HOLIDAZE, 2

Before Christmas I happened to read a little editorial piece in the local DE paper in which the columnist claimed he was glad to be considered "a Grinch" and that his main gripe with Christmas is that no one seems to know for sure what they are celebrating. He backed this up by talking about how the Gospels and Paul's Epistles make no mention of Christ's birth as a day to be commemorated. He also pointed out that at least some of the imagery of Christmas derives from pagan customs--for instance the date of December 25th itself.

All that of course is well-known and clearly has little relation to the holiday itself which, because it is largely a folk custom that got endorsed by institutions, both religious and secular, has no use for consistency. Which is why the cries of "commercialized Christmas" ring false to me; as do cries that Christmas--as a religious, specifically Christian, celebration--should not be endorsed by stores and other secular, non-denominational entities. Christmas has no one meaning or purpose--unlike Thanksgiving, it isn't even patriotic in some dimly perceived way. Of all holidays it's the one that might be called the most Eurocentric, in that it reaches back into the customs of the northern countries while coupling them with imagery derived from the Semitic birth of Christ and the Italian tradition of Biblical iconography. And even though that Eurocentrism might be under attack in some quarters it's still simply a fact that the majority of those who live and work in the U.S. come from origins in Europe, as does the basis of this country as a nation.

Even so, when I think of Christmas it's as an American phenomenon, and it's one that has so many layers that it's worth celebrating for that reason alone. Very few events or occasions are so laden with associations, with input from all kinds of sources. For me as a child, Christmas began as simply a special, unreal time: a tree was brought into the house and prettified, people spoke meaningfully of snow even if no snow was to be seen, particular kinds of music were present, everyone was around the house more than usual, people were visited, people visited, uncomfortable clothes were worn at various times, great new things were discovered beneath the tree and much eager anticipation led up to "the day" when it would happen again. In school, the time-off before and after Christmas were considered islands of serenity, undisturbed by the quotidian school year. And, because I attended a Catholic school, Christmas had a holy meaning as well: the great story of a miraculous baby, of a lowly birth, of a heroic life to come. I can remember in high school--when the Church's view of the world began to seem more and more unreal--still being moved by "the ancient yuletide carols." That music was simply a part of childhood awe, whether of one's parents or of Santa Claus or of some intangible quality of promise in humanity that Jesus spoke to.

But I also grew up in the '60s when some "TV classics" were being aired. The 1951 version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol that I first tried to watch through snowy reception (let it snow, indeed) that my father struggled with rabbit-ears in an attempt to clarify, became a mainstay, not only because its sentimentality suits the season, but because it created a sense of continuity in Christmas--"at this time of the rolling year"--past, present and to come. Each year one watches it is to feel that force of time, of what has changed and what has not. Then there were the new, made for TV specials: Mr. Magoo's version of A Christmas Carol, which I also first watched with my parents before the age of 10, had very lively and affecting songs added to the familiar tale; Charlie Brown's Christmas with that unforgettable jazz piano score and Linus' simple reading of the nativity story as one might hear it read in school--and of course "the Charlie Brown Christmas tree," versions of which I seem to have purchased myself over the years; Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which created an imaginative fable out of the old chestnut; Santa Claus is Coming to Town, which did the same for that song--and which inspired me to sit up one Christmas eve spinning extemporary explanations about Santa for my younger brothers; How the Grinch Stole Chrismas, which finally animated Dr. Seuss--with Boris Karloff no less!--involving my favorite author and best-known horror movie star, and so on.

Those images became a part of the annual ritual of Christmas which, though it slipped away in my twenties, came back with a vengeance when it was my daughter's turn to experience Christmas as what it seems to be, to me, most emphatically: a family holiday--which means it entails whatever traditions cause a family to share the same host of Christmases past, present and to come. The "secular" meaning is therefore the richest meaning because it's based on what brings people together. The reaching out aspect of the more religious side of it can be expressed simply in the visits and/or gifts to those otherwise neglected--which can certainly encompass charitable acts of all kinds--but it isn't the celebration of Christ's sacrifice (however much the Church always wants to keep that uppermost) that resonates in the season: it's the birth of the child. So, in keeping with Christmas as my parents' conceived of it, Christmas, for me, is for the children, the time at which they become the stars of the show. Though I suppose that, as we age and there are fewer actual children present, it becomes the time to think again about the children we once were, with, maybe, some retention of whatever it was that we found wonderful in the pageantry of the holidaze.

HOLIDAZE

Off to the usual visits in the tri-state area: DE, NJ, PA. Some time it might be interesting to spend Christmas somewhere completely different, but the only aspect of the holidays that makes them "traditional" is the fact that they find me inevitably back where I started from. It seems fitting somehow that the end of the year be marked by a return to origins. I suppose somewhere new for the new year would make sense too, but... that usually takes more energy than I can muster. Besides, there's something appealing about being in a college town in "the between days" after one semester and before the next.

New Year's resolution: to finish Against the Day and write about it in the first week of 2007. I'd hoped to make it before the year ended, but too many other things impinged.

No grand pronouncements for year's end, so I'll just leave with some lines of Berryman's that occurred to me this week, for some reason:

Working & children & pals are the point of the thing,
for the grand sea awaits us, which will then us toss
& endlessly us undo.
-- Dream Song, 303

WAITS REVISITED

Two weeks ago, on Dec 7th, Tom Waits' 57th birthday, his new 3-CD set, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, arrived in the mail from Amazon. I've listened to it quite a bit since then and it has inspired a few reflections on Waits' career -- the major phase of which runs from the early '80s to the end of the '90s, with the twin high-points being, for me, Rain Dogs (1985) and Bone Machine (1992).

Waits began his recording career with Closing Time (1973) -- piano-based tunes that wouldn't be out of place in other singer-songwriter catalogues of the period (in fact, ubiquitous purveyors of CA mellowness, The Eagles, recorded "Ol' 55" from that album -- Waits remarked, "the only good thing about an Eagles LP is that it keeps the dust off your turntable"). The songs on his debut are "nicer" than any other Waits songs, having the one quality that would be the mainstay of Waits' music for some time to come: good tunes, many of which already seem familiar even when you hear them for the first time, but the lyrics haven't yet attained the other mainstay of the early Waits: sentimental treatments of the "beat" world of derelicts, hookers, mechanics, short-order cooks, strippers, bookies, and the whole world of people getting by in the cracks of the "service industry"; the setting seems to be always within the first decade after WWII in Waits' early work, the time when Kerouac was doing his best writing while fondly recalling the pre-war 30s with its equalizing hard times.

