Liner scat

Liner scat (see the posted playlist in the previous post):

01. I didn’t exactly miss the Nyro show back in the 60s, but I didn’t exactly jump on the bandwagon either. She lingered in my consciousness through the years, mainly for having shown up in my cousin’s record collection. I couldn’t get my ears around her jangle at the time, but I was surprised (and impressed) that she had wandered into mi primo’s stack. Next I knew, she was dead at 49, ovarian cancer. Four—was it?—years ago, I stumbled over her Angels in the Dark disc, recorded shortly before her death: my head was blown off: I had my head glued to my speakers for days on end, I could not get enough of this awesome diva, and so I made my way back through her whole catalogue. True Nyro fans would string me up, but I still think Angels is her masterwork. In her take on the chestnut “Walk On By,” she morphs the line “And so if I seem broken and blue,” into “And so if I seem broken in two (into),” and your heart breaks knowing she is and has been. “Stone Soul Picnic” is from the younger happy daze, but I like the way that surrey gets rolling in the beginning.

02. Ah, Lady T: I have sung the lady’s praises several times previously in this blog-village. Four years ago, when funk radio FINALLY came to Tres Leches (it has since departed, que lastima), the new station splurged by playing something like 18,000,000 commercial-free hours. One day, I was mesmerized by the T’s near thirty year old “Lovergirl.” Again, as with so much music in my life, not a song that grabbed me first time around, but this wondrous day (I was pumping gas at the local HEB), that song cleaned out my head. As chance would have it, Lady Diva had just come out with La Doña, a glorious oil-spill of a “I may have been down, but I ain’t out, here’s fifteen’s years’ worth of what’s been pent up” disc. It was a majestic throwdown. While jumping like a madman on that wagon, I also found my way back to “Ooo La La La,” which is just about as good as it gets, o my brothers and sisters, for pure love soul.

03. “Black Rain” is just one cozy example of why I can’t wait for Lady T to get on with her promise to morph into a jazz diva in the years to come.

04. Di Meola jumped into the spotlight as a twenty year old phenom in Chick Corea’s Return to Forever project back in the mid to late 70s. AD put out his own blazing discs along the way, and also teamed up with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia for some guitar orgies that left one and all gasping. About five years ago, my son and I were driving home from the biblioteca when on the radio comes the announcement that AD will be giving a “free” guitar clinic at Hermes Music, as part of an Ovation Guitars promotional tour. Did we hightail our asses over to Hermes? You bet your bippy, and there we were dazzled with two hours of “Mediterranean Sundance”-like magic.

05. Mi amigo Steph has been, more than any other, my music guru through the past thirty years: twas he who brought The Waterboys to me ears, first with a sizzling cover of Van’s “Sweet Thing,” and then on and on from there. The two cuts posted here cover a nice spectrum from pub rocker to heartbreaking ballad. “Fisherman’s Blues” opens the glorious romp of “Waking Ned Devine,” a movie one and all should see before going on up to the Upper Room.

06. The West Bank of New Orleans, where my therapy practice was officed, can attest to my love of this song: sometimes between clients, I would drive all around Algiers and Gretna and Marrerro, playing “When Ye Go Away,” over and over and over. One of those “six months on the turntable” cuts.

07. Much as I love all the music on this list, if I had (HAD) to pick the one I could not do without, it would be “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart.” I’ve never been a big fan of Sinead, but when I heard this song over the closing credits of the film “In the Name of the Father,” I knew I had found my anthem: I was rocked by the song, and continue to be all these years later. Sinead is not of this world: she is a voice, a spirit, a demi-urge from Lothlorien: I hear her voice coming straight from Gaia. That rousing Celtic bagpiped mash in the background just deepens the spell. Good god.

