Wednesday, May 17, 2023

WHATCHA READIN?: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MODERNISM? (2010)

Grey Matters in New Haven is a fairly new addition to the city that has changed its character a little. Book Trader, the former primary used bookstore, stocked mostly trade books—novels of all kinds, biographies, books on a range of subjects, yes, but not many purely intellectual works. Grey Matters is more like visiting “the old curiosity shop” and at least some Yale students I’ve met view it as the means to serendipitous finds, browsing their way into the byways of texts not on the syllabus.

I say that, but I don’t know for certain. Maybe there are still theory classes like there were in the ‘90s, but I doubt it. In fact, the shelves of Grey Matters let me glimpse again what it was like to elbow one’s way around Micawber Books on Nassau Street in Princeton or Labyrinth Books on York in New Haven back there at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one; even the university bookstores attached to Yale and Princeton were once full of books! Strange but true. And so you could go in at any time and expect to find bound copies of the entire works of a considerable range of authors, or at least the best-known or most oft assigned. And there were shelves packed with the products of university presses, each proclaiming that new research and new terminology and new career-making inquiries or late career-capping retrospectives were as important and timely as whatever latest celebrity memoir or business, money, love or family How To.

At Grey Matters, which used to be a clothes store, it’s like you’re in the attic where all those used student copies from the ‘80s and ‘90s went to remote storage. Sometimes you’re even faced with a collection curated from the library of a deceased professorial eminence, a memento mori of texts, books that may bear an inscription from the author, letting your mind wander for a moment over conversations and conference meetings and correspondence that may have gone into a lengthy acquaintance over the course of time needed to bring an idea to birth as a book. The writer’s life, so very rewarding! And yet it all seems filmed over with the dust that has long since settled on print culture, blown in from the long years that have intruded themselves between my earliest thirties and my dawning mid-sixties.

The students, at play in grandpa’s library of long gone intellectual heroes, may take what value they find. Me, I’m on the lookout—as sometimes in used record shops—for this or that find that reminds me there’s room for one more. Something I passed over before but which now will have its day, suiting my mood or a quest for a new wrinkle in an old suit of clothes. I’m not that various, sticking usually with What I Know, but the landscape of that terrain has altered in sometimes unrecognizable ways by this point. And with books, unlike music, I don’t feel the same friction of identity. A book can be picked up out of idle curiosity. Music, less so. Music will need to be inhabited and the object itself has to have a certain allure or aura. A book—usually I have “heard of” the author at least—can just be a momentary indulgence.

So it was when I stepped away from a conference celebrating the career of Peter Brooks (one of those important professors of literature in my grad school days who is stlll with us, as emeritus, and still producing books) to browse a bit and let my mind wander: I came upon a Gabriel Josipovici hardback in clean wrappers—with a Klee on the cover—from Yale University Press: What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010). Now, it wasn’t simply that perhaps elegiac or perhaps jeering or perhaps ironic rhetorical question/title that got my interest, but also the date of publication. Having recently begun a new fiction ms. set in 2010, I found the coincidence providential. I’d already found—from what little I’d written—that an author born in 1937 and so in his early seventies is holding forth on his views on literature. So why not a quick acquaintance with what GJ (born in 1940) has to say about that literary and artistic movement or tendency or aesthetic doctrine that fascinated me so in my early twenties and became significant to my education and professionalization (such as it was) from the mid-Eighties to . . . well, yes, about the time of GJ’s book! For 2010 is just after the Birth of the Smart Phone, and just after the Big Buy Out, and just two years before my last five week course devoted to Ulysses. Whatever happened, indeed?

The book, it turns out, derives from lectures given in 2007—so not quite the coincidental chime I’d imagined, but no matter. It’s not as if my fictional novelist is not drawing on a lifetime of reflection on his art, much as GJ—a novelist and playwright as well as critic—is doing. In fact, the GJ book that I seemed to dimly recall as I flipped through this later work was Lessons of Modernism (1977; 1987), a book that I at least glanced at somewhere there in my undergrad and/or grad days—1985-94—and so he seemed an old mentor or former teacher showing up again. Why not? I left with the book.

Actually, reflecting on it while carrying groceries home today, I recalled an advisor in grad school mentioning GJ with approval and can only assume Lessons of Modernism was the text in question; it may be that she was pointing to his work as insights from a practitioner of fiction and not simply a critic or scholar. That there was something more at stake for him that had to do with a dissatisfaction with contemporary fiction, which is certainly something I was always going on about back then. The period between the wars had seemed to promise so much for what novels and poems and paintings could be; GJ is fed up by having the likes of Martin Amis and Iris Murdoch and Ian McEwan trotted out as worthwhile novelists. Part of the problem is that GJ is situated in the UK and it’s well known that Modernism didn’t have much purchase there—especially if you clear out the Americans like Pound and Eliot or the Irish like Joyce and Beckett. You’ve basically got Woolf, Forster (if you think so) and Ford Maddox Ford. Lawrence? Well, there you have it. Lawrence is certainly a modernist in his interests but his methods are pretty much cut in the good old yarn-spinner’s mode. But I guess there is a syllabus where Lawrence can sit with “American modernists” like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, sure. The point is that Modernism—which, because of the last named, throws a long shadow of influence in the U.S.—doesn’t inspire the next generation much in the UK. And so GJ imports almost all his examples from Europe and even from other eras.

And that’s where I found him on familiar ground—because arguments about the modernity of Don Quixote and Pantagruel and Tristram Shandy had all fed into background arguments I’d found useful for what made Ulysses the unique work it is. Not that GJ is all that keen to deal with Joyce. He’s much more likely to find figures for his supreme modernist in Kafka, Beckett, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Borges. He’s also apt to pull in Robbe-Grillet and Simon and all those French figures who kept the radical stress on form alive and active in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It’s not that I’m out to fault GJ for his references; I merely read his book to see how well what he says jells with my own discontentment with fiction as generally practiced, looking for maybe the odd apercu that would bounce around in my brain while at work on what my Jonathan Hawthorn is hawking.

Following the idea that serendipity has its own logic, or at least that what gets taken up randomly may provide random yet providential input, the passages in What Ever Happened that appealed most to me came from Kierkegaard (who I’ve mainly read in quotations, though he seems to be for GJ the kind of “modernizing thought influencer” that I found in Nietzsche, way back there in my schooldays), and, which I'll get to first, some quotations from visual artists that struck me as apropos to my own endeavors in that realm. The first from—so unlikely a source as to be memorable—Marcel Duchamp, he of the objets trouvĂ© and source of all that “is it art?” “what makes it art?” rigamarole that keeps the critics and scholars busy and Duchamp, no doubt, laughing in his grave:

“Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.”

For Duchamp: what object to choose and what to do with it?  In “normal painting” (which is I guess what I do), “what size,” “what orientation,” “what surface,” “what colors,” “what brushes,” “what ‘object’ or ‘subject’ or ‘image’” . . . notice how the second we move away from tangibles—the materials that are used to make the art object I’m making (called “a painting”) we get bogged down. Is the object I’m making a depiction of some other object (the “object” of my attention—in my case, often a photograph or photographs I’ve chosen), or is it a depiction of a “subject”—as in a topic or theme? Or both? And is the ”choice” of an image to depict—based on photograph or image of a painting or some other kind of visual source—the start of the object I’m making or is it not really “an image” until I’ve done something with it? The good news is that—in order to paint—I don’t have to care at all! I’ve only got to make my choices and get busy, which is what I like about Duchamp’s statement. I don’t even have to choose how I want to talk about the painting really. (I’m still put-off by the fact that what I’m doing while I’m at work on the ”piece” is called “painting” and that when I’ve stopped work on it, it is now called “A painting.” The point seems to me to be that “painting” is what you do (as in: applying paint to a surface), and the thing you achieve is a painted surface and we should have some term for the thing other than that which designates the act itself. But we don’t. To even call it “a work of art” is a distortion, since not all will admit that every painting is a work of art, because “art” has a limited range of applicability, whereas “painting” is a generic term (it’s a painting, not a drawing, etc.). But then so many works of art aren’t paintings and the whole problem of “work”—again an activity that gets imported into the static object at the end of the process—is its own headache.)

What this all gets at, to me, is the fact that “the painting” is never really finished, so “painting” it is because it could go on, but also it points to the fact that the painting is not a static object at all—though a photograph of it is. The painting keeps changing—first as the pigments set, then as they age, and, always, depending on the light and temperature in which they are situated, they look different to different eyes, which also age and change. So, if you are at all an aware viewer, you know that you yourself—in terms of your attention and focus and awareness—are never exactly the same when you look at the thing. You keep seeing it differently, if you bother to look carefully.

So, I’ll go with “choice is the main thing” when we’re talking about making the thing—or appropriating a thing for artistic use. But “choice” is not the main thing about the “finished thing.” Except to the extent we become critics and, like GJ, choose our quotations and our examples. So let’s turn to another quotation I wrote down, this time from Francis Bacon, the powerful twentieth-century British painter (I’ve seen two retrospectives, one at Yale British Art Gallery, the other at MoMA), who said, in an interview: “I believe art is recording; I think it’s reporting.”