During those initial years of Waits' career I didn't pay him much mind because that beat ethos seemed pretty dated after the shake-up of the '60s. The breakthrough came, sorta, with the stand-out song "Tom Traubert's Blues" on Small Change (1976). By then Waits' voice had begun to achieve its trademarks: a Louis Armstrong rasp with phlegmy quavers and growls. The song is brilliant as writing and as performance, but it didn't make me jump on the bandwagon. Consequently I didn't know of the stride forward in 1980 on Heartattack and Vine (where suddenly the beat ethos has become more virulent -- in the title track -- while also taking maundering to new bathetic heights, with the vocal tour de force of "On the Nickel"), nor of the move into a whole new terrain on Swordfishtrombones (1983), after his marriage to Irish playwright Kathleen Brennan. Listen to the title track, and to "Underground" and "In the Neighborhood." The places are familiar, but the outlook is freakier and the music is carnivalesque, what Waits called "a demented marching band."

Not until Rain Dogs did it become impossible to ignore the fact that a songwriter had emerged whose unique lyrical world could rival the best of Dylan and Cohen, and whose musical style could stand with works by Brecht and Weill, while also being as much of its "time" as the dark, post-punk operatics of Nick Cave's mid-to-late '80s work. From then on, each Waits album has been something to experience, an opportunity to visit again a consistent but, surprisingly, never simply repetitive universe. This isn't to say that some songs don't seem to retread the themes or voice of previous songs -- at times one can feel trapped in the same, endlessly unfolding story of colorful, quirky, shifty and cunning characters not noted for their high-profile success -- but Waits, even more than Dylan, generally knows how to get the most out of his material and makes his voice an instrument that sets as much as it tells the story. Waits assumes voices that enunciate characters, that create the entire mood in which the song should be heard.

Waits has been in various limelights: he acted in movies directed by Jarmusch, Coppola, and Altman, to name but a few, and even had a role supporting two of the greatest film actors of their generation -- Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in Ironweed -- was nominated for an Oscar for the soundtrack to One From the Heart (1982), produced a musical based on his songs, Frank's Wild Years (1986), and worked with avant-garde theater-director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, had songs featured in the high profile soundtrack for Dead Man Walking, performed a clip of a song as the lounge singer in Shrek, and so on. A complaint: while Orphans seems to revisit Waits production from late '80s to the present, all the songs are listed as 2006, so there is no info provided as to their origins, date of composition or of initial recording, despite the fact that some of the songs have appeared already in soundtracks.

In any case, the Waits' industry (most are co-written with wife Kathleen) presents a steady stream of songs that celebrate a subculture of losers, grifters, offenders on the run, and regular working-stiffs who take suitably jaundiced views of themselves and others. The set is divided into Brawlers: songs that tend to be more aggressive (including "Road to Peace," a take on terrorism in the middle-east, and "Walk Away," a stand-out song from Dead Man Walking); Bawlers, the trademark "cry in your poison" songs that Waits does so well (he may be the greatest purveyor of melancholy in American music) -- "Fannin Street," the standard "Goodnight Irene," and a cover of the Ramones' "Danny Says"; Bastards, songs -- and several spoken performances -- that capture the oddity of Waits, his willingness (and only Cave treads on this territory) to let a bastard have his say -- the bedtime story from Woyzeck is preciseless, as is the shaggy dog story that concludes the collection.

Blackjack Ruby and Nimrod Cain
The moon's the color of a coffee stain
Jesse Frank and Birdy Joe Hoaks
But who is the king of all these folks?
--Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan, "Bottom of the World"

I'M A SCHIZO, YOU'RE A SCHIZO

Today I finally finished reading Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1973), which turned out to take most of the semester. It's the kind of book where at times one is intrigued by the lucid thoughts that percolate through the brain while reading, at other times one finds oneself looking askance at the entire enterprise. And that is partly to be expected as it's a book that aims at schizoanalysis, which is a way of saying that a stable, centered, rational response to the book or to one's own thoughts is not what the book promotes.

The main point of schizoanalysis is to try to overcome all the deleterious effects of psychoanalysis -- to some extent as a procedure, but mainly as an intellectual presupposition that dominates our collective educated Western thinking. How so? According to Deleuze and Guattari the oedipalization of the unconscious was one of the great disservices of our world; it has created a context in which sexuality and, more importantly, desire are tied to a myth of mommy-daddy-me, a viral famialism that perpetuates a reactionary space from which all sorts of desires -- which they term revolutionary -- are banished. This process does not begin with Freud, but Freud represents the reified version: the point at which a reactionary tendency toward repression becomes a condition for a 'cure' of what the schizo experiences as flows and breaks and what D & G call "the body without organs."

For myself, the point of reading this book is to grasp something which does exercise my mind in various ways: what, if anything, is the philosophical outcome of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll? In other words, IF one accepts that those patterns of behavior, those identifications and forms of expression alter not only some time-bound era of culture (e.g. "the 60s" or "the 70s" or what have you), but alter as well the subject or self, then what changes in the content of thought? How is the world transfigured? This question interests me when thinking about works that I believe to be marked by such changes -- whether Dylan of the mid-60s, Beatles of the late '60s, or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, all of which I consider to be schizo texts in D & G's sense. While reading Anti-Oed, I'm constantly referring to those pop cultural forms that in some sense intrude between daddy/mommy and me: that libidinal liberation that occurs when one grasps one's "jetztzeit" -- to use Benjamin's term for that awareness of a temporal position as a "now" that fulfills a past and projects a future (or fulfills its future by projecting a past).

The question moves beyond that specific temporal, "alternative culture" challenge when one considers the degree to which D & G look to Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Beckett, Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Proust to help formulate their own conceptions: figures who all in their way marked to some degree a stage in early periods of my reading during those years when I might imagine myself -- now -- to have been best enacting the schizo purpose. A period, from '76 to '82 say, before the re-oedipalization that is parenthood began to have its effects on the degree to which I could fluidly re-imagine myself each waking day. So I find myself also applying D & G's conceptions to the work whose contemplation remained fixed in my mind during those years of more or less willful oedipalization (otherwise known as a college education): Finnegans Wake, a schizo text par excellence, and one that engages at every moment with the effort to reconfigure all the prevailing myths of daddy-mommy-me. Does JJ ultimately cure himself or us? No. Plus his daughter was nutty. Or was she simply schizo in D & G's sense?

Not a question I really mean to answer or entertain. I'm more interested in what D & G can offer me in ways of thinking about the reactionary, oedipal, paranoiac registers of thought as they come in conflict with the revolutionary, anti-oedipal, schizoid registers.

