marc pietrzykowski

The magazine Poetry has been timid and robotic for a while now, but the archives are certainly worth looking at:

A Day on the Big Branch

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Years ago I had a job working for a fat little man who drove a huge, very shiny cadillac. One day I pulled into the lot in my dirty, beat up nissan sentra just as the boss was getting out of his car. He looked at the car, looked me up and down, and said, “you know, the kind of car you drive says a lot about the kind of person you are,” to which I replied, “yes, I know, and my car says I think that’s a stupid way to live.” I’m not sure why he didn’t fire me. Maybe my existence validated his view of the world? You’re welcome, wherever you are, little fat man with a big car.

291) Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: Cornology

Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. This validates my world view, that’s for sure. They even make funny instrumentals, which is not as easy as it sounds… and often, the jokes here verge, as most of the best humor does, on something creepy:

292) Artful Dodger: It’s All About the Stragglers

2-step skitty pop, twitchy without being glitchy, modestly fun and danceable, a snapshot of a time and place. Also, largely responsible for Craig David.

293) Los Amigos Invisibles: Zinga Son

More of the best invisible friends a music aficionado could ask for. Somewhat more burnished than their earlier releases, but not to the point of being over-produced. Viva!

294) Bonnie Prince Billy: Master and Everyone

Whoa, there’s a sudden shift in mood, from Invisibles to Will Oldham. Oldham has written some good songs, but also has written some really forgettable things that are mood pieces and nothing more. Pleasant enough CD from an overrated artist, good for playing in the background while you paint the ceiling.

295) Talking Heads: Naked

Half a dozen excellent songs (“Mr. Jones,” “Blind,” “Cool Water,” “Nothing But Flowers,” a few others), and the rest are sketches that don’t come together as songs, but are still moderately interesting. This is the sound of a group of musicians going their separate ways…

296) Graham Parker: Imaginary Television

I listened to this one out of order, since I just bought it. Ye gods forgive me! Parker is one of my favorite songwriters, and the conceit here is that each song accompanies a treatment for an imaginary TV show. Well, all except “More Questions Than Answers,” which is a cover. I only wish there were more songs, as the interplay between the written “treatments” and the listening experience really works. Inspiring.

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Somehow, I never read Grapes of Wrath before now:

The Western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western states, nervous as horses before a thunderstorm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simply — the causes are hunger in the stomach, multiplied one million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied one million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied one million times. The last clear definite function of men — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man. To build the wall, to build a house, the dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take heart muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you say is man — when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the marketplace, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, and the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live — for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live — for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. In this you can know — fear the time when manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of man self, in this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

Cannery Row is certainly more fun, but reading Grapes while watching our would-be corporate masters struggle to maintain control is quite resonant….

285) Status Quo: The Complete Pye Collection

Like many people in the USA, I only knew Status Quo from “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” but I picked up this 3CD set for 10 bucks and found out they’re quite an institution in the UK. I also found out that a lot of there songs, at least from this period, aren’t very memorable; it seems like every time they wrote a good song, they then tried to copy that song 3 or 4 times. There are, for example, 3 other songs that sound A LOT like “Matchstick Men.” Donovan did much the same thing, I think. But, worth checking out if you have something else to do while listening….

286) Pere Ubu: The Story of My Life

Pere Ubu gets back together to record a CD? Could they have mortgages to pay, nostalgia to indulge in? Crap product to crank out? Nooooo! And, well, no, this isn’t just crap laurel-resting, though it’s not as prickly and experimental as their best stuff, and though they “disbanded” in 1982, they rebanded in 1993 for this recording and have produced stuff ever since. Now, if I could just find the version of Ubu Roi David Thomas did with the Quay Bros… oh, here is some of it.

287) Sparklehorse: Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot

A while back I listened to It’s A Wonderful Life, my favorite Sparklehorse CD, and wondered why M. Linkous hadn’t made a recording that good since. A few days later, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a rifle. If you live long enough, these coincidences start to pile up. Anyway, this is also a good CD, not quite as good as It’s A Wonderful Life,
but nearly so; this was Sphorse’s debut, so the seeds of It’s A Wonderful Life are everywhere, some very good dissonant noise alongside the hushed baby voice songs.
Sorry the shit got too rough, Mark, rest in peace.

288) Gong: You

I never heard Gong, heard lots about them: hippy space rock stuff, like Hawkwind for people who though Hawkwind were too punk. And yep, that’s what this is:

Now I know.

289) Cowboy Junkies: The Nomad Series Vol 1.

