On My Way (Yesterday)
Wednesday. US Air Flight 4337. Seat 8 F. Hardly enough room for a last View, but room enough for me to see the end of a very ugly chapter in my so-called life. Goodbye Scranton. And goodbye Pennsylvania. We were decidedly not meant for each other.
The plane’s a twin-propped relic, straight outta
Casablanca, ala
Earl. As is the Scranton/Wilkes Barre International airport, without the mood or the funny. It’s also about the size of a suburban carport, only smaller.
One can only imagine where their international destinations lie.
In the air and face against the window. I haven’t seen sky from this height in forever. As you might suspect, the view down is an utter disappoint, unless you’re impressed by wasteland. Scarred nothingness, as if a devilish god came around, torched the ground, then sprinkled powdered sugar on everything before sitting down to sate. Of course once he got a taste of the place he probably spit it out. He sure as hell left a lot of nothing on the plate.
Au revoir, Scranton. We shall not meet again.
Philly International. At least it’s an airport. Unfortunately it’s also a victim of 21st c ninnyisms. In other words, no smoking, anywhere, not even in the bar. I’m not allowed a drink; at least let me have a cigarette.
There’s WiFi, but you gotta have an account or a credit card to log on, which kinda spoils the whole freeing of communication. Puts a damper on the bloggery too. The airing of it anyway. I guess getting back to Go Street is a good excuse to postpone a post.
And, Zeus-willing and Hood-be-doing, it’s the last excuse I’ll ever have to postpone anything. Wait as a mandate is no way to live, especially for one as impatient as I. From here on in there won’t be time for me even to listen for a knock -- I’m kicking the door in.
And with that I gotta thank each and every kind cool one of you for tuning in and enduring my pitted fits and dimwitted starts these past seven months. Knowing you were out there really made my dogged days. I'd also like to invite you all to therealjohnhood.com/bloggery, where I’ll be slingin’ a Hood’s-eye-view of a whole brave new wild world. Oh my View’s still gonna be skewed, it just won’t be skewed Scranton. Instead I’ll be skewing from a place where the visionary is unimpaired.
Let’s hope I keep seeing things.
(Bloggery begins tomorrow, 3/10.)
Nothing But
There are some remarkable stirrings that I dare not remark upon till they're absolutely finalized; meantime I share this, spurred my way by the great good Kretzschmar.
Dig in:
Five TruthsNothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." William Burroughs
Symbolic TruthThe first truth is the symbol-word "Truth." The one spelled with a capital T. It is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is a thin veil of semantics used as a shield against reason, often raised in the defense of some ideologic somethingism. It is the blind truth, faith undeniable, the operating system of all religions.
It is that which attempts to rise above a simple grouping of alpha-numeric code, to shine in some god-granted light. It is an abstraction of an event or concept beyond any physical or perceivable reality.
This is the sovereign truth of all official histories.
Our Truth The second truth is the truth we tell ourselves. It is the limit of our perceptions, it is a filtering of reality which becomes our story. It is my side of it.
It is the facts we build lies on, the memories we cherish, the life we lead. It is our hopes, aspirations and dreams. It is life and death in the modern world.
The second truth is rarely true.
Their Truth The third truth is the truth they try to sell us. It is the same truth as number two but from different eyes. It is their side of the argument, seen through their history, their belief system.
Call it Propaganda if you want -- but it's still a truth.
The Hidden Truth The fourth truth is the truth you won't tell yourself. It's your hidden secrets -- compulsions, anxieties, fears -- the memories we can't edit. These are the dark truths that are the foundation of the underlying self, the controller, the rational voice in the daily dialog of momentary indecisions.
The Final Truth The fifth truth is the true truth, the absolute truth -- it is everything which is the truth is or could ever be.
The final truth is the fate of Universe itself. It is birth, life, death. It is the closing of a circle. It can only be experienced, never fully known.
The final truth is the most beautiful truth of all.
Urban Urchining
If the Hollywood set city-slicking of
Peter Gunn leaves me itchy for action, the actual urbanity of
Jonathan Lethem’s
Motherless Brooklyn has left me a miss more than leaving itself. The walk-and-talk, the candor, the quick. The “forest of skyscrapers.” The “thirsty face.“ Even a dimwit doorman leaves me aching for New York.
And laughing for air. His uber hero, the Tourettic Lionel Essrog, is a gas. Light heady and vapored. And his spill on the doofus garbage cop is priceless:
"In fact, I hated Loomis… [h]is imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts -- his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again:
game over. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing -- so it was my duty to loathe him instead."