"We have repudiated and lost all our beliefs that proceeded by way of objective representations. The earth is dead, the desert is growing: the old father is dead, the territorial father, and the son too, the despot Oedipus. We are alone with our bad conscience and our boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing left but images that revolve within the infinite subjective representation. We will muster all our strength so as to believe in these images, from the depths of a structure that governs our relationships with them and our identifications as so many effects of a symbolic signifier. The 'good identification.' We are all Archie Bunker at the theater, shouting out before Oedipus: there's my kind of guy, there's my kind of guy! Everything, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, is taken up again as shadows projected on a stage."--Deleuze and Guattari

Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty-first century schizoid man
--Fripp-McDonald-Lake-Giles-Sinfield, 1969

TO EMILY

(for Emily Dickinson's birthday, December 19, 1830)

It seems so long since I had heard
Your quiet voice -- a gifted Bird --
It hid in me and its Song
Pulsed aloud -- a preacher's tongue --
Assuming sought Reward.

And so you see I do accept
Your familiar, wise precept --
As aspirants to the Crown
Find footprints in the Unknown
To which their Steps adapt.

--DB, 1991

TP 'N' ME

When in Mason & Dixon the eponymous duo were shown visiting New Castle, DE, and using the steeple on the church on the Green as a reference point for their calculations, I must admit I was touched: here were Pynchonian protagonists in my hometown! Granted, the loveable surveyors were there well before America became the United States, but so was the town I hail from (well, actually I'm from the suburbs between it and Wilmington). The church of course is still there and the Green and the churchyard played their picturesque part in a senior high school project on the old town. Despite the fact that Pynchon's novel was set so far in the past, I amused myself imagining TP himself visiting my familiar stomping-grounds so as to recreate the place for his protagonists.

In Against the Day, I'm similarly amused by the fact that some of it takes place at and around Yale, but the narrator's remarks on Yale simply echo remarks in Gravity's Rainbow about Harvard: (gee, won't those Cornellians ever stop sniping?), but I admit I was tickled by the following:

All the way out Prospect Street, past the cemetery, the feeling grew that something awful was about to happen.

Since every time I walk or drive home from campus, I go "all the way out Prospect Street" past the Divinity School, which is well past the cemetery, this allowed me for a moment to think of Pynchon taking the same path up Science Hill. The only problem I have with his statement is that the cemetery is right on the edge of the main campus, so to go "all the way out, past the cemetery" is merely to be at the start of Prospect (which is called College Street until Grove, where the cemetery sits). But I grant you that only the cemetery was likely to have been there both in the time of Kit Traverse and now, so it would be hard to pick another landmark. But I'm quibbling. The sentence steps for a moment onto my turf, and that was a pleasure.

" . . . . sometimes, to be sure, he'd caught hints of some Kabbalah or unverbalized knowledge being transferred as if mind to mind, not because of so much as in spite of Yale." I hear you, brother, I hear you . . .

WHERE HAVE ALL PAPA'S HEROES GONE?

After all, it is Reading Week (the week for students to cram before exams, but also the week for instructors to grade), so what I've been doing is reading TP's big book. But the other thing I've been doing is indulging my list-o-mania, an irresistible tendency to make lists of things -- usually (as at the right) lists of books to read, tasks to do, but also lists of "best of's" and "favorites."

The list I've been concocting is a sequence of topics I'd like to write on some time. It went from an idea that vague to a much more structured list: it exists now as fifty related topics that span my intellectual history from grade school to the present. In other words, to paraphrase Wordsworth, it's "the growth of the critic's (or novelist's) mind." I hesitate as to which word to use to designate 'whose' mind is doing the growing. And that's partly the point of the project: in examining these topics, in writing up a mature perspective on them, I shape not only my appreciation of these things but also reshape or reinvent the mind that these things first appealed to.

What things? An assorted grab-bag, but I had a big breakthrough when I realized that each was an example that fell into one of two big categories: the narrative, and the lyric. Which is to say, we have, in the former, novels, films, and myths, and, in the latter, poetry and songs. That formulation makes it sound as if I'd be dealing only with individual works -- sometimes, but sometimes I would be commenting on several works by an individual writer (whether of novels, poems or songs).

Fifty, and that divides into ten groups of five, and each group of five encapsulates a particular "era" in my growth. So that, for instance, the earliest period (the late '60s), holds 1) my favorite Marvel comics of the era; 2) the Bible stories that I consider most definitive; 3) four albums by The Beatles; 4) the Greek heroes whose stories I read and re-read in grade school; 5) four films of 1966-68 that, in retrospect, help me to establish that era's attitude in popular genres.

The ten groups of five divide neatly at number 25 with my first (and second) start-to-finish encounter with the work that left the most indelible mark on me (because at number 25 we've only reached my 21st year): Ulysses.

So: 25 of the topics cover the first 21 years of life; than another 25 cover the next 26. Not a bad ratio, I guess, given that those first 21 years are the most formative (and that the late '60s/early '70s is my favorite period for music and films). And given the fact that part of the interest of making the list at all is to re-structure those early years and determine what, in fact, was formative. This point might not be of keen interest to the imagined reader (like there would be one besides me!), but I think the topics I write on could be made of interest, even if the principle of selection is entirely idiosyncratic (i.e.: well, it was important to ME!).

Which brings us back to the question of whose growth and why I hesitate: because to some extent I'm choosing as my model the review articles I've written on works of literary criticism, which is to say that there is a critical evaluation taking place, but at the same time what I want to highlight is what can be gained from these works, what it is that they have to say -- and that requires me looking, at least somewhat autobiographically, at what it is they said in the time of my first encounter with them. Perhaps it's best to just say "growth of the writer's mind" -- leaving aside what kind of writing specifically is intended.

But the main thing, friends, is that it's not "growth of the professor's mind" -- the list doesn't offer a syllabus or curriculum, and the vast majority are things I chose to "study" on my own. Better: they're the things that claimed my attention along the way; I'm tantalized by the prospect of giving them critical attention, now, in propria persona, as it were.

List, list, O list! -- the ghost of Hamlet's father

THE STORY SO FAR...

So far I've read into the second section of Pynchon's Against the Day and, as the Prankquean might say, "Am liking it." Listing things seems a good way to proceed, so here's some things I've noted:

1. DeLillo and Pynchon both published big books in 1997. DeLillo's Underworld was in many ways a summation of his career -- and kind of a summation of the Cold War era. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon wasn't at all valedictory, moving into a narrative voice and historical era radically different from his previous work. AtD seems much more like the summation that Underworld was for DeLillo. The tone of certain passages takes the reader back to many previous moments in the Pynchon universe, so this does read somewhat like a retrospect at times.

