Time machine.

Bo Bartlett-Young Life (American contemporary)


Say the money just ain't what it used to be
Man how we used to tear apart this town
Put a dollar into the machine and you'll remember how
-M, Ward, 'Post-War'

There have been good jukeboxes before in this civilization. Even a few comparably great ones--the Mom's jukeboxes in Philadelphia spring to mind--3 between two locations, each finely tuned to suit the room, each impossibly good. I like Grumpy's in Minneapolis, The Grog Shop's in Cleveland. But the Gooski's jukebox is something else. It feels like a tv show that's been on the air all my life, with characters coming and going. Some of them reappear after years of absence. A few were there when I first tuned in and have remained. What distinguishes it from so many others is how so many people have put their mark on it. Originally it was, I imagine, Marcus, who filled it. He's the one who changes it. But over time Bob and John put in. I got a few numbers in it myself--no one's particularly happy with my hidden Lil Wayne tracks. I imagine there are others as well who have found their way in.

An acrid book could be written on the subject of the tunes that should never again be played. They come up every fifteen minutes. People like em. They get to stay. Sadly, they get to stay. MGMT is the latest, but the list is as old as the jukebox itself: Johnny Cash, the Pixies and Black Sabbath...But why dwell on those.

At the risk of feigning impossible authority these are--if not the ten best, then ten tracks that make it what it is:

1. George McCrae-I Get Lifted

2. Clinic-The Return of Evil Bill

3. The Sonics-Have Love Will Travel

4. Nerves/ Blondie-Hangin' on the Phone (yes, both versions!)

5. Bo Diddley-Hey Bo Diddley

6. New Pornographers-Myriad Harbour

7. Love and Rockets-Kundalini Express

8. The Strokes-Someday

9. The Vibrators-Baby, Baby

10. Roy Orbison-Workin' for the Man

October 23, 1963.

Someone must've been cleaning out an attic space on Polish Hill recently; I found this check--it was written and cancelled a little less than a month prior to the Kennedy assassination. Sometimes chaotic tragedy is the best way to demarcate time. The natural chemistry took innovative care in its development, thinking, we need an interceding force. Something memorable: This time a simple snow won't do. Thusly did we learn about how snow is older than misfortune.

On the afternoon of 9/11 I recall, in the second, more mundane, wave of realization, in which the world was starting to take its new shape, thinking of Borges' short story, 'The Aleph', and my grandparents, none of whom exactly knew the world as it quite unexpectedly was.

The picture must've been snapped at the house in Sharon, probably 1978 or thereabouts. My brother popped out in '77. Each time I think of that house something is in a different place. It gets larger and larger with time, its details fewer and parsed by the emptying space--can I expect an extinguishing white mural when I finally go? Actually, I suspect death isn't so much blank as it is garish. Like bad carpet or wallpaper.

Each time I paint a picture like this I imagine a volunteer panel of archetypal Austrian psychiatrists hovering over it, examining how small I made the mouths, and how wanly these figures seem to pry for sustenance. Or even light. Just once I'd like the panel to be made up of "the fashion police", eager to spread wide my ideas of a somber coverage.

Janine: You know Wilfred, this is the kind of sensible attire a man is liable to wear when, against the pit of sensibility and the advocacy of his own personal welfare, he looks back.

Wilfed: Looks back indeed, Janine. I couldn't agree more. Bawdy Smallmouth Glycerine is a dominant color this fall.

...nor his field.

This small, extremely self-polarizing statement is dedicated to one of the few world class music writers I know, Francis Davis, in congratulations on his recent Grammy for the liner notes to Columbia's Miles Davis-Kind of Blue 50th Anniverasy Edition.  Francis is a writer with an unparalleled gift, and a genuinely good person, which among the vocation knows even fewer parallels still.

I've lost the will to criticize music at age 33.  

The reason is, I think, because on some fundamental level by doing so I find myself trying to anticipate the experience of hearing.  The older I get the less I care about the lives of musicians, the reasons they do what they do.  I don't fuss as much over their mistakes and I don't appreciate the perfection.

