The Schoolyard Of Forever

I'm not sure exactly when it dawned on me in conscious words, when its virtual 12-point type scrolled across the frontal marquis, but it did so. Most people never mature emotionally beyond who they were at 17 or so (I haven't) and many freeze earlier. If you find yourself talking to a roomful of executives, for example, assuming they're rational adults is a huge mistake. We may be experts at hiding it, but in the electric assemblages which our neurons fire, including the envelope which stretches from back to front and in which we perform name-calling, we're still children.

In that roomful of professionals there is a boy like the one you slammed your head into on the playground your first day of kindergarten; there is the poor speller who still feels dumb about it; there's the girl whose primary objective is to maintain a clique; and sooner or later, there'll be the guy who's been held back a couple times, the pissed-off terror who is going to rough you up and try to establish a protection racket. Boardrooms are classrooms, politics are schoolyards. Dick Cheney and Rummy are still out there, holding people up against the anchor fence, we're still beating up the maladapted kids from the bad homes.

The title above is a poem by Charles Bukowski. In it, he picks up the regimented brutality of a Prussian-designed compulsory school system, turns and examines it, telescopes it up then declaims it down into what's lacking in a country's soul. An awareness of it. A resistance to it. Apparently his grade-school nemesis was named Herbie Ashcroft; one of mine was named Alan Pabis, who has a facebook page. No hard feelings, Alan, hope you're well. Can't think of you without feeling that spot on my right hand, the 4th metacarpal. Where the bone thickened after the teachers privately came up and thanked me for hitting you. Here is the beginning to The Schoolyard of Forever:

the schoolyard was a horror show: the bullies, the dragons, the
freaks

the beatings against the wire fence
the eyes of our mates watching
glad that they were not the victims
we were beaten well and good
and afterwards
followed
taunted all the way home to our homes of hell
full of more beatings

in the schoolyard the bullies ruled well, and in the restrooms
at the water fountains they owned us and disowned us
but in our way we held
never begged for mercy
we took it straight on
silently
we were trained within that horror
a horror that would later hold us in good stead
and that came around
as we grew in several ways with time
the bullies gradually began to deflate, lose power

grammar school
Jr. high
high school
we grew like odd plants
gathering nourishment
blossoming
then the bullies tried to befriend us
and we turned them away

(for those who would go on, here's the rest from bukowski.net)

Neko Case In The Crystal Ballroom

Seats for Neko Case's show at the Paramount in Seattle were already selling for $250 back in April. They were only $25 per in Portland so a kindly internet goddess, aka Lord Wife, swooped in to scoop up two for my birthday, booking us onto an Amtrak and into the Hotel DeLuxe. It's just a few blocks away from the Crystal Ballroom where she played two nights, an old hall with a fully functional "floating floor" once popular for swing dancing.

I was turned onto Neko Case by a friend's facebook aside in late February, never hearing anything of her before. The more she sinks in now, the clearer she stands as a poet who happened to develop into a singer. Poetry in turn brings back Mr. Marcinec, my high school AP English teacher, who once asked the class to debate whether verse can be assessed on technical merits alone, or if the artist's life must be taken into account. The answer, to me, was as sharp as a late hit. If you walk home past dark woods on bitter-cold nights near Robert Frost's haunts, as I did, musing on death whilst rejecting it is an option is easy to spot. You have to move, or you have to freeze.

Knowing that Coleridge woke up from his opium dreaming of Xanadu and Kubla Khan increases your odds at guessing what suppressed wish a stately Pleasure Dome signifies, and J. Alfred Prufrock's spiritual exhaustion starts to resonate when you plot it against T.S. Eliot's European travels as Edwardian life unraveled prior to World War One. Neko Case went to school in Tacoma, leaving home at 15 to live in a classmate's unfinished cellar while the nearby Green River Killer was ripping through more than 70 young women, half of them under-aged runaways. She's still scared to walk alone at night, and absent that context, you might awkwardly misinterpret one of her most popular songs, Deep Red Bells. She wrote it not as an ode to g-spots, but to victims:

where does this mean world cast its cold eye?
who's left to suffer long about you?
does your soul cast about like an old paper bag
past empty lots and early graves?
those like you who lost their way
murdered on the interstate
while the red bells rang like thunder
deep red bells, deep as I've been done

Putting Case's name in the same breath as Coleridge and Eliot is intentional. She belongs. At 18, she started playing drums for a succession of punk bands. A god-given ability to sing was noticed and invited to do covers, and from there she went on to share in the artistic processes of a number of bands. She credits collaboration with musicians such as The New Pornographers, The Corn Sisters, The Sadies, Cub, Maow, and Kelly Hogan for teaching her the craft. She began to write her own material, releasing her first solo album (The Virginian) in 1997.

