The Westboro Baptist Church is a "Christian" religious cult famous for protesting military funerals with signs proclaiming "God Hates Fags!" The leader of the group, Fred Phelps, is a particularly virulent hatemonger who's not afraid to speak for God, whom he apparently interprets as a narrow-minded, vengeful bigot with a big old country helping of holier-than-thou attitude.
This 24-year-old girl was born into this ball of snakes. Because she questioned its dogma and chose to leave the church, she was cast out of her family. Good riddance, we say. We wish her the best.
I'm looking forward to reading The Pale King, the unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace that will be released later this month. Advance reviews have been glowing. Why read an unfinished book? According to one reader, "The Pale King is, for great swaths, an astonishment, unfinished not in the way of splintery furniture but in the way of Kafka’s Castle or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine." High praise, indeed. And while this may seem like hype, Wallace has delivered the goods in the past and this highly awaited novel--finished or not--may be the publishing event of the season. According to Time Magazine, "If The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist."
Wallace was a thoughtful, extremely intelligent writer who suffered from depression and took his own life in 2008--and certainly that will be the angle of many reviews, that this is his crowning achievement, the culmination of his life's work, his swan song. In our newsy society, everything is reduced to a human interest story, and if death is involved all the better, but DFW's suicide is really just a footnote to this book. If you know his work, you've enjoyed his dark wit and keen eye and you know how funny he can be--depressives make the best comics, truth be told--not funny ha ha, but funny in a sardonic way that encompasses our foibles. For the uninitiated, these highlights from the Charlie Rose Show will help open the door a crack. Better yet, read one of his books. The Pale King will be released April 15th.
I know my way round town. Used to live around here. I know the sites to see, the things they mean to me, and how we tore it down. Let me walk with you cuz it's breaking my heart. The things that we had, the good and the bad - now it's parking lots.
Père Ubu is a strange, underground proto-new wave band that avoids rockist cliches in favor of raw, direct, theatrical avant-garde garage rock. Formed in 1975, when mainstream radio was having a love affair with Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, the band rejected slick pop production values and anticipated the rough, weird world yet to come. Some say they were the missing link between the Velvet Underground and punk rock. Whatever they were, they were outside the box. The group took its name from Père Ubu ("father Ubu"), the protagonist of Ubu Roi ("Ubu, the King"), a play by French writer Alfred Jarry, which gives you a clue to their intentions. Greil Marcus, rock-crit emeritus, said "Pere Ubu boards a train that passes through a modern nation as if it were an ancient land, all ruin and portent, prophecy and decay. Thus the terrain makes the familiar terrain strange, unseen - new." The question that comes to mind is, "Who's the fat guy?" That's David Thomas, the only constant in this ever-changing band from Edge City.
Welcome to Mars! It's open all hours. Bill's in the back and Fred's on the phone, sayin, "What are we doing here?" Oh, he was sayin that you are never alone in the Twilight Zone. What are we doing here?
So throw off your stupid cloak Embrace all that you fear For joy will conquer all despair In my Blakean year
It's national poetry month. I don't expect all sentient beings to have Blakean visions or to scribble down poetic thoughts or to even read a poem. Most people are too busy. Most people lack the imagination, or the willingness to risk seeming foolish, to write a poem. Most people quake in their boots and stare at the ground and scratch and spit and think poetry is for gays and weak sisters, juvenelia written on PeeChees--or think that poetry is something off a Hallmark card or has to do with an old woman who once lived in Nantucket. Can't blame 'em. They're too busy to slow down and smell the poetry. They're too important to waste their valuable time communing with the Muse. If you could look into their hearts you would probably find that they're deathly afraid of those naked, unguarded moments of the unchained mind--that poetic state that comes unbidden at three in the morning. That state must be kept at bay, distracted, subdued, tricked into silence--and if they ever let up and stopped their internal, sub-vocal peptalk for even a moment what angels or demons would they be inviting to slowdance?