08. Late in his life, John Lee hooked up with the Mighty Van, his duet partner on this lovely piece of loveliness. God I love John Lee’s phrasing. He and Van take this beauty for a nice long walk, so one and all can “see, see, see…”

09. Look to the right, under the words “About Me,” and you see “unfettered and alive.” Straight from this song. I was not a fan of early Joni, but come the passage that gave us For the Roses through Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns and the Hejira masterpiece, when she was edging into her jazzy sabbatical, she owned my turntable. She lost me when she jumped whole hog into Her Jazz Diva-ness, but even that was resurrected beautifully by Herbie Hancock’s River album (though even he stays away from the Diva-ness years in his choices).

10. One late night in Jackson, Mississippi, Steph rolls out this beauty. I don’t know if there is a more haunting whisper than Nick Drake’s. Dead within months of these songs, but he has had an underground following ever since.

11. “River Man.” Nick going to meet his overarching Fate.

12. The first long poem I ever wrote ten years ago was an expansion on this song. I love the song, I love the Mary, I love Cassandra Wilson’s (Murrah High School class of 1972, Jackson, Mississippi) gorgeous whisky-drenched husk of a voice: what a wonderful surprise it was to find that she had covered this aria. If you don’t think teen Cassandra didn’t worship Joni Mitchell, give a listen to this.

13. So many to choose from in the Mighty Neil’s catalogue, but I was thinking a quiet, simple way to end the “show.” It came down to “Harvest Moon” or this one. If I were you, I’d go find the former muy pronto, or you could do no wrong listening to Cassandra’s cover on her magnificent New Moon Daughter.

Boy, did this take forever...

...but twas fun...

I had to keep cutting, and the order I was wanting kept fritzing on me. So it goes.

Only Going Over Home

Last night, the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble (SAVAE) gave a majestic performance of "Wayfarin' Stranger" at The Episcopal Church of Reconciliation here in Tres Leches. As chance would have it, I had just run across this in the afternoon...

The notion of a glorious kind...

That good/bad shoelace therapist’s got me feeling badly about my earlier take on Ms McKee's post-Goth Gothiness. I’ve spent a few hours over the past few daze digging deeper beyond the epiphanous apocalypse of “I Found Love.” There’s plenty more out there, and it’s still happening. Go see for yourself, if you’re interested.

Still, I thought it only fair to include the lyrics to that awesome celestial hound dog of a song. Chica is locked in good—real good. Of course, these lyrics are minus the sublime glossolalia of the performance. Peace to the sister.

I FOUND LOVE
Maria McKee

I was mindin’ my business like a good girl should
Maybe a little too careful for my own good
It was just like livin’ life in the dark
‘Til somethin’ jumped up and it grabbed my heart

Chorus:

I found love
I found real love

The beginning and end of every wish
Is balanced in the center of a vision like this
Maybe my emotions are inclined
To surrender to the notion of a glorious kind

Chorus

One touch, souls speak
The Power’s got me and it won’t let me be
It’s too much this heat
I wanna laugh cry jump for joy shout scream
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

At the end of every tunnel there’s a shining light
In the heart of every storm there’s a quiet night
My joy was hidden in a dream
I didn’t know that it was there until you set me free

Chorus

The Avatar Has Landed

Sunday Scribbling #121: Solace

When I saw this week’s Scribble prompt—solace—I met it with competing waves of satire and fatigue (given my love/hate relationship with the Scribblers’ prompts, a good, even a bad, therapist would tell me those reactions are just two sides of the same coin). My satirical side’s first reaction was to write a piece on s(h)o(e)lace(s), but my tired side wasn’t sure I was up to sustained levity. Why so tired, you ask? More than likely my endless troglodytic inability to post a YouTube video to this blog of Lone Justice/Maria McKee doing a kickass version of “I Found Love.” My failed attempts are either out there somewhere in the cybernetic ethers or about to descend in one fell swoop on Murat-ville in endless repetitions. And then I’ll be like Melinda Dillon’s character Teresa Perrone in “Absence of Malice,” running up and down the street in my nightie trying to pick up all the papers before the burbanites walk out to find the hoohaa in their midst. That’s a badly worn nightie and metaphor, thank you.