Her pieces combine stark observation with gorgeous melodies and fervent passions. Anger stirs unmistakably below all the surfaces, and there's a wild, even creepy quality to her, like wind blowing dust over abandoned roadside attractions. Flash-floods of overstuffed vans and army bases, grabby brakes and shabby blokes, emotional voids and hangovers, waitress gigs and crippling angsts come gushing through like gray water in laundromats. While her songs aren't always equally intense or personal they're sent from the same address, and she writes only as a woman who has been helpless before men can. It must've been very tough for a control freak of such high order. Her body of solo work is nothing less than a resolution to turn and face the humiliations of love, and, with music as her protector, to learn. With Middle Cyclone, she sets out to explore, finally having taken her struggle by the smooth handle.

The album seems to rein in vocal strength in favor of sharper lyrical focus. Every note and part of each composition is arranged to let you apprehend the words, delivered atop exceptionally precise instrumentals which often meander from traditional verse/chorus structure to weave in micro-songs. Heard live, the band performed a studio-perfect version of every piece, so tightly that "Neko Case" might best be thought of as a collective. Middle Cyclone was accordingly recorded in her barn in Vermont with over a dozen musical guests, including Garth Hudson (formerly of The Band), M Ward and a nest of robins in the rafters.

The Crystal Ballroom was Sold Out and a waiting line had already formed outside the closed box office two hours before the show. We spotted it in perfect time, so I snagged the best standing-room spots in the house--we occupied the "Magic Corner" 20 feet away from the artistic breakthrough of the year's main mike. Even without industry backing (Case's US label is ANTI-), Middle Cyclone debuted at #3 on Billboard, occupies the #2 spot on US Rock and is easily the most successful indie release of 2009. After a long hike, she arrived at a secret narrow embarkation point where critical acclaim meets critical mass.

Case had long been pigeonholed as a banshee, a speed-baller for belting out other people's songs. While there's no overlooking her dominating voice, labeling her as a torch singer is downright obstructive, and fails to describe how she can sail across genres and vocal planes. Let me put it this way: she could sing like Patsy Cline, Tanya Tucker or Rosemary Clooney, but they could not have easily returned the favor. As a pure singer, she's capable of nerdy introspection, tobacco-row mourning, indie-pop smoothies, eco-folk, jagged punk, charcoal chanteuse, retro orchestra and I would bet Wagnerian opera. She can conjure an interstate truck stop at 4AM, high school sweethearts home for goosebumps, fuzzy heroin magic carpets, square dancers bouncing off '68 Cadillacs with big chrome bumpers, and spiky CBGB mosh pits. Her voice attracted big-label attentions, but its proprietor had other plans:

"I'm not out to become Faith Hill, I never want to play an arena, and I never want to be on the MTV Video Music Awards, much less make a video with me in it. I would like to reach a larger audience and see the state of music change in favor of musicians and music fans in my lifetime. I care very much about that."

Case claimed there would be no love songs on Middle Cyclone, that all the lyrics could be taken literally, that Nature would be the focus. Which may be technically true, but it's akin to Stephen King stating, "I'm through with horror. My next books will all be travel guides." Ruthless restraint and a naturalist's aperture are devices which set the album apart, brilliantly so, because her genies can't be bottled or chained. You feel them straining and threatening to break loose at a remove, and you can hear when they beat the screens down. The first song is about a libidinous tornado unable to find its lover, or make him understand, carving his name across three counties. "People Got A Lotta Nerve" is about a caged elephant and an aquarium killer whale taking revenge, but like Coleridge's subconscious, Case sidles up and becomes a defiant predator giving fair warning. Then, as with Frost's deep dark woods at night, it's a mite difficult to rule out indelicate possibilities when she tosses her throat back and wails, "I'm a man-man-man, man-man-man eater!"

At a concert you pick up things the albums and tubes can't convey. You realize Neko's an introvert, not very comfortable in the spotlight, self-conscious of her relatively flat butt. Her skin and hair have the translucence and texture of perogies in orange vodka sauce, and she honestly loves animals. She's really just there to cut diamonds, and to compensate she's hired a statuesque, lung-expanding brunette backup singer arc-welded like a water tower to her left who banters in the pauses like an extroverted emcee, announcing her love for good burgers, that she's 46, and "my beauty secret is low wattage."

Before singing "The Pharaohs" Case remarks, "This song is about my second boyfriend," and when she pours out the bourbons of "my body burned, my legs ached/but you never came to bed/you just left me there awake/you kept me wanting wanting wanting/like the wanting in the movies and the hymns," veins thick as her middle fingers stand out on her neck. She discloses that "Red Tide" is about 3 million assholes who moved apropos to Seattle during grunge's gestation and suddenly noticed they hate the rain. The mollusks, they have won. You notice she reads voraciously and make a mental note: if you ever run into her, don't ask her about what she's done. Ask what she thinks of The Confessions of St. Augustine.

