hooks itself into the bumper. “Fire it up!”
She pedals the gas and they drive off into the night.
Our stubborn belief in the permanency of the Internet is often shown to be off the mark. Every so often, when I marvel at the lyrical prowess of David Berman (Silver Jews), I think back of a certain article I once read. A website had put out a call for favorite lines from songs, and when the results came in half of them were lifted off of Silver Jews songs. It is the ultimate tribute to a fantastic songwriter. Yet every time I try to trace my way back to this article, I end up empty-handed.
Let me put the limelight on a song of his that is not among his most-lauded. Black and Brown Blues. There is a definite sense of where-do-we-go-now-but-nowhere in this one, a desperation that Berman manages to make poetic and comical at the same time.
When I go downtown
I always wear a corduroy suit
Cause it's made of a hundred gutters
That the rain can run right through
But a lonely man can't make a move
If he can't even bring himself to choose
Between a pair of black and a pair of brown shoes
Their inability to say what they see or think is a cause of suffering to most people. They say there is nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; it's necessary, they say, to describe it in the air, with one's illiterate hands, using gestures, spiralling slowly upwards, to show how that abstract form, peculiar to coiled springs and certain staircases, appears to the eye. But, as long as we remember that to speak means to renew language, we should have no difficulty whatsoever in describing a spiral: it is a circle that rises upwards but never closes upon itself. I know perfectly well that most people would not define it thus, because they imagine that to define something one should say what other people want, and not what one needs to say in order to produce a definition. I would go further: a spiral is a virtual circle which repeats itself as it rises but never reaches fulfilment. But, no, that's still abstract. If I make it concrete all will become clear: a spiral is a snake, which is not a snake, coiled vertically around nothing.
All literature consists of an effort to make life real. As everyone knows, even when they act as if they did not, in its physical reality, life is absolutely unreal; fields, cities, ideas are all totally fictitious, the children of our complex experience of ourselves. All impressions are uncommunicable unless we make literature of them. Children are naturally literary because they say what they feel and do not speak like someone who feels according to someone else's feelings. Once I heard a child on the point of tears say not 'I feel like crying', which is what an adult, i.e. a fool, would say, but: 'I feel like tears.' That child produced a fine definition of his particular spiral.
Mark Miller: Escher-esque
It's too early in the morning and I’m on a train that is not moving. When it will start up again it will move northbound. Or westbound, southbound, eastbound. I don’t have a clue, actually. I just like to use such words. When you’re in a directionbound train, you feel like you’re really going somewhere, you know? It's more whimsical and dreamy than simply going to 'Amsterdam'.
We’re in the snow season, and in train terms that is known as the time in which humanity is put right back in its place. For all our wonderful technical advancements, it only takes a single snowflake for the machine to break down.
And speaking of snowflakes: a drop of water pesters me every now and then. I am in the process of locating it. I am seated on the outside of the two seats, even though the other one is empty. This is due to my fear of pairs, my intuitive wariness towards things that come in twos. I can't have someone join me, sit next to me, force me to consider myself as part of a duo.
Which is why I don’t mind the drops of water: they come one at a time. I look up to the roof of the train, to see if there might be a hole or leak where the melting snow drips into, but find no marks of this. Then, a little further down, I find the culprit: the suitcase of the man in front of me must have brushed the snow-covered grounds, and is now transferring its burden to me through the slow yet unstoppable laws of chemistry.
I find myself faced with a conundrum: I either tell the man, and feel incredibly silly and petulant for bringing such an infinitely trifling thing up, or suffer the feeling of the onset of rain for the rest of the journey. A third option, that I had to invent (and now have to mention) because of the aforementioned duophobia, is to move the suitcase myself. Would that be considered a breach of conduct? Can I handle the split-second moment where the man might think that I’m going to steal his suitcase? I suspect that he would confront me about it, make me explain and be petulant anyway.
I finally settle the argument, in typical fashion, by cheating myself into a fourth option: moving somewhere else. I wonder what I’d say if someone bothers to ask why I’m suddenly changing seats. “I felt a drop of water.”
After briefly being annoyed by myself, I realize the value of this anecdote as a potential scene in a story, and this perks me right up. The fictional taking priority over the real.
I am SIMUVAC in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, using a real-life disaster as a model for the simulated evacuation. I am Spencer Krug who, as I’ve mentioned here before, responds to his girl’s cry for help with “can I use that in a song?”
The snowflake - reality - melts and leaks into me like water - fiction. The point being that the difference between the two is often arbitrary and overstated. They are not a scary, complementary duo, but two overlapping autonomous systems.
“But this evacuation isn't simulated. It's real.”
“We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.”
“A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”
“We took it right into the streets.”
“How is it going,” I said.
“The insertion curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s probability excess. Plus which we don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we have to take our victims as we find them. We didn’t get a jump on computer traffic. Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape. You have to make allowances for the fact that everything you see tonight is real. There's a lot of polishing we still have to do. But that's what this exercise is all about.”