2. Part of that "retrospect" has to do with details here and there: elements that recall earlier books (faked postage stamps, for instance), names -- like Roswell Bounce (in GR there's a Hilary Bounce) -- that seem meant to indicate relations of earlier characters. The Traverses in this book are clearly ancestors of the Traverses in Vineland and, indeed, the section on Webb and his sons is a very Vineland-like section. There are also names that simply seem to recall other Pynchon-type monikers in their stylized absurdity: Otto Ghloix, Professor Vanderjuice. Then there's the dog who reads Henry James and Eugene Sue, to compare to the talking dog in M&D. The other feature, like M&D, is the tendency to use anachronistic bits of description that reference something from our time -- in this case the game Tetris and Japanese anime, or an MTV-like "video" in M&D -- to create that texture of double entendre or double voir that Pynchon exploits very entertainingly.

3. If, like me, you've read GR innumerable times (ok, 6 or 7 in its entirety but some parts lots more), then you have long ago assimilated "the Pynchon view" (or some version of it that you can live with), and if you've tried "teaching" the book (or writing about it), then you know that it's almost impossible to keep in play all the bits that are relevant to whatever point you want to make. AtD seems to me, besides offering its own arcana that is fun and informative to track down, to offer an easier take on Pynchon's grand obsessions. In other words, it's not that it's "Pynchon-lite," it's that it's Pynchon made more accessible. And, given that GR, but for its devoted acolytes, seems still to enjoy the status of "unreadable" as far as the uninitiated are concerned, that's actually good news. It's not so much that this is a more accessible Pynchon, but it is a Pynchon who we might imagine has had to explain things to his kid, at least now and then, and, well, that makes teachers of us all, doesn't it? Pynchon, may the force be with him, doesn't seem tired or merely playing by numbers, but, whereas Pynchon once wrote as the wise(guy) adolescent, now he seems to write from adolescence-loving wisdom. There's a lot of "kidstuff" in the early going of this book -- because the Chums of Chance are enterprising, adventurous kids and behave accordingly, and because the young Traverses are clearly a new generation to take note of. Then too, on the note of explaining things to the kid, we have Merle Rideout trying to tell it like it was to his daughter Dahlia (or Dally) which has more than a few shades of Zoyd, Prairie and Frenesi in its intonation.

4. He can still pull out all the stops and do things with prose that no one else even tries. In fact I'm beginning to see that what we call "Pynchon" is, in writing, a sum of three main parts: 1) a tone that is capable of utter silliness, outright hokeyness, dalliances with bathos, and arch, know-it-all informativeness, but is generally that of a good faith yarn-spinner with a lot of ground to cover; 2) a style that is capable of layering clauses to cover not only the image or scene to be depicted, but also to include harmonizing details or asides that connect with larger thematic interests -- and it is this "sleight-of-hand" style that makes him "difficult" because, even though the narrator is telling you things you should notice, the style makes those "things" open onto wider vistas rather than focus down on some little bit of info; 3) thematics that try to sweep all possibly relevant associations into the fiction's frame of reference, so that the same ideas keep being explained with different metaphors, or different facts or slightly skewered facts; by now, the arsenal of Pynchon themes are fairly familiar -- the metaphor's tenor, let's say -- but the vehicles run into ever-new areas. AtD picks up the attempt to understand the actual status of the planet Earth -- offered by way of the paranoid fixation on gravity in GR, and by way of the mapping of terrestial space in M&D -- and moves it into the Aether, and the way that time and space itself are measured with, its seems so far, light being the common denominator of both: how much light does the earth (and any object on it) attract, and for how long, and what does that tell us about our place in the cosmos?

5. The other common denominator theme, which has been prevalent in Pynchon from the time of the Whole Sick Crew, to the aficionados of the muted post-horn, to the various Black Market types in GR, to the dispersed malcontents of Vineland, to the idiosyncratic oddities of M&D -- all through our crippl'd Zone -- is the love of the renegade operation and the various states of zeal, secrecy, community and bitterness of the amateur enthusiast in a world of specialized, vested, controlling and regulating interests. To enter the Pynchon universe is to step outside the door of your safe and predictable associates and walk into the waiting arms of the lunatic fringe -- not something Those Who Know and Are Known seem to like doing too much...

155 pages in, 930 to go...

MUSICAL MISCELLANY

Every December 11th from 1993, when she was 12, till last year, when we collaborated on one, I made my daughter a tape of music released in that magical era, 1967-75, and called "Miscellany." No particular reason for that date; it was simply the date I made the first one, back in Princeton. It became a tradition, one of those non-denominational holiday activities. The semester ends, time to kick back with some cognac and trip down memory lane in the cozy warmth of that trough of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas that I dubbed, when I was in high school, "the pre-Christmas vagaries."

And that's something those tapes were meant to relive: that season of the year and the time of my time, from age 12 to mid-high school. The fact that I went on making them throughout my daughter's college years just shows how much it became a part of the season, but also how much fun it is to turn-up some old chestnut you haven't heard in decades (like Uriah Heep's "Come Away Melinda," or Cat Stevens' "Lady D'Arbanville," or Yes's "A Venture"). So, part of the yearly revisit had to do with finding old and overlooked stuff, but also with coming up with "new" old stuff -- stuff that was out back then, but which I didn't know or own at the time: like The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, or Tyrannosaurus Rex's Unicorn, or any of the Fairport Convention albums.

It could be said that my interest in this kind of music stems entirely from my passion for Jethro Tull from about 1972 to '76. (After all, in the latter year I did paint a triptych of Tull images; the central 4 foot by 4 foot panel was a very faithful rendering of the group portrait on the inside of Living in the Past, a photo of the band that recorded Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play: Ian Anderson, John Evan, Martin Barre, Barrimore Barlowe, Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond -- the line-up I saw perform in '74.) Tull's sound was based on both hard rock riffs and the soft, vaguely Elizabethan strum of acoustic guitars -- and of course Ian's trademark flute and Evan's stately piano. An unusual sound, and unusual lyrics -- to say nothing of the temerity of writing albums based on what were essentially long poems. None of the other "concept album" writers did that. They basically put together albums that were a collection of songs, oftentimes running the songs together (as in Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon). Ian fudged it by writing a variety of bits that he then wrote transitional music to link, but what I liked was the sense, following the lyric sheet, that it was a continuous work of verse, not distinct song lyrics. Yes came closest to this with their side-long suites that, on Tales from Topographic Oceans, were more or less united compositions, one per side. But Ian's opuses took up both sides.