After whistlings and stompings on the trampoline floor the backup singer came back up first for the encore and you caught her say "Oh, what the hell." They played for another forty-five minutes, so you knew they were done for good and pressed back through the bodies of screaming cognoscenti. You walked up to the DeLuxe and asked your wife how best to classify sui generis. She pauses and says, "Country gothic," and you think of how Boadicea might have fared if she'd properly armored herself for the Romans and their arenas. You think of her song about waking up to disorienting hotel fans spinning overhead, heads webbed with indiscretions watching maids who have nowhere else to be in Portland on a Sunday morning:

Prison girls are not impressed
They’re the ones that have to clean this mess
They’ve traded more for cigarettes
Than I’ve managed to express

Neko Case, "Hold On, Hold On" Music & Lyrics

A little mental vacation on a sunny cumulonimbus-free afternoon in the Pacific Northwest. Tickets to Neko Case's June shows at the Paramount in Seattle start at two hundred and twenty dollars and you can't even find her music on a jukebox in a bar. Her album Middle Cyclone is taking her over the top music industry be damned. She writes it, she belts it, great musicians back it and a vocal accompanist adds a 12th-part Jimmy Martin high lonesome harmony to all the right places. Amongst her musical influences are Hank Williams, Tom Waits, Loretta Lynn, Neil Young, Nick Lowe, Charles Bukowski and Ralph Stanley. Lord Wife got tickets in Portland for my splendid birthday, at the Crystal Ballroom. The lyrics:

The most tender place in my heart is for strangers
I know it's unkind but my own blood is much too dangerous
Hangin' round the ceiling half the time
Hangin' round the ceiling half the time

Compared to some, I've been around
But I really did try so hard
That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on"

In the end I was the mean girl
Or somebody's in-between girl
Now it's the devil I love
And that's as funny as real love

I leave the party at 3AM
Alone, thank god!
With a valium from the bride--
It's the devil I love
It's the devil I love...
And that's as funny as real love
And it's as real as True Love

That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on!"

That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on!"

Born To Run: Lyrics, Bruce Springsteen

Was waiting in the car outside the East-Side credit union today avoiding the news and listening to classic Rock when 'Born to Run' came on. Reflected how text is obscured when it goes into song even for the Boss. Wanted to understand more about the New Jersey of his artist eyes. Fished the iPhone out of my pocket and searched for the lyrics to confirm, read them and said yep the poetry he wrote is different from the song of the proper laureate of my America. He saw the same things we did. He just took the time to grab a scrap of paper to sketch it down with a pen right then and there and beat the ore out later like a blacksmith melting language until it answered back with the right curves and tings. The words:

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American Dream.
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
sprung from cages out on highway Nine, chrome-wheeled
fuel injected and steppin' out over the line.

Baby this town rips the bones from your back.
It's a death-trap, it's a suicide rap,
we gotta get out while we're young...
cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Wendy, let me in. I wanna be your friend--
I wanna guard your dreams and visions.
Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims
and strap your hands across my engines.
Together we could break this trap,
we'll run till we drop, and baby we'll never go back

Will you walk with me out on the wire?
Baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider,
but I gotta find out how it feels.
I want to know if love is wild, girl,
I wanna know if love is real

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard.
The girls comb their hair in rear-view mirrors and the boys try to look so hard;
the amusement park rises bold and stark. Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist.
I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.
Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide.
Together, Wendy, we'll live with the sadness
and I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.

Someday girl I don't know when, we're gonna get to that place
where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun.
But 'til then, tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Caravaggio Cheated!

And it's comforting, in a way, because elephants and cats paint better than me. Via the Guardian:

Revered as the baroque master of lifelike portraits and light and shadow, the 16th-century painter Caravaggio is now being touted as the first master of photographic technique, two centuries before the formal invention of the camera.

The Italian artist has long been suspected of turning his studio into a giant camera obscura, punching a hole in the ceiling to help project images on to his canvas. But new research claims that Caravaggio also used chemicals to turn his canvases into primitive photographic film, "burning" images he then sketched on to for works such as St Matthew and the Angel.

"We were already sure Caravaggio projected images of his sitters, but we have now found mercury salt in his canvases, which is light-sensitive and used in film," said Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at Florence's SACI institute.

Lapucci said she investigated the use of chemicals after building a camera obscura with artist David Hockney. The technique of using lens and mirrors to project an image was written about by Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio was reputedly inspired to use one by the philosopher Giovanni Battista della Porta.

"You get the image by turning the whole studio into the camera obscura, but you need darkness, and the problem is you cannot paint in darkness," she said. "X-ray fluorescence shows the presence of the mercury salt in his canvases. That is not uncommon because it was used in glue, but we are awaiting proof he was using it on the surface, in his primer."

The image burned into the primer would last about 30 minutes and only be visible in the gloom. "Therefore he used a white lead paint to sketch, mixed with barium sulphate which was luminous, and which we have found traces of. That way he could see where he was sketching."