Yes, YouTube is one source of solace when I’m feeling a desire to reach across decades to my still burgeoning adolescence. I was hardly a chronological adolescent when I first saw Ms McKee whoopin’ it up, most likely during one of my late night visits with MTV when it was MTV. I shudder to think what happened to the lass in the intervening years. A quick Google check on her status revealed a someone I could not recognize in the least, a post-Goth Goth, I cannot imagine her as the demented cheerleader Muhammad Ali speaking in tongues dervish that woke me up one foggy night back in Reagan Land. Miss “Essence of a Thing” Alister recently revealed her avatar (her divine eye) to her readership: I’d say that Ms “I Found Love” chica comes as close as anything to embodying my avatar, right on down to the fine and dandy Goodwill couture, and most assuredly the hopping around like a devil may care damn fool. Sorry I’m adding to the labor of reading this ditty, but if you wanna check out my avatar in action, click here.

Yes, music is certainly one of my shoelaces, all the way back to my toddlerdom, when my mother was selling records downtown at Tres Leches Music Company, sometimes parking me in a listening booth with a stack of 45s, a practice that continues to this day on occasion down at the Rio Tres Leches Starbucks HearMusic store with its bottomless vault of music for sampling. My father was also in the music business as a sales rep for Decca Records (long before they ever signed The Who), so it’s no surprise that my first photo studio portraits show me chewing on a piece of 45 rpm vinyl. Not even an archivist’s magnifying lens could reveal the title of that auditory morsel. I suspect it’s my “Rosebud,” if nothing else.

But, lazy (and inept) ass that I am today, I’m settling for a list of something else that has given, and continues to give, me shoelaces through the ages—los libros. In keeping with my penchant for Hit Lists, I’ve even ranked them, 1 to 50, titles purloined from a larger list my son asked for a year ago, my list of books he should read at some point in his life.

The list represents bonds of slavish devotion: it is in no way erudite, nor is it a critic’s or scholar’s list, and on any other day, it could change, though not much. It could also be called The 50 Books on My Top Twenty List.

Without further ado, I give you, The 50 Shoelaces:

01. Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon)

02. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

03. The Collected Stories (Grace Paley)

04. All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)

05. Tropic of Capricorn (Henry Miller)

06. Coming Through Slaughter (Michael Ondaatje)

07. Rimbaud in Abyssinia (Alain Borer)

08. Edisto (Padgett Powell)

09. A Woman Named Drown (Padgett Powell)

10. The Alexandria Quartet (Lawrence Durrell)

11. Aliens of Affection/Typical (Padgett Powell)

12. Nothing Like the Sun (Anthony Burgess)

13. All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)

14. The Iliad and the Odyssey (Homer: Robert Fitzgerald translations)

15. American Noise (Campbell McGrath)

16. The Book of Bebb (Frederick Buechner)

17. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)

18. The Tennis Handsome (Barry Hannah)

19. Study of the World’s Body (David St. John)

20. V (Thomas Pynchon)

21. Collected Works (Jane Austen)

22. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles)

23. The Sunlight Dialogues (John Gardner)

24. Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)

25. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

26. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

27. The Raj Quartet (Paul Scott)

28. The Simple Truth (Philip Levine)

29. The Crossing (Cormac McCarthy)

30. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia-Marquez)

31. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

32. The Geography of the Imagination (Guy Davenport)

33. Collected Stories (Flannery O’Connor)

34. The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)

35. Junkets on a Sad Planet (Tom Clark)

36. A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

37. The Rainbow (D H Lawrence)

38. Cane (Jean Toomer)

39. High Lonesome (Barry Hannah)

40. Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)

41. The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Mina Loy)

42. The Way That Water Enters Stone (John Dufresne)

43. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia-Marquez)

44. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)

45. Collected Fictions (Jorge Luis Borges)

46. Collected Stories (Mavis Gallant)

47. The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)

48. Man of Light (Henri Corbin)

49. Never in a Hurry (Naomi Shihab Nye)

50. From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger (Lorna Dee Cervantes)

Yes, lots of good folks missing. I may have liked ‘em, even liked ‘em a lot, but I didn’t have a crush on them—at least not enough to crack the Top 50/20.

