Looky-Touchy-Feely - The Atomized Bombs of Jessica Smith [Part II]

Part I (The Book)

 

Organic Furniture Cellar is a self-published work of 95 pages, 7 3/8"x9 1/4", a dimension whose scale is very similar to the old Wesleyan University Press poetry series design. It was printed by McNaughton & Gunn [Saline, Michigan]. The cover design fabric freize is an adaptation from a William Morris design. The covering wrapper is printed on matte sheen finish, and Smith-bound (trim & glue). The text stock is cool greyish-white. The text font is distributed Garamond, with titles in Arts & Crafts Hunter by P22 Type Foundry. I mention all this because the design of the book is by the Author, for whom the form of the presentation, and the implications of the design principles employed, are clearly important to the meaning of the work, and how we are to judge its effectiveness and ultimate significance.

  

Since I also self-published my first collected poems, Stanzas For An Evening Out [L Publications, Berkeley: 1977], as well as a later collection, Metro [Privately Published, Kensington, 2005] I am sympathetic with the Author's impulse to control the form of the presentation of her work, and would recommend the option to other writers seeking to disseminate or realize their texts in forms appropriate to their intention. 

 

Historically, since the inception of moveable type printing, Authors have relinquished their texts to printers, book-binders and designers, as well as distributors and marketers and advertisers, causing an alienation of the artist-writer from the material text, and encouraging a separation of the maker from the object-product. This separation, aggravated by further mechanical sophistications over the centuries, has tended to reinforce the dependancy of the maker upon the machine, (and) upon the commodity production-system which controls the "publishing" of nearly all printed matter in the world today. 

 

I have advocated an alternative system, which might return the maker of the text to the condition of an original artist role, where the choice of the "final" form of the text might be closely monitored, and in which the production of the text itself might be incorporated into the creative process, side-stepping the oppressive (and traditionally regimented) concepts of standard publishing procedures of materials and distributions, to explore the actual relationship between medium and inspiration, and facilitating a more creative connection between maker (artist-writer) and a probable "audience" (one conceived out of a revised and renewed sense of participation and interaction). 

 

As the traditional "press" model of material text production has declined into obscurity, "fine press" production has continued to thrive, albeit modestly, at a tiny, marginal, "crafts" level. Too, fine press has continued to be governed largely by historically timid departures from "tradition" and the previous technologies of mechanical printing. 

 

Thus, Jessica Smith's choice to self-publish, though admirable on its face, nevertheless encounters concepts of available alternatives, which bear substantial resemblance to pre-existing cliches of "book" production: I.e., the short-run university press prototype of the cheaply bound paperback book, limited by cost and mass market-driven choices of materials and forms (paper, type-fonts, length, and so on). Her choice to compromise her ambitious ideas of textual expression by delivering them in the pre-ordained material designed forms consistent with the clichés of the contemporary book production, bring into question the degree of her commitment to a really challenging vision of an expanded realization of the text. I would encourage Ms. Smith to think more about the potentials of a truly committed compositional methodology, if she is truly serious about seeing beyond traditional concepts of the generation of text and the relation to audience. Her presentation here is not nearly as opaque or obdurate as she may suppose.

 

My main complaint, aside from the issue of traditional presentation versus espoused interest in novel presentation, is that the choice to present the whole text in a tiny font (size 6?)--even the very lengthy "Forward"--is difficult to read. I can understand that many of the poems, printed at a larger scale, would require a much larger page size, but the choice of a larger font size printed on a larger page--say, 8"x10"--would yield a much more comfortable read, and might emphasize the dramatic atomization of effect which seems to be part of what she is striving to achieve. I mention this, again, because Ms. Smith makes a point of wishing to challenge, or "subvert" the traditional approaches to reading procedure, and because she had the freedom to determine such parameters of presentation.

 

 

                                _______________________________________ 

 

                               

The title of the work, Organic Furniture Cellar, is derived from the name of a small, second-hand used furniture store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "For me the store name evokes an exploration of memory, of mnemonics, of the organic cellar of the mind and its structures. What stirs one's memory--the precise color of an autumn leaf, the smell of a city, the repetition of dates, the retracing of a well-known path--stirs an entire mnemo-topological system." Here is a photo of the shop in question--

   

The choice to conflate the "furniture" of the title, with the fabric design on the cover may not be altogether fortuitous. There is a certain connotative craftsmanliness which is either too obvious or too trite to bear emphasizing, in context of the very serious, and ambitious Forward. But this is just a quibble.   

