Le Basilique de Sacre Couer (from earthinpictures.com)

TohuBohu Tales
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~ Chapter 4: Sacre Coeur!

Chapter 4 ~ Sacre Coeur

There really is no hope of capturing Paris in words, though I will make some tiny, sorry attempts. The subject is too big, at least for me. Better to stay small. I will not be obligated or responsible for you somehow seeing the Paris of those years. This is a failure I concede up front. Go yourself. Look up pictures. Read Hemingway, whomever. I declare I am not responsible for Paris, although I am responsible for leaving some things behind there. That will be my tale, my story of Paris. That is all it will be. Better, I say, to stay small.

I saw before me a demitasse of chocolat chaud, a tiny spoon delivered by a Tunisian waiter at a Montmarte cafe along with our gleaming white porcelain cups and saucers. Back home, where gulping food and drink, then gulping more, was my norm, this French serving seemed an impossibly tiny amount of hot chocolate for such a freezing night. Abdullah and I had arrived in the City of Lights on Christmas Eve,  1987. We paced ourselves through our cups. With each teensy spoonful, the spoon’s metal tang came first, then the hit of syrupy, steaming chocolate went down like what chocolate must have first tasted like to a Mayan lord or whomever first served the cacao bean, warm and wet. We were ecstatic to be free young men in Paris for several days and nights, hot cups in cold hands, so our judgment was perhaps severely clouded. But I remember, twenty years later, how that chocolate tasted.

Our hands and faces were frigid from a walk up out of the Marcadet des Pouissoineers Metro stop to this café blocks away in Montmarte.  On our way along boulevards, up serpentine side streets, we passed bakeries, bookstores, groceries, candy shops, perfume stores. All the minutiae of French commerce, the slivers of shops you bounced among to compile your needs for the day and night. We strolled past an open butcher shop. On a hook above the window outside the shop hung head-down the body of an antlered deer. A sprig of mistletoe decorated its mouth

We each poured the last drops into our mouths. Left a few centimes behind, exited the café. The moment had come. Would this work? We rounded the corner to a seven-story building hunkered at a three-way intersection. The building commanded the corner. It looked as if it had been there since Napoleon, maybe well before. The way in was through two massive wooden doors, twice as high as  Abdullah or me. So, let’s see. (more…)

Some years ago, my friend Amy Van Gogh snapped this shot of a startling public haiku that used to adorn the side of a building along Summers Street across from the Capitol Plaza Theater in downtown Charleston, W.Va.. Rarely are taggers and graffiti artistes this fine with words. This is the title of a book/poem/song I intend to write someday. I have not yet grabbed the idea of it out of the dream-crowded air, but know that it’s there. | click photo bigger

In the Audible Arts Studio, Robert plays my new samisen, using the traditional bachi or plectrum. Click the player below to hear Robert and Sammy going to town.

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A couple of years ago, when I first began hanging out with the Mercer Street irregulars after a magical Clementines gig at The Room Upstairs in Princeton, W.Va., I fell in love. It was an odd love affair. She was ungainly. Thin. With an odd, twangy voice. She was Japanese, which added to her exoticism and allure. I was smitten. I had to have her.

Problem was, she was owned already. Robert Blankenship of the band Option 22, and co-founder of The Room Upstairs, played her all the time. “Robert,” I said. “WHERE did you get that samisen?” For that was her name – samisen (or also shamisen). You can call her ‘Sammy.’ She has three strings that produce a banjo-like twang. Courtesans in old Japanese society used to train on the instrument, as a means of entertaining their clients before the evening’s other entertainment. That was all I knew. I had to know more. I couldn’t wrest  Sammy from Robert’s arms – he had, well, a fixation on her, too. He would lend her to me, but it was a fleeting thing.

Hence, I went to the Man, the man who had made Robert’s Sammy. The Professor, we’ll call him, a fellow of great accomplishment in both making music and making the instruments of music. Plus, The Professor is one of the few mature males  who can get away with wearing a black bowler hat in the year 2010 and not look absolutely ridiculous. But that’s another story. So, I tossed the Prof two sawbucks as a measure of my commitment to the creation of something like Robert’s sammy. He demurred – this would take work. He had Other Things To Do. It Could Take Awhile. I said, Fine. I. Can. Wait. The sawbucks disappeared into his pocket.

Later, hungry for a little sammy action, I cut him a check, a bigger downpayment. This got his attention. He began work, e-mailing me photos of her creation. Then, the day came. He showed up at my house with her. She was done. Initially, I was intimidated. She was so exotic, so strange. I would run my fingers along her as she hung beside my Taylor Guitar on my guitar rack (they needed to get to know one another). Then, one day, I took her up.

There are many ways to love a samisen, literally scores of ways to tune her. I began by creating an octave between the bottom two strings, tuned to an F-sharp, with the top string raised a fourth above that. I am still getting to know how to play my sammy in my completely unlearned, non-traditional fashion. (If you want to hear a rocking, contemporary samisen-powered group, check out the Yoshida Brothers). But now that I have her (well, when I can get her away from Robert, who has a serious crush on her) we have much to learn together. Wish us well. Sammy will be showing up on some tunes we Mercer Street Irregulars are now cooking up. Stay tuned. Sammy is in the stadium.