I think I just worked harder than I would have with my s(h)o(e)lace(s) idea. C’est la vie.

Devotion

Mother Mary (2008) by Tina Karagulian
Donated to the Our Lady of Częstochowa, Church of the Black Madonna

About sixteen years ago, two years before I awakened to my spiritual adoption by the Yoruban goddess Yemaya, I ran across China Galland’s book Longing for Darkness, in which she chronicles her journey away from Catholicism into Eastern spirituality, then further into the sacred feminine dark (the Sufis’ radiant dark), only to have the dark goddesses of the East lead her full circle back to Our Lady of Czestochowa, also known as the Black Madonna. This was a time of deep spiritual exploration for me as well, and the sense of radiance in a sacred darkness, holiness in the dark, resonated strongly with my journey at the time.

As China circled back to the unexplored underground caverns of her own Catholic traditions, she wrote at one point about a Black Madonna shrine in San Antonio. I was living in New Orleans at the time, but I became obsessed with finding the shrine the next time I visited my home town. No one I knew had ever heard of the place, and this was still four or five years before I discovered my ability to find at least scraps of anything I might be looking for on the internet.

But find her I did, in east San Antonio, on tiny Beethoven Street, in an oddly shaped chapel, surrounded by a half dozen cottages in which lived a community of Polish nuns dedicated to living in her grace and the peace she inspires. And on the morning of March 13, 1998, while standing in the gorgeous blue-stained light of one of her stained glass windows, Tina and I felt so blessed by her grace as to feel married in her sight. Our civil ceremony in Walden, Vermont in August of that year, while blessed in its own right—well, we consider the Vermont ceremony our renewal vows.

When we moved to San Antonio in 2002, we sought out Mary and her sisters in all the places where she and they are honored in this matrilineal wellspring of a city. It seems our pilgrimages were part of an old unconscious calling, too: my mother, for whom Our Lady of Guadalupe is as resonant as the Black Madonna is to me, told me that when I was but a babe, she used to take me all over town to the grottos and shrines of devotion to the Blessed Mothers.

Here’s local Tres Leches poet-extraordinaire Naomi Shihab Nye in a poem I read a few days ago:

I Feel Sorry for Jesus

People won’t leave him alone.
I know he said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it.

Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember “Telephone,” that pass-it-on game

where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think he’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where he was born.
I closed my eyes where he died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

I know, it’s not really about Mary, but it struck a chord. Much as I like to blab on till midnight, my spiritual path is lit least when I am talking. I fall prey to thinking and, worse, over-thinking. I am fully capable of pulling apart something beautiful and fine and deeply important to my soul if I start talking and thinking about it. I love the idea of Naomi’s “secret pouch of listening.” It’s what I have for Mary and her sisters all over the world. I don’t theorize or adjudicate Mary: I simply sit with her and feel myself go deeper, way past the way signs of all my frittering days. When it’s time, and it’s usually not more than, say, three times a year, we head out past the tamale stand, take a left at the always closed menudo shrine, and slip through the portal into Mary’s world. As we did this afternoon, and in silence, sat.

Sunday Scribbling #120: Ghosts

ChocoPie

“Brutal inquisition.”

“Daft, I’d say.”

“Concave entry, convex termination, you call that daft?”

“Eye of the beholder, Jerry. Could have just as easily called it pissy arrogance.”

“Pissy? Since when?”

“Astral flight, my brother. Round trip ticket’s essential.”

“Or else?”

“What do you think, or else? You gotta hard-on for Mumbai?”

“Low blow, Samson, very low. I don’t question your personal hygiene.”

“Maybe you should. When’s the last time you really checked in?”

“Not counting Pasha?”

“Not.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Exactly.”

“Which proves nothing.”