How did I miss this book?
Another Stain
Another town. Another stain. This one a bit larger, milkier, muddier than the last just past. Greasy. Like the puddle left by a trashed vehicle that's sat for thirty years. Effulgent. Like the remains of a mottled corpse. It deserves a chalk-line but lacks the wherewithal even to note its own demise.
They call the stain Wilkes Barre and neither Wilkes nor Barre would approve of what it's become.
The town looks like someone came along and kicked the living shit out of it. With few exceptions, the buildings all have been capped at the knees. The few exceptions are entirely unexceptional. A Times Leader tower that shrubs. A Radisson that hedges. Something else that someone slow stopped at a sprout. Everything, everywhere, standing squat, stunted at birth, denied the necessary nutrients for growth.
The locals say that things were never the same after Hurricane Agnes hit in '72, when the levees broke and the water rose chest high. When hope ran away like so much silt. Mulch meat. Boo hoo. Leave it to the excuse-ridden to find an excuse for their own malaise, the die-slows to stick up for a town that won't stick up for itself. 33 years ago something wicked that way came, and they're still licking their wounds.
Let's hope the Big Easy won't play it so hard.
Chapter & Verse
Music is somehow both further up in the sky and deeper down in our bodies than the other arts. Jonathan Lethem
Alec Hanley Bemis conducts a
kickass tete-at-tete with
Rick Moody,
Jonathan Lethem and
John Darnielle in this week’s
LA Weekly. If you dig music, if you dig books, and if you dig the points where they converge, this is a well-worth read.
Speaking of converging well-worthiness, The Mountain Goats have a
version of
Suede's Trash that might just break your heart.
If you've got one.
Medium Coolery
More Gunn Clubbing. Specifically, Set 2, Volume 3 of
Blake Edwards' increasingly enjoyable
Peter Gunn. And these times our impeccably-groomed hero gets a humoured going over. I blog about
Let’s Kill Timothy, which includes a jewel heist, a double-cross, some fisticuffs, and - get this - a seal. Really. On a leash, in Gunn’s convertible, and at the center of some simple-minded diabolics. Gives
Craig Stevens a chance to stretch himself into a wide smile.
Further stretching the Gunn play is
The Missing Night Watchman, which would be notable for having
Mayberry’s
Floyd as a protagonist but goes three steps further, with image and angle and shadow that evoke nothing if not
The Magnificent Andersons. One expects a little Welles-like flourish in our big screen Noir, but to see it on the ’58 model boob tube is a surprise, and a delight.
And the edits! Lieutenant Jacobi’s door closing to a coroner pulling back a sheet off a corpse, an upper crusty creeps to a window and tears open the curtains to reveal not the expected intruder, but himself.
Brilliant.
And
Herschel Bernadi's Lt. Jacobi, a man of infinitely even keel. He’s got a voice that reveals unsaid - and unsayable - great depths. And now that we see he keeps on hand an acoustic guitar, that reveal’s taken another fathom. Imagine the stoic Good Lt. sitting alone in his office, strumming to solve the hard crime on his mind.
While I’m celebrating medium coolery, I gotta give a way-belated RIP to
Don Knotts,
Dennis Weaver and
Darren McGavin. Barney, McCloud and The Night Stalker, natch. You were three of a one of a kind, gentlemen. Inimitable and immortal. And the whole wild world was better off when you were around. Thanks for the stories.
The Sound of This Thursday
With Wednesday’s Ash now gone to unceremonious dust, I dare not look to this day, Thursday, for the get-up that’ll permit me to go. There’s been way too many days like these. Better to look toward tomorrow, even if it never comes. That way I won’t be disappointed.
So today I’ve got
Friday on My Mind, and that means
Bowie and his
Pin-Ups, particularly his immortalizing of
The Easybeats. The slab, and the song, were an integral part of my youth, not just for Bowie’s take on things that were, but for his passion for those things, and for his reverence. After all, if it weren’t for Bowie’s tributation The Easybeats might have been shelved in the dustbin of Pop’s history.
Then I wonder which of the myriad songsters currently buffering my exile might too be shelved, or covered, or heralded, or all or neither of the above. And I figure I better spill a few words while they’re here, now, and while I’m here to hear ’em.
It’s the least I can do.