 

 

Part II (The Poetics)

 

The decision to introduce one's own work with a long, discursive critical essay or manifesto--as Ms. Smith has done here, in her own Forward of some 7000 words of single-spaced text, again in very tiny type face!--as a defense of the methodology of one's (aesthetic) approach to form, strikes me as pretentious, unless what one has to claim about the value or difficulty of one's work justifies the interposition. In Smith's case, I would argue, the complexity and richness of her description of the implications and potentials of her own work, exceeds by a considerable factor, the supposed density and probable implications of the work itself. The essay reads like a slightly pretentious abbreviated master's thesis by a modestly gifted, but unimaginative, graduate student attempting to defend her poems as deliberate derivations of established Modernist canonical figures. 

 

The idea that one's poems might need an advanced explanation to be properly appreciated is an academic tendency which I find suspect. Poems, if they are to be appreciated at all, need to stand on their own as examples of what they might mean to anyone reading them for the first time. Attempting to lay the critical groundwork for their reception is like a premonitory warning against, or exaggerated presumption of the value of, a new work. A preliminary discussion about one's influences, or explanations about how the work itself is to be read, may constitute a confession of the failure of the work to stand on its own. One must believe, having read the text to which such a statement or manifesto is the advanced qualification, that the work itself justifies the claims that have been made for it. This is the risk that Ms. Smith takes, and having now read the complete text itself, I'm not convinced that it was justified, since I believe that the work is easily accessible and self-evidently apprehensible on its own, without any need for warnings, instructions or explanations. 

 

In her Forward, Ms. Smith makes a distinction between the calligraphic arrangement of words within the space of the page, using as an example Apollinaire's poem Il pleut ("It rains") from Calligrammes, in which the graphic display of words describing rain "fall" vertically down the page (what Smith condescendingly refers to as "mere ideograms"), and what she refers to as "Plastic poetry" which, rather than being only self-referential ("flat"), gives rise to "something outside of itself." 

  

 

Plastic poetry "disrupt[s] the reader's space...disrupt[s]...the virtual space one moves through when reading a poem."

 

Plastic poetry "draws attention to the physicality of reading."

 

Plastic poetry "respond[s] to a pre-existing typographical space as well as to the existing syntactical structures in the reader's mind."  

 

Plastic poetry "is forced to hesitate between the memories and potentialities of meaning...[and] entangles the reader in a web of undetermined syntactical relations."

 

Plastic poetry "problematizes the assumed relationship between language--specifically the logic of syntax--and the world." 

 

Whereas in traditional poetry "the organizational models of syntax we learn neither mimic real thought nor force a reader to negotiate the language," Plastic poetry "disrupt[s] the reading process, call[ing] attention to the way a reader uses the virtual space of memory to syntactically organize fragments of language into meaning." In traditional poetry "the production of meaning is constrained by the obvious relation between the poem's visual format and its regimented reading sequence."     

  

After noting several historical examples of alternative forms of composition in architecture and music, Smith describes the various ways in which her Plastic poems may be read. They can be read in any order, in any direction, and never in the same way twice. The possible meanings one may derive through the variously proposed processes (my italics) of reading are all genuine, and acceptable; none is the correct one, none is intentional, none is predictable. Nevertheless, Smith claims, "although these poems can always be 'read' or 'performed' differently by the eye and inner ear, the parts of each poem are made to coordinate with its other parts down to the minutest detail." In other words, the possible myriad "readings" for each of her poems is predicated on the notion that her settings/scorings anticipate all such possible variant readings, "down to the minutest detail." This is an ambitious claim. If there are no correct, or ultimate intended readings, then the Author has deliberately abrogated the essential function and the first responsibility of the modern artist: to create persuasive form which convinces through its power and suggestibility, offering new ways of looking at experience, thought and expression. As an analogue for irrationality, or for the secret logic of cognitive processes, or for random forms of organization, such an informal approach to composition creates many more questions than it can well supply answers to.

  

Smith tells us that she wishes to "disrupt" expectation, to cause a "hesitation" before comprehension. "Throughout Organic Furniture Cellar, all writing methods are maps of memories." These maps are not literal, but abstract maps, through which the reader wanders randomly, making connections, drawing parallels, getting temporarily "lost" or subsumed within a private "reading" made out of accidental impressions of "fragments" or "shards" of verbal matter. For Smith, memory comprises both the raw matter, and the conceptual frame through which every reader apprehends her work. We perceive syntax as the familiar or unfamiliar confrontation with expected word order, thus the act of reading is a randomized, syntactically open-ended novel reconstruction of what Smith "remembers" from her past. Putting aside the philosophical complications, and semantic and linguistic vagaries which this implies, we could say that a notational template or nimbus of separate impressions and fragments, scattered across a page, constitutes a "map" of a place that only exists in Smith's mind, and which cannot be discerned by ordinary means (grammar and logic), nor should we expect it to be.        

