On a video call with Ginger last nigh she gave me a tour of her shop. It was a few Christmas lights, dimly lit in red, white
and blue. I had called to speak with Mom, who had once again had a couple of nights recently spent in the hospital for
some reason (this happens, the reasons have been numerous). Mom was there at Ginger’s house a few miles from rural Charleston, in
Arkansas, where we all resided from when we each were born until we left the home of our parents. Mom was there at Ginger’s place, too.
She was who I initially attempted to call, eating her supper, which consisted of some combination of chicken and potatoes, followed
by dessert, which Ginger kept stressing was a bit of a mistake in that whoever had made it, or however it had gotten made,
it had gotten made rather than with cherries, which I suppose were in the recipe, and for some reason it would have “made more sense”
with the cherries, this dessert, but the red fruity splotches that were in the heart of this odd-looking cake-like dish were not cherries,
as it is noted that they should have been, as if it it should have been obvious (wink wink) that it should have been a dessert the red chunks
of cherries, but some wiseguy like character, seemingly, had instead put in strawberries.
Somone mischeivous and wrong but yet slightly
naughty in that good sort of way, this all from the different faces Ginger made as she kept repeating apects of the story of how it had
become so, had gotten the bright idea to put in strawberries (and some Cool Whip, and, for good measure, sprinkles of slightly browned coconut,
as well). Oh, and Ginger’s shop turned out to be much bigger than a few dimly lit red, white and blue patriotic lights slung somehow slightly into
the wood next to which Ginger lives. There was a huge warehouse filled with exotic-looking vacationing automobiles and RVs, wherein
there had also been some recent time put into adding a first facsimile of a second floor room. And there was a warehouse-sized
open space that had a concrete floor with a roof over it (no walls), a roof which I imagined as cover to a large open shed rather than a shop, within and
outside of which there were potted plants with nestling cats (one was named Betty and Betty was quite a tiny cat) and there were otherwise
fountain-schaped sculptures of live plants scattered about as if to mimic flowing fountains from which came splashes of leaves and blooms
from the various plants within the “sculpture”. These plants resided within the open-air shed and were not actual spouting waters cascading
from elaborate sculpted spouts or spewing from the lips of, say, metallic fish of various sizes, around some sort of fountain periphery. Those
qualities would have made it an actual fountain, and there yet may have been some of those somewhere around what Ginger called her shop, which were
actually a rather elaborate set of spaces, slanted and flat, walled in or open-spaced, wooded or more domecile in nature, all of which apparently made up Ginger’s shop.
I embraced a cloud, but when I soared it rained. —Frank O’Hara
I embraced a rainbow, and slid down its length getting rich from gold until I fell into the boiling cauldron at the end of that rainbow
So I came out pretty injured as a result of this particular hug, this unlucky get rich scheme. And I won’t but go down screaming awaiting
the catastrophe that is my personality to seem like Frank’s typical beautiful self again, but it suddenly blooming into something interesting, or even modern (like perhaps I once would seem from some angles), is really pushing it.
Come to the Club, come in to the Club of Love —Madonna, ”Love Without Words”
Or that’s how I heard it come out when I accidentally—or inadvertently—found my way catching the entire brand new album, the first one she has released in six or seven years, I believe, and a sequel to one of her most popular albums ever. So, before I even know it, I’ve listened to the whole of today’s newly released Confessions II. And like the lyrics of the 3rd, 4th and 5th best songs on either of her albums, I find myself at times laughing at her silly lyrics. But also, all the while, and especially with this album, I am one hundred percent on board, in this case caught up in each subtly complex, hippy ditty, even and esecially the silly, particularly Madonna-esque
turns of some of the dumbest-sounding lyrics. One after the other, all of the songs pop up on my YouTube, each song playing in its entirety, as I just listen, in awe of how the album is so smartly and tightly and thematically put together,
how poignant her lyrics are, how crisp and deceptively-layered each tune is. Several songs have sparkling resonance with individual songs from this album’s prequel, her Confessions on a Dancefloor. Much as I do love her and her music and how she’s steadily flown through the zeitgeist ever since I was a teen,
there are some very integral aspects of a dance-pop tune that she does not have