Each day, like clockwork, armed with my nifty new
HP notebook I hit Northern Lights for some Free Trade roast of the day and a few good downloads. I’m only permitted an hour at a time, but in that hour I bitch and moan and groan, and I make the rounds of indie offerings, some good, some real good, and some even quite great. All made possible by the generosity of concerns such as
Anti,
Sub Pop,
Vagrant,
K,
Barsuk,
spinART,
eenie meenie,
Team Love and
Fueled by Ramen.
There’s
Eef Barzelay’s twanging through his
Ballad of Bitter Honey, a ridiculously compelling twitter, from the voice of the ridiculously compelling
Clem Snide, a personal fave, whom I’ve got on hand once with
Fill Me With Your Light and twice with
All Green, a double shot of unjust rewards.
The devout stirrings of
Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins,
Melt Your Heart with it’s
Fade Into You moodswinging (which coincidentally I first heard on Valentine’s Day), "Born Secular" with it’s Sunday schooling; the hip
Lynn-like
Clinings of
Neko Case, and her sister-in-crime,
Jessie Sykes, both of whom deserve their very own Grand Ol’ Opry, right in the middle of Manhattan.
The classicist groove of
Living Things and
Calla, the
Collectivist trippings of
Panda Bear, and their outta-this-worldly brother
Ariel Pink, which segue nicely into the
10cc-sized revvings of
The Sunshine Fix;
Merle doing
Hank’s
If You’ve Got the Money after candidly
Wishing All These Old Things Were New;
Dashboard Confessional, who can either be blamed or praised for the rash of emo on the air; the pre-neo post wavishness of
Jennifer Gentle’s
I Do Dream You which could’ve been rendered by
Plastic Bertrand’s niece.
Echoes of all and none the period piece
Melt With You-ings of
Mates of State‘s
Fraud in the ‘80s, and the way the world is turned on its head and spun anew by
The Fiery Furnaces'
Police Sweater Blood Vow the winsome
Smithsomeness of
The Dears; and the new trad
Melvinings of
The Hold Steady, who‘s
The Swish is positively delish.
“I came right over the counter just to kiss you.”
Some
Tricky trippery, a
Dimension Mix of
Stereolab’s
Mudra, the
Foldsy
Teenaramics of
Apollo Sunshine,
Koufax and The Hush;
Frank Black and the Catholics bluesing through
Nadine, putting on the Francis for a reductionary recap of
Monkey Gone to Heaven, and the jungled relations of
Bunky’s funky
Monkey Song, and
Low’s own knowing
Monkey.
My groove is gotten with
Spam Allstars and
Mark Ronson’s reflooring of
Radiohead’s
Just (scroll to 2/20); my radio head is highed and realized via
Nada Surf and
Ted Leo and
Starlight Mints and the
Ageless Beauty of
Stars;
Iron and Wine and
Smog provide the simple, supple sustenance my soul requires, as does -- different yet equal -- that dame known as
Tender Forever.
There are
The Frames, who first came to me, as most things first came to me the two years before my Scrantoning, over
XPN. I can’t remember the track, but I do remember digging it, and when I stumbled upon
Star Star I recalled why. The Frames have a way with song. Their
Fitzcarraldo, inspired by
Herzog’s heroic
flickery, even makes me not mind a bit of jam.
But above all of the above finery there are three songs that have moved me to near tears and made me marvel that my belief in the power of melody is not completely without merit:
Cat Power’s
The Greatest,
The Elected’s
Greetings in Braille and
A Girl Called Eddie’s
Golden. I won’t say anything more about them here, ‘cause I can’t say enough.
I will say this: Just because I’ve still no View doesn’t mean I can’t listen.
John Hood
The Lean Mean
Meaning is arbitrary and without foundation. Translation: meaning doesn’t mean shit. Or it means whatever the fuck you say it means, want it to mean, need it to mean, mean it to mean.
You say you mean one thing, I take it to mean another; together we get something else. Something different. Something the same. Meaning. Is this miscommunication, or is it collaboration?
Both. Blessedly, beautifully so. Get to the happy place where accidents happen. And all it means is we both got there. At last.
We gotta get somewhere. Somewhere else.
The spur comes from Kalle Lasn’s soon to be unleashed
Design Anarchy, an inimitable
Adbusters offering. Dig the previews, they’re a gas. Lean, mean and keen. Simple, solid and elegant. And then some.
And Tibor. Lots and lots of Tibor. Evoked in mug and mood and spirit. Homaged in idea and angle. Adbusters know enough to know a master, and they know how to due things masterfully.