  

Since the Enlightenment, the advance of science has permitted artists to realize that nature is not a chaos, out of which the artist must fashion an "order"--but rather a highly articulate and complex system of interrelationships. The world is not divided into "wild" and "tame" but is a whole, holistic, entity, any part of which may not be imagined as standing separate and untainted by the rest. However, the power of art lies in our ability to fashion persuasive rhetorics of formal structure and organized frequencies, which then stand for what they mean, as ends in themselves. They cannot merely be windows to something else, vehicles which may or may not function, or receptacles of possible meanings no one of which the Author is willing to furnish.  

  

We may experience painting, or music, or architecture, or poetry, as process, but the process is deliberate, and repeatable, and persuasive, and not random, or accidental, or informal. If an artist wishes to create works which offer multiple possible means of apprehension, the danger is that the strategies by which that apprehension is facilitated may be so slack as to lack any sense of intention whatsoever. The power of poetry implies an ability on the part of the poet to make structures which are unique, fascinating, compelling, entertaining, and resistant to boredom. We admire Shakespeare because of the power of his vision, the great genius of his verbal ingenuity, the delight and pity and joy which he is able to inspire, and the insight we derive into the human condition. These are the same qualities we sense in Homer, or Milton, or Chaucer, or Blake, or Browning, or James Joyce, or T.S. Eliot, or William Carlos Williams, or Louis Zukofsky. Writers who choose to forfeit the challenge of making formal arrangements directed toward a deliberate human end, will ultimately fritter their gifts on trivial parlor-games, neither more nor less meaningful than a game of chess. 

 

As I shall try to make clear in a discussion of Smith's poems, there is nothing very new about either her technique, or her approach to visual form. The claims she makes for it in her Forward, are applicable only as external critical observations, since the work itself neither suggests, nor prompts the specific dynamic characteristics she describes. In other words, without her Forward, the poems may be seen as empty arrangements, fragments without a compelling formal purpose or function.       

  

                                         _____________________________________

 

 

Next Post:  Part III (The Poems)

                         

A Brief Hiatus - I Set Out Now, In a Bed Upon the Sand

Maybe not seaworthy, but charming nonetheless. I'll be putting the blog to rest for five days, never fear, I shall return, hopefully a more prosperous and fortified fellow. Maybe by next week I'll receive my copy of Organic Furniture Cellar so I can review it. In the meantime, too-ta-loo.   

"So Ardently Contested..."

Two weeks ago I wrote a review of another young poet's first trade collection [Minimalism Part VII]. I took that book to task for not aspiring to a high enough model of practice, and suggested that a compromised version of writing, could lead to a compromised, short-circuited fulfillment. The poet contacted me and suggested that I must be "angry" at him or his writing, else how could I not find the worthy aspects of his poetry? The idea that a negative reaction to any poetry, could only be explained by a kind of premonitory disaffection, is probably a natural enough reaction to rejection. 

 

The idea of a standard of value as applied to poetry is one that is always on the table, even when--even though--we may not express that in so many words. People will often say that the only worthwhile pastime is promoting and expressing pleasure at what we like and admire, but if we (or everyone we think belongs to our sphere) spend all our energy praising each others' work, in the end we can't have any standards at all, save for friendship and good cheer. Friendship is a wonderful thing, as are loyalty and admiration, emulation and gratitude. But these qualities, as necessary as they are to a happy existence, can't be the basis for an aesthetics, or a poetics.

 

It is perfectly possible to be trapped inside a provincial mediocrity, buttressed by the wholesome encouragement of friends and close associates. And this mediocrity may not even be geographical. In the modern age--especially now in the age of the internet--one's circle or coterie of attachments or contacts may be built out of a casual series of electronic communications, which defines a certain attitude or set of shared tendencies. There's a very real desire, sometimes, to believe that acceptance and approbation are a spontaneous phenomenon, that praise is a confirmation of the value and quality of one's enterprise. 

  

Lately, I've noticed a tendency amongst younger writers to think of criticism--all criticism--as an old-fashioned parlor-game, in which outdated or outmoded theories of critical regard are applied, as a kind of throttle to youthful inspiration. Perhaps this has always been the case, but there never was an opportunity for people to respond, so immediately, to negative critical appraisals. Again, the notion that negative reviews could only be the result of some kind of pathological, predatory motivation, designed (fabricated) to inflict undeserved and unwanted pain, is not a new idea, but one which seems more in evidence, with the explosion of literary interactivity on the web.

 

The notion that any writing--all writing--that one might do, or have published--could be considered a personal, or social, or literary good, despite whatever qualities it might possess, is a ridiculous idea. I noticed the other day that a young poet who happens to have some resources, has only been writing for about 15 years, but has over 30 titles, many self-published. This kind of profligacy does not in itself prove anything, perhaps, except that ambition and energy can generate the illusion of accomplishment. 

