Saturday 12/2/23
I broke my Boston Ballet mug this morning by knocking it into the sink. I feel oddly naked without it and will replace it as soon as possible. There is a reason for every last thing I do. It all goes into creating, enduring, moving forward. There is no, "I'm just doing this to do it." I have three mugs I mostly use. Or used. My Boston Ballet mug and a mug a friend gave me with a crab on it because there's a crab in my first book. Those are the mugs I use for all of the teas for my heart and blood pressure.
Then I have a big mug from Rockport for my coffee. And that means every time I take a sip of that coffee, I'm thinking about what I don't have, what these bigots have kept from me, what I should have had a long time ago, and what I won't have if I don't keep trying. I think about all of that with every sip, and I drink a lot of coffee.
Yesterday I wrote a fine piece on Shane MacGowan that I'm not going to be able to move, which I figured was likely before I began it, but I thought, well, write it anyway, you'll have an great piece that no one else could touch, and you can put it in your book of rock and roll writings either way. It's personal, universal, probing, expansive. This is from it:
We try so hard to impose these demands on life. We have rules, agendas, assorted strange gospels of this which shall never mix with that. We make friends former friends if they believe a given thing that we don’t, and we excel at isolation. Physical isolation, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
God comes up a lot in MacGowan’s lyrics with the Pogues, but you may take God or leave him as you listen, the same as you can in life. God isn’t even necessarily God in a song like “The Broad Majestic Shannon,” in which people gamble and curse and flirt as the sounds of the rosary are heard from a distance. The real god is openness, wonder; an acceptance of the evinced blend.
For all the sonic bile with which MacGowan regularly spat the words of his songs, a gentleness is often in evidence at the center of their narratives, the wisdom of one who is both observer and participant. The individual who sees, learns, incorporates as they go along, so that they may go better.
The Pogues at their finest were as fierce as the young Clash—it’s little wonder that Joe Strummer thought so much of them—but they were also long on tolerance thanks to MacGowan’s story-songs with their stabilizing roots of self. Watch, listen, learn, they instruct us—even if you’re out behind the pub and someone’s about to kick you in the balls.
Unfortunately, the Pogues, at least Stateside, are mostly known for “A Fairytale of New York,” and thus only come ‘round once a year. The song lifts its title from a 1973 novel by J.P. Donleavy about a neophyte undertaker who has lost his wife and wants to die himself. It’s a comical, uplifting book, and if you’ve read it, the nod from the song is plain: reality is always a composite.
There is is nothing any of us can do about that save accept it and try and live the best we can in following. This requires a broad mind, and less of an agenda or a need to declare, “That’s bad! I’m out!” Or “How dare you! Time to make you go away!”
We tend to be emotionally partisan and hyper-insistent with our feelings. How often do we encounter someone saying that they’re living their best life in an attempt to run roughshod over reality? But we know that they drink to much, they’re lonely, angry. We may be this person—chances aren’t exactly unfavorable, are they?
I gathered all of Nick Drake's lyrics in one place.
Downloaded Eric Dolphy and Booker Little's At the Five Spot Complete Edition, Booker Little's Booker Little (listened to it as well--that's a good group, with Scott LaFaro on bass), Ornette Coleman's Hillcrest Club gig from another source, the Gerry Mulligan Sextet's Complete Studio Recordings, Peter Brotzmann's The Complete Machine Gun Sessions, and Beverly Kenney's The Complete Decca Recordings.
Listened to Honegger's Une cantate de Noël--London Philharmonic version with Vladimir Jurowski conducting.
I'll write a John Lennon piece for someone.
I just clicked on a woman's dating profile on Facebook. It began, "I'm fat, die angry." People are almost always their own worst enemies. That's how you want someone to first experience you, via a sentence over-loaded with projection and insecurity and a directive for them to die?
The dots of most people's lives are so close together, and still they cannot connect them.
Walked three miles yesterday, did 200 push-ups, and did five circuits in the Bunker Hill Monument, so that was better. Facebook sent me a video from ten years. I had a fat face. You can always run stairs.
What really stops anyone from doing all of the things they don't do?
Themselves.
Look at all of the broken people out there who call themselves writers who are terrible at it. If you wanted to get better at writing, you could get up at four in the morning and work on it. What's stopping you? Oh...that doesn't sound fun. It sounds hard. It's easier just to sleep. Well, there you go.
An editor I don't know wrote me yesterday and said she loved the Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club 33 1/3 book and bought a copy for her roommate for his birthday. That was nice of her.
This is the most important month to date for me. I must bear down.
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