Now, the context for Bacon’s statement is he’s explaining why he doesn’t care much for abstract, non-representational painting, but also why his style of painting—which is truly unique and a significant achievement for twentieth-century painting—isn’t simply “illustration.” In other words, even as great a painter as Bacon has to worry about what the hell he’s doing. It’s not enough to just be a great painter and get on with it. No, you’ve got to carve out some space between those who believe all representational imagery is “illustration” (clearly, an “applied arts” and not “fine arts” region) and those for whom “abstraction” is built into the very nature of painting since the point of the procedure is not to make an exact copy of some already existing thing but to alter it according to a method, style or manner. Bacon has a definite style, manner, and method and it should be enough to have those things and so be discussed for what those things, in his case, bring to the table. But Bacon, in trying not to just dump on shaping colors on canvas for the sake of visual effect as an end in itself, has to take on a dimension that matters to him (and to me): “recording . . . reporting.” As in: his paintings have “subject matter.”

At the outset though I want to say that I believe that any kind of painting is recording and reporting. An artist of abstract painting is recording and reporting too. It’s just that what they record and report doesn’t take the form of a representational image, and so the “report” is something you have to work to intuit. But the point is that, even with a representational image you recognize at once—Christ’s nativity, say, or a Rembrandt self-portrait—you have to work to intuit the “report.” Because the report is how the painting is a painting. It’s always a report on what was made. Now, with a more abstract canvas the record is really just the record of what got painted, and that’s what makes abstract painting so satisfying as an object: there’s nothing but the painting as painting to be concerned with. But the kind of “recording" Bacon means has to do with the artist as a person who exists in time and so wants to leave a record of that—which may take the shape of a series of non-representational paintings, or which make take the shape of a series of faces or places or animals or what-you-choose.

And so, for my projects of “renderings,” I felt implicated. Since I have one series, called “Philly Days,” in which I choose scans of photos taken in the period when I lived in Philadelphia (1979-83) and make them the basis of paintings: “for the record,” so to speak. That was. Now I’m reliving it (not just recording but reliving because the whole time I’m painting I’m in some space not wholly contained by the here and now). 

Then there’s a series called “21st Century Studies” from photos taken in the 21st century, which, because the pictures chosen are at most 23 years old, feel more immediate and so a “report” on life in the 21st century, so far. In both series, I’ve so far drawn only from my own “circles”—of friends and families, but the “reporting” on the 21st century could go on into other areas. 




Much like the “recording of what was” has: I’ve also commenced two series that allow me to “record” images that “stand for” certain influences in my early life: one I call “Pop Figures,” which so far consists of a rendering of James Joyce and his book Ulysses, painted for its centenary; a rendering of the photo of The Beatles on the cover of The Beatles For Sale (1964); a rendering of a composite of stills of Boris Karloff as ‘the Creature” in the original film of Frankenstein (1931). 

The other, related, series is called “Masters Revisited” in which I take an image of a painting by a master painter and submit it to my style of rendering; so far I’ve done a study of the mother and children in Michelangelo’s Flood sequence on the Sistine Chapel; a study of a Madonna and child by Raphael; a reconfiguring of the “muse of history” model in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, complete with images of places of personal relevance on the map behind her; and a painting done from a lithograph by Delacroix—actual illustrations for Goethe’s Faust—depicting Faust and Mephistopheles on horseback.


So, the final point: because I’m nothing like so great a painter as Bacon I don’t mind at all that what I do be considered “illustration.” In fact, I think that, if Bacon pushed a bit harder on his language, he’d see that “recording and reporting” simply means—in one sense, at least—illustrating one’s point. One puts up images when words fail or when—perish the thought!—they are utterly irrelevant to the act of looking. Even better than the act of looking is the act of painting.

Then there’s the act of writing (as opposed to reading) but more on that next time . . . 

 

 

 

 

Monday, October 10, 2022

IN COMMON SPACES: ARTSPACE 2022 OPEN SOURCE FESTIVAL

 


Artspace Open Sources 2022

This year Artspace’s Open Studios permits in-person showing of art in a public space. I’ll be located in the Creative Arts Workshop at 80 Audubon Street, New Haven, on Saturday, October 29, and Sunday, October 30 where some samplings of my paintings will be on display. Here are the nine photos I submitted this year that are now uploaded to the Artspace site here, and I suspect most of these will show up, and possibly others, while I’m in situ.

1. Philly Days 1: Mary + Kajsa 1981 (March, May, October 2020), 30x24 stretched canvas


The painting is based on a photo from 1981 showing my wife, Mary, and our newborn daughter, Kajsa, on a summer morning in 1981 in Philadelphia. The point of the rendering is to capture the light, as the photo did, but where the conversion factor into paint is determined by the feelings and perceptions of the moment. This is still my most painterly production where there is some evidence of painting “for the sake of” painting. Favorite features: the cut-off jeans, the reflected light in the diaper, and the central creases in the background pillow. Theme song: “In the Summertime” by Bob Dylan (1981)

2. 21st Century Studies 1: Kajsa in Norway 2015 (July-November 2021), 16x20 stretched canvas


Based on a photo I took of Kajsa in Norway amidst our northern European cruise in 2015, the painting aims for a harmonious rendering of foreground subject and background landscape. Since I hadn’t really tried to render landscape before, this was an experiment in how I’d work from a source much more detailed than I wanted to deliver, while avoiding Impressionism. I think I sort of managed it. It’s also, for me, unusual to render a profile, which I didn’t quite get accurately though the finished painting is “like” Kajsa. Favorite feature: Kajsa’s jacket. Theme song: “Goodnight, Oslo” by Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 (2009)

3. 21st Century Studies 2: Max in Hamden 2021 (July-October 2021), 22x28 stretched canvas


Mary’s grandson Max visited us in January 2021 and posed for a photo in our sunroom. That’s the basis for this painting which tries for a looser interpretation than the previous two, if only in response to Max’s youth (age 20) and attitude. The likeness isn’t as precise as I might like but then again I’m deliberately trying not to be too slavish to photo reality in these renderings. Favorite feature: Max’s jacket where the force of some of the strokes on the sleeves is shown by residual swipes I chose to leave in. Theme song: “Snowblind” by Black Sabbath (1972)

4. Philly Days 3: MEM 1980 (October 2021), 18x18 gesso board

The photo of Mary in our first Philadelphia apartment in the spring of 1980 is, as one friend said, “mesmerizing” in terms of the gradations of light on her face. I didn’t do a bad job rendering them though I’ve simplified the photo—as for instance the painting in the background, which is Vermeer’s “Girl in a Red Hat” but which I’ve changed to a kind of modernist portrait. In a way that sets the tone of what I’d like to get to eventually. Theme song: “Dreaming” by Blondie (1979)

5. Philly Days 4: DB, PAFA 1983 (November 2021-January 2022), 22x28 stretched canvas 

A photo of me, taken by a co-worker at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, on the office stairs (designed by Frank Furness) at the school door on Cherry Street, has long been a favorite of mine because of how the light “abstracts” the shapes and details in the shot. In the photo I’m 24 or almost and it’s very near  the end of my time in Philadelphia, so the sense of disappearing in broad daylight, as it were, is the point. Favorite feature: the reflected light at far left and my left arm. Theme song: “Of the Instant” by Gang of Four (1982)

6. Philly Days 5: Tim 1979 (January-March 2022), 22x28 stretched canvas


Mary took a black and white photo of Tim, my oldest friend (since middle school), in August, 1979, a few months before his twentieth birthday, while he was helping us move into our first apartment, 1931 Callowhill Street, Philadelphia, in a building where he was our upstairs neighbor. The view out the window was of a parking lot behind the Philadelphia Public Library on Logan Circle, though in the painting it’s improvised (the photo’s windows white out). The point: to render this image with a sense of its present—back then—and my present, looking back. Favorite feature: my rendering of Tim’s legs, and the aforementioned view out the window, a kind of modernist fantasy of a neo-classical building. Theme song: “Cities” by Talking Heads (1979)

7. Famous Faces 1: 2.2.22: James Joyce, Ulysses at 100 (February 2022), 14x18 gesso board 

During my time in Philadelphia, one of my big obsessions was James Joyce’s Ulysses which I first read in 1980; eventually I became a bit of a Joyce scholar, writing a thesis on Finnegans Wake and a doctoral thesis that included a chapter on Joyce’s novels, as well as teaching Ulysses to undergraduates in Yale Summer Sessions on six different occasions from 2002 to 2012. So when Ulysses turned 100 this year I had to commemorate it. My painting combines a rendering based on a photo of Joyce in his late 30s (he turned 40 on February 2, 1922, and at his birthday party was presented with the first bound copy of his great masterpiece) and an image of the original blue-bound version of the book. My intention was to do this in as few sessions as possible; it took five, Feb 2, 3, 5, 6, 9. Favorite features: Joyce’s wrist and forehead. Theme song: “Flower of the Mountain” by Kate Bush (2011)—which takes its words almost wholly from the “Molly Bloom monologue” at the close of the novel.