 

There is a movement abroad in the land of poetry, a belief that in order to succeed in the nation of Andrew Carnegie and Donald Trump, one must promote one's work, and that of one's friends--that all symptoms of withholding, of subtraction of support and approbation, are dangerous, nefarious threats, which must be resisted, discredited, stamped out. 

 

What I suggested in my review of August 25 2010 was that the young poet in question had chosen a set of literary models which were insufficient to his talent--a tradition of bad imitation of Eastern poetic forms, as well as of the superficial characteristics of certain American writers (William Carlos Williams). Reactions to this assertion suggested that not only was it permissible to engage in third-hand, watered down emulation, it was actually preferable to do this, rather than exhibit any true original talent; indeed, that the evidence of derivation of formal properties, of apprenticeship, was the best possible aspect of this work, because it showed respect, obedience and devotion (all good virtues). Another way of saying this is that William Carlos Williams is a great model, as is Classical Chinese poetry, but Williams or Basho through the eyes of Corman, or Rexroth, may not be an entirely propitious transmission. If Joseph Massey wishes to rise above the level of mere politeness, he should set his sights higher than Cid Corman and Frank Samperi.                                           

   

 

 

All of which leads me, by circuitous animadversion, back to the work of another poet, one long dead, whose promise was cut short at the very beginning of his career. Max Douglas was a poet, born in 1949 (two years after me), who showed great promise. His Collected Poems [published by White Dot Press, Washington, D.C., edited by Christopher Wienert and Andrea Wyatt] which runs to some 150 pages, is precocious, since Max died at 21 of a heroin overdose. What is immediately apparent upon a first reading of this collection is that Douglas had already, by the tender age of 20, absorbed and digested the formal lessons of Black Mountain (Olson, Dorn, Blackburn, Creeley), and was poised to embark on what almost certainly would be impressive and important work. 

  

 

Spring Again

 

1

 

old barns and houses

are falling down

 

2

 

sheds lurch filled with limp hay

sour smell of dung

  

3

 

sharp smell of burning fields

far off columns of smoke

 

4

 

angry dogs defending

country store

  

       

This is simple writing, whose skill is accomplished through subtraction and suggestion, not through performance and showing off. Immediate impressions, regionally founded, with clear acknowledgments to forebears.  

 

Second-rate imitations of estimable work is almost always better than first-rate imitations of inferior work (the point I attempted to raise in the work of Massey). You can hear Dorn and Creeley underneath these lines--

 

 

School Zone

 

small girls

jumping rope

 

air lifting hair

boys skipping

 

in a long line

at the end

 

a little blond

in stripes

 

his arms going

like a brakeman's

 

I watch

from another world

 

theirs beginning

where the shadow

 

of the overpass

quits

 

and the sun and

screaming takes up

 

the overpass itself

winding away

 

on its stilts

trucks sighing

 

east pigeons

flying under

 

leaves paper

dust blowing

 

across the asphalt

on which the last

 

baseball game

of a few children

 

is shattered

by the bell

 

that brings now

older boys

  

 

--but there's a maturity, not just of concision of use, but of revelations of life experience, astonishing in one so young. Compassion, self-consciousness ("I watch/from another world"), vivid observation ("the overpass itself/winding away/on its stilts"). The line-breaks and enjambments aren't violent and overdone, but are natural, and flow, connected, in an ordered sequence that is as determinative as the movements of the head or eye. 

 

  

Song

 

In October

my soul is dim

  

as the sky settled

flatly

  

over the fields

of our fearful isolation.

  

Twelve bare trees.

At Northville the cemetery

  

rises

above corn

  

to the south &

east, to a wind not kindly

  

by any season

to exposure so severe.

  

Atchison, her

massive granaries...

  

O it is a land of plenty It is

a time

  

of harvest...

And we have attained

  

that critical Missourian shore/

without welcome, finally.

  

The single white

elevator of Rushville.

  

It is a fine rain haltingly falls.        

 

 

This is an unashamed adaptation of Dorn's "Geography" style, and I wouldn't make any claims for its originality, but I believe in its honesty. Douglas was a Missouri kid, and a budding regionalist (a quality his teacher Dorn would undoubtedly have fostered in him, following from Olson's insistent example). Wienert, in his perceptive Introduction to the poems, refers to Max's "vocal hesitancy...sparing in his measure of the line...this compressive turning and halting syntax...marks discovery in the poem...the minimal phrase which most clearly articulates his poetic eye." Emotion driving formal structure, rather than the amusing coincidence of novelty which so often diverts the untrained mind. 

  

These poems aren't mature, finished efforts which stand alone as things in themselves, but they address concerns which incorporate feeling--a feeling for one's place, in a place, on its terms--and open those feelings out into things, rather than simply describing inert matter and phenomena as diverting, mechanized contraptions. 