“Fuck my luck.” Did I just say that out loud? I look around me. No one seems to have noticed. Anyway, yes, fuck my luck. It’s the match of the season, and of course now my phone fails me.
We’re about midway through the first half. Somewhat uneasily I raise my eyes from the jet black surface of my phone to the pitch. All I see there are dots, ants crawling around. The first few seconds, as my eyes get used to the distance, I can’t even locate the ball. It’s a completely alien spectacle to me, watching this with naked eyes, from my second ring seat. An orchestrated 2D simulation of the real thing, a vintage top-down video game. Flashbacks to simpler times knock on the door to my brain. I shake them off and start scanning the spectators. My eyes follow them doing an imaginary wave across the stands, from the man seated directly to my left all the way around to my other neighbor. Everyone is seated as if bowing reverently, head down, hypnotized.
All of a sudden, an ooh rings through the crowd. I quickly tend to the green pastures but nothing seems to happen there that warrants the commotion. I look to my neighbors left and right. They are staring ever so focused at the mirrory screens in their palms or on their laps. I am dying to sneak a peek but I feel restrained by the heavy breach of etiquette this entails.
A buzzing sound, specks on the horizon, rays of sun reflected in my eyes, then another ooh. It dawns on me now. So obvious, in retrospect. It’s the match of the season, of course there’s going to be plenty of famous people to spot. I try to follow the robot bees by sound. The Doppler-effect I experience tells me they are now behind me. Upon turning around, I bless my luck for the first time since the crash. Diagonally seated above me, quite nearby, a blonde woman sits surrounded by this swarm of metal. I do not recognize her. Here I sorely miss the captions and biographical information the phone usually provides. She does the classic little celeb wave, subtle yet not arrogant. This kind of stuff is like honey to the bees, who capture it minutely for about thirty seconds, before moving back to follow the course of the game. This 30-second celeb-harassing time span is also considered standard etiquette.
Half-time: the hundred-thousand legged slumbering giant wakes, yawns, stretches, looks around with a profound sense of ennui, yawns again for emphasis, then turns its hundred thousand heads back down to vocalize a chorus of tweeting.
I feel cut off, lost, adrift. I feel like I haven’t felt in years now, a loneliness of a different kind than the one abundant these days. Looking around, it’s clear that everyone is thoroughly amusing themselves.
Ironically, while I am probably the only one staring at the field, staring as to watch the grass grow, I am the only one who misses the start of the second half. I still haven’t gotten used to the microscopic view, and I need absolute focus to follow the ball around.
In order to escape the sense of solitude dragging me down, I do just that: focus. A modest feat of magic happens. As I watch, I slowly zoom in, ants turn to cats turn to apes turn to men, I discern colors, one team from the other, referee, linesmen, goalkeepers, and finally I get a good grip on that most evasive and fleeting element of all: the ball.
I have never seen football like this, and I become ecstatic. My eyes glide from player to player, sometimes following the action, then focusing on just one of the actors, then everything at the same time, analyzing tactics and patterns. I feel emotionally involved.
Within this dreamlike reverie of mine, a fantastic attack evolves. From the defenders up to the striker, almost everyone contributes with precise passing, intuitive runs, one-twos, a dummy shot and finally a smooth, sober finish. 1-0! I jump out of my chair, I throw my hands up, I scream my lungs out, completely beside myself, feeling fantastic. My neighbors look up. First slightly surprised, then mostly nonplussed.
I realize with a shock no one else is celebrating. The players too seem upset by the lack of response. I figure there must have been another distraction in the crowd just before the goal, which means everyone missed the magic, had its assisting eyes off the pitch.
Again the buzzing sound, strong and getting stronger, again the specks, again the sunrays. No Doppler this time. A cacophony of noise. The bees stick to me. Faint echoes of laughter. With a chuckle I realize I am still on my feet, arms lifted. I yell again. Not saying anything specifically, just sheer noise for noise’s sake. My soul pours out, and everyone can watch it happen. It feels liberating.
The bees leave, my limelight moment is gone. The little machines will go and look for a bee that did capture the goal, to download the data from him and relive the magic moment. There are always a few people in the audience who have their flying cameras on Manual instead of Auto mode, daredevils who hover around the field according to their own whims. These are their grand moments. They concede many things due to their idiosyncrasy, and now they finally have something worth bragging about, something no one else has. As great a day this must be for them, mine trumps theirs. I am certain of that, as sure as I’m still standing, arms aloft, yelling.
Full-time: the hundred-thousand legged slumbering giant wakes, yawns, stretches, looks around with a profound sense of ennui, yawns again for emphasis, then turns its hundred thousand heads back down to vocalize a chorus of tweeting, mechanically gets up to leave.
I feel cut off, lost, adrift. I feel like I haven’t felt in years now, a loneliness of a different kind than the one abundant these days. More than anything, though, I feel vibrant and alive.