“Several’s the times I’ve suggested the very same, but does that stop you?”

“I gain as I go along, I don’t ask for plenty.”

“No, you just take. Your division’s a sour case.”

“About which you are aggrieved?”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“You’d rather—”

“No, I wouldn’t, actually.”

“Carsequam, then?”

“If you only knew.”

“No need being obtuse.”

“No need, my brother, being anything but.”

I'm 2 for 2

This one's now in my Top 5 (of course, there are at least 25 movies in my Top 5, but this one is definitely there): Pane e Tulipani.

Sweetness

The movie Bella: put this one in your queue, for sure. Dave was right.

Visions

Old friend cassowary is a bit intense, self-taught (which means non-taught) in the social skills, tends to fix you with that peripheral stare, so it's nice to move on to another image. We dropped in on our friends at Fishead last night to see the amazing art of Fred Rich. Wonderful as this image is, it just barely conveys what's up with this visionary artist. Ms Tina Karagulian will be exhibiting at Fishead in November.

Sunday Scribbling #119: My Oldest Friend

AND THE NECK IS BLUE

Tazzle freak, you expect more than mohair collectible teddy bears, you gotta meet some more new people, the frizzle blooms acquiescent and then there’s fiyo in the bayou and you’re starting all over, imitative, scrubs in the piperlime mo-pit of cassowary love. Agents to fill, devils may care, riddles may wonder. The lady does not want the married couple, cast ands crew, analysis, polls, she much prefers the instant yaya, the casual dictates, the overloaded dumpster. My old friend Headwater ambled out one day and we ain’t seen him since: searching was fruitless, he was ever a gadabout, a chili dog, irreverent iconoplasm. Free your old friend and you’ll love the Old Friend shoes, scrobbled on your last play. I had a friend, let’s call her Donny Sunnyside, let’s envision her Joan of Arc, but let’s not play with matches this time, let’s keep it to hypercontextual Barbies, forget the American Girls, they so fey. We connected online and I gave her the futon receipt, the woman book by Tina, and more. She blossomed, old woman friend, varicose novelty act, Serendipity Fading—covers of Tremeloes, Titans of Night, Ars Nova. After the bloom faded, she was back off to Silsbee, corner of Highways 96 and 327. Jiggle the point, you’ll see it, it was actually sent, overland express. I met her in Deer Park, gothic refinery backdrop, acid rain in our coffees, edge to our sleep. Shadow caster sat down beside us, luthier and dental reconstructionist. I passed around the jelly beans, all java jelly, the notion was a hit, we ran that refinery right on out of there. Gifford seemed in my imagination to be looking for me, frantically I tried to regain hold, Ortor of Murkblood was playing second and I hadn’t a clue at shortstop, it was nothing more than Julia Roberts in Notting Hill and we all know what a fiasco of pruned Ovaltine that was, o my brothers. They’ve woven their stories and I’ve told them again, plagiarizing the instep, overstepping my bounds, baring the good news one more time.

Sunday Scribbling #118: Chance Encounter

WOODLING

I was five days into my post-debacle tour, bedded on the fourteenth floor of the Monteleone, but only bedded. The five hours I was not down and out I was running the streets of the Quarter again: Galatoire’s, Mr B’s, The Gumbo Shop, Lafitte’s Blacksmith, du Monde, Maison de Ville, Peristyle, Port of Call, shooting out Metairie-way to Bozo’s and Andrea’s, back down to the Warehouse District for high tea at the Windsor and nirvana at Emeril’s. Let’s not forget Mandina’s. Please let’s not.

Running the streets, are you kidding? I was a beached whale. I’d beached one sad afternoon up on the levee, staring across at Algiers and Gretna, lamenting the demise of LeRuth’s—foot cushions for the ladies, old fashions to biochemical perfection, mandarin orange ice to titrate the bacchanalia through seven courses of bona fide heaven, all brought to you compliments of big Warren and one hellaciously large dose of OCD, throwing it all away to futz over his frozen custard down at Chelsey’s.