  

  

Northwest Missouri

 

1.

 

birds

whipping in

under eaves

 

perching

to touch their shadows

in the spaces

 

between boards

the Coca-Cola ad

the entire east face

 

is peeling badly

dated by its slogan

YOU TRUST ITS QUALITY

 

the sun, shining between

boards, stripes hay bales

shaded in

 

The small barn

giving them the appearance

of sleeping tigers

 

2.

 

everything 

upward from the creek

bed except the yellow

 

leaves which are falling

down black cattle

Angus on above the other

 

on the grassy slope

which continues to rise

above them all

 

on top there is a young tree

dark perpendicular fence

post against a white sky

 

all this rising so ardently

contested by the horizontals

of the fencing      

  

3.

 

beside clear running

water dry leaves and

rocks lie down

 

in the same bed

the tracks of small

animals in the mud

 

a tree upright still

by virtue of what roots

the bank has not abandoned

 

leans over the water

which mirrors it

nestling a beer can

  

in a crotch 

of its roots

 

4.

 

the moon above

the hills barer

each day

 

is like a

slice of ham fat

 

in alfalfa

on the hill

overlooking the valley

 

a spider

scurries across

my shoe

 

a patch 

of dead grass

 

is an island

of grasshoppers

 

I am overtaken

with a sense of

not decline flight

 

crickets ticking

rime running out

 

a freight train

rumbling through

the valley

 

 

The quality of feeling--the emotion, which Pound always insisted upon as a measure of the fidelity of any poem--runs like a clear stream of intention through the described events. "All this rising so ardently contested" could stand as a definition of the principle--"by virtue of what roots the bank has not abandoned" a delicate turn of phrase clean out of nowhere--"I am overtaken by a sense of...flight...a freight train rumbling through the valley." The arc of the poem's movement from moment to moment, image to image, is deliberate and confident, not accidental, gratuitous or wasted. "Birds...perching...to touch their shadows in the spaces" towards the "flight" at the end.

  

The sense of loss we feel in the work of one so young, on the threshold of discovery and achievement, is like a stillborn birth. In this instance, it wasn't a lack of conviction, or a passionate intensity that was lacking, just the fickle needle of chance. I commented earlier on the career of my late friend, Patrick Schnoor [I, II, III]  whose promise was similarly cut short by a drug problem. Whether Max Douglas realized the jeopardy in which he placed his fate by injecting himself with a heroin overdose, would never be known. Certainly he wasn't suicidal, or there's no evidence of that in the work. 

 

If we could undo the past and open a door into possibility, we would never "know" what mightn't have happened. We can't not know what we think actually did happen. And so the Max Douglases and Patrick Schnoors of the world spin endlessly in a sort of limbo of possibility, half in the world of make-believe, half in the actual world of reality. But they should remind us of the duty we bear as survivors, we carry the burden of their promise as talismans of inspiration into the future.    

The Nat King Cole Trio - Nostalgia Was Never Better

I've been You-Tubing lately, with predictable results. 

 

There are things you seemingly rarely hear, or read, or see, but which are instantly recognizable, and inspiring, but which you always seem to "forget" about. I'm not sure why this should be. I've been listening to jazz, swing and pop for over 50 years, but every time I hear a piece by Nat King Cole's Trio, I throw up my hands and exclaim "Man, oh, man, that's the most underrated musical phenomenon of all time! It's been much too long since I listened to that, what could I have been thinking?"

  

Cole was among the first--if not in fact the first--to try out the small trio concept based around a jazz piano. Cole's Trio, him on the keyboard with a bass and a guitar back-up, later became the regular setting for a host of talented composer-singers such as Tatum, Jamal, Peterson, Ray Charles, etc. The idea of using a couple sidemen to weave a tightly focused harmony had been common in classical compositions ("chamber music") for centuries. During the Swing Era, the tendency was to expand the down-river Dixie "band" concept into a full jazz "orchestra" but the core Swing Era was fairly short-lived, and the Depression and War years made the big group economically unviable, and besides, times (and tastes) were a-changin'. Cole's intimate, upbeat, and jazzy-sexy singing prefigured the 1940's and 1950's torchy tradition, and Cole himself moved on, abandoning the keyboard in favor of straight stand-up solo voicings. 