The music of the "Miscellany"doesn't derive from Tull, but it's music that "goes with it" in my mind -- like Steeleye Span's recordings of traditional British folk songs that they arrange in ways that remind me of Tull -- or Led Zep's folksier moments, picked up from the likes of The ISB, and Bert Jansch. But one thing Tull doesn't have as much in its sound that is a stand-out in some of this music is a driving organ (as in ELP and Uriah Heep) and the mellotron (as in King Crimson of that era and in Yes). These artists generally use keyboards well (even harpsichords and Moogs) and rely on them in a way that departs from the typical guitar-based rock of the early '60s, but avoids those damned ubiquitous Farfisa keyboards that would come to dominate the '80s sound. This was the era of the Hammond organ, a warm sound that immediately makes me think of hymns and frosty nights in early December.

Something else that unites this music for me, true of Ian's lyrics, and generally the case: the lyrics are verbose, oftentimes full of antiquated phrases or of lines that boast a kind of flamboyance that no American lyricist would even try, much less get away with. It isn't psychedelic, though some of it owes its genesis to that. More to the point I think, is that it all owes something to the cult of a fantasized English past that never existed but which became common ground with the late '60s explosion of Tolkien readers.

In the case of King Crimson and Procol Harum, the lyricist was not a musician: Peter Sinfield and Keith Reid only wrote lyrics, and both have a highly wrought style; Reid is more witty, Sinfield more arcane, but both can be oddly inpenetrable. I remember Crimson's Robert Fripp, at a show at Toad's in New Haven a few years ago, offering a souvenir (a red brassiere that an enthusiastic fan had flung on stage) to whoever could recite the opening lines of "In the Wake of Poseidon." Sure enough, someone was able to scream out: "Plato's spawn cold ivyed eyes/ Snare truth in bone and globe." At one time I would've been up to it, but all I could think of was: "Night, her sable dome scattered with diamonds,/ Fused my dust from a light year" -- which are, of course, the opening lines of "Cirkus," from Lizard (1970), the album I still consider to be Crimson's most distinctive.

One other thing: for some reason every "Miscellany" began with a Bowie song, a tip of the hat to the fact that in the main era I'm recalling ('72 to '74, when I became familiar with most of this music) the main rock rag I read (and which actually quoted song lyrics in italicized stanzas) was Circus (not yet dedicated to heavy metal) and at that time glam was all the rage in that mag, an era of what I often refer to as "rampant Zigginess" (though Bowie's the only glam-rocker who makes the tapes).

Life's a long song
but the tune ends too soon for us all -- Ian Anderson, 1972

ASS OF GOD, BRAY FOR US

The final film of the WHC's Fall Film Series was shown on Saturday: Au hasard Balthazar (1966) by Robert Bresson, which acts as a perfect bookend to Mouchette (1966), the Bresson film shown earlier this semester. Both feature lucid and carefully constructed accounts of the depredations of rural life as shown by the unprepossessing life lived by a young girl. But in this case, there is a figure present who has been read allegorically by some critics: the donkey, baptized by the children, Balthazar (after the Ethiopian magus who worshiped at Christ's nativity). Balthazar, in his stoic suffering, parallels the girl's (Marie) treatment by several "masters" (her father; Gerard, the local tough to whom she submits; the aging merchant (perhaps the most sadistic of all Balthazar's keepers) with whom she negotiates a price for her favors). Unlike Mouchette, Marie is permitted to leave these degrading circumstances, though we have no idea of whether for a better or worse fate, while leaving behind her beloved donkey to die in her stead, so to speak.

The "transcendent" readings that find an overcoming of suffering in the donkey's expiring moments on a hill as Schubert plays and a bevy of placid sheep surround him have much to overlook. Certainly Balthazar's end can be said to smack of the kind of spiritual attainment to be found in something like Johnny Cash's "I'm Free of the Chain Gang Now" -- where a prisoner can say that death is a freedom from the prison that is life. That sense was present in the almost jaunty suicide of Mouchette in the other film, but Au hasard Balthazar is more sombre, if only because the events turn so regularly upon cruelty, betrayal, and the haphazard meaninglessness that is captured by the phrase "au hasard." Shortly before the escapade of smuggling that leads to his death, Balthazar is called "a saint" by Marie's mother; the phrase has much to recommend it in the sense of the saintly long-suffering and uncomplaining nature of the beast.

But rather than Christ, Balthazar's adventures put me in mind of Apuleius' Golden Ass -- the story of a fellow's metamorphosis into the form of a donkey and of the picaresque "chance" occurrences that lead the animal through a cross-section of Roman life (though, granted, in a much more comic register) to a final role as a minister of Isis (the new cult in town). In the case of Balthazar, his employment with the mean-spirited Gerard as bread deliverer, or as beast of burden for the drunken and perhaps simple-minded Arnold, or as a math-computing performer in a circus, or as a wretched mill-driver for the merchant, all point to a kind of rural everyman status for the donkey, victim of random oppressions, on one hand, hero of a series of providential escapes, on the other. Several times Balthazar returns to Marie and indeed his highest moment is early in the film as her admired pet, wearing a crown of flowers like a newly crowned Bottom ready to cavort with an enchanted Titania. If Balthazar is a Christlike scapegoat in the end, he is also a fertility symbol, also a clown, and also the inadvertent means of Arnold's death.

The tone of the film seemed to me fairly quizzical: the actions of the characters are not to be questioned, but are rather implacable and in complete keeping with who they must be. In other words, the attempt to read the film allegorically is supported by that sense of everything being contrived or "ordained." But the problem with that reading is that it overlooks what the film seems to accept, quizzically, as the element of "au hasard" or "at random." To say that Marie and Balthazar are in some sense "fated" to parallel each other is much like saying, as does the rich boy Jacques, whose family had stayed in the rural town during his and Marie's childhood, that he and Marie are meant for each other. A fact that Marie denies with the simple statement that his conviction is unreal, that reality is something else. Un autre chose, par hasard.

TELL ME TALES OF JIM AND JOHN

On this day, December 8th, in 1943 Jim Morrison was born, and, in 1980, John Lennon died.