a lot of talent in order to maintain these standard qualities, some of the most importnt ones she seems incapable of even pulling off. And yet, her albums are most often brilliant successes. I am not here to explain this mystery, just point it out. As noted, it can be debated with ease that she cannot sing, that her lyrics are ridiculous, that it is not that easy for her to focus on a central theme for any album, simplicity rules over muli-faceted parts coming together with the delicate attention or coming together at all within any album or even song, and much of her notorious repetitions within songs and albums come across as redundant or trite for the sake of redundacy and cliche. So this album sounds literally too good to be a Madonna album, I keep thinking. But it is (too good and a Madonna album indeed!). Somewhere in here, there has to have been a joke upon which some clique is rolling their eyes at us in disgust at our ignorance. But it appears that this lovely collage of dancefloor pop is no joke. It’s a masterpiece, I think. A
masterpiece? From Madonna, who has given us so much, how could we possibly deserve a Madonna masterpiece. It is not something I ever thought might come, even though one could argue that several from her decades in the business have been. While she might have at times simultaneously been the butt end of a few jokes during her thus far amazingly illustrious career. Again, it has been six or maybe even seven years since she even put out an album. And no one is more representative of each dancefloor’s diary over the past nearly 50 years, of my lifetime. Her music has dominated, with iconic hit after hit filling the radio airwaves, television and internet music videos, awards ceremonies, cinemas and dancefloors the world over for as
far backas I can remember up to present day. All the while her controversies and causes could be found discussed in abundance from these and fro other more news-like talky venues. She’d ride the fence that lies between being loved and
hated masterfully, often having a hand in creating whatever was trending at any
particular moment, and doing something that would simultaneously thrill her fans while creating venom and spite among conservatives and other haters, popping up so often just to seemingly turn something upside down or inside out, instantaneously repopularizing her own self, paving the way for new
scrutiny on each hot potato subject along with a devotion to many personal
charity ventures for folks on the fringes, craving something risque or
humanitarian, etc., with many such moments changing how a general populace would forever view a subject matter. So today is that rare day in pop music history that will likely be once again such a turning point. And to make things even more riveting (at least to me) it seems that everyone in the industry came
out and did their best, as if simply in celebration of or to ride her coattails
during the debut of her new phase. Madonna. It has caught me so off-guard, which I love. Once again the granny of pop is holding on to the zeitgeist as if
it were the reigns to an elaborate stagecoach. And I am happy about it. Happy
for us. For where it takes us. And hopeful she will gain innumerable new fans in the process. I am indeed so happy for her. And I am very much
looking forward to inhabiting a dance floor again soon.
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over. —Frank O’Hara (from “MEDITATIONS ON AN EMERGENCY”)
That is how I just typed it up, anyway. Or that’s the way it reads in my Donald
Allen edited O’Hara Selected. Which is, of course, saying something, but, these
days, is really saying something. And that’s not a good thing to say (as in No
way!). Is what I suppose I should really at this point relay.
And let also say that I am taking this stanza, this paragraph, completely as if it
were a (and couldn’t it easily be?) standalone.
But BEAUTY? Pah! I’m trying to envision it another way, but I can’t in his words imagine it but being his. Which would not only be so very different from mine
(and surely different from anyone else’s, I suppose, if one supposes such things),
but would also be some kind of IDEAL, his, if an attainable one. I imagine he
had a few candidates for such an ideal, idealist that he was, able to at any
seeming moment conjure up one of his muses.
I’m no scholar. I just have my big, awkward movements in that area. Which,
without picking up anything except, again, this particular Selected,
has me thinking O’Hara had in mind as representative of beautiful that
New York School muse that we would often him dipping his metaphorical
ink into,Jane Freilicher. Or it could be any number of such muses. But Jane,
The New York School muse.
But O'Hara was gay, I might point out (as I do, and surely others have made
a note of this as well. Or have they? This is how much I am NOT a scholar.
I’ve made it loud and clear so often over the years, that he’s my favorite poet
out of all of them, yes, the audacity, and I stand by it) – oh, if I could even be
a smidge as dishy and pithy and have even a tenth of whatever must have
generally floated around behind that tall young forehead.
So, beauty; back when it meant something. Perhaps towards the tail-end of
when it might have, just to add that, as if it were something that we knew.