  

In my view (and I'm not alone), this was really a shame. Cole was a wonderful jazz pianist, certainly as good as anyone during his era (Teddy Wilson, Shearing, Earl Hines, Errol Garner, Bill Evans, Count Basie, etc.). Cole's years bridge the Swing Era, the early Bop and Progressive Jazz style Era, and finally the Fifties Pop style, eventually capitulating to Rock. By the mid-1950's, Cole had abandoned the keyboard (and his Trio) for television spots, and straight solo singing gigs. In retrospect, of course, this was really inevitable. The audience for purely instrumental solo-ing had always been limited, in comparison with the growing dance band and pop concert scenes, in addition to the lucrative recording business. As the Big Bands shrank or broke up, smaller groups like Cole's Trio could still find work, while the travel and board expenses were manageable.

  

There's a kind of easy ingratiating quality to all of Cole's music. Aside from the caressing baritone, which he was always in complete command of, his own arrangements from the 40's are always constructed around a distilled, integrated version, the very essence of any lyrical line. He was never a "virtuoso" showing off the way many jazz greats could be at times. It's interesting to speculate about what kind of solo keyboard work he might have done into the LP era, when sides could be expanded to 5 or 10 or even 15 minute sets. 

  

If you had to choose, you'd certainly take the wonderful singing over the pianist, and mourning the loss of something like Cole's instrumental gift is really just a way of regretting the decline of Swing music in general, I suppose. Also, Cole's abandonment of the group seems to have spelled the end of his composing and arranging career. At Capital, he shared Nelson Riddle with Sinatra. Sadly, at the end, his only successes were the "novelty" tunes, like the "Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days" and I'm always amazed at how young he was at his death, from lung cancer, at the age of 45 in 1965, the year I graduated from high school. 

  

In 1948, when Cole purchased a house in an all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles, members of the local property owners association told Cole they didn't want undesirables like him moving in. Cole said "Neither do I, and if I see anybody undesirable coming in here, I'll be the first to complain." The Ku Klux Klan placed a burning cross on his lawn. Throughout his life, Cole dealt first-hand with racial prejudice, and eventually gave up performing anywhere in the South, after an incident in which he was almost kidnapped. 

 

Listening to these old recordings from the 1940's and 1950's, I sometimes feel as I once did, as a child, that I had lived in an earlier time, and experienced the world my parents had, because the oppressively omnipresent vestiges and carry-overs from those years seemed so much more powerful than the world in which we actually lived (the 1950's and 1960's). And in a sense, that's true: the music and the stories and the memories of those who lived through the Depression, the War and the early years of the Cold War were a powerful evocation of a time that was more vividly alive than the world they created for their children. But we were soon to create our own dramas--Vietnam, the Counterculture and Conservative backlash, the whole Boomer phenomenon which is just ripening now into later age.

  

Here are a handful of YouTube clips of Cole Trio pieces:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50efrirBImc (Better to be By Yourself) --check out the keyboard action! 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKB_RpYvDNM (Moonlight in Vermont, piano solo--lovely meditative stuff)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy4I16awsow (Baby, Baby All the Time--I can hear early Jamal's style inside this arrangement from 1946) 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf55piLGFOo&feature=related (Sweet Georgia Brown--just for Cole's keyboard riffs)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfE3Upy7jQ (Too Marvelous For Words - April 11, 1946, this is so much more lyrical than anything being composed these days, why wouldn't anyone be nostalgic for a time in which this was possible, instead of the crud being done today?)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc5RMYvXOhA (Paper Moon--innovative keyboard riffs)  

  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLNnHPXc4CA (What'll I do?--his very slow, romantic style)   

 

 

The Taser Controvery - Latest Local Incident

 

On June 30, 2009, officers from the Marin County Sheriff's first response unit entered the private home of Mr. Peter McFarland, in response to a third party report that a man had "threatened to shoot himself in the head." The response team ended up subduing the man, using a Taser four times, to force him to go to a facility for evaluation.    

 

On the Compass Rose blog, we have attempted to convince people that the use of these dangerous new police "toys" is both far too risky, and subject to all kinds of abuse. After we first went on record on this matter, Tasers were implicated in the accidental shooting death of a BART passenger, resulting in a manslaughter conviction (the Mehserle case).

  

In the succeeding months, the public outcry against Tasers has been steadily growing, with multiple death incidents (murders) and incidents involving minors (children), disabled victims (including those with clearly identified vulnerabilities such as heart and neurological conditions), being reported in the media, as well as by members of the general public. 

 

In the latest local incident, a crude video of the encounter was released, which shows in graphic detail the unwarranted, irresponsible use of a Taser to subdue an older man (64), who was clearly not being either uncooperative, or acting in a manner which would suggest that he was a danger to himself or to others (in the legal parlance of the 5150 procedures). In the video, the officers, acting stubbornly and in total ignorance of common decency and common sense, provoke Peter McFarland off his couch, then proceed, with no provocation on McFarland's part, to repeatedly Tase him, including three times after he was lying helpless on the floor. Both McFarland and his wife, who was at the scene, warned the officers several times that he was disabled, and suffered from a major heart condition. After he was thoroughly subdued, the team refused to remove the Taser from his chest, cuffed him, and continued to berate him for "refusing to cooperate" and "resisting"--and McFarland was further encumbered with straps and taken against his will, via ambulance, to a hospital for "evaluation." 

