Loose Strife

An MP3 blog

Monday, May 30, 2005

#5 - The sound of emotions in real time

A thought: What would it be like if everyone could express emotions immediately as they were feeling them, bring them to the surface and voice them in real time. What form could it take, if not musical? Would it look like one of those Robert Rauschenberg “combines” of fuzzed-out photo silkscreens and lightbulbs and t-shirt cotton and autumn leaves and condom latex? I think it would. (The recent New Yorker profile on him, by the way, is a good read.)

Or if it were a spoken language, what sort of word-torrent would that be---would it be intelligible, or just a gibberish flow? Would it sound like my head during yoga practice? Count your breath One Two Three Four Five Love Love Stress Love Stress I Fucking Hate Me Sad Hunger Hate Confusion Tired Love Love Count your breath One Two Three Four Five Bliss Stress Stress Stress Yank your consciousness back like a puppy to heel Fuck Count your breath One Two Three Four Five.

I would rather listen to music, thanks.

Monday, May 23, 2005

#4 - Masks, cartoons, Alzheimer’s, and the big big sound of Ben Webster’s tenor

“Someone To Watch Over Me” - Ben Webster
“Yogi Bear (title theme)” – Hanna-Barbera


More on this idea of names and self-invention. I think one of the reasons I’m so drawn to music is the way it lets performers take on new personas, new masks, continually. Not just with every band project (or, in the case of certain DJs and indie-rock types, every moniker: see Scott Heren, aka: Prefuse 73 and Savath & Savalas---a hip-hop hippie and laptop-style Latin lover, respectively---or Ben Gibbons of Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service, a dude lonely both in a crowd and in bed with his PowerBook). Not just with every album, or even every song. When their shit is hot----when Ghostface Killah is firehosing, or Jason Moran is punching out Cecil Taylor note clusters between stride piano riffs, or Bjork is pushing vowels and consonants together like tectonic plates realigning themselves deep in the heart of the earth---a musician can reinvent themselves every second. Compare this to an actor, who can take on any number of roles, but only one at a time, even if they’re one of those stand-up comics who do multiple-character routines.

I think it was after the two women completed work on Lars Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark that Catherine Deneuve asked Bjork (who has confessed to being somewhat traumatized by her role in the film) if she found the idea of being an actress, of becoming someone different for a stretch of time, appealing.

She replied: “No.”

And if you were Bjork, in all your creatively bottomless, fiercely gorgeous, perpetually-morphing glory, it would be a perfectly reasonable response.

I chose this Ben Webster track, a sublime 1964 reading of the Gershwins’ “Someone To Watch Over Me” with some lovely Hank Jones piano color, for two reasons. The first is that Webster, a wonderful tenor saxophonist and quite possibly the greatest ballad player in the history of jazz, easily the equal of Miles Davis in terms of the emotional heft of his playing, was a man who used his music to create profoundly alternate personas. He died in the Fall of 1973, when I was a year old, so obviously I never met him (although I have met plenty of musicians who fail to match up with their artistic identities in my years of doing ‘zines and other music writing). But by most reports this dispenser of tender, breathy, vulnerable coos was in life a nasty, violent sonuvabitch. In the liner notes to Havin’ A Good Time (Hyena, 2005)---a just-issued ‘64 live session that has the saxophonist sitting in with the similarly full-bodied singer Joe Williams---the veteran jazz producer/indie label owner/excellent storyteller Joel Dorn writes “When he drank, Ben Webster was a mean drunk, ready to start swingin’ before anybody even thought about dropping a hat. One guy, two guys, a group, it didn’t matter, he was ready to go.”

I listen to the sound of Webster’s tone, like the amplified rustling of well-worn cotton sheets sliding over the shoulder of a lover who’s still thrumming with the attenuating reverb of orgasm, and I marvel at the spectrum of emotion that can exist in one human being.

The second reason I chose this song is because Ben Webster is my father’s favorite musician, and he of course is who I got my name from. Although he would say, if he were able to form a coherent sentence---which occasionally he can these days, but not often---that it came from his father, Giuseppe Barbara, and that he, my father, less in humility than to wash his hands of any responsibility, had played no part in it. I recall some family suspicion that my paternal grandfather’s last name may actually have been Barbera, like the wine---or indeed something else entirely---but that he changed it when he married my grandmother for a period of three months, after which he disappeared into the depression-era flow of displaced persons, occasionally surfacing at the home of one relative or another to bum a few bucks before hopping a railroad car or thumbing a ride back into the chasm of the nation, lost to any history I have access to except that which I’m fudging here, leaving her with a baby and little else---only some photos and other memorabilia which I’m told she burned in a coffee can on her fire escape years ago.

Anyway, my father’s name is also Robert, making me Robert Jr., technically, although I don’t like to use the Jr.
My mother’s name is Hannah, although her birthname is Giulianna. She grew up in Little Italy in Manhattan, and adopted the name Hannah because most of her friends in the smart classes were Jewish, from the other side of the Lower East Side, and she wanted to fit in. (Being book smart and kinda dumpy, the Italian kids all picked on her.)

In truth, I kinda wish she hadn’t changed her name. Being dumpy and book smart myself, I got picked on, and having a loud, slightly insane mother named Hannah Barbara didn’t help my case. In the boundless name-calling creativity of children, her name of course became Hanna-Barbera, the name of the famous television-cartoon production team, and I became alternately Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble, Magilla Gorilla, Yogi Unbearable, and Scooby-Doodoo, along with Barbara Ann, Barbara Fag and many others. That their invented name for her might have actually been closer to her true name (assuming my mystery gramps was in fact “Barbera”) only made it more irritating.

I should note that my father was never as violent as Webster supposedly was (though he was, and can still be a mean bastard) and certainly isn’t now, as he can barely stand up unaided, crippled by arthritis and Parkinson’s and the senility everyone now calls Alzheimer’s. And while my mother is not a producer of comedy---despite the fact that she is essentially dating a guy whose ’05 Hummer H2 (the most despicable car ever made) has a license plate that reads MDLFCRISIS! while still living in the same house as my father---she is often a shrieking cartoon.

Anyway, there you have it: Two songs that conjure my parents, who are upstairs as I type. I would come up the blue wooden staircase and put them on the livingroom stereo for them to hear, except neither of them would comprehend their significance---my mother because she is clueless, and my father because his hearing is mostly shot and in any case the Alzheimer’s has left him apparently unable to process music, which was once as great a passion for him as it is for me (heartbreaking, even if he is a mean bastard).

And so, with all that said, I offer them up, a gift from (