Day Five I was looking for tawdry, I was looking for Ignatius, I was looking for dogs on wheels. I bolted the Monteleone and headed down to the Square to check out Rodrigue’s inedible blues, with an eye out for a rolling frank.

Corner of Royal and Toulouse, Lucky Dog heaven struck, but something was up. Seller behind the cart, I knew that beefy frame—linebacker in peasant rags, tight bun atop the crown of her bushel-sized head. She’s playing Nevilles out of a pisspoor pair of JVC speakers, sounds like unforgiveable cat scratch fever, not the Holy of Holies. She scowls at me from beneath a Phillies cap, wields a magnum of yellow mustard.

“How much for a Lucky?” I ask. Flabbergasted I may be, but I’m still seekin’ tawdry.

“In the inside there is sleeping,” she replies.

“Yeah, darlin’, I figure you got ‘em in the cart, but how much are they?”

“In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting—“

“Whoa, chica, I may be lookin’ for tawdry, but nobody said nuthin’ bout mounting.”

She sets the yellow magnum down, opens the cart and stares down into its beefy sauna.

“It’s a simple—“

“All the yellow has discrimination—“

“I presume that would be your mustard—“

“And all the circle has circling. This makes sand.”

“…”

To which she turned up the scratchy Nevilles. Cyril be croonin’ bout that’s my blood down there—

I’m turning into Lou Costello, but I can’t help myself.

“Gert, it’s a simple proposition: two Lucky Dogs, all the works, how much is that gonna cost me?”

Down at the Napoleon, I could be into my second Pimm’s and halfway through a veggie muffuletta, but this, my friends, was a tender button not to be missed.

She stared back at me for a good thirty seconds, took a gander down Royal and another down Toulouse and then another long one back at me: annoyed, I’m sure, that I was still beleaguering her cart.

“A little piece of pay of pay owls owls such as pie, bolsters.”

Ignoring the audacity of owl pie, I answered, “Exactly what I’m talkin’ about, sister. A little piece of pay. I like that: quaint.”

Oops. I saw my mistake before the thunderclouds hit the Phillies-capped metrodome. You don’t quaint the Empress of the Lost Generation, the Hierophant of Postmodern, the Patron Saint of LangPo, the Godfather (I think she would insist) of Pablo’s Stunning Revolution, not to mention the purveyor of your one and only tawdry shank of sallow meat.

Zeus-like, she delivered: “Will leap beat, willie well all. The rest rest oxen occasion occasion to be so purred, so purred how.”

“Miss Stein, I deserved that one. Fair and square. I deserved them all, for that matter. I beg your pardon. I am beside myself with the discovery of you here.”

She turned the cap backwards on her head, mopped her face with her ketchup-stained apron. She bled a stab of ketchup from her left eyebrow. I forebore myself to touch the wound.

Scratchy Cyril slipped into Clarence “Frogman” Henry: I’m a lonely frog—

I dug deep and took a big breath. Tawdry depended on it.

And this I said: “Go lack go lack use to her. Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal. Whist bottom whist close, whist clothes, woodling. Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal. Pain soup, suppose it is question, suppose it is butter, real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since.”

She smiled, tender buttons those eyes, retro-fitted the red cap, snared two delicate shanks from their steambath, sleeved them elegantly, regaled them mustardly and, winking, asked: “Relish, too?”

“Always, my sister. Always.”

[Thanks to Gertrude for playing along, from Tender Buttons.]

Journey is Complete

How fitting that on this "rainiest" of daze here in Tres Leches, mijo should finish his Potter excursion, all 7 of them, read over the past ten months. Begun while an eight year old third grader, finished while a summer-slacking nine year old soon to be fourth grader. It was a wild ride; I joined him for the last hundred pages this afternoon.

"Why are you crying, Dad?"

Peace.

Poem

[bagatelle]

blue highrider
dorsal fin
extreme auto toys
aqueous night
the daily amens
east &
only creeping.