The image above is Judith Beheading Holofernes, a depiction of yet another comforting Bible story, this one from the Book of Judith. Holofernes was Nebuchadnezzar's general besieging a Hebrew city. Judith was a beautiful widow in the city who seduced him, got him drunk, and cut off his head with his own sword. She carried his head along the ramparts to avert the city's imminent surrendur, simultaneously lifting Nebuchadnezzar's siege. Perhaps some good woman in Washington, D.C. will be inspired to do likewise with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

The excellent Bee Keeper's Apprentice uses Christofano Allori's 1613 version of the event as her blog graphic, and by coincidence the same massive, ornately framed, seven-foot by nine-foot painting would greet visitors to the living room in my stepfather's house, as follows:

Books Don't Burn Easily

books don't burn easily you'll know that if you've ever tried a pile
they're anti-flammable so you've got to put them down and pour
on gasoline and that's good because we have so many in our house
it will never burn neither but my body does and it will burn to cinders
after i'm gone if they come for my wife they will need to negotiate
narrow pathways and breach bocages because she'll have the whole
place barricaded and her protectors will be loyal phalanxes of books

People Got A Lotta Nerve, Music & Lyrics By Neko Case

Fair warning. If you click on that vid there will be returning. It'll take you back to your daddy's Ford to wild scallions growing up alongside gutted roads to the flat bench with your almost sixteen year old girl smushed up just as close as she can sit beside without you driving with her in your lap. There's a rifle in the gun rack enough gas to get there and back so you're driving off to find Paris in the dark.

She was right there with you too on the stainless steel cover of the cooling fan you sat on when you were nine watching people in the pavilion dancing and drinking their heads off to the Country Playboys singing promenade all the way swing your corner lady and promenade the hall. This girl is right where you're from doesn't even think about fighting fair she does not compromise and she told the whole music industry to go fuck itself and it did. So if you choose not to click on the vid I understand but here's what she had to say:

So the saying says an elephant never forgets. Standing in the concrete cave, sway inside and sing! They walked over the ocean and their dreams they dreamed awake until the lights grew dim. Until the cop cars came. Everybody tells me this is crazy yes I know but I'm a man man man man man man man eater! But still you're surprised prised prised, when I eat ya.

You know...they call them killer whales but you seemed suprised when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank where you can't turn around it took half your leg and both your lungs and I craved, I ate hearts of sharks. I know you know it and I'm a man man man man man man man eater but still you're surprised prised prised when I eat ya. It will end again in moon-lit song, it will end again in moon-lit song.

As an added bonus, Neko Case has been banned for life from the Grand Ole Opry for taking off her top during a performance. Let's go see her when she comes our way.

Smokestack Lightning, Music & Lyrics By Howlin' Wolf

Chester Arthur Burnett was better known as Howlin' Wolf. He was an ass-kicker in the crafts of the blues and life, stood six foot six and traveled north and south across a border of 300 pounds. He was born in West Point, Mississippi, in a sharecropping triangle of the Delta as flat and hot as a pancake off the griddle. His were the people who invented deep blues and his mother never accepted any money from him because it came from the Devil's music.

Charley Patton taught Chester how to play guitar and Sonny Boy Williamson schooled his harmonica while living with his sister. Chester backed up Robert Johnson in juke joints as a teenager. First time I heard the Wolf too late I cursed my culture for hiding him from me and just like Sam Phillips did I said, "This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies." Chester fell in love at first sight with a girl named Lillie from a good family in an audience in West Chicago. They had kids he became a devoted dad drove a Pontiac station wagon while he succeeded and for Lillie he sloughed off illiteracy in his 40s and passed a middle-aged GED.

Near the end of his career he had painful terminal cancer but he'd still go play a set at a bar and sing stop your train darlin' let a poor boy ride. His manager Eddie Shaw would drive him back to the hospital in Chicago where his big body died in 1976. He wanted all of it not just some of it. He wanted all of it. This song is about chasing after women and experimenting with electricity and waiting for that card that's so high and wild you'll never have to deal another. Much of a muchness.

This song is about Chester Arthur Burnett and a little bitty boy inside seeing his future brown-eyed wife out in the audience. It's like those feelings you may remember when you were a little child when you woke up and the morning smiled so you tilted your head worked your mouth but the words didn't come out yet so you did what you could do and smiled back. Chester and Lillie did that. When lightning hits, it doesn't arc down from the sky. It is spit up from the ground, its undeniable frictional energy searches for some high and appropriate dense object, tenses around it and bolts up through the cradling clouds out into higher space. Smokestack Lightnin' is about thunderstorms its about how a cold front hits a warm front and how the earth we walk upon ejaculates. The lyrics:

Ah, oh, smokestack lightning
Shinin', just like gold!
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Ah, whoo hoo, ooo-ooh...
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, tell me, baby
What's the, matter with you?
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, tell me baby
Where did ya...stay last night?
A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh--stop your train
Let a poor boy ride
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, fare ya well!
Never see, ah, you no more
Ah, why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Ooh, whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, who been here baby since
I, I been gone, maybe a little, bitty boy?
Girl, be on!
Ah, whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whoo hoo

From The Comments Section "Of Coal Mines & Canaries"

Still Life Living, who wrote the original post, observed:

It is interesting how we Americans recently poured $140 billion into Citibank ($50 billion cash and the rest thru off-balance sheet Fed incentives, loans, and cash infusions), and the market cap today is only $19.35 billion!