But those three sentences. That singular paragraph (I love to imagine that
final word, over, as it stands by itself on its own line, as intentional
enjambment; form might have been something that was beginning to also
lose meaning, by this time, which I say as if it means something, but as far
as I can tell, scholar that I ain’t, it still was a veritable ruler, a stick that
might be, ahem, shoved up something, and surely often and (even today)
sometimes happily. Someplace. It seems so ... and would he not have
appreciated the word that just came to mind ... ineffectual?
But a philosophical bent seems clear to me, in that he wore his ideals upon
his sleeves, if you ask me, but why would you? AND he was gay, so any
concept of beauty he goes on to reduce in whatever way gets fractured
in so many of the ways and means of BEAUTY, at least to this small reader,
when it comes to how to interpret what the writer literally meant when HE
wrote the word.
But the simplicity of how those three sentences can, for me, indeed, conjured,
perhaps in pieces and parts deliberately Doctor Frank’ened (har har!) hap
hazardly together, building someone in particular I’ve never met, or just as
easily suggesting a particular half a dozen or more with whom I am at least
acquainted. How EASY that lovely paragraph can mean. And if that is what
happens when I read it, it would likely be just as magical to anyone else
who does. Try, it. You can, you know. Let me know if it works.
If so, just look how many of us are getting presently all bent out of shape,
getting giddy within our own recollections or collections. Our own selections
conjured from just a few lines in this particular selected poems, by my favorite
poet all time (I will keep being on the record just to say that much). A quote
that appears in one of my favorites poems by him, “MEDITATIONS ON AN
EMERGENCY.”
I mean, (Call 9-1-1!), who else but the man who not only put New York City
on the postmodern map, but turned it into an ideal—a place in which I’ve
never lived, have but taken up space within for no longer than a week or
two at a time. Such a beauty. (“Aw, shucks! Really?”)
But yet from a distance of all of the vast expanses from him and his words to
here, he can yet today have an unscholarly hick sitting in San Francisco
seeing BEAUTIFUL, seeing BEAUTY, as if truly knowing seeing it appear before
him in Cinemascope. Loud and clear. And that’s sincere.
The chief scientist on board was convinced that it would be a worth while experiment. At times he would think that, aside from
those that come with a risk of exp iration, most any experiment is a worthwhile one. But, sun of a gun, this particular experiment came with
an extinction risk of which he remained until the soggy end unawares. Baloney, as it turns out, blows. Not only in the exploding sense, but in the toxic sense,
in the Biblical sense, and even in that risk of migrating plastics eventually residing within the testicles sense, whether it’s ingested, blown onto, or,
as was the case for those on the ship’s deck, ever so gently blown up. Fortun
ately, for the sake of neighbors and
other lucky landlocked acquaintances
of the family members left on the home front, the chief at least had the sense to perform the experiment asea. He thought his senses were steady, but
clearly he had begun experiencing signs of brain-rot, perhaps brought about by some of his earlier baloney experiments. Most curious about this
latest experiment was what happened
to the men who worked belowdecks. There was a serious misunderstanding of some sort, or else the chief’s dementia
had been virulently contagious. For each of the coal shovelers and the rest of the generic belowdecks seamen, before the baloney blow-up, were
cradling infant-sized baloney loaves, rocking them back and forth, with a
few kisse being blown at the tips of each of the baloney babies’ imaginary
noses. Some of the men who blew too close found those noses quite tasty, but refused to season them, choosing instead to make baby noises. Before the ship
sunk, each had laid down their baby- lengthed, unsliced body of baloney and had pinned a diaper around the loaf’s meaty middle, or wherever each man
decided it was where its diaper should be pinned. The assistant to the head of
the blown up baloney incident had been going around and taking notes, asking
each man cradling his baby-length baloney belowdecks the sex of his child, despite it being literally comprised of a few pounds
of cheap, non-sentient, unalive, soon-to-sink-
to-the-bottom-of-the-sea meats from various
portions of various animals. As the ship swooped about making its way to ward the ocean’s bottom, the men
seemed rather astounded that their babies seemed unaffected by the car eening and the onslaught of incoming sea-water. Until each man drowned,
he was cradling his baby made of baloney as gently as if it had been his firstborn son or daughter. When word made it to the CEO of Science,
the Baloney chief scientist’s boss, that the experiment had been the catalyst of such a horrendous event, he wrote a brief
suicide note and jumped to his death
from his office window. Ironically, for lunch
that day, he had eaten the most delicious
fried baloney sandwich that his wife had sent with him to work as he left that morning.