  

McFarland was understandably cranky, and called the team members names, but he was at no point a threat to them (or to himself), and did not present as someone who needed "evaluation" or incarceration. No crime had been committed, and Mr. McFarland showed no signs of mental illness. Once McFarland had been shoved inside the transport vehicle, the officers giggled as McFarland moaned in agony in a restraining chair (the cuffs and Taser wires still in place).  

 

In short, the team members failed to use good judgment and acted like ghoulish, bullying children, exacerbating a situation, making it much, much worse, and threatening McFarland's life and health. The legal issues surrounding the incident are complex. McFarland has vowed to sue the County. The Marin County Sheriff's Department has circled the wagons, claiming that it can show it followed procedure and has nothing to answer for. 

  

The availability of these terrible new weapons in the hands of untrained and out of control police officers and emergency teams opens up a whole new area of potential abuse. Each new weapon that is made available to law authorities can, and will be, misused. There are many ways in which this may occur. The Mehserle incident showed how a confusion between guns and Tasers can lead to tragedy. The McFarland incident shows how Tasers, used in about the same way that children would use squirt-guns (but with potentially catastrophic consequences) on others, can and will be abused.  

  

There's no question in my mind, regarding the McFarland incident, that McFarland should be awarded high damages. I would think the County's best alternative would be to settle out of court, given the highly inflammatory nature of the video evidence itself. I also think there's little question that the officers involved in the incident need to be terminated from their jobs; no one with tendencies like those shown in the video should be placed in a position of power or responsibility. If I were in the Marin District Attorney's Office, I would seriously consider prosecuting them for aggravated assault. They acted cruelly and irresponsibly, and could very easily have killed Mr. McFarland. 

 

As might have been predicted, Tasers have the effect of making enforcement officers feel that these "tools" are just harmless toys, that encounters are like games in which taunting and provocation can be used to manipulate and punish "perps" or simply innocent people who don't show enough adequate "respect" for the police. But Tasers aren't toys, and law enforcement isn't a game of chicken. Anyone confronted by legal authority should obey without question, not because their protests may be misconstrued, but because the police can't be trusted to act in a professional, adult manner. Tasers have become the new toys for brutality. Woe to the man whom the police want to "manage" with these clever new shocking devices. Woe to the man afflicted with a heart or neurological condition, whose life is immediately at serious risk of death or severe injury. 

  

In dealing with any police officer, it's always best to assume you're dealing with a possible psychopath, or someone who thinks his "authority" is best expressed by calling everybody's bluff. Tasers, unfortunately, not only make the consequences of unwarranted police force much, much worse, but actually have the effect of encouraging officers to provoke. It's a recipe for disaster.        

   

Tasers must be outlawed!                          

The Sinatra Silver Mobile Fidelity 16 disc Master Set [1983]

Sometime in the late 1980's, back in the days when records were still being sold--though soon to be supplanted by the cassette tapes of that transitional era--I bought the Sinatra Silver Mobile Fidelity limited boxed set of 16 mint LP's for my wife for her birthday. Her Mother had idolized The Voice since her bobby-soxer days in Denver during the late 1940's, and had tracked Old Blue Eyes's career through the 1950's and 1960's, until his voice (and popularity) finally gave out after 25 years on the pop charts. M inherited her mom's infatuation, and why not? Emerging from under the protective wing of a Swing Band leader, Frank reached his maturity just as Nelson Riddle entered the scene as master arranger, and the collaboration that ensued created recording history, in a string of incomparable albums that set the standard for torchy style crooning that still stands today. It's possible not to like the sound of Sinatra's voice, but it's hardly possible not to appreciate the control, the phrasing, and the perfectly coordinated orchestrations backing him up.   

 

Recently, I read a short biography of Sinatra, Why Sinatra Matters, by Pete Hamill.1 An unabashed fan, Hamill lays out the usual bare facts of Sinatra's troubled private/public life, and finds excuses for all of his excesses. But, as Hamill argues, the value of the musical legacy transcends ephemeral concerns about Frank's connections, his behavior, his flawed vision of himself and his place in the world of entertainment. 

  

Largely uneducated, Sinatra clawed his way up in the musical world of the early 1940's, and managed to outlive and move beyond the first opportunities and styles that were tailored to the Swing Era, and his youthful crooner's sound. By the early 1950's, his voice had matured. Despite being a heavy drinker and a smoker, his rich tonal range and exquisite enunciations and phrasing defined the limits of the male singing persona, and he was able to fashion a musical projection that incorporated the disappointments and attitudes which drove his personal biography. Few artists are able to do this, especially to their advantage, and in so doing, Sinatra entered the public's fantasy world, and became a personification of the role of the loser/winner, fighting back failure and self-doubt to triumph on his own terms. 