God bless America. Where else could such a ruse be pulled off? Why didn't the US just buy all of the outstanding shares at market prices and go forward with a truth commission like investigation? Once we own the company, we own the history. Then we can prosecute and maybe seize assets and get our money back.

Halliburton has a market cap of $16.4 billion. I think the USA should buy it so we can own the history and start prosecutions.

Where did that 150 billion go? At this point, no one knows, but that's a shit-load of money, 7 or 8 times the total worth. Far cheaper to buy their ass, buy all their assets. And what are they building in there, between 10-K reporting deadlines? I don't know, but Tom Waits and I will tell you one thing: they're not building swing-sets for the children. It would be much cheaper to buy the truth than to keep paying off our captors.

Blind Faith, 1969 Music & Lyrics: Come Down Off Your Throne, And Leave Your Body Alone

Come down off your throne
and leave your body alone
Somebody must change
You are the reason I've
been waiting so long
somebody holds the key

Well, I'm near the end
and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted, and
I can't find my way home

Come down on your own
and leave your body alone
somebody must change
You are the reason I've been
waiting all these years
somebody holds the key!

Well, I'm near the end--
and I just ain't got the time!
oh, oh, and I'm wasted, and I...can't find my way home.

Counter Culture

Graffiti artist Banksy depicts a street worker power-washing cave art.

The Grandest Novel

Opening paragraph to The Odyssey:

This is a story about a man, one who was never at a loss. He had travelled far in the world, after the sack of Troy, the virgin fortress; he saw many cities of men, and learnt their mind; he endured many troubles and hardships in the struggle to save his own life and to bring back his men safe to their homes. He did his best, but he could not save his companions. For they perished by their own madness, because they killed and ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun-God, and the god took care that they should never see home again.

'Jolene,' Ray Lamontagne, Song & Lyrics

There's a guy in front of the grocery store, looking down at the ground, rocking back and forth on a folding chair, abusing an acoustic guitar. As you get closer you can hear him start to sing, "Cocaine flame in my bloodstream. I sold my coat when I hit Spokane. Bought myself a hard pack of cigarettes. In the early morning rain." Right with his first line, he has earned your attention.

An interviewer in Australia pressed Ray LaMontagne on the inspirations for his songs, where they came from, his artistic process. After uncomfortably deflecting a couple of the questions LaMontagne paused for a long time and then said, "I was reckless with my self sometimes." He didn't betray any secrecies to which he'd sworn, feeling his songs already do it well enough. The accidents of linguistic structures force poetry into sidetracks, sometimes inaccuracies and sometimes embellishments, but while soaking in his constructive mastery, you can also tell it's for real:

Cocaine flame in my bloodstream
sold my coat when I hit Spokane
bought myself a hard pack of cigarettes
in the early morning rain

Lately my hands they don't feel like mine
my eyes been stung with dust and blind
held you in my arms one time
lost you just the same

Jolene,
I ain't about to go straight--
it's too late
I found myself face-down in a ditch
with booze in my hair, blood in my lips
a picture of you holding a picture of me
in the pocket of my blue jeans

Still don't know what love means
Still don't know what love means
Jolene!

Been so long since I seen your face
or felt a part of this human race
I've been living out of this here suitcase for way too long
A man needs something he can hold onto
a nine pound hammer or a woman like you
either one of them things will do

Jolene,
I ain't about to go straight--
it's too late
I found myself face-down in a ditch
with booze in my hair, blood on my lips
a picture of you holding a picture of me
in the pocket of my blue jeans

Still don't know what love means
Still don't know what love means
Jolene!

Coldplay's 'Viva la Vida' & Lyrics

Myth prefigures art, art prefigures physics, and physics prefigure the unthinking efficiencies of resulting orthodoxies. I've heard this song quite a few times this summer, not least because it has climbed to #1 on the charts. Like all their other work, Coldplay's trademark poppy-flows lull you into swaying trances, and as the overwhelmed words wash over you, the song becomes something like a holograph. Beautiful, rotating, floating just beyond your grasp, you never quite get at what they're about by just listening.

The band's music in general and this song in particular are vessels, it seems, for world music and for an entirely different commercial model, bearing other artists and styles away from nearly a century of American dominance, ostensibly from what has become a usurious, hyper-vigilant Industry, a rusting monolith thoroughly ill-suited to digital distribution. The album 'Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends' is themed around guerillas and insurgencies, around love in all its diversely and promiscuously international forms, around the global cycles of war and peace. Song and album were both produced by Brian Eno and released exclusively on iTunes on May 5th, with Europe having to wait quite a while for production of a physical CD. By the 30th of June, the album had sold more digital downloads than any in history.