There was a time when these two, after Dylan, were the front-running contributors to that phase of nostalgia for the music of the late '60s that I experienced in the closing years of high school, 1976-77. It meant hearing the music of The Doors for the first time -- I mean apart from recollections of '67, when "Light My Fire" was on the airwaves, and '68, when "Hello I Love You" first aired, and '71, when I bought a copy of the spooky "Riders on the Storm" around the time Morrison cashed it in. His death didn't mean a hell of a lot to me at the time. An infatuation with Morrison's simple but provcative lyrics, hypnotic voice, and narcissistic hipness didn't dawn for me till certain avenues of substance abuse opened, as they will, and the vistas presented from that vantage showed Morrison as the only proselytizer of California-inspired drug culture who seemed to accept from the start that it was a doomed trip, a kind of youthful, tribal embrace by Eros of Thanatos, or, as Joan Didion puts it, The Doors' lyrics tended to "reflect either an ambiguous paranoia or a quite unambiguous insistence upon the love-death as the ultimate high." More than that, they reflected comfort with the schizophrenic state of the times, a state that Didion can only grope toward in her memoir of the period, The White Album.

Morrison, for my money in those impressionable teen years when the end of school meant the end of everything existence had been up to that point, offered a giddy sense of how the self-involved ego could insist upon a dynamic indifference to the actual in the name of personal fiction, a mythos of imagination. Perhaps the great visionary poets had done it, but those days were long gone. Now it was only rock poets who stood a chance. The rapidly aging Beats were basically like any other long-haired college profs. Morrison, dead for five years when I started listening to him, looked to me to be a poet in that Romantic sense -- the way of Rimbaud and of Shelley: arrogant, extreme, somehow a bit beyond this world, dead young.

"Better to burn out than to fade away," Neil Young's line, hadn't been written yet in '76, in fact Johnny Rotten hadn't quite penetrated to these shores yet, but already those '60s greats who didn't burn out like Morrison were left to live on in some kind of attenuated twilight. '76 wasn't a good year for anyone who admired the music produced by that generation born 1940-45; as they passed the mid-30s it became clear that the music that had made their careers was beyond them, tied to an age and a period now superseded. So what can a poor boy do but get back to where he once belonged? (Dylan tried it with his Rolling Thunder Revue.)

Though The Beatles' hits were second-nature to anyone growing up when I did, the LPs were still material to be explored, with mature ears that could now understand something of what those times were all about (hell, I'd read Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by then, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). So welcome, John Lennon, no longer the round-faced moptop with the glib wit, but instead the angular guru with the round glasses and lank hair worn Jesus-style, sometimes with a beard that would do any rabbi proud. Back to the Lennon heyday of '66 to '69, and songs like "A Day in a Life," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "I Am the Walrus," "Come Together," "Tomorrow Never Knows," "Across the Universe," "Happiness is a Warm Gun," "Revolution," "Cry Baby Cry." In Lennon there was no posturing toward the role of doomed dionysian minister of eros that Morrison played at; instead it was the posture of the Wise Man, the savvy seer, the raised-consciousness media manipulator. The lyrics were always nonsense that might "make sense" in unexpected ways, or at least might seem to joke against sense in interesting ways.

Lennon's murder in 1980 occurred on a Monday night. Some friends and I had just left a poetry reading in Philadelphia and I stopped to call my wife. She gave me the news as I stood on a city street and it suddenly seemed as if every dark thought that might've been inspired by the Reagan election a month old was caught up symbolically in the event. I remember asking for clarification, "you mean he was shot because he's John Lennon?" It was an assassination, in other words, not simply a murder: as with MLK and RFK and Malcolm X, the '60s legacy of gunning down symbols had reached out and anachronistically struck down a relic and recluse who had just re-upped on the merry-go-round, despite what his hit "Watching the Wheels" proclaimed. As a friend, Harold Watson, who was with me that night wrote, "who saw could've not've seen whole metropolsomes/ blown away momentarily like some metaphysical/ phenomogy.// I'm double drunk man/ and it makes me surquester, richie/ has another martin been christ'd?"

The enormity of the comparison rang true in the light of those times: he died for our sins, which is to say, as scapegoat for that era which would be gleefully repudiated and repealed in the coming decade, its failed geopolitical war restored to honor, its hand-out for the underclass replaced by trickle-down, its analog recordings digitized, its cinema verité of the streets traded-in for blockbusters with "production values," its guitar-heroes derided by walls of keyboards, its radicals converted to conservatives or at least cleaning up their acts to join the mainstream, from communards to capitalist entrepeneurs, and so on. A new age dawned and eventually I even began to take musicians of my generation seriously, but still, when I recall the glory days of rock music, Jim and John are going strong, 25 and 28 respectively, the electronic media are stamping the minds of the children of the middle and working class, the college kids are making news, the 2nd Kennedy has fallen and the Democratic party is suffering a set-back it won't recover from for twenty years, if ever.

Five to one, baby, one in five/ No one here gets out alive--Jim Morrison, 1968
If I ain't dead already, oh girl, you know the reason why--John Lennon, 1968

THE RAINBOW IS OVER

Today I wanted to go to lunch at the Rainbow Café, downstairs on Chapel St. in New Haven, only to find out it's closed, kaput. Businesses come and go, certainly, and even if I might mourn no longer having their veggie burgers, or hamburgers, or pita pizza or chicken sandwiches, the loss of such culinary items in themselves should not stir much emotion. And yet I felt a distinct depression as I continued down the blustery street.

I think it had to do with the images that first sprang to mind: The Rainbow when it was new and lively and pretty, when two graduate students in the English dept. suggested it as a lunch destination when I was new to CT as a postdoc fresh from Princeton. That was in 1995, I guess. It had changed since then, becoming noticeably, in the last year especially, not well-kept, a bit down-at-heels. The quality of the food and service never declined but the appearance of the place did. It was no longer fresh and enthusiastic. And neither am I.

Other thoughts: how often I ate lunch there during those years when I taught on campus several days a week. The busyness of being part of the lunchtime crowd. But also many summer evenings dining there with my daughter when New Haven would be largely uninhabited, the restaurant patronized only by this or that crowd of summer programs students. Those memories confronted me with how much time has passed since I first moved to New Haven in 1999, because memories of a place are invariably associated with the venues where one spends time. It's odd to think that I won't sit in The Rainbow anymore, grading papers, reading The New Haven Advocate.

Recently a blog I read, as well as people I know, have mentioned and mourned the closing of Tower Records in Philadelphia. Tower didn't have a lot of associations for me, but today I was able to better appreciate what it was those people were trying to communicate. I think it's more than a desire to pay tribute to a good business, a valued place to shop or eat. As Ol' Fezziwig says in the film Scrooge: "one doesn't run a business just to make money . . . It's to preserve a way of life that one has known and loved." We rely on such places as providing identity for what "our town" is, and for providing us with a renewable sense of who we are as their steady patrons. You are where you eat, and where you shop? Something like that.