An interesting direction for the Junkies to head in: grafting some Chinese sounds (literally–samples of people working, etc) onto the bluesy spooky groove, keeping the arrangments sparse; the title makes me think this will be the first of a few releases with the same theme, but with different countries and cultures visited. Good stuff.

290) Townes Van Zandt: Live at the Old Quarter

Such an underrated voice. Townes in known for his songwriting, but the way he sang them was incredible too, like a man so used to being ridden that the rider becomems part of him… CDs like this are exactly why I hate the band America.

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I read something the other day that has occupied my head ever since: the author was talking about the lukasa, a sacred object that the Luba people use in various rituals and which has a wealth of information encoded in its designs, cognitive cues meant to help the skilled reader tell stories, give advice, render judgment, and so forth. Many ritual objects serve this purpose, of course, but then the author went on to say that it was “more of a map than an argument.” The author is quite fastidious about acknowledging western bias elsewhere, so it’s not just that he is denigrating the lukasa, he is in fact delighted and amazed by it. He just thinks that maps are not arguments. I certainly understand his distinction; maps do not make overt attempts at persuasion… but they do, really, they persuade the person reading the map that the map is an accurate representation of whatever it is mapping, that it will help the reader get from here to there, and the act of successfully reading and using a map argues that maps are good for this kind of thing. And yet, maps leave out so much, they reduce 4 dimensional space (yes, I’m including time) to 2 dimensions, even the measurement of time is reduced to a 2-d coordinate plane. Maps have to reduce and impoverish the reality they describe, or they would be ineffective, since the map that takes everything in is not a map. Then there are maps to celebrity homes, and to fancy restaurants, and there are argument maps, and the musical artist maps, and–well, maps are a language, they are part of our grammatical brain structure, the means by which we constantly reduce and inflate the real and try to make it manageable. So, is language an argument? Perhaps defining terms would help, and no, that’s not meant as a joke. So, I’ll check the dictionary, which is a map, and also makes an argument:

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Here’s a good one: “tradition is based on pride in collective habit, on the conscience that approves the pride, and on the fear that if habit and conscience fail, the result will be social chaos, the fear of which is in turn based on a particularly low assessment of human nature” (Ami-Scharfstein). I am trying to write a novel, which is a fairly traditional thing to do, and I suppose I do have pride in the collective cultural habit of producing novels. My conscience, the moral judge seated in every person (well, almost every person) by the same collective habit, approves this pride, believes novels are  “good to think” (as Levi-Strauss put it). I do not think that we would descend into social chaos if people stopped reading and writing novels, however, though I do find the idea very sad. I am fairly certain, actually, that we will grow beyond reading and writing at some point in the near future, though i think we will retain a grammar for things, however we do manage to communicate them. Ah well, time is long.

I managed to write 6,000 words yesterday, then was overcome by the need to go get ice cream. Maybe I can get to 10k today; then again, maybe I need to get some qat.

278) Gogol Bordello: Multi-Kontra-Culti vs. Irony

I have heard that the Rick Rubin produced the latest GB CD, and that it flies out of the speakers in close approximation to their live shows. I can’t believe that, since their live shows are something to behold, but o what a fun band, even if Hutz is faking the whole accent thing…

279) Eugene Chadbourne and Evan Johns: Terror Has Some Strange Kinfolk

Boy, Eugene loves to make scritchy noises with his guitars. Any recording by him will feature: scritchy, noisy guitars; goofy covers (“Achy Breaky Heart”); clumps of free jazz that last 30 sec-2 min; political rants in a comical southern accent. For people who find this approach appealing (like me), it’s loads of fun. Everyone else will leave the room.

280) Huun-Huur-Tu: The Orhpan’s Lament

There’s a lot more to Tuvan music than throat-singing, though the throat-singing is pretty cool. Tone, timbre, mood, all are carefully orchestrated to evoke the mood of the open plain, the relationship of human art to the natural world, and the essential loneliness of human beings. And they play a rattle made from a bull scrotum.

281) Gang of 4: A Brief History of the 20th Century

I like this band more than just about any band that made music between 1978-1985. Why? I’m not sure exactly, maybe just the fact that the idea we could dance our way to revolution seems real when I listen to them…

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I’ve started a novel, and need to spend the next several days in a marathon writing session. I’m shooting for 10,000 words a day, no idea if that’s feasible, but what the hell, it’s a nice round number. The added benefit is that I will get to listen to plenty of CDs, and perhaps get to #300 soon; so, 10k and 300, here we go.

273) Carl Perkins: Go Cat Go!

A collection of Perkins tunes, most of them duets: Perkins and Willie Nelson, Perkins and Tom Petty, Perkins and Bono and Willie Nelson and Tom Petty; a few songs featuring Carl by himself; and then, not sure why, 2 covers of “Blue Suede Shoes,” one by Jimi Hendrix and one by John Lennon. A strange project, but very listenable, since the songs are uniformly great.

274) Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose: Classic Masters

Yes, they had more songs than “Treat Her Like a Lady” and “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” and some of them are excellent, like “Since I Found My Baby” and “Let Me Down Easy.” Their version of “Ain’t No Sunshine” is good too… but some of the others are buried under schmaltzy K-Tel strings. Oh well, it was the 70’s, after all.

275) Etta James: Her Best

And her best is awful good, throaty and powerful, reaches down into the belly and lifts the listener out of the chair by the bowels. “I’d Rather Go Blind” makes me weep:

276) Los Amigos Invisibles: Arepa 300

Highly contagious dance/rock/samba/funk/acid jazz and etc. From Venezuala, where they eat lots of Arepas, which are a bit like pupusas but fatter, and boy are they yummy. Eating while listening to the Amigos is not recommended, as you are likely to drop the Arepa because you are dancing uncontrollably.

277) Tom Waits: Real Gone

I wasn’t so crazy about this CD the first time I listened to it, and then forgot about it. Now I think it’s pretty fantastic, it’s very subdued but also kind of noisy, and features Waits doing beatbox on more than 1/2 the songs (!). Lots of looping, some scratching, and apparently a lot of instrumentation by various Waits children. Some of the lyrics seem phoned in, but some are the equal of the best Waits stuff, and the whole thing is a reminder of how willing Waits is to experiment with his formula–a valuable thing in the era of art-as-market share.

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Works of art, ideas about art (which are kinds of art), “come in families, lineages, tribes, whole populations, just like people. They have relations with one another as well as with the people who create and circulate them as individual objects. They marry, so to speak, and beget offspring, which bear the stamp of their antecedents” (Alfred Gell). A fine metaphor, though apparently Gell did not mean it metaphorical, but rather that works of art were living beings; I’m not sure I buy that, I’ll have to read more of his work, but the metaphor above helps explain what depresses me about so much modern, internet-influenced art: all artistic objects emerge from other works, all works of art are “mash-ups” to some degree, but when the aesthetic focus is on the mechanics of the collage, then of course the content needs to be familiar and immediate: a mash-up of LaMonte Young and Mahjoub Sharif would be fascinating, but not as a mash-up, because it would not stimulate the average listener with juxtapositions of the familiar. The cliche is that we live in an ocean of information, and so slapping together a few aesthetic bits in a way that draws attention to the fact that they are a few aesthetic bits slapped together is supposed to reflect the state of living in said ocean. We don’t live in such an ocean, however; we live in something more like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of mass-produced iterations of cultural junk, and so the same junk gets slapped together in more or less the same way, and we get to pretend that we’ve seen something new, something stimulating, like Iron Man 2 or Lady GaGa. One reason pastiche is so popular is that it’s is simple to produce, there is a formula, and since those in charge of distributing art have a vested interest in consolidating power and because the formula is not very interesting (especially for producers!), the distribution itself becomes a kind of elite art form (just ask Will.i.Am). Many US poets have been lost in the same mess for decades, except that instead of talking about generating multiple income-streams and Real-Time Personalization, they talk about “poetics” and schools of poetry… and boy is it getting long in the tooth, as witnessed by such desperate attempts to maintain institutional genealogies as The New Thing.

270) Tom Waits: Orphans

3 CDs worth of odds and ends, some fabulous (versions of “What Keeps Mankind Alive” and Daniel Johnston’s “King Kong,” and 2 Ramones covers!), some just interesting (the song about Ants), some not really fabulous or interesting, but groovy nonetheless…I’ve met a lot of people who hate Tom Waits, which baffles me, but then I’ve met lots of people who really like Pizza Hut, so there you go.

271) Little Feat: Shake Me Up

I’ve heard lots of Little Feat over the years, and the only song I remember is “Mojo Haiku,” because I like the title. I know the Lowell George stuff is funky and well-written, and that this CD is not from that era; it is: bland, MOR flailing with the occasional capitivating guitar break.