8. 21st Century Studies 3: Jerry by the Delaware, New Castle 2013 (May 2022), 16x20 stretched canvas

 

Back to photos from the 21st century: in this case, my younger brother Jerry, the year he turned 50, by the banks of the Delaware in Battery Park, New Castle, Delaware, our hometown. The month is August, my birth month, and the painting combines a photo of Jerry by the river with a photo of boats on the river, to create a kind of a companion piece to Kajsa by the fjord in Norway. In this case, the light on Jerry and the clouds in the sky are my favorite features, and just feel like Delaware to me. Theme song: “June Hymn” by The Decemberists (2011)

9. 21st Century Studies 4: Mary in Hamden 2016 (May 2022), 18x18 gesso board


Clearly, I tend to find photos of Mary worthy of rendering. This one she took herself (somehow) in the backyard of our home in Hamden, early in our residence there, as a self portrait for a photography class. My rendering deliberately went for a certain minimalism while remaining true to the dramatic lighting. Favorite features: the jacket on the left hand side and hand on the hat, and the jeans. It’s taken awhile, but I think I prefer the painting to the photograph now. Theme song: “Sins of My Youth” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (2014)

More paintings may appear as I get photos of them . . .

Friday, February 18, 2022

THE TAROT TAPES, Side 2: XIX THE SUN

Ethos 2: XIX The Sun (2020) upper panel
The title of this one could be “waiting for the Sun God” in the sense that the Sun has associations with the Big One, the God of not only our Solar System but of the entire Universe. In other words, the primeval sense of the Sun as lording it over our world, controlling it—which was the case even when humans mistakenly believed that the Sun rotated around the Earth. The relation of the Earth to the Sun, however one positions them in the heavens, equates the Shining One with light, truth, godliness, and our planet of earth and water with a nature that might be able to be transcended but which seems doomed to just circle and spin for some indeterminate allotted time. Earth is existential, we might say. The Sun is too, of course, but we allow it to symbolize lots of things that aren’t if only because of the vast scale of its energy and the duration of its existence.

I know enough about Solar Myths to know that there’s good reason to write Christ into the mix, but I chose not to in my rendering for the panel. I went for deliberately pagan or classical, pre-Christian, and with a sense that the Sun God is a bit like Phoebus, a bit like Cupid, a brat we might say—you know, Phoebus Apollo killed the Python while still a baby and then became a seer. My feeling for the Sun God could be described as ambivalent, I guess, since the Sun, while it makes life possible on this planet, could also make life unbearable here, as it is—in my imagination anyway—in certain climes at certain times. I’m not a sun-worshipper, much, and so I wedded my Sun Child, rather enamored of looking at himself in a hand-mirror, with a desert wasteland, even as he sports with corn and sunflowers in his own little bubble. The “sun story” I got into as a kid, reading Greek myths, was of the son of Helios, Phaeton, who insisted his old man let him drive the sun chariot through the sky. Kid couldn’t handle the horses and the earth got badly scorched. Zeus had to knock the little jerk out of the sky with a lightning bolt.

Choosing songs for the panel’s tape side should be pretty simple. Search for all the songs with “sun” in the title and slap ‘em together in some semblance of order. Yup. But then, it’s the ordering of the examples that leap to mind that makes for our Sun saga. And two tracks don’t even have “sun” in the title, so the process may still be a bit associative . . .

Two songs on the side I’ve known since I was ten; my familiarity with most of the songs date from my teens, though there’s a key pair from my twenties and another pair from my forties, which is I guess a way of attesting that “the Sun” inspires a youthful disposition, or at least a cyclical view of nature acquired in youth—it comes up, it goes down; it’s summer, it’s winter, and so on. The listing is track # on the tape, title, artist, album it appeared on, date, composer, and, for the bio, the age (sometimes approximate) I was when I first heard the song, followed by the number of years, roughly, I’ve known the song as of this writing.

The point of the songs, often, is to ponder our relation to the Sun when we are most aware of its influence, whatever we may want it to mean. Here, in Ethos, it’s the sense of abundance, not of a Sun God who can do things to you—like Apollo often does—out of whim, but of a Good that just can’t help but shine and radiate and warm you up when you need it. As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, at the start of the Prologue, speaking to the Sun: “You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?” He speaks to the Sun as, like him, overfull with wisdom and joy, spiritual goods which must be shared with the world. That sense of the Sun is needful, I’d say, for its part in the Ethos of the artist. Why make art at all if it’s not a question of sharing what talent dictates? The Sun, then, might be the god of that endeavor, the unchecked radiation that creates or makes vision possible. 

B. Ethos 2: XIX The Sun (May 2020)

B1 Waiting for the Sun—The Doors (Morrison Hotel, 1970; Jim Morrison) 18: 44 yrs
In the history of my listening, this song dates to the winter/spring of my first year after graduating high school. I was eighteen and working a dead-end, fast-food job. The spirit of this song—“at first flash of Eden we race down to the sea”—was one of those “consummation devoutly to be wished” situations. When it got warm, it would be possible to go to the beach. And one thing I associate with staying surfside is the prospect of getting up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the ocean. That, friends, is the basis of most of my poetic associations with the Sun. As Rimbaud says so well (even in translation): “It is recovered. What? Eternity, in the whirling light of the sun on the sea.” And, yes, it was in high school I learned he’d said that, thanks to Paul Schmidt’s recent translation. In my senior year, I became fascinated by The Doors though Jim Morrison had been dead seven years. Those first two Doors LPs seemed to promise something new in the possibility of rock poetry and I was all about that in those days (this was the era of Patti Smith’s first three LPs—which decidedly picked up on the myth of Morrison).

The third Doors LP is Waiting for the Sun, but with no title track. The song with that name appears somewhat belatedly on Morrison Hotel, their fifth studio LP and a much less stellar effort, though with some high points, this track being one. It’s the kind of song I easily transported myself into in those days, gripped by the idea that there should be these great liminal spaces, such as a beach at dawn, where transformation, if not transcendence, would be possible. I was deep into a book called The Transformative Vision and so this song kicks off my side on the Sun with a glimpse of . . . let’s call it situated symbolism. My situation at 18 was to believe in the power of the imagination as wielded by visionary poets, and there were a few such to be found, I believed, in contemporary songwriters. Which is why I’m inclined to compile tapes of songs as inspiration for paintings and to write about them.

And let’s not forget there’s always something dark about The Doors. They are not a feel-good band. “Waiting for you to come along / Waiting for you to tell me what went wrong.” That gesture towards the failed experiment of whatever all those newly released energies of the Sixties were supposed to mean was the take away for me in those days, all hepped up on Hunter Thompson and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, A Season in Hell, and still chipping away at Gravity’s Rainbow. Suffice to say I want my Tarot side for The Sun to recall that promise of starting out but right at the outset I have to sound the belatedness of the entire endeavor. “Can you feel it, now that spring has come / That it’s time to live in the scattered sun?” That “scattered sun” said it well enough. Something not fully realized, piecemeal, cast to the wind. Pearls before swine?

B2 A Spoonful Weighs a Ton—The Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin, 1999; Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, Steven Drozd) 40: 22 yrs
Then we jump forward to one of the latest songs on the side, first heard live when my daughter, then starting college, and I sought out and heard the Flaming Lips on their tour for this LP. Actually we saw them first when Robyn Hitchcock opened for them, then sought them out on their own right and KDB got the record and then I heard it. The song is fit for inclusion on this side because of that great opening: “And though they were sad / They rescued everyone / They lifted up the sun / A spoonful weighs a ton.”

Following on The Doors’ “tell me what went wrong,” it’s not inappropriate to hear this, coming along at the turn of the century, as a kind of continuation of some of those energies unleashed by the bands of the Sixties, the ones that were still with me as ‘legacy’ handed on to my kid. The Flaming Lips, it seemed to me, had imbibed deeply of not a few of the same kinds of things that made their mark on my musical tastes and so this album was like the big pay-off. It had a Sixties-revisited feel but with a touch of post-punk prog—is how I imaged it. And that had great appeal for us, Dad and Daughter, generationally speaking. “The limits now were none,” “The doubters all were stunned.” Sure, why not. Total free license of the imagining, a Second Coming into consciousness (like when your kid goes off to art school because you didn’t, when you were her age).

When I was a kid in the Sixties it seemed that all of youth had access to a way of meaning that was lost on the elders. It was a flash of insight or spirit that could simply be the perennial gift of Youth or Sun, but which seemed caught up in so many things of that time, music not least. To me, the Lips here recall that “starting out” flame and, with its all-you-need-is Love gestures (“louder than a gun”) that have the peaceniks singing hosannahs, it’s like the same anew. Like the sun every morning, no? “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” we learned back there in Kiddom, but here a spoonful of sun sure do weigh a ton . . . like, as we’ll hear later on the LP (and in this series of tapes), it might be too heavy for even Superman to lift. But for now, no limits, doubters to the hindmost. The Sun is riz. We high priests & poets and musicking shamans figured out how to set it up there like a big special effect spectacle hanging over the birth of Lord Sunshine.