The clearly audible first line, "I used to rule the world," is a tip-off to greater depths and possible endurance, as is its title from the Frida Kahlo painting of watermelons; the album's cover art is from the 1830 painting by Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. I dawdled a while before searching out the lyrics, but sure enough, frontman Chris Martin, better known in the US as Gwyneth Paltrow's husband (for whom he wrote the intimately disclosing song 'Yellow'), penned a title-track meditation on imperial strivings and deceits: "Revolutionaries wait...for my head on a silver plate. Just a puppet on a lonely string...oh who would ever want to be king?"

Martin thinks Saint Peter will never call his name. Not sure about that, but funny enough, the song and album's release are an artist's crowning achievements, ones which surely demanded an intense devotion to craft, which surely plant new guidons for others to follow. The viddy is of them playing to an adoring, seemingly thrown-together crowd at the BBC Centre. Here are the lyrics:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemies eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing:
"Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!"

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
Once you knew there was never, never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world


It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in.
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People could not believe what I'd become
Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
I know Saint Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world

Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Someday Never Comes" Lyrics & Music

If someone were to ask, "What's the most American music?," a whirlwind of sound and images would jam through my mind, Robert Johnson playing his guitar and poisoned with lye, Roseanne Cash singing her high lonesomes, Louis Armstrong dealing effortless masteries, Julia Ward Howe getting martial. Flat and Scruggs, Wynonie Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Buddy Holly, Blondie, and Led Zeppelin dwell co-equal in the pantheon. Even if those last guys were Brits they did it right, and they did it good.

If someone says, "No, you can only choose one artist," the first one I'd think of is Creedence Clearwater Revival, the roots-rock band formed in El Cerrito High School, California. Most of the rhythms and chords they use are 200 years old if they're a day, their music is simple as grass and non-Americans simply would never have put it together. Americans are always going to listen to Creedence, and would always have loved John Fogerty's songs at first listen. His songs contain our core, and come from the geographies which define us.

Strong statement, I suppose. Yet you can imagine Revolutionary war minutemen absent-mindedly singing "Suzie Q" together as they trudge along a dirt road; you can see chain gangs cutting sugar cane, singing "Long as I Can See the Light," families would have fun around log cabin firesides singing "Looking Out My Back Door,"and lonely muleskinners hauling their loads west would no doubt sing "Molina" to empty plains. "Proud Mary" might just as well have been sung on the steamboats going up rivers and around the bends. In a Simpsons cartoon episode, Homer Simpson hears a panicked Marge ask if anyone knows how to perform CPR, so he looks up into the distance and sings, "I see a Bad Moon a-risin'--I see troubles on the way." I rest my case.

CCR remains popular in the YouTube age, with most of the tunes mentioned above having been downloaded millions of times. In their hay day, the band was so popular and prolific they released four Top Ten albums in 18 months. "Someday Never Comes" was one of the last songs they wrote before breaking up. Here are the lyrics:

First thing I remember
Was askin Papa, "Why!? "
For there were many things I didn't know.

And Daddy always smiled,
He took me by the hand
Sayin, 'Someday...you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now
each and every mother's son
you better learn it fast
you better learn it young
'cause someday never comes.

Well, time and tears went by
and I collected dust,
there were many things I didn't know
and when daddy went away
he said, "Try to be a man,
and someday...you'll understand."

And then, one day in April
I wasn't even there
there were many things I didn't know:
a son was born to me,
and his mama held his hand
saying "Someday, you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now
each and every mother's son
you better learn it fast
you better learn it young
'cause someday never comes.

Think it was September, the year I went away
for there were many things I didn't know
and I still see him standing, trying to be a man;
I said, "Someday, you'll understand."

Butch And Sundance: Reel Heroes, And Real

News came out last month that Paul Newman has lung cancer, and probably has only weeks to live. Famous for his film acting, such as his smash hit with Robert Redford, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," most people don't know he was just as successful in car racing over the past three decades--in 1979 he came in second at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and incredibly, he more recently placed third in an SCCA Trans-Am race at the age of 78. Yet it's his work as a philanthropist which is likely to endure--all profits from Newman's Own food products go to charities, most of them anonymous, so far generating over $220 million, and his family will continue taking that forward.

Newman and writer A.E. Hotchner founded Newman's Own in 1982 as a hare-brained scheme, selling olive oil and vinegar dressing. In 1988, they started the Hole in the Wall Gang summer camps for terminally ill children. In 1993, they started the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, for courage in the face of adversity to defend freedom of speech; amongst other winners was Sibel Edmonds, the FBI employee who tried to bring government-sponsored sale of nuclear secrets to light. He was no slouch when it came to personally facing up to bad guys, having once been #19 on Nixon's Enemies List for his effective support of Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Presidential Campaign.

As a person, Newman always played it very close to the vest, and he's not the type to explain things. It's hard to figure out his motivations in any detail. As an actor, however, they're all written out on his face: a stubborn, competitive-as-hell guy with a quirky sense of humor who believes in giving people a fair shake.