Most men, said Thoreau, lead quiet lives of desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. How sad, and how boring. No guts no glory. As if in retort, Jack Kerouac, in his overquoted phrase, would utter "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..." and so on. And then he drank himself into a stupor and backed off from such a demanding proclamation he himself couldn't live up to. His rowdy days were over long before he buried his guns. He chickened out in the end.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Robert Frost said that. It's as good as any description of what inspires the subversive act of poetry. What good are poems? No good whatsoever. If anyone tells you otherwise be suspicious. In the right hands, poems are about as useful as beach grass, as October light, as the midnight of the soul, as an unspoken truth, as tits on a bull.
Gide, the thief, once said, "Please do not understand me too quickly."
My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.
Anyway, I lived on the streets and did pretty good until I got caught stealing, what was it? I kicked in a restaurant window, went in and took all the food that I wanted, and while coming out I was grabbed.
I remember the people I knew in prison; I was very fortunate to know them - they came from 1910, 1920, 1930.
I was what? - twelve years old - and I was thrown in the cells with these people, so I learned fast.
The lucky thing was that I was Italian; when the other Italians saw me fight back, they came to my defense.
They, that unnamed "they," they've knocked me down but I got up. I always get up-and I swear when I went down quite often I took the fall; nothing moves a mountain but itself. They, I've long ago named them me. --quotes from Gregory Corso, American poet(March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001)
"Oh, how this spring of love resembleth, The uncertain glory of an April day, Which now shows all beauty of the Sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away." William Shakespeare certainly wasn't talking about this first day of April because if love "resembleth" this spring day it would be a cat-and-dog love, a drencher and a drizzler, a love like a cloudburst, deluge, flood, flurry, monsoon, sprinkling and a rainstorm. This love would be a watered-down love, a soggy love, a wet and waterlogged love. We all know love can be furious and fickle, heart-filling and crazy-making and untrustworthy, like the weather, but there is a love that is sublime and can always be counted upon and that is the love of a good sandwich.
The love of a good sandwich can't be beat, whether it's a Cuban pulled pork or a croque-monsieur, a juicy French dip or a chicken parmigiana, a double-decker Dagwood my mother stuffs with hot peppers or the Reuben my friend Jim pan-fries for poker parties.
“There are sandwich shops in New York which offer the nobility and gentry a choice of no less than 100 different sandwiches, all of them alluring and some of them downright masterpieces.” -H.L. Mencken
Mencken was right. The great delis of New York--the Carnegie and the Stage and Katz's--have elevated the sandwich to godlike levels, in particular the hot pastrami sandwich. This is food, sure, but this is Art as impressive as anything you might catch on museum mile. Pastrami masters are zen monks of an exacting faith. They have looked into the void and returned with a sandwich. They have created something beautiful. Check out these deli guys and you might get a clue.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535 BC - 475 BC) famously said "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you." While the Greek may have been correct in the philosophical sense he was wrong when it came to music. Musicians return to the same river all the time, set up camp, and pan for nuggets where once gold was found. The Rolling Stones are a case in point. They stepped into the same river many times and started out covering old Chess records by the likes of Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters. Their first single was an old Chuck Berry nugget, "Come on." With all due respect to Heraclitus, they were part of that ever-changing flow of time. "All things flow," he said, "and nothing endures but change."
"Watching the River Flow" might have been written by Heraclitus, but it was actually written by another philosopher knee-deep in the rushing river, Bob Dylan. The Stones recently recorded a bluesy cover of the song for an upcoming tribute to Ian Stewart, one of their original members, and word has it that Bill Wyman, another original, returned from retirement to play bass on the track. It sounds good. Out of time and timeless. Give the song a listen and pay attention to the wind-down at the end.
Note: To some contemporary music fans, Dylan and the Stones may seem irrelevant and outdated, but even if you're spinning hip hop, Deerhoof, or the Glee soundtrack, every so often it's worth going back to learn something new from something old. Pack a lunch and head down to the river. Who knows? You just might bump into Heraclitus.
You are beautiful. But what does that mean? Is beauty entirely relative or are there universal qualities we respond to regardless of culture, race, class, creed and hairstyle? Artists take note. Dave Dutton has a provocative theory, and with the help of swift animator Andrew Park he will rivet your attention for the duration of this video. Afterward, I have some nice hand axes I'd like to show you that I made myself. Hey, I'm serious.
Phuck Phelps.