B3 Here Comes Sunshine—The Grateful Dead (Wake of the Flood, 1973; Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter) 16: 46 yrs
And here he comes! The repeating motif on this side is that you wait for the sun, or lift it up maybe, and, it comes! It’s there! For real! End of night, darkness driven away again. And that’s what this song by the Dead makes me feel. It’s an early morning song, a just got up and got to make my way somewhere song, bleary and leery of what that might entail. But unbowed, nonchalant, as mellow about strict fate as only the Dead can be.

I remember with astounding sonic clarity putting this song on my turntable and listening as the sun lit up the church across the street and I watched out of the corner of my eye for the school bus I was a-waiting on the last day ever of my state-mandated education (June 1977), so glad to see it gone: “you just don’t have to go no more,” Jerry sings with the gleaming tingle of baptismal benediction. Go in peace, the mess is ended.

That line and the part about “good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor / why hold out for more” came to me as the mantras I needed since I had no job prospects, no employable skills or ever-ready credentials, and I’d had it with whatever the local suburbs unbroken of baleful New Castle could offer in the ways of culture, work, or vistas. But I did have shoes on my feet and I liked to walk, and so I’d saunter my way into some kind of inspiring frame of mind, if only the sun were kind. And here it comes, creeping up in that lyrical way this song has which always puts me in mind of the fact that there was a mix of LSD called “Sunshine” back in those days I was learning to recall fondly by proxy and the way that particular drug had of creeping up with tingling antennae stretched to receive was certainly part of the associative logic that binds together our first three oh so trippy bands. Have some “laughing water” while you’re at it. Justa giggling with those ticklish rays beamed on its grinning, fluid face.

B4 Silent Sunlight—Cat Stevens (Catch Bull at Four, 1972; Cat Stevens) 13: 49 yrs
This song goes further back. Cat Stevens was the romantic songwriter of the early Seventies when I was transitioning into early teens from adolescence. He had a great voice and a kind of spiritualized view of the times, as if a throwback to some pre-industrial era. I always thought of him as a medieval troubadour type, out of step with the modern world but still somehow a “pop star.” And that’s exactly the sort of possibility that inhabits the ethos of artistry, I’d say. You can be of it and apart, simultaneously.

The thematic tie-in of this song is that it speaks of the day beginning, the “silent sunlight” streaming in, and “the work I must now begin.” It’s a roll-up your sleeves and get to it song. But there’s also a lingering recall of the children who “wait to play”—like waiting for the sun, waiting to play is waiting for a kind of inspiration, as an artist might, but also for the permission or simply the right moment. To work, to play—to make them almost the same thing? Art. In any case that was my hope for art when I first heard that Siren Song pretty steadily during those years, when I was filling up notebooks with verse and trying to figure out how to use paints.

And this verse is as satisfying in its simplicity as a poem should be: “Sleepy horses, heave away / Lift your back to the golden hay / Don’t ever look behind at the work you’ve done / For your work has just begun / There’ll be the evening in the end / But till that time arrives / You can rest your eyes / And begin again.” Certainly I had no idea, then, that modern poetry was rarely as lyrical as that. What stayed with me was the injunction against the look back at the work. Keep going forward—every new day is a new beginning for whatever you’re trying to accomplish. What’s already been done is already gone.

Even now I can hear this song with some belief in that view, here in “the evening in the end.” True, looking back is often now a disbelief at how little was done—by me—and how much others accomplished, and not long after I first made this song’s acquaintance that sense of the enormous pastness of art and lit would start to become an issue. All the more reason to want to remember “When all things were tall / And our friends were small / And the world was new.”

B5 Here Comes the Sun—The Beatles (Abbey Road, 1969; George Harrison) 10: 52 yrs
The next song goes even further back in my trajectory: this song is from the the first full-length Beatles LP I heard, age 10, 1969. Abbey Road had that weird B Side of little songlets, but the lead-off song, Harrison’s, was the most hummable tune on the whole record, so genial and benign. It’s more Easy Listening than Rock, true, but no one then was going to tell The Beatles they couldn’t be mellow if they wanted to be, and this one—with that “sun, sun, sun, here it comes” choral bit—sounds like something for hippies to bond to. Sun Children, little darling.

The smiles returning to the faces, the ice melting—it’s not just a new day, it’s a new season. Spring, then summer, so not a song for all seasons but for the great anticipation of what it means when the sun comes back, the Sun God exerting his recurrent magic over the land. The song here takes its cue from the Cat in continuing with that feel of a long ago golden time. Sure, it’s childhood, for me, not even a teen yet, but it’s also that sense of a time when simple pleasures—the sun’s back, it’s warm again—were enough to make life worthwhile. “First flash of Eden,” and all that.

It was also something to realize—when I got a copy of the album in the later ‘70s—that there’s a synthesizer on this track, which aligned the song with those arrangements I loved so much in the prog years featuring acoustic and electronic instrumentation together. Like the stately piano on Cat Stevens’ track, the tinkly fingering on the guitar here ushers us into some kind of Sun Kingdom where all is golden and so, our next track . . .

B6 Golden Years—David Bowie (Station to Station, 1976; David Bowie) 16: 46 yrs
“Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere, angel.” That opening line, the song’s syncopation, Bowie singing tracked with himself, that “run for the shadows” chorus. “Never look back, walk tall, act fine.” This song is—to borrow a phrase from the film The Missouri Breaks (also 1976)—“slicker than snot on a doorknob.” Hard to believe maybe that anyone thought 1976 and the next few years “golden years” but if you were a denizen of the discoing demimonde, you’d say Oh Yeah. Bowie’s stepping out, his pants pleated, his hair slicked back, his moves and his moue all moussed with liquid strains.

A relevant question here:  if you were Dylan and you’d done the run of records from 1965 to 1967 . . . then what? And Bowie had already roped us teen-types in with Ziggy and Aladdin and “Rebel, Rebel,” now what? Coke it up and cut a rug? Sheesh. Anyway, the song is Dave’s second bona fide U.S. radio hit in a row (“Fame” made #1; this one #10). He’s hitting the stride of sounding like the radio likes. But I’m with him on this one—though, at the time, I gave the Young Americans LP a skip. I’ll accept a blues belter going white soul, but folky hippy glam guys, no so much. But the sea change often throws up unexpected creatures and the LP Station to Station is like that. It’s a sound I go back to often in these days of posthumous Bowie.

So, celebrate the golden years, however you imagine them, whenever they may be. “Act fine”—it may be all an act but that’s what makes it golden, n’est pas? It’s your performance for the statuette. “In the back of a dream car twenty foot long,” like every just-so starlet, “I’m begging you save her little soul.” Well, yes, “nights are warm and the days are young” but how long can that last? About the time you have to run for the shadows is when maybe you suspect a deal with the devil (“opening doors and pulling some strings”)—and he’s up there waiting in our five panels for Ethos. “Lost that’s all.”

Halfway through the side and we’re remembering the request: “waiting for you to tell me what went wrong.” Or, what we did wrong?

B7 Look into the Sun—Jethro Tull (Stand Up, 1969; Ian Anderson) 18: 44 yrs
As the second half of the tape gets underway, we hit this little trade-off quartet: song from the Sixties (first heard as a teen) then song from the ‘80s, when I’m in my twenties. One-two, one-two. Makes for a a nice “step forward, step back” rhythm as we move along here: like saying we’ve gone from watching the sun rise to seeing it hit its stride, and now we know it’s bound to be on the wane. The songs themselves play into that dynamic in interesting ways as well, and none of them are “big songs” (in terms of radio play) for the artists involved.

This track from Jethro Tull’s 2nd LP was already a throwback when I got to know it, post-high school in the late ‘70s. For me, Tull as a big influence came to its fullest fruition in 1972 with the release of Thick as a Brick and the retrospective collection Living in the Past. Then, brought up to speed more or less (including a purchase of Benefit, the LP immediately preceding Aqualung), I was primed for A Passion Play (still my favorite), summer of ’73, then the War Child tour when I saw them live. After which their releases were less appealing and I’d moved on. Anyway, years later I picked up Stand Up with a sense of wanting to complete the collection (acknowledging that point when the new stuff isn’t as good as the old stuff … or just more of that Sixties fetishism which was looming large in my legend around then).

The song is an Ian Anderson love song (not too many of them in my Tull), and what’s more it’s an end of love song, which Dylan is great at (like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”) and so the tone of this has immediate appeal. But it’s on this side because of that “think of all the things you should’ve done” when you “look into the sun.” Of course, we were always told not to look directly at the sun and to do that means a certain risk, and here a willingness to face the truth (always risky). So it’s not what we did wrong . . . it’s what we didn’t do that we should’ve. We’re still on that theme, but we’re also basking in a sound—back when Ian was mellow with more of that stately troubadour vibe—and a feeling that whether she should’ve stayed with him or not (“remember who and what you nearly had” recalls another Beatles sun song, “I’ll Follow the Sun”—“you’ll know I was the one”), we shoulda stayed back there pre-teen in the world of the Beatles and a certain golden late post-war, pre-recession time.