One could speculate further. Newman was a World War Two veteran, serving as a torpedo bomber's tailgunner on the USS Bunker Hill. He was at the battle for Okinawa, and the pilot of his plane had an ear infection, so he didn't take part in an attack from which none of his flight-mates returned. He would not be the first veteran who, thankful for his good fortune, vowed to give back to people. Whatever drove him, Newman appreciated life, took its full measure, and did a tremendous amount of good on the way. May his pains be brief.

Huckleberry Finn's Opus And Time Magazine's Feature Of Mark Twain

The editors of Time, buffered like the rest of us upon litanies of atrocity, searched last week for something we could be proud of, and they settled on Mark Twain, who they put on the cover. The main article, written by Roy Blount, Jr., opened like this:

What, if anything, about this benighted moment of American life will anyone in the future look back on with nostalgia?

The nostalgia is this: a country produced a humorist, thinker, and moralist who took the pen-name of Mark Twain. As a young man, the restless, traveling parent-less Sam Clemens from Hannibal, Missouri hitched a boat-ride down to New Orleans, where he schemed to go to South America for to make his fortune smuggling cocaine back to the US. Not finding a ship quickly enough, he signed on as a steamboat pilot's apprentice and went back up the Mississippi. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he signed up briefly for the Confederacy, and pistolled an innocent horseman down in the darkness by his nervous bivouac in the woods. He stood over the man's body, trying to yearn him back to life, and he left the service soon thereafter to light out for silver mining in the territories where he became a yellow journalist.

That's a common story we, all of us Americans as ancestral flotsam, come from. Sam was like any of our other over-reaching rough young opportunists who didn't fit, a printer, a digger, a Billy the Kid, an adventurer who was just another searching inconsiderate who wanted something better. But with this kid there was a twist, and somehow his glimmerings of conscience kept steadily growing, aided by an ability to embroider yarns, to write and observe and express himself in print.

Eventually, in 1884, he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a semi-autobiographical or imagined examination of his childhood. For its sublime, honest, between-the-lines treatment of the turbulent, existential relationships of race, space, and the roiling cultures of an emerging country--themes which haven't calmed down by a long shot--it is the crowning achievement of American literature. I'm not sure if I've ever read a greater work, more accurately plumbing and surveying, more celebrating, capturing and penetrating, including all of Shakespeare's.

I have some inklings of what personal introspections, meditations, and unsparing intellectual braveries it took to write it. Not surprisingly, Twain said it took him the longest of all his books to write. It called all the fundamental assumptions of his boyhood appropriately into question, yet in many if not most high schools in my country today, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a forbidden work. (It makes liberal use of the language which was common at the time of its writing and subject, and of a pejorative word referring to color and race.) Quite simply, this is a cultural crime. Banning such a masterpiece is like burning down trees because they might one day burn, for Huck Finn is nothing less than the secret code and avatar of our national salvation.

In the story, a desperate, regularly abused and abject Huck Finn spreads blood on the ground and makes it look like his father, the notorious vagrant drunkard Pap Finn has killed him and dumped him in the river. At the same time, Miss Watson's slave Jim escapes her ownership because he longs to see his family, and the two wind up on the same mid-stream island. They elude the search parties sent to find them, and then take a raft down the Mississippi. There are misadventures, and Huck is tormented now and again by the legal and moral questions of sheltering an escaped slave. On page 100, he considers the temporal and eternal consequences of going against social and heavenly conscriptions, and decides that he solemnly will risk Hell for harboring a slave.

We gradually begin to realize that Jim is a thoroughly wise and moral man, about the only one we meet in the book, and that he's the best father figure Huck has ever had. At the end of the story, we learn that Jim earlier shielded Huck from the sight or knowledge of his biological father's dead body in the wreck of a gambling house that was swept down the river on a flood. Jim tells Huck to great relief that he's not condemned to return to his father's wrathful fists in St. Petersburg (Hannibal), and Huck may live with Tom Sawyer's family. Jim, having reached a providential freedom, takes his leave to go see his his wife and children at last.

It was Twain's intention that Jim, a slave, was Huck's better father, and if you closely read the story of their journey down the central, massive, live-giving river of our country, their mutual regard for each other gathers steadily until it starts to get unmistakably loud and finally hints of something greater. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a beautiful story, but it was intended even more as an allegory, you see, about the people in our country eventually becoming equal, about the rightness of them loving each other without reference to ownership, poor circumstance, or color. Twain knew that respect and love could be shouted down by present and future crowds, but a beautiful story can't. He sheltered his meditations in impervious armor, and we can be proud of that.

(Note: this version edited for errors regarding points of plot.)