Over the weekend I came across a fantastic little essay written by H. L. Mencken for a publication called Smart Set, in 1919, called "The Music Lover".   Mencken especially advised the humanists who seek to teach a love of music to the unformed student heart, as if conveniently in the rote-learned appreciation of Scarlatti might also flower a resistance to commit violent crimes or masturbate immoderately.  

Some people will move to music, others simply won't.  They don't need to learn the notes of the scale, the traditionalist convictions of Brahms or difference between modal and tonal jazz.  No amount of classroom pummeling is going to affect the inner lantern.  

The mark of a music lover then is the urge to create his own music, Mencken went on to say.  But seeing as he wrote the essay well before the advent of ubiquitous music journalism he might suffer a small modification:  There are many of us whose sole function is to bray indulgently, often without conviction on any number of subjects.  On music, our numbers are legion and most highly braying.  It could be that we music writers are the ones most sorely in need of the creative act we observe: the clumsy, arhythmic and often just plain self-conscious who hide our personal music in our bedrooms or in our heads.

Whatever we think of active musicians, those of us who love music find in it something transcendent.  As such the act of creating it isn't so much an artifice, such as seeing a tree in nature and drawing its likeness, as it is a possessed and probably uncontrollable communication of something grander.  It is a natural passage through the body of the musician.  As critics we envy that with a searing redness.  And when we feel the musician has erred in the conveyance we pounce.

So, without impulse, age 33, I have grown mostly comfortable with the notion of listening and listening only--a pronouncement that even now I defy arrogantly.  To be in love with something requires that you do not distract it by anything but the disturbance of love.  Some critics would argue that's exactly what they do.  But often the written word reads different.  There is bitterness and personal neediness with no place in the writing.  The urge to find beauty is supplanted by a thirst to name-stamp new discoveries.  The masculine urge to recharacterize the sound in one's own voice and likeness obliterates the kernel of reverence--I speak from some experience.

I have come to a place where, at 6:15 on Saturday evening, on every Saturday evening--as I am forming habits with age, I pull a record from its sleeve, play it, wishing I had no idea who the people responsible for the sounds were, wishing even the names and pictures were gone.

There is one tendon of resistance to the joyous abyss of hearing it on those anonymous terms:  

I go over to the computer, invariably and with the urgeless propriety of myself, age 17,  and change my Facebook status to read:

Bryan is listening to

It's an irresistible force, not unlike a song.

Even the sunlight was cheap.

I couldn't say what reminded me, but having that itch nearly exclusive to Sundays, I'll write this little chestnut down before the vodka swills and half-remembered blows to the head flush it all away.

This would've been the autumn of 2006.  Miss Kathyrn and I were living on Two Street, Mummers' Row in the heart of old Irish South Philly.  The First Ward.  Pennsport.  Not two blocks from the Riverview movie theater where you can take in a Pixar and get shot by an infant for the same ticket price.  A steal, if that's your thing.  Also we had a Burger King.  Jesus, was it awful.  Anyhow Kate and I liked it and we had some happy times in that place.  

At the time I was working at the law firm of Larrabee, Cunningham & McGowan, P.C..  A terrific bunch of folks who put up with me much longer than I would have.  And given that they paid me a king's ransom (by my math anyhow) I used to spend the liberated evening hour going through the Reading Terminal Market, shopping for the makings of supper, often giving very little regard to what I spent.  At the risk of a digression: Le Bus batards; Salumeria's clotted cream and purple-marbled Roquefort; the cookie & an attiude (the attitude was free),  the rabid octogenarian playing the upright piano as if all music was the embossment of her dream and all the Market was bygone Vienna; the Amish yogurt and raw milk; chickens from Och's; Jill's Cook Book Stall--yes, Kate I did have a kind of crush on Jill, but it was a harmless one; the leeks, Yukons & cipollinis from Iovine Bros.' that became so many a night's copper purees and then the chive ragouts that crowned them, are among not only my fondest memories of the Market, but of Philadelphia on the whole.  Hell, of all my known adulthood of details on the whole!