The “golden years” are passing away from me at the ripe old age of 18 is what I’m getting at. But then—and this was the feeling the song gave me when I first heard it, around the same time as “Waiting for the Sun”—“summer always comes anyway.” Seasons change then change back. Is anything really over? So let’s set out again at dawn—as Rimbaud does at the close of his season in hell.

B8 I Remember the Sun—XTC (The Big Express, 1984; Colin Moulding) 25: 37 yrs
Now time for a retrospective glimpse of the sun. Fitting, since I acquired this song when I was back to living in my hometown not far from my parents’ house and the schools I attended, even the church, and all that pastness hovered in the background of the present. To think back to “days when we had enormous super powers” was easy to do, since the places where I’d play-acted as a superhero with my kid brothers were nearby. “When I remember days at school, most of all I remember the sun.” Whether that’s true or not, Colin Moulding made it so. I can recall, indeed, days in the last stretch of the schoolyear, May, early June, and walking home in the sun. And walking the streets barefoot as a child—“tarmac on the road feels soft”—yeah, and very, very hot.

So this is a song about the sun when we were kids, about that period of starting out that took place even earlier than the teens. This, from an album by these New Wave British guys pushing 30, played into where I was then as well. My kid still in the midst of her untrammeled childhood (a year before kindergarten) and all’s right with the world or at least it’s a time to revisit what childhood is like through the lens furnished by my own starchild.

The song has an odd, lurching sound, and effects that make it aurally interesting but also a bit off-putting, especially that weird climb into what are essential lyrics, but hard to get: “Sun that worked on overtime / Fueled our bodies, kindled fire in our minds”—yes, that “kindled” mind was already suggested by “I thought a page like it’s written in ink.” That was part of my childhood and early adolescence too, making things up, inventing, composing internally, and so, what the Sun is starting to become is a way of suggesting the Inner Light, the shining inside, the burning beacon of the Imagination. It pays to remember that, I want to say, want to believe—but “pays” how, exactly?

B9 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun—Pink Floyd (A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968; Roger Waters) 14: 48 yrs
I might say this song is the heart of this side. It’s not a particularly “sunny” song, but it fulfills on that idea of “the Sun” as being both a center of the personal universe, so to speak, and the celestial body that centers our solar system. The conflation of the two spaces—interstellar and inner—is the “trip” of this song.

Pink Floyd are one of the trippiest bands ever, having pioneered a form of rock that can indeed rock but which is more often spacey and eerie and introspective and even pastoral at times. Here, it’s at its eeriest and, the first time I heard this song (which was in the summer after the release of Dark Side of the Moon), it fascinated and hypnotized me. It’s not that long but it seems like it could go on forever—like how long would it take to reach (in Waters’ whisper) “the heart of the sun, the heart of the sun, the heart of the sun”?

The drum pattern and that little melody that sounds in some odd way primeval is what does it (like we stumbled onto a tribe of sun-worshippers). The overlay of electronic sounds is in keeping with the Floyd as masters of a certain kind of tech that, in those days, was often called futuristic, as in: that time when acoustic instruments played by people would be replaced by electronic instruments played by computers. And onstage during this song the band would walk off leaving Nick Mason, the drummer, to be the human playing with pre-set sound arrangements. Of course the drum pattern could be programmed too and free up everyone. Just “set the controls” and head backstage. There’s a nice irony to it but also a sense that we’re already in that future where gadgetry prevails and yet, this song is very humanistic: “love is the shadow which ripens the wine.” Well, I guess.

The point is that the song, with its man who raves and makes a question to heaven, is one of those “alone with the universe” situations and the last lines of the last verse sound that note I began this post with: “Whether the sun will fall in the evening / Will he remember the lesson of giving?” That lesson of the Sun as simply the heavenly body that can’t help but light our world, giving us all we need in the way of a livable environment, is the abundance I was talking about. And knowing that we have this “wheel of fortune” thing going where we have to turn away from that light and warmth along a definite track of time, so it “falls” in the evening and we plunge into darkness, is one of those “awareness of mortality” things that should keep us humble and human.

In that light, a journey to “the heart of the sun” (besides suicidal, a real flame-out that even Phaeton didn’t attempt) is a journey to where the sun never sets. Kennst du das Land?

B10 Invisible Sun—The Police (The Ghost in the Machine, 1981; Sting) 22: 40 yrs
And so, though we turn from the sun on our planetary journey, the sun continues on—invisible, as in this song, which did get some airplay (it was a single from the LP Ghost in the Machine elsewhere but not in the U.S.). The Police were pretty much an unavoidable radio staple in those days and so I rarely bothered to buy their records—you couldn’t help hearing them, but this album I got and maybe it was because this song wasn’t available otherwise. I’ve only just now seen the video for it, all centered on Belfast and the conditions there, and the song begins with a reference—the Armalite rifle—that is relevant to those scenes. I seem to recall the sense, hearing the song on the radio, that it had an occasion—a place with a definitely hostile military presence—but I don’t think I thought of it in terms of a specific locality.

As with many songs by The Clash that I was getting to know in the 1980-82 era, the mood of truculent endurance here was key. “They” were the ones with the guns and the numbers, “we” were the ones trying to get by and doing what we could to make things better for the innocent and the oppressed. And that—not a particular political underground—was the “invisible sun,” the local and anonymous and not widely publicized acts of kindness and collective hope. The song makes its case with a sense of sullen survival, with a couplet that’s one of its best: “I face the day with my head caved in / Looking like something that the cat brought in.” That resonated with a life on the margins, sure enough, along with the line that reached out of the radio and grabbed me: “I don’t ever want to play the part / of a statistic on a government chart.”

The invisible sun is unfelt in its effects? In any case, it can’t be measured by that always intrusive government that wants to know where you live and how much you make and how much energy you use and who your friends are and their known occupations. There’s a sense too that the sun that burns on, invisibly, giving us “hope when the whole day’s done” is, like the sun whose heart we want to reach in the Pink Floyd song, already within us, y’know, like Jesus’s claim about the kingdom of God.

B11 That Lucky Old Sun—Johnny Cash (American III: Solitary Man, 2000; Haven Gillespie, Beasley Smith) 41: 21 yrs
And that should count as a segue into this gospelly worksong that dates from 1949. I first heard it, I think, done live by Dylan in one of his acoustic sets in the 1990s. Johnny Cash, as with so many songs he recorded with Rick Rubin for the American label, takes it away and makes it his own. As far as this side goes, it just popped into my head, perhaps conjured up by the ’60s-’80s trade-off I had going: had to jump clear of the clockwork and land . . . way up there in the dawning 21st century. It’s a song that spoke to the times in the sense that I was just beginning my forties and so had “paid my dues” in a sense. Now wanting to “roll around heaven all day” rather than toil to get somewhere.

It's a view that sees the Sun as blessed, a kind of detached and blissful body on its appointed circuit. Rather than talk about its abundance and all it does for us down here on the ground, the singer sees it as “lucky” because it’s got “nothin’ to do.” It’s the way you feel about the weekend, maybe, when you’re in the middle of the week, or summer vacation when you’re a kid stuck in the doldrums of school, or a wage-slaver looking on at the retirees who have finally attained that “paradise” imagined as the cessation of striving. All of which is a way of saying that the song appears here as the notion of the Sun as above it all, out of the give-and-take and the ups and downs, stuck only in its circuit and lucky not to have to sweat about it.

Cash, in his late sixties when he recorded this, sings it with a somewhat mournful sound in his fervent wish, particularly the plaintive “lift me . . . to paradise,” which sounds like the prayer of a man who hopes, to borrow Dylan’s line, “to get to heaven before they close the door.” In any case, we believe in the hardship of the life and the glance upward to the Sun as the symbol of an extraterrestrial serenity and fixity. Amen.

B12 Sunrise—Uriah Heep (The Magician’s Birthday, 1972; Ken Hensley) 13: 49 yrs
Now, back to those teen years again, a time when “the Sun,” to me, was the bright light shed by the literary works I was reading, mostly on my own dime (as in: unassigned). It was so early in my setting out, I hadn’t yet reverted to the ’60s’ greats as the beacons to embody, but was still enamored of hard rock and, soon, prog. Uriah Heep had its place in both those scenes, and they even took their name from the villain in my favorite Dickens novel, which I’d already read.

The album of the Heep for me was Demons and Wizards (which will have its day soon enough, as we’re moving toward a Magician and the Devil), but this album, the follow-up, kicked off with this song and this song was almost as good as anything on the predecessor. “So from now till who knows when / My sword will be my pen.” Yeah! Just the thing for a teen poet to hear, at a considerable decibel level.

That comes late though: in the beginning it’s a love-lost song, where the sunrise shines on “another day without you.” So, yeah, pining for the great love, the one who makes it all ok, little darling, angel, remember who and what you nearly had, love to ripen the vine . . . and then the singer addresses the sun directly: “Bless my eyes / Catch my soul / Make me whole again.”