But I always come back to: "it is Margaret you mourn for." What my unflattering eye saw in The Rainbow's decline was confirmed by its closing. Hard times. Feeling far from flush myself as yet another year ends, I took the loss as a sign of the decline and shutting down of some of my investment with this place and whoever I might have hoped to become while living here. In a collegetown, the population is recurrently transient -- students, grad students, junior faculty come and go. It's not surprising the stores do too. Some closings, like the York Theater, or a favorite coffeeshop, have been met with expressions of regret in the press. The Rainbow is the first closing, for me, that isn't simply inconvenient, but seemed to tell me something about my own tenuous existence. Perhaps it's simply that it reminds me I never intended to be here so long as to outlast a restaurant!

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
If birds fly over the rainbow, then why O why can't I?

Ist die Sage umsonst?

(for Rilke's birthday, 4 December 1875)

J.M. Coetzee quoting William Gass on Rilke:

"He hid inside The Poet he eventually became, both secure there and scared, empty and fulfilled; the inspired author of the Duino Elegies, sensitive, insightful, gifted nearly beyond compare; a man with many devoted and distant friends, many extraordinary though frequently fatuous enthusiasms, but still a lonely unloving homeless boy as well, . . . enjoying a self-pity there were rarely buckets enough to contain; yet with a persistence in the pursuit of his goals, a courage, which overcame weakness and worry and made them into poems . . . no . . . into lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself . . . lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish -- the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength." (31-32, Reading Rilke)

Coetzee comments, "Aside from the cliché of the lonely boy, this is well and generously said . . . ." I agree and, apart from the "rarely buckets enough," I'd say that this diction is nearly adequate to the challenge of Rilke, whom, judging by other comments Coetzee makes, Gass, in what strikes me as typical American fashion, prefers to snipe at because of the high art pretensions of The Poet that no mere man can possibly live up to. The point I'd make, though, is that dropping the ball of diction when offering a sweeping commentary on The Poet of the twentieth century is bound to make one look philistine, even if one thinks that philistines is all we are.

Coetzee also cites with approval these words from Gass, on the Duino Elegies: "These poems are the most oral I know. . . . They must be spoken -- not merely by but for yourself, as if you were the one who wondered whether you had anyone to call to" (Gass, 101).

Here I'm less in accord. I certainly find much to agree with in "spoken not merely by but for yourself" -- well I recall reading the poems on tape (in A. Poulin, Jr.'s translations) in my late teens and listening to them again and again -- but the "as if you were the one who wondered whether you had anyone to call to" reads as if The Poet is trying to find a date, or maybe an agent, or, at best, a reader. The resolute prosaicness of "wondered whether you had anyone" is so comically inadequate (without being deliberately deflationary) to the state of mind of the Elegies -- to imagine The Poet wondering whether anyone is listening (are you there, God?) is to risk the kind of snide, matter-of-factness Gass seems to employ in his assessments of Rilke the man. But here Gass is ostensibly characterizing poems which begin in an abyss of feeling from which any cry or call must either express everything or fail utterly, he's supposedly conveying why we must speak these poems -- because their very purpose is a defense of enunciation and annunciation against the silence of history, of the dead weight of the everyday, of the smallness of our imaginations even when most primed for flight -- and he's instead suggesting that we all sometimes wonder if it's worth it, so, I guess, that means we can "relate" to what Rilke is saying in these here poems about language and poetry and death and stuff.

Granted, Gass isn't so hokey, but that's partly my point. His phrase attempts that clean, unfussy, anyone-could-say-this diction by which American English asserts its plainspeak standards. So I'm not surprised that Coetzee is not convinced by Gass's translations of Rilke. I recall a prof at Princeton, Stanley Corngold, taking exception to my endorsement of Poulin's translation, referring to it as a bit too tainted by California and a certain "express yourself" ethos in the diction of the '70s. Fair enough. But my interest in the translation here is peripheral. What I'm trying to say, on Rilke's birthday, is that The Poet of the last century did not write his great poems in English, and possibly will never be at home in English, and, more to the point when we speak of America, will probably never be understood there where a poet as a fine, robust, ripening-unto-death of a strain of romantic and lyrical surrender has never been grasped much less celebrated.

Aber wir, die so große
Geheimnisse brauchen, denen aus Trauer so oft
seliger Fortschritt entspring -- : könnten wir sein ohne sie?
--The First Elegy

OBSCURE ORSON

Thursday through Saturday the WHC hosted a conference on Orson Welles, featuring some pretty obscure stuff. In his career, Welles went from being the infant terrible to the exiled renegade to the old, legendary hanger-on (in my teens he was best known for those silly Paul Masson wine commercials, "we will sell no wine . . . before it's time" -- I will confess that Paul Masson was the first wine I bought as an underage drinker, possibly because of Orson). I didn't make it to the conference proceedings, unfortunately, but I did make it to see the closing showing of Welles' masterful adaptation of Shakespeare plays that feature Falstaff. The film is called either Falstaff or Chimes at Midnight, and, for legal imbroglio reasons, hasn't been available except in awful VHS prints. We were treated to a 35 mm print and were told that it seems the end is in sight and a fully restored print will be used for DVD purposes.

The genius of Welles is in the camera set-ups and the editing and the lighting. The latter, particularly, is where he offers a model that many could benefit from marking. Lighting in most films is completely uninteresting, oftentimes cloying, never inspired. Welles understood that film is actually painting with light and that each shot can be a new "take" on the scene. In Falstaff, those "takes" are like a series of Netherlandish paintings, awash in chiaroscuro -- even the robbery scene takes place in a dappled forest with visible beams of light. And the ways in which he illuminates himself as the face of Falstaff is nothing short of breath-taking: Falstaff's visage is the text of the film, everything is written on it, a life of the most taken-for-granted humanity. Nothing Falstaff does or has done is lost on Falstaff; he is always equal to the task of being himself. This comes out wonderfully in the scene when Hal and Poins try to baffle him about his tall tale of being robbed after robbing. Falstaff is one who accepts that others will "suffer" him because they always have and now he is old.