I don't remember what I bought that day, save for what was jutting out of my book bag.  It was one of those kinds of book bags they only give us city liberals.  You wingnuts don't get them.  To accentuate the elitism and snobbery of my book bag, I'll add that it read the name of the greatest record store on the planet, my former place of employment, A.K.A. Music., where, as we speak A.K.A. Mike is edenically rooted in a Frankie Miller live album, arguing about Slumdog Millionaire with the excellent Tony Creamer.  Oh wait, it's Sunday.  Mary and Mia.  Jesus, Mia's pregant!  

I rely on these details to safeguard the chemistry of nuances.  It's like when you watch Bob Ross paint a picture there comes a time in the execution of each canvas when you caution him, Bob, that color doesn't go there.  That's where the stream yields a tuft of blond grasses, like you said earlier, before you started.  But moments and soft words later the counterintuitive swath of emerald green has fallen behind--that's right, a precise and exemplary tuft of blond grasses.  So please know that it all belongs, and belongs in the order in which it falls.

In those days I rode the old Smiths bike.  A 50's era Ross, doubtless made in Allentown P.A., resembling the regal Raleighs of Nottingham, England.  I remember at first sight of it, thinking of my hero, the great tragic World War I poet, Wilfred Owen, riding across a smoke-buffed moor path with a bag of letters, intelligence and the augured imaginings of fatality and honor that would win him his sad fame.  If I could imagine him there on that Ross--a Raleigh simulacrum, then it was the vehicle for me.  I could, and it was.  Incidentally we called them Smiths bikes because of their profusion in the 1987 music video for The Smiths' "Stop Me If You Think You Think You've Heard This One Before".  Both anglican associations gilded my appreciation, though truthfully neither came so readily to mind as thoughts of excessive violence upon watching a thief in a red sweatshirt ride it past me, the unlatched cord-lock sitting in the wire basket I'd added only days earlier.   You know...

Anyhow, these we're happier times to be sure.  Peeking above the scarlet rim of my tote was a batard, some greens, a white paper wrapped parcel of Luganega sausage--I do remember!--and a slender bouquet of flowers wrapped in green tissue for Kate.  In those times, too, I was better dressed than I am now.  Like the self-portrait galleries showing Rembrandt's rollercoaster of fortune and misfortune, my own is detailed in the sartorial surges and crashes that live in memories.  It was cool enough for a scarf, and this was before that rueful day when Kate gave me the brown corduroy jacket ultimatum.  So there I was, affected and content as could be, pedalling my way down Two Street, a tote brimming with food and flowers, oh, and a 30 pack cube of PBR balanced precariously on my handle bar.  From behind me I heard the acceleration of an engine and as best as I could, I yielded to the unseen auto.  This had to be done cautiously, and yet with enough expedience that the driver would detect my courtesy;  that kind of bike, with that kind of occupant, carrying that kind of tote formed a gestalt portent of Pennsport gentrification.  I was not so well liked by the neighbors.  Nor was Kate.  And she had being pretty on her side.

So there I was, yielding to not just a picture of fourth generation Pennsport stock, but one driving a pickup, more to the point one with that dusty red complexion exclusive to contractors fond of the n word.  He cast me a long unconceding stare.  The thought occurred to me to stop entirely, let him pass as quickly out of sight, and out of the path of confrontation, as possible.  I thought about how old I was, how I'd come to look and act as I did.  I was from people so much like him, and yet I was so unlike him.  I don't mean that in a  judgmental way.  Where did my water diverge from the greater currents?  

The glare seemed to occupy the entire autumn of 2006, when, having slowed to my unsteady bike pace he imparted, "Brother, you are living the dream."

As quickly as that my confidence was restored. I remember finally laying the flowers on the kitchen table, overtop a gas bill.  There was enough light coming off the Delaware to know one object from the next.  But really, that was it. 

The honey resin.

Edward Steichen untitled photo (American 20th century)

(For my pal, F.A., out west.)

Song is the fantasy of all speaking:

Look and see, reading lips

That Sinatra was singing:

"The fire in your heaaaart"

with lopings rupturing those vein-blue lines

&

Grace restored all eyes to a state of,

Quietly,

Umber poisonous wax on sofa-like bumps

In today's night.

It is no longer used to hurt people;

Ready, but I mean, this soft uncrude stuff

Has been eliminated; now they say it's torture:

People watching with the mute button impushed

And all the candy on the floor from this time.

And all the candy on the floor from last time.