That puts the Sun in the guise of the Listener, the Mentor, the Great One who must shine on this endeavor, must countenance this effort to shine in a merely human way. So that the “and I’ll love you for all of my time” isn’t, finally, that lost lover with which we began, but the Sun itself. From now on out, singing its praises. The lucky orb, crown as big the circumference of the Sun.

B13 The Sun King—The Beatles (Abbey Road, 1969; John Lennon, Paul McCartney) 10: 52 yrs
But there’s still room left on the tape, just enough for this little mini-ditty from John Lennon, reprising the “here comes the sun” lyric from his bandmate George but with a twist: “here / comes / the sun … king.” The Sun King, of course, was Louis XIV of France, but I doubt that’s a meaningful reference, particularly. In any case, on this side, the song features as a coda—to reference the Sun as a King—and to recall, again, my childhood at the end of the Sixties, and the time spent with Beatles recordings as a kind of magic synthesis of the era itself. “Everybody’s happy, everybody’s laughing.” We’re still happy children on that Yellow Submarine, with beautiful overlapping voices and a feeling of dolce far niente, cheerily singing what sound like nonsense syllables but which actually bring together phrases from various languages to create a bit of Joycean polyglot. Questo obrigado, no?

Friday, December 31, 2021

THE TAROT TAPES, Side 1: 0 THE FOOL

Near the end of Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye’s book on William Blake (which I finished reading in December 2020, before beginning the second group of Tarot panels), I came upon this reflection:

“Blake … seems to be striving for an ‘alphabet of forms,’ a Tarot pack of pictorial visions which box the entire compass of the imagination in an orderly sequence. The alphabet itself, if we may do some imaginative guessing, may be a fossil of some such work of art, the Zodiacal signs another, and the Tarot pack (with which [Blake’s] Job series has been associated) a third.”

I got a kick out of that, certainly, because some such intuition was the basis of me picking up a book on Blake (and not just anyone’s, but Frye’s—the master of the “anagogic method”) and beginning some readings in Blake at the start of my consideration of the Tarot panels. Indeed, the idea of an “alphabet of forms,” or a series of pictorial visions, is the driving force behind the Tarot panels and the example of Blake as a poet, artist and visionary is at least provocative. My earliest reading of any of his verses was probably around 15, and I remember time spent with the Viking Portable Blake at 19. But there was little in-depth exposure to his work, mainly because of the alien mythography at work in his writings and art. I didn’t pursue the English Romantics in college, and in graduate school improved my familiarity with Wordsworth and Keats, but that was about it. There was a semester at Yale, in the 2000s, when I sat in on a seminar that took up Blake among the other Romantics and it was there I first saw an image that I’ve recalled in the fourth Tarot panel for Ethos, XV: The Devil. So let’s say there’s some debt to Blake somewhere in the deep background, but even more so in trying to imagine “illustrations” for the Tarot figures.

But that’s the panels, as an ongoing visual art project. Accompanying each panel is a cassette tape’s worth of songs, a 45-minute playlist that assembles itself in the process of transferring the tracks from vinyl or CD onto tape, but which may be prepared for by any number of list-making sessions to see which songs most readily suggest themselves as part of the tone, mood, or theme of the Card. And I should point out that I think of the Tarot as a complex system of playing cards, and I have done readings to see what a lay-out of cards “says.” For the purposes of the panels, though, which are not cards and not meant to be used as anything more than paintings, an “alphabet of forms” is apt enough since the cards, in my decision to break them up into four different groups, do “spell out” an associative logic. And associative logic is the key to how playlists form, aural illustrations of “the spirit” the panel is aiming for.

The first group is Ethos, which is to say, based in character and upbringing, in the kind of collective rationales for behavior that mark anyone’s Bildung, but which, in terms of artistry, can also create a dichotomy between the individual person (in this case, me) and the symbolic conditions of art . . . or the artistic realization of symbols. However you put it, Ethos keeps in mind that the person who is aiming at art is forming an ethos that differs to some degree—and maybe in kind—from other practices, such as those primarily concerned with getting along with others and performing the tasks of non-artistic activities. The onus of an artist’s Ethos, simply put, is self-realization, in no matter what forms that takes. So, for me, the five Cards grouped under Ethos are the five I recognize as the most germane to my sense of what an artist is.

Tape I

A. Ethos 1 (center panel): 0 The Fool (April-May 2020)

Track A1: “The Fool”—Camper van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, 1988; David Lowery, Jonathan Segel, Greg Lisher, Victor Krummenacher, Chris Pedersen)
This instrumental track from my favorite Camper van Beethoven album could be said to be the “curtain’s up” on the entire tape, maybe the entire series of tapes. I don’t know why the song is called “The Fool,” but I’d be willing to bet it has something to do with the Tarot card, though it might also be a reference to a 60s psychedelic band of that name (elsewhere on the album is a cover of “O Death,” the Dock Boggs song also covered by a 60s psychedelic band, Kaleidoscope). The late ‘80s, twenty years on from the height of psychedelia, found more than a little inspiration in the artists of that earlier period.

Camper van Beethoven, with that joke name, are suitable to start things off on our Fool’s terrain, certainly, being a fairly whimsical and comical band, heroes of the “indie” or “alternative” world of college radio rock from the 1980s. The ‘80s, in my view, have much to answer for, but the good side of it all was the number of bands who were never in any danger of becoming monster artists of the inescapable mainstream airplay variety, but would always be a bit of caviar to the general. It was a time rife with subcultures, and why not tip my hand at the start, as part of the appeal of “The Fool” is that very willingness to pursue a quixotic goal, to be an adept of an unknown practice, to prefer the cult or coterie offering. The cards themselves, no matter how popular or ubiquitous, will always be a bit esoteric by the standards of world-wide religions and symbolic systems.

The track sounds like a movie theme, almost, or at least a soundtrack for a kind of carnivalesque sequence. Sort of eastern European, ‘80s gypsies feel. Brash, with a certain Old World charm that’s seductive in its own way. No fooling.

Track A2: “The Fool on the Hill”—The Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967; John Lennon, Paul McCartney)
Most of the songs on these playlists will date from the era long since designated as “classic rock,” and this song was already a classic when I finally got around to acquiring Beatles albums in the late 1970s. And yet I do remember when it was on the radio—there were several covers of it, as I recall, not least by Sergio Mendes and Brazil ’66—and on the Beatles cartoon TV show. It may well be my first cognizance of a use of “the Fool” in a way that seems properly capitalized. Not “a fool”—as in some stooge or dunce—on the hill, but “the Fool,” as, for instance, a character you could meet (and I did by around 1974) in King Lear. Of course, the phrase could also simply be pointing out a particular fool—the one on the hill as opposed to the one in the meadow, or next door, or in the White House (the sense of a political fool suggested perhaps by “the man of a thousand voices” whom no one hears, “they can tell what he wants to do.”)

In any case, as sung with his characteristic twee-ness by Paul McCartney, the song struck me—as a child and later—as oddly ruminative. You know, the mid-late ‘60s period was when McC was apt to come up with weird little ditties of dysfunction like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Penny Lane.” This song is somewhere in between, not as dolorous as Rigby nor as jaunty as Penny but detached. The contrast is between the Fool—who sees the sun going down and the world spinning ‘round—and the people who don’t like him. He doesn’t care because “he knows that they’re the fool.”

So at the outset we get what will be a theme to this side: the Fool who knows he’s considered a fool (as in idiotic or silly), but who takes that in stride because maybe he knows something “They” don’t know. The Beatles, with their madcap, antic natures—as a collective—captured well the nature of the Fool as someone who is wise in his own way. McCartney has claimed—so Wikipedia tells me—influence from The Fool (the band mentioned above which was also a design collective) and from the Maharishi Yogi, who may or may not have had a laugh on our nirvana-seeking Brit tunesmiths.

Track A3: “Fearless”—Pink Floyd (Meddle, 1971; David Gilmour, Roger Waters)
Now that the Beatles have provided us with both a fool and a hill, we will take it to the next step. Here someone, who may be seen as something of a fool by the crowd, is challenged to climb a hill—which he’ll do “in my own time.” Like: when I’m good and ready. The notion of climbing a hill becomes a theme, and there’s also an element of tempting fate or of relying on God, or of, God knows, trying to achieve some particular facet of selfhood or even to attain . . . the ultimate Self. Which, I just want to say at the outset, may in fact be a Supreme Fiction.

You can see how well Gilmour and Waters feed into our topic (and it would not surprise me to learn that they might have had some memory of “The Fool on the Hill” floating in the background when they wrote the song’s lyrics). From “Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd” to “And who’s the fool who wears the crown?” we know we’re in the world of trying to judge between “the idiot” who may be a wiseman, and the earthly authority who may in fact be a fool. And with that bit about “Go down in your own way,” how could I hear this song, when I got around to this album in 1974, gripped by my earliest reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as not sharing some of the spirit of Nietzsche’s opening, where Zarathustra decides to go down from the mountain and back to the people? And the first thing he encounters is a crowd watching a tightrope walker, who falls to his death when a Fool comes onto the wire and leaps over him.