In editing, there are many examples of how Welles thinks. That is to say: editing is the syntax of film, and syntax, as we know, is what makes the expression of thought individual. We all have to use the same words, more or less, but how we put them together is anyone's guess, is, in fact, the game at hand. Welles is never content with unremarkable editing. Some might say he's at times too flamboyant, that editing, like syntax, shouldn't distract from the scene or from the point being made, but Welles would seem to demur. His editing is very conscious, deliberate, and so makes us not simply follow a scene, but follow the shots of a scene. The battle sequence is the most stunning I've ever seen because it doesn't simply "record" the battle, it comments on it, and it inhabits it, and it observes it, and it expresses it, and, with the quick cuts to Falstaff in armor looking like a little wind-up toy, it also ironizes it.

Camera set-ups are a particular delight of Welles': long-shots, close-ups, point-of-view shots, shots composed within arches, with figures in close, middle and far distance in a single shot, a huge foreground presence (Falstaff) as Hostess Quickly runs to answer the door in the background, and of course those famous low-level shots that cause characters to loom larger-than-life. The particularity of the camera shots is what makes the first viewing of Citizen Kane such a memorable experience: one sees the film as images, as something we have to "look at" as well as watch. The crown's split-second point of view shot when King Henry puts it on the pillow beside him is the kind of "grace note" sort of thing that Welles likes to risk doing.

All these elements of Welles' cinematic greatness make Falstaff a triumph. But what about The Bard? Was Shakespeare well-served? Gielgud is on hand to deliver a soliloquy ("uneasy sleeps the head that wears the crown'), shot so that his eyes are mostly in shadow and his mouth, speaking the passionate and despairing speech, is in bright illumination. Nothing could've more emphatically made the point that kingship as Henry lives it is all words, a way of cozening the populace into accepting him as king. Also, Falstaff's famous speech about honor, delivered in middle shot while he and Hal stand side-by-side on the field of battle and clouds move in swift and evanescent shapes behind them, is a masterful marrying of image and speech.

Welles generally strikes me as a hammy actor -- I think his Macbeth never finds the heart of the part but is mere show. But that hammyness helps in some cases: enacting Charles Foster Kane and Falstaff, two roles that show him to be an actor with the skill of forgetting himself in the part (rare enough in movie acting). The best scene for this is the moment when Hal, as King Henry V, denounces Falstaff ("I know thee not, old man") and Falstaff's face, as he hears the high imperious one cast him off, registers first surprise and shock, then pride in what his dear boy has become (a true king!) whom he would love to embrace and win over, then finally a slack realization that all his hopes have died. It's all in reaction shots, in silent acting worthy of Emil Jannings, the great German actor of the silent screen.

We have seen the Chimes at Midnight. Of that I'm glad.

EARLY ELTON

At home over break I happened upon a television performance by Elton John from the early '70s. There he sat in his sweater vest, with his bangs and long feathery hair and tinted glasses, performing two songs, complete with strings, that I hadn't heard since those days -- "Sixty Years On" and "Take Me to the Pilot," both from his eponymous second album (1970). I remembered the lyrics to the songs as he sang them, and believe I saw the show when it aired back then.

As it so happened, Amazon had a T-day sale on '70s music and I was able to pick up Elton's 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th studio albums (the latter two I do own ragged vinyl copies of) for dirt cheap. They've been remastered to get the most out of his uncluttered but layered arrangements. Listening to them again was in equal parts a nostalgic return to music that I haven't heard much in years and a discovery of the fuller sound and magnitude of the songs. I shudder to recall the stereos I listened to that stuff on at home.

I stopped listening to Elton after the 5th album (summer of 1972). And that was the album that began his launch into mega-stardom. I remember him making the transition from AM songs I liked (like "Friends"), which did respectably on the charts, to songs that hit the top 10, most of which were songs that annoyed me. It seems the change was due to my own developing tastes as well as to something that altered in Elton's music and general persona. I think it was the combination of "Benny and the Jets" and the glasses with the windshield wipers.

On Elton John (1970), Bernie Taupin's lyrics were sometimes compared to Dylan's and, while that's a stretch, they do sometimes, especially with the sweet melancholy of Elton's tunes, venture into Jacques Brel territory, almost. Tumbleweed Connection (1970) is very much an homage to The Band and the kinds of songs Robbie Robertson used to write, rife with Americana and motifs of the old West. Elton's an unlikely cowboy, but he does create an aura of a Hollywood melodrama of the West that seems to live up to its mythos the way a spaghetti Western does. I think it's my favorite, overall.

The next album (after a live one and a soundtrack) is Madman Across the Water (1971), the first album of his I bought (I was 12), mainly because of my love of "Tiny Dancer" as one of the most fascinating vocals of its time. In fact, the fun of listening to Elton is in following his voice as it croons and bellows and soars into upper registers, not sustained, but effectively punctuating his tunes, following the signature cadences of his expressive piano-playing. I was always fascinated by his delivery and often wondered if it had anything to do with the fact he wasn't singing his own words -- he seemed at times to treat the words as musical phrases. The title song of that album is still for me the moody tour de force of his career -- and I was happy to get on Tumbleweed an earlier version of "Madman" with Mick Ronson on guitar -- pre-Ziggy!

Honky Château (1972) ended the run for me and on that album I already hear some of the qualities I consider more "commercial" -- something to do with how hooks are deployed. But the overall quality of the album is better than I remembered, with some songs having a looseness and a bit of casual cajun flair not out of place in a summer when THE album was the Stones' Exile on Main Street. Ah, those days of funky rock recordings made in France!

What interests most in this return to songs from a bygone time is that the distance seems to clarify something about those days themselves. It was a time when Dylan's productivity had dropped to nothing (I was touring his retrospective Greatest Hits, Vol. II in 1971, but it wasn't music on the airwaves), and Van was a taste I had yet to acquire. Elton John stepped into that breach -- John Lennon was quoted as saying that EJ was the biggest new thing to arrive since The Beatles -- and produced, with Paul Buckmaster as his George Martin or Jack Nitzsche, rich, fully articulated songs with presence and passion. Only occasionally does mawkishness in the music or sentimentality in the lyrics spoil the effect on these four albums. He was briefly a hero before my allegiances focused on Ian Anderson by spring of '73. The friend who played Elton John for me took up piano around then, partly influenced by Elton I believe.

It's curious how for a brief time an artist can become, like a friend of a certain era of our lives, someone we keep up with, someone whose changes matter to us as part of our own changes. And then, it's over. Much later we might hear of the artist making more money than we can easily imagine and penning music for a Disney film, but it's just peripheral clutter, nothing we need to concern ourselves with. Fortunately music, unlike a person, remains right where we left it and can sound even better after the intervening years. In that sense, you can almost go home again.

and the future you're giving me holds nothing for a gun
I've no wish to be living sixty years on
--Elton John/Bernie Taupin, 1970