272) Fishbone: In Your Face

That the Red Hot Chili Peppers became B-list glitterati and Fishbone did not is just plain wrong. But then Fishbone are black, and political, and like to make songs about their testicles…

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My lovely wife expressed some envy about the way I read, that is, the way I read 7 or 8 books at once, bopping back and forth between them. I have always done so, I like how they books often talk to one another, and I have books assigned to different times and places: my read in bed book (currently: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal ), my downstairs bathroom book (currently: The Pelican History of the World), my upstairs bathroom book (currently: Run With the Horsemen)  my waiting around book that I keep in my car (currently: On Bullshit), and then the 3-4 others I read when not in bed, the bathroom, or waiting somewhere… my wife reads many things each day, as we all do, but prefers one book at a time, which I find just as puzzling as she does my multiple book habit. I suppose my reading habits also mean I am not the target audience for eBook readers, since I would have to chain it to a pierced nipple of something so I was sure to have access to books at all those times and places…

267) Linda Thompson: Fashionably Late

The story of Linda Thompson’s crippling stage fright (hysterical dysphonia) is fascinating, she couldn’t sing for 17 years; I’m certainly glad she found her way out the other side, as she is a wonderful vocalist and also a fine songwriter, as is clear from this recording. And Richard even shows up to play a bit, which is somehow comforting.

268) The Neville Brothers: A History of the Nevilles

Such a weird double CD; the cover is a weirdly drawn picture of Cyrille Art and Aaron, smiling away, and the tracks alternate, one after the other, between Neville Bros tracks and Meters tracks. Great songs, of course, but a strange package… and this is odd, too, though also cool: a fan-made “Hercules” video mashed up with scenes from Meanstreets:

269) The Be Good Tanyas: Hello Love

I first heard these women while driving through Kentucky and Tennessee, up and down the foothills, desperately searching for something that was neither glitter-country crap nor classic rock nor wackadoo preachers, and lo, I found it, though I’ve still no idea what station it was, because they played 4 songs by The Be Good Tanyas, minimal, delicate, raw country folk, and then the station broke into static. I may have dreamed the whole thing, and could in fact be laying in a ditch on the side of Route 65 even as I am dreaming of writing this… but probably not.

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Hmmm:

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.
–Ivan Illich

That sounds familiar, though Illich wrote it in 1971. He also wrote a lot about substituting “webs” of learning for “funnels,” meaning the learn-to-work training mission of modern education. Unfortunately, management shamans have got hold of things even more than they did in 1971, assessment and accountability and other such empty buzzwords drive curricula, and students learn to toe the line or else. Same as it ever was. I teach in a college, and can’t ever quite tell if I’m helping people learn and explore and find meaning, or if I’m just another fool who thinks they can “change the system from within,” otherwise known as Jerry Rubin syndrome. And I guess I won’t ever know, and it’s probably not as bleak as it seems, there are good people teaching here and there, I’ve been taught by some of them… ah well. Sometimes it’s reassuring to know you are too far gone to ever be properly assimilated.

264) Kool Keith: Black Elvis/Lost in Space

Lots of great, funny songs, and I’m a fan of the pre-grime production beeps and fuzz bass wobbles on here, some is Sadat X, some is other folks… and he drops Stretch Armstrong, Chairhead Chippendale, Argonauts, Ringling Bros, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and the Vulcan Neck Pinch in one verse, for god’s sake.

265) Loudon Wainwright III: Attempted Mustache

Loudon and Kool Keith, that makes sense somehow, they should do a song together. I like watching Loudon on M.A.S.H., but all the clips of him from that show on YouTube have been taken down, so instead, the first song on this CD:

266) The Kinks: Muswell Hillbillies

One of their best, most consistent recordings; even the fluff (“Have A Cuppa Tea”) is inspired, and the band sounds tight and bluesy, and, and, and, well, even if it only had “Complicated Life” and 10 versions of “Louie Louie” I would buy a copy. Really:

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I must post more CDs, I am getting behind again. Reflexive update: I am listening to all the CDs I own, in order, because my wife challenged me to do so and, well, why not?

260) Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: Freak Out!

Freak out indeed, an early Zappa recording, Suzy Creamcheese and so forth, “Help, I’m a Rock!,” “Wowie Zowie,” it’s Zappa, great if you when you are in the mood, and luckily I was when this one’s turn came…

261) Prince: Sign O’ The Times

I thought “If I Was Your Girlfriend” was the greatest pop song ever for about 2 months after I heard it; I still think it’s a great song, but the spoken word goofiness in the middle part is a little too Prince-peculiar. But wow, what a consistantly great collection of songs, stunningly, uniformly of a quality most songwriters could only dream of…

262) Cabaret Voltaire: The Original Sound of Sheffield ‘78/’82

Very lo-fi electronic weirdness, not nearly as poppy or danceable as their later stuff (which is saying something); interesting in parts, dull as hell in other parts, might be fun to chop up and remix.

263) Astor Piazzolla: Tango: Zero Hour

I think I will listen to the Piazzolla box set when I hit #300. I can’t say enough about Piazzolla’s compositions, which would be stunning even if he were just a bandleader, but good god, be plays this stuff on a bandoneon…

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