“Fearless” ends with the interpolation of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as sung by a crowd at a football match in England. Apparently that song, which I associate with Jerry Lewis telethons, is often sung at such sites of collective outpourings of belonging. According to Wikipedia, the song, in 2020, was put at the service of tribute to the sacrifice and dedication of the frontline workers facing the COVID-19 pandemic. So, all the more appropriate for my Fool, painted in April/May 2020, while lockdowns were general. He’s walking off a cliff, though, so is, indeed, walking alone. Except that maybe, just maybe, we’re all going off the cliff with him.

Track A4: “Up the Hill Backwards”—David Bowie (Scary Monsters, 1980; David Bowie)
This song is not even one of the best tracks on this great album which I bought immediately upon its release in 1980 because of “Ashes to Ashes.” “Up the Hill” appears here because of that hill and because of its key line: “It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it.” Could be a reference to that plummeting Fool (“witnesses falling”), could be a reference to the hundreds of thousands of deaths due to COVID-19, or even to any eventual extinction that may be awaiting mankind, to say nothing of whatever shibboleths of social justice are currently on crusade. Quietism? Perhaps, but it’s more—in the context of our theme of a crowd misjudging a “fool”—about the fact that “I’m OK, you’re so-so.” All y’all.

In other words, it’s a wonderfully insouciant song, full of casual aplomb. And what we might call a survivor’s attitude. “While we sleep they go to work / We’re legally crippled, it’s the death of love.” Hard not to think of those who have to go struggle in Covidville while others get to be at home in their legally crippled privilege. Death of love—what do you call it when sacrifice goes awry? Or when love has to be proved by deaths? When you get to a certain age, the grim reaper is waiting in the wings, so why not ignore the struggle of others to stay alive and concentrate on what you might make of the time you’ve got?

Me, I’m just a painting fool for the time being, stirred by “the arrival of freedom and the possibilities it seems to offer.” For one thing, a shrug directed at all the things I’d otherwise be doing if not trapped at home. And climbing the hill “in my own way,” didn’t someone say? How about backwards? Here being a good place to pile up that detritus that Walter Benjamin imagines Klee’s Angel of History looking back at as he is blown into the future, which is bound to be an uphill course. Unless in fact it’s all downhill from here. As our plummeting Fool is no doubt about to find out, the hard way.

Track A5: “Po’ Boy”—Bob Dylan (“Love and Theft”, 2001; Bob Dylan)
I have to say that when I first thought of compiling mixtapes for the Tarot cards, I went through picking a Dylan song for each card, and I also played the same matching game with The Beatles. For probably obvious reasons, those two musical acts set much of the tone for what my record/CD collection became, and these playlists come from that collection. This “late period” Dylan track (the 21st century, for me, is “late,” as middle-age and after) continues the insouciance of “Up the Hill Backwards” but now things get positively jokey as Bob indulges in some one liners, a knock-knock joke, and conjures a Po’ Boy (not the sandwich but a kind of wise-guy rube).

That element of jokester/jester/comic gets picked up in some later songs on the side, and this is its first sounding. The Fool has to master a certain self-deprecation, playing for laughs. My list of favorite comics would include Groucho Marx, the troupe of Monty Python, Bill Murray, in many of his roles, but my sense of comic hijinks in song begins with The Smothers Brothers and Allen Sherman, both gifted with altering song lyrics for laughs, a knack I’ve indulged on occasion. Dylan here is riffing on that kind of thing, it seems to me. He could play the “poor boy” straight, as an underdog of the underclass, but instead he gives him the gift of absurdity, which is one of the great strengths to have in this world.

And that is what I’d say is the dominant sense of this side: a willingness to risk the absurd, to do things for no particular reason, to be a fool to one’s own vanity or ambition or desire or attachments, but also to laugh at one’s absurd effort to overcome such limitations, as though there is a Big Pay-Off waiting for the Fool on the hill, or the Fool climbing the hill, backwards and probably sticking his tongue out. Is the most foolish line in the song “things’ll be alright by and by”? You decide. “I already tol’ ya, won’t tell ya again.”

Track A6: “Ship of Fools”—John Cale (Fear, 1974; John Cale)
The Ship of Fools (Die Narrenschiff) by Sebastian Brant dates from the fifteenth century, in German; in an introduction to that work, in English, its translator, Edwin Zeydel, attributes to Brant the notion that “all sins are reducible to forms of folly.” But maybe it’s the sins that are expandable into acts of folly; which is to say “sin” could be a lesser idea than “folly” or greater. Zeydel, and Brant, go for sin as greater, but I wonder. It may be that the inclination to sin is, in itself, folly, making folly the force that drives the wheel, so to speak. Brant created a work in which a wide variety of follies are depicted, some of which—like avarice or gluttony—do get called ‘sins’ as well. In any case, the idea of a group of ne’er-do-wells aboard a ship bound for disaster—a ship of fools—sticks. So much so, that there are two songs on this side with that title.

In John Cale’s version, the ship of fools almost sounds like a collective of worthies—I think of Chaucer’s pilgrims on their trek to Canterbury. “The ship of fools was sent / to make sure we all got home for Christmas.” Not a bad thing, I take it. But the opening, with its weary request “take me off I’ve got to eat” and reference to “the same old story, the same old thing,” makes the ship seem not so much foolish as boring. And Cale’s tune is bright, with those tinkling sounds—a celeste?—that give the whole a stately air, full of a lighthearted dignity. And the goings-on are comic book style—“we picked up Dracula in Memphis / It was just about the break of day”; and there are ominous bits of detail: “a black book, a grappling hook, a hangman’s noose from a burnt-out tree—guess we must be getting close to Tombstone” (one of my favorite sequences in all of Cale’s oeuvre). The whole lyric feels like a fantasy of traveling through America, with a wish, for fisherman, that they “could sail from Tennessee to Arizona” (making the heartland not “flyover States” so much as “sail over”). In the end, Cale brings it all back home to his native Wales—in fact, his hometown, Garnant, gets a shout-out—and, in general, I think of this song as giving us a positive sense of the Ship of Fools.

And that’s important because the jokiness that came aboard with Dylan, and that “in my own way” theme, from Floyd, and the “they’re the fool” and “it’s got nothing to do with you” views, all come together now to give us a glimpse, maybe, of fools who are glad to be sailing away from the world where everyone else resides, whether content or contentious. And when we do get back “all the people seemed quite glad to see us.” Maybe that’s foolish on their part: to be glad to welcome a ship of fools. As the sixth song of twelve, Cale’s “Ship” ends the first half of the tape on an up note—the song’s mood, to me, feels like early spring, the season of Aries (and of All Fool’s Day), and is lively if also somewhat haunted by “something in the air that made us kind of weary.”

Track A7: “Running Up That Hill”—Kate Bush (Hounds of Love, 1985; Kate Bush)
With Kate Bush’s opening track from probably her greatest album we sound another take on “that hill.” Kate’s singer wants to be running up that hill “with no problems” and as the reward or punishment of a “deal with God.” The key idea here—since the singer is addressing a “you”—is that the deal with God would let the singer and the “you” swap places, so they could “exchange the experience.” Like, the only way to understand someone is to become that someone and vice versa. Like all those movies from the 1980s in which a parent and a child exchanged places. Presto: a pre-glimpse of maturity, and what it requires, and a reminder of immaturity, and why it works.

But in typical idiosyncratic fashion, I rarely listened to the song as a way of swapping viewpoints with some difficult personage in one’s life but rather a deal to swap places with God, thus making that climb wholly unimpeded by human foibles and concerns and failings. It would be a climbing that would be utterly transcendent, we might say. That is the aspect of the song that feeds into this tape because, while the Fool is on his way down, the eventual appearance of the Wheel of Fortune—way up ahead there in the 11th place of this schema—means he’ll also be on his way up, eventually. And the Fool, in shedding the limited perspectives of all those wise guys who think the things of the world are where it’s at, is transcendence writ small and humble and simply—as we’ll see with a few songs showing up soon—getting by by his wits.

Kate Bush’s song is propulsive and features a great rhythm track, something the 1980s were pretty good at, creating rhythm tracks which can sort of stand alone and be wedded to songs as one chooses. It’s a kind of autonomy, the rhythm that rules, and that’s important here because I feel certain that—whether as oneself or as God—the hill compels one to climb it, the propulsive rhythm of life will have it so, much as the great Wheel must spin and the earth must spin as it circles the Sun (which is coming up next). Much here lies with Kate’s repeated “if I only could / be running up that hill.” Like a Sisyphus fated to run up the hill forever and never have to come down when his big rock does. A running, climbing fool, and no mistake.