  

Thinking about Sinatra's slight physique, his peremptory, often blustery bearing, both in private, and with the Press, it's hard sometimes to conceive of him as heroic, but his whole approach to singing was built on that formula, and if you can't appreciate that aspect of his art, you probably won't respond to his music. I was never a fan of his early teen style, the long, soft notes held, the moony, silky sound he cultivated with Dorsey. Like most people in their Sixties or older, I think of him in his prime, during the 1950's (Capital Records period), and those knock-out ballads, lonely and sometimes despairing. I disliked the later work, with the harsh "Las Vegas" band arrangements, the whole "I did it my way" phenomenon. 

 

His renditions of A Foggy Day, I Get a Kick Out of You, In the Wee Small Hours, Violets For Your Furs, I'll Be Around, The Lady Is a Tramp, Fly Me To the Moon, Young at Heart, Chicago, and three dozen others, are among my favorites; they seem limited only by the flaws in the writing itself. Sinatra could bring out the best in many different kinds of musical moods, but he was the master of the down-&-almost out heart-break lament.                   

 

 

 

As an actor, Sinatra had no formal training, and his only qualified performance in From Here to Eternity [1953, for which he won his Oscar] was followed by a string of stinkers. Aside from On the Town [1949], Guys and Dolls [1955], The Man With the Golden Arm [1955], High Society [1956], and The Manchurian Candidate [1962], it's forgettable stuff. Still, putting two serious careers together during that decade of the 50's was an astonishing feat, and lent credence to the myth of his legendary energies, and his seemingly unlimited, essentially intuitive, aptitudes as an entertainer.

  

Sinatra's romantic escapades, and shady "Mafia" associations, would have brought a man of lesser charisma down in a hurry, but he survived these encounters, which became a part of his reputation as surely as his professional exploits did. It's odd to think of him in the same breath as his later contemporaries, the Rock & Roll stars of the 1950's, '60's and '70's. Changing musical tastes tended to make him, and his dated style, seem quite old-fashioned, but his core audience (which was never divided along sexual lines) never abandoned him, and his career declined in proportion to the numbers of fans who had survived those decades with their memories (of his earlier days) and their sensibilities intact. 

  

Is it still possible to listen to the Capital recordings, preserved in the technically impressive Mobile Fidelity album omnibus, without feeling as if you're in a time warp? Probably not. The birth of "pop" which accompanied the advance of popular media (radio, TV, phonograph) in the 20th Century, has as much integrity as any folk or art song from the 19th Century, even when it may seem "unserious" in its intentions. As a jazz singer, Sinatra was among the very best, seizing what he needed from other innovators, and bringing a special sexy, jaunty, devil-may-care tenderness to each carefully constructed performance. 

  

We won't see his like again. 

 

Here are links to the Mobile Discography list, and the NY Times review of the package in the year of its release. The box was later reissued, very little changed for content, as a set of CD's, but the sound range lacks a basic "etched" quality which the needle in the groove makes. I've often thought this edgy quality isn't something that will ever be quite reproducible in any other medium, though technology may in due course solve it.  In the meantime, like they say, there's the box, copies of which can still be had on the used and rare market. It originally sold for $350 a set, but it may cost a lot more now.                  

    

____________

1. Here's a long quotation from Hamill's introduction to the book: "This book does not pretend to be the final word on Frank Sinatra. Several full-scale biographies have already been written, each with its attendant excellencies; more are sure to follow. But there were aspects of this man that should be remembered and honored. In Sinatra's time, his fame as a singer spread from his own country to the world. His turbulent personality, often shadowed by notoriety, seemed inseparable from the style and originality of his art and gave him an essential place on the public stage of the American century. Now Sinatra is gone, taking with him all his anger, cruelty, generosity, and personal style. The music remains. In times to come, that music will continue to matter, whatever happens to our evolving popular culture. The world of my grandchildren will not listen to Sinatra in the way four generations of Americans have listened to him. But high art always survives. Long after his death, Charlie Parker still plays his version of the urban blues. Billie Holiday still whispers her anguish. Mozart still erupts in joy. Every day, in cities and towns all over the planet, someone discovers them for the first time and finds in their art that mysterious quality that makes the listener more human. In their work all great artists help transcend the solitude of individuals; they relieve the ache of loneliness; they supply a partial response to the urging of writer E. M. Forster: "Only connect." In their ultimate triumph over the banality of death, such artists continue to matter. So will Frank Sinatra." [Little, Brown, 1998]