If I told you where I heard this phrase for the very first time, just two days ago, it might say a bit too much about why I’d until then never heard it. It doesn’t matter
where I heard it. Maybe, at least for the purpose of my current meanderings, it doesn’t even matter what it actually means. It caused a bit of a pang in the vicinity of my heart when
I heard it articulated, as well as, I’m sure, a not-so-subtle eyeroll that was surely noticed by some of the folks around the table at which I was sitting. All I could think at that moment
was, What a tediously cynical world in which, in order not to be deleterious to those around us, we are now each expected to be pessimists!
I couldn’t understand what he was getting at. Was he mentally displaced, or an alien from outer space, or an app arition that only I could see? And what
was I hearing him say? Loin voids? That sounded suggestive in an asexual sort of way. So of course I was intrigued and looked around to see if I was the only
one catching this. It wasn’t a busy time of day, there were a few tourists, since it was a time when most locals would be working in offices in the Financial
District, where we had our encounter. And then I noticed that I had been paying so much attention to this, whatever he or they or it was, I mean,
one doesn’t go around dressed in a polka-dotted suit, with the dots being seemingly every color on the palette— dotted upon white—and NOT get noticed. I
looked down, I wasn’t dressed for work or
anything, I was on one of my elongated non-
working periods, you know, the ones that got
me here typing this story up to you with such
faux urgency? I was wearing sneakers, the most expensive pair of shoes I’d ever worn, to the best of my knowledge, picked them up the weekend previous at
some swank new hipster haven, it was on Fillmore, as I recall? So, expensive sneaks. “Loin voids!” I felt like I was doing research, but then, as I said, I
looked down, somewhere in the direction of my own voided loins, but what my eyes landed on cranked up within me a sort of exasperation, and anger, and who was the
first...thing...upon which I’d take out this
anger? My new friend of hollowed out sex.
I’d just decided he wasn’t a figment of my imagination but rather one of those Frisco
freaks who walk around at all hours relaying to whomever will listen about something terribly bad was about to happen. And soon. An alien
invasion. The next best earthquake. That Jesus
was here and would soon be floating home with
his flock, and he’d be grinning and winking at
all of those of us who were left behind. Some such tale of twisted baloney. And they were
the only ones here to give us a fair warning.
As I said, while looking down, I glossed over my
sexless middle section and noticed that my precious
new sneakers had sunk into wet concrete, up
to well above the iconography on the canvas
or hide to the level with the laced portion of
my shoelaces. I let out a very feminine
yelp, or it could have been a full-fledged
girlie scream, trying to articulate the pain I was feeling with words that would have meant My Brand New Fucking Shoes!, but me being me it came out more like I, Mandy,
Stuck in Poo! And this of course was directed at the San Francisco freak because I was already blaming him for my somehow not knowing I had passed a “Sidewalk not in
use” sign, as well as a, “Please cross here,” as in to the other side of the small Financial District alleyway the two of us were traversing, or had been only moments before my shoes
got stuck in hardening concrete. And after I yelled whatever indecipherable nonsense I had yelled at mister voided loins he patiently gave me a look of dismay as if I had excusable
personal issues or something and said again what he had already repeated maybe three times at this point: “Hey mister! I said maybe you should pay attention, learn words, can’t
you read? That sidewalk’s been closed all week. He was gone before I could apologize. Or before I had the wherewithal to do so. And I stood there long enough that I had to slip
my feet out of my new sneakers and walk home sock-footed, all the way up the hill, had blisters for weeks, all the while thinking about what a Loin Void might be, if it would
have been something said, if those had actually been the words directed by me by the Frisco Freak who tried to save me and my sneakers from the fresh concrete from across an alley,
as I failed to focus on what he was saying in actuality when we crossed paths. I kept imagining that he’d always said what I thought for sure I heard him say, that weird little pair
of words (he had to be from New York City, surely) that kept me from paying attention to where I was going and upon what my new shoes had stepped upon and into. Which is the story of my
life in a nutshell, I suppose. Always too engaged with my surroundings to pay attention to myself. Always blaming others for my stupid booboos. It’s an expensive and an embarrassing problem, to say
the least, and one I’m sure I’ll take to my grave. I’m
no comedian, but it just goes to show that sometimes
nailing the punch line is a bitch, am I right? But hell, how
would I ever know, having never been much of a comic?