Track A8: “Fool’s Gold”—Graham Parker & the Rumour (Heat Treatment, 1976; Graham Parker)
But what’s such a fool after? Graham Parker, with his usual surly view of the mass of humanity, clues us in a bit: the search itself makes the fool a fool. He’s after “fool’s gold,” which can be read as any possibly fictive or chimerical goal, something others—more sensible—would decry. And here I have to say that I’m maybe not fool enough myself to share the vision fully. I can see the transcendent view—climbing forever—but not the notion that there is something—physical, tangible—that can answer the seeker with a definitive status of “found.” Thus my favorite part of Parker’s song is “people say heaven knows heaven knows heaven knows / see what comes I suppose.” Yeah, if it’s good enough it will be worth the search . . .  I suppose. “Well, well the event” as someone says rather testily in Lear.

As an expression both of the limit of judgment and an exasperation with explanatory comments, my mother was fond of saying “heaven knows” (and it appears in the title of one of my dad’s favorite movies, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison), so that may be one reason that line resonates for me—with its repetitions—but it also falls into line with the notion of a “deal with God.” Meaning that there might be a perspective—from heaven’s view or God’s eye—that sees the search fulfilled. Like: you gained the goal, Fool, and just didn’t know it. But heaven knows. That’s a strong fulfillment, but it’s also quite possible that the search is the goal, in some Zen-like way, Grasshopper. Like climbing that hill, backwards, in your own time, the search is your fate and your folly, one and the same for any good fool.

Parker is a blustery singer and I like the way he handles this lyric, giving it his White Soul all. It starts quiet and ruminative but with heaps of passion surging again and again, and I always listen for him getting worked up in the fade, “and in the deep blue sea,” which is a nice segue to our next track, another “ship” on the sea, helmed by fools en route to disaster.

Track A9: “Ship of Fools”—The Grateful Dead (From the Mars Hotel, 1974; Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter)
With this track—our second “Ship of Fools”—we can say that we’re entering the non-transcendent portion of the tape. The three tracks after the Dead are about jokers—not, perhaps, fools outright, but they do bring into question the interplay between fools—in the more spiritual sense we’ve been working up—and jesters, those who simply use levity to amuse or undermine or, maybe, enlighten. Lear’s Fool is a good case in point because he does want his jokes to “land” in such a way that Lear will perceive his own folly, but, because he’s a jester, he can allow that he’s just “fooling.” But before we get to our jesters, let’s give Robert Hunter’s lyrics their due.

This is one of those slow, mellow Garcia tunes, the kind that usually means he’s pondering big questions, trying to find a form for Hunter’s more searching lyrics. Here, the perspective is of a young man (thirty years upon his head . . . it’s when that Baby Boomer generation born in the early to mid ‘40s, hit their 30s, in the 1970s, a pretty dysfunctional time) who has had enough with the powers that be. The world, as conducted by these stalwarts, is a ship of fools, doomed. I’ve long aligned the song with the “non serviam” of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, particularly in those lines: “though I could not caution all, I still might warn a few / don’t lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools.” Here again we might see quietism more than activism—we’re being told what not to do, not what to do—but that caution suits the situation, perhaps. We’re not sinking yet, in 1974, so maybe it’s enough to NOT get caught up in the actions that are leading many fools to their flag-waving perdition.

And anyway the opening of the song is more aggressive: “I would slave to learn a way to sink your ship of fools.” That’s pretty emphatic, like—in “Candyman”—when usually docile Jerry muses that “if I had me a shotgun I would blow you straight to hell.” Sentiments like that are what give the lie to what is too often perceived as laid-back, hippie bliss-out as the dominant mood of the Dead. This song is not only bemused, it’s mournful and maybe ready to get serious. At any rate, the singer “cannot share your laughter.”

And that line can stand as the thin end of the wedge here. Since, in the fool/jester’s province, it’s all for laughs. Which is a way of saying, as Hamlet does, “why, what should a man do but be merry?” He asks that, of course, with all the sarcasm he can give voice to, being neither merry nor assured that there is any action—not even those a man might play—that is of any use . . . not even laughter. And if that’s so, we’re fucked.

So, before our ultimate demise, let’s have a few laughs with some jokers ready in the wings.

Track A10: “Man on the Moon”—R.E.M. (Automatic for the People, 1992; Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe)
Michael Stipe’s lyrics for R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon” directly reference comedian Andy Kaufman and a few of his comic routines—from “goofing on Elvis” to playing Twister live on national television with volunteers from the audience to the “breakfast mess” with pro-wrestler Fred Blassie—and the whole song has a kind of quizzical, quixotic vibe, signaled in that “IF you believed they put a man on the moon” chorus. The questioning of the moon-landing is one of those great “conspiracy theories based on media events” that leave us uncertain about what’s real and what’s not. And it’s in that space (“is it real or is it Memorex?”) that Kaufman’s humor lives: which is to say, thanks to media, we don’t know what’s real and so we’re all fools being fooled or primed to be.

Kaufman’s fooling may have had its transcendent side—at least I feel that his persona was “holy fool” enough to lend itself to that interpretation—and in the song he’s linked to figures such as Moses, Newton, and Darwin, the kind of fools who bring on a serious change in values. Which is a way of aligning them with Hunter’s spokesman in the preceding song; these are men who won’t lend their hand to lift no flag the fools are saluting. They have a different sense of things. Egypt, aka Cleopatra, “troubled by the horrible asp” is a bit of a non sequitur in that crowd, though I think we can allow that a victorious Egypt would’ve made for a different world than the one Rome bequeathed us.

The genius of the song is that such grand figures are still reduced to sound bytes, to what “we”—in the blips of our media brain—can call up about them. And, in that company, Andy—like a “truck stop instead of St. Peter’s”—is just a little ghost for the offering. “Mister Andy Kaufman’s gone wrestling”—which was a non-put-on-put-on of a sport that’s all put-on, for the sake of comedy and satire and something else, which might be ego-as-event. Like when Andy put his continued presence on Saturday Night Live to a vote and was voted off the show. It’s reality television, that great oxymoron of our times, and maybe that begins with a televised moon-landing, way back in 1969.

“Nothing up his sleeve,” of course, makes us think of magicians, and that type of potential charlatan is coming up soon—the third panel—but for now it’s enough to register the inclusive/exclusive nature of laughter—we’ve got to be in on the joke to get it—and the fact that belief is always at risk of “the joke’s on you.”

Track A11: “Dear Madam Barnum”—XTC (Nonsuch, 1992; Andy Partridge)
And with that said, let’s recall the man who famously said “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Surely, they come along much more quickly in these accelerated times, but, even so, P. T. Barnum knew whereof he spoke. And it’s fitting that Andy Partridge, while imagining himself in the role of circus clown, addresses himself to Madam Barnum, conceived as the mistress of the spectacle—a ringleader—he’s now about to depart.

“You tread the high wire between truth and lies” certainly gets at the aspects of performance, and fooling, that we saw with that Fool in the Zarathustra scene, but Partridge is also thinking of the truth and lies of romantic involvement. His fool is a fool for love who draws the line at being a cuckold “If I’m not the sole fool who pulls his trousers down / then, dear Madam Barnum, I resign as clown.” Clowns, of course, often get their trousers pulled down in performance, for laughs, but lovers pull their trousers down for other reasons and linking the two acts is a great notion of Partridge’s.

Here the clown quits the show. Let’s say it was causing him some psychic distress, playing for laughs, sure, until he realized the joke was on him. And that no self-respecting clown can endure. We could let it stand there as the end of the tape, a resigned fool resigning from his act. Cured! Or at least a fool no longer—at least not consciously. Lear’s Fool doesn’t get to leave, really. He gets a last line—“and I go to bed at noon”—and then is heard and seen no more. I’m inclined to link that statement to Zarathustra’s great noontide, but that’s merely a figment of tangential reading, at a time when fools were brave for risking mirth where others were solemn, not least in philosophical circles. And yet the possible incentives of mirth can’t be contained, like high tides at flood walls, and soon we’re laughing at ourselves for our own foolishness.

Track A12: “Happy Jack”—The Who (Happy Jack, 1966; Pete Townshend)
So why not one more track (because it fits on the span of the tape’s 45 minutes or so)? The Who’s “Happy Jack” is possibly the most quizzical track on the tape, its subject a person known as Happy Jack who gets persecuted, seemingly, for singing off-key and for generally not fitting in. “He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man” is one of those lines that might be literally true but also highly figurative. He’s a figure for the fool, to me, because his feeling happy is linked to the waters lapping—neither of which can be affected by the kids. Here, the kids are not “alright” but rather malevolent, as kids often are, and their targeting of Jack is just one of those “us against him”—or “them against me”—situations that fools are apt to find themselves in. 

The water lapping in the harmonies and the tide in Keith Moon’s drumming make for a wonderfully pungent aural world in this song, the kind that only The Who could bring to us with such unvarnished authority. I always think of the Who as the coolest Brit Invasion band, not madcaps like the Beatles, not surly and sexual like the Stones, just not easily made fools of, and Happy Jack, as a short, simple track, gives us a little anthem for the insouciant fool who maybe knows more than others, maybe less, and who may be the kind of figure Kurt Cobain expressed when he sang “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy.” Is God happy? I don't know but I like the line delivered by Karen Blixen's factotum in Out of Africa: “God is happy, Msabu. He plays with us.” No fool like an eternal fool.