Introducing Ray Lamontagne, His Song "Hannah," And Lyrics

One eternal yawp is never equal to another. Even if it doesn't echo here, it can hit the Top 40 elsewhere. There are only 10,000 downloads on this YouTube so far, but there's a singer you should know. He's from here, but he's big in the UK. From Wikipedia:

Ray LaMontagne was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1974 to a constantly travelling mother. When LaMontagne was a child, his mother left his musician father, while his father was on tour, and moved him and his siblings up north. His father had no contact with LaMontagne and had no knowledge of his whereabouts for years. Because of the stories told to LaMontagne about his father, LaMontagne refrained from most musical activity, instead spending much of his time reading fantasy novels in the forest.^[1] His mother moved her six children wherever she could find work, so it was difficult for LaMontagne to make friends. LaMontagne attended high school at Morgan High School in Morgan, Utah, but frequently ditched class, wrote stories, or got into fights with other students. As a result of these interactions, his grades were poor — LaMontagne barely graduated.^[2] After graduation, LaMontagne moved away from his family to Lewiston, Maine in order to find a full-time job.^[3]

LaMontagne found a job at a shoe factory in Lewiston where he worked 65 hours a week. One morning at 4 a.m., LaMontagne heard Stephen Stills' song "Treetop Flyer" on the radio as it awoke him for an early work shift.^[4] After purchasing the Stills Alone album, LaMontagne decided that he wanted to quit his job at the shoe factory and start a career as a singer-songwriter.^[5] LaMontagne began touring in 1999, although he maintained a side job as a carpenter.^[4] In the summer of 1999, LaMontagne amassed 10 songs for a demo that he sent to various local music venues. Mike Miclon the owner of Buckfield Maine's Oddfellow Theater heard the demo and invited LaMontagne to open for folk acts such as John Gorka and Jonathan Edwards. A friend and business executive, Ron Clayton, heard LaMontagne's recordings and introduced him to Jamie Ceretta of Chrysalis Music Publishing. CMP recorded his first album, and sold it to RCA Records in the US and Echo Records in the UK.

The lyrics to 'Hannah:'

I lost all of my vanity when I peered into the pool
I lost all of my innocence
When I fell in love with you

I never knew a man fall so far until I landed here
Where all of my wounds they turned into gold when I kissed your hair
Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come home to me--
And I'll lay down this bottle of wine
If you'll just be kind to me!

Ask her why she cries so loud
She will not say a word
Eyes like ice and hands that shake
She takes what she deserves

To celebrate her emptiness
In a cold and lonely room
Sweep the floor with your long flowered dress
If you cannot find a broom

Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come home to me
And I'll lay down this bottle of wine
If you'll just be kind to me!

She's got hair that flows right down
Right down to the backs of her knees
Her Papa he was a preaching man
And the Lord is hard to please

So she comes down from the ozark hills
to these very streets to roam
With a banjo and a bible
and a fine tooth comb

Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come home to me
And I'll lay down this bottle of wine
if you just be kind to me!

I'd walk one mile on this broken glass
to fall down at your feet
Mmm-hmm-mmm Hannah: you're the Queen of the Street,
and I climb the tree with my Hannah-lee

My intentions they were pure
Oh the breeze did whip and I lost my grip
And I tumbled towards the earth
Where you never would guess
who it was that stood below

And His name I would never tell
But His eyes were clear
And His arms were strong
And He caught me as I fell

Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come on to me--
well I'll lay down this bottle of wine
If you'd just be kind to me!

Now I'd walk one mile on just broken glass
To fall down at your feet
Mmm-hmm, Hannah: you're the Queen of the Street;
The Queen of the Street.

Robert Frost's Beer-Filled Nauseous Wood

More than two dozen teens,
vandals who hosted a kegger
in Robert Frost's old house,
were ordered to take a class on his poetry.

Two roads diverged in a tedious wood.
"This is where Frost is relevant,"
said Jay Parini, his biographer,
rehearsing What Should Not Be Taken.

"You come to a path in the woods
where you can say, 'Shall I go to this party
and get drunk out of my mind?'
Everything in life is choices."

(Adapted from a CNN story. Teenagers broke into Robert Frost's former house and had a party, which turned destructive as the crowd swelled past 50. Though dead, it was easily the biggest, most rollicking party Frost had ever hosted at his home. Chairs were kindled and burned in the fireplace, windows were broken out, fire extinguishers decanted, much vomit and urine emitted. In fact, how about this as a best-seller: The Underage Drunken Vandals Guide to Historic Homes in New England. )

Safe In Their Alabaster Chambers

Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
Rafter of satin, and roof of stone. Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence,--
Ah, what sagacity perished here! Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

My high school English teacher, Mr. Marcinec, once asked our class, "Can poetry be judged on merit alone, or is the life of the poet applicable?" Easy answer. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts of goodly parents. She grew up with the irrational, deeply held conviction that all lives are equal. Years after the Civil War, she wrote the lines above on a scrap of paper and sent it to her longtime correspondent and friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Higginson was a pre-war abolitionist who became the first commander of African-American troops in 1864, the South Carolina Volunteers. It was he who documented their Gullah dialect, wrote Life in a Black Regiment in 1870, and later recorded their spirituals. Dickinson wrote the poem as a memorial to the escaped slaves who had died assaulting the Vaubanite earthworks in the South as cannon fodder, and to whom some white monuments were eventually erected around Cambridge after the war. The poem doesn't make much sense unless you've stood in front of one of those monuments, and in front of Higginson's house.