The Ancient of Days by William Blake (a k a God as an Architect)

“… As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly interested, I live by Miracle. I am painting small Pictures from the Bible. For as to Engraving, in which art I cannot reproach myself with any neglect, yet I am laid in a corner as if I did not Exist, & since my Young Night Thoughts have been publish’d, even Johnson & Fuseli have discarded my Graver. But as I know that he who Works & has his health cannot starve, I laugh at Fortune & Go on & on. I think I foresee better Things than I have ever seen. My Work pleases my employer & I have an order for Fifty small Pictures at one Guinea each, which is something better than mere copying after another artist. But above all, I feel myself happy & contented let what will come; having passed now near twenty years in ups & downs, I am used to them, & perhaps a little practise in them may turn out to benefit. It is now exactly twenty years since I was upon the ocean of business, & tho [I] laugh at Fortune, I am perswaded that She Alone is the Governor of Worldy Riches, & when it is Fit she will call on me; till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is busied among my Friends … ”

~ William Blake in a letter to George Cumberland, August 26, 1799

Let us pause for a moment, those of us of a certain age, and consider. Consider what? How the feck much things have changed. Sometimes actually for the good. Yes, yes, there is much, much change for the worse. Vicious demagogues rule a major American political party. Everywhere you go, an 800-pound gorilla named Wally (last name Mart) squats upon the squashed remnants of main streets where it used to be pleasing to stroll, shop and stop. Crosley Field is no more. Phil Collins is still on the radio.

On the other hand, I just popped into my MacBook Pro a CD by Habib Koite, who I’m to interview for a feature story in advance of his appearance with his band Bamada March 7 at the Clay Center in Charleston, WV. My iTunes program speaks up: “Yo ho, Master,” it says (it understands its role in our relationship). “Would you like, sire, for me to add this CD to my library. You down with that?” (more…)

“TohuBohu Tales”
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5: First Meeting ~ Chapter 4

Chapter 3.5 ~ First Meeting

SETTING: A sunlit meeting room, 7^th floor of a hospital named Bethesda North. A dozen people sit in cloth-upholstered chairs ranged in an oblong. The last of a pot of coffee gurgles into a glass pot on a side table. A man in a brown tweed jacket, the left corner of his mouth pursed downward, stands, pulls a Styrofoam cup from a stack beside the pot and pours a cup. He ignores the containers of cream and sugar. A heavy-set woman in a nurse’s jacket decorated with tiny blue-and-yellow flowers  and a white badge that reads “Jacky,” holds a clipboard with a plastic tab at the top that reads ‘Thioridazine.’

JACKY: OK, let’s get started. As agreed, we’ll not be using our real names, so that we all may speak freely.
MOTHER: (Sighs): Why are you doing this? Why are we even here? This is a family matter. You know we love you. This is something for the family. No one else.
SON: (Shifting, reaching down to scratch his foot): What year is this?
JACKY: What year do you want it to be?
SON: I want it to be over. I want to go back.
MOTHER: Back when?
SON: Before. When I didn’t need them. (He stares out the window at the trees. With his left foot, he toes a metal crutch on the floor, the kind with a brace for the forearm). Or after.
FATHER: After what? (more…)

A little Neruda is always a lot. Here is the ending third of  “Sonata con algunos pinos” (“Sonata with some pine trees”). You’ll find the full poem in “Extravagaria.”

… what justifies not being?
where did other people take you?

It is good to have a change of clothes
of skin of hair of work

to get to know the earth a little
to give your woman new kisses

to be a part of clear air
to disdain all oligarchies

when I went from fog to fog
navigating by my hat

I never found anyone with directions
they were all preoccupied

they were off to sell things
nobody asked me who I was

till I got to recognizing myself
till I set off a smile

in the half sky and the warp of branches
let us make peace with our tiredness

let us have talk with roots
and with disenchanted waves

let us forget about hurry
the teeth of the efficient

let us forget the shadowy
miscellany of those who wish us ill

let us make a profession of being earth-bound
let us touch the earth with out beings.

One of the Catch 22’s of  obscure blogging (aren’t most bloggers obscure ones?) is that you may feel that since only 17 people read your posts on any given day (actually, 113 on Friday; 64 on Saturday; and 47, so far today) you are free to write any old damn thing. Free to be ridiculous or to over-share because, hell, no one’s really paying attention, right? But then, as e-mail scandals demonstrate, everything you write on the Web is hidden in plain sight. It could come back to haunt you, all that over-sharing or venting, all that exertion and postulation. All that earnest prose and stinky fish yanked from the stream of your consciousness, then flopped, half-cooked onto the plate of a blogpost: Here’s a snack! So, it is with cautiousness and trepidation, shot through with the urge to join the exhibitionist party, I’ve recently begun to post regularly. I could flee at any moment, I should tell you, leaving this blog to join the dead ends, ghost towns and 404 File Not Found valentines hosted by ISP’s across  Blogostania. Because, really, is all this time in front of my computer, seated at my backyard picnic table, smoking an 8-5-8 (and hunting down an 8-5-8 Web link on my MacBook) really worth it for you 47 people? Do I even know you?

It’s a little like the streaking craze that swept through America back in the day in the early ’70s. Everyone’s doing it — or enough people are doing it that we keep reading about it. So, feck it all, let’s us do it. My only streaking experience came one night at J.’s house when I was a senior in high school back in Ohio. He’d stolen my girlfriend. Well, if there were a Wikipedia listing on the episode, it might recount that V. left D. for J., possibly because D. had failed to renew his temps and J. had a killer powder-blue convertible. But that would be a disputed interpretation caused by D’s abashed disappointment and inability to drive V. to the Pizza Hut anymore. Much less to make out in the backseat, except in your parent’s driveway, which is never cool. And J. had indisputable charms, not the least being he was tall, handsome and the mayor’s son. In any case, D. got to visit the boudoir, not to mention the bloomers of one of J.’s fading loves a few years hence in college, squaring our dance card. (See what I mean about over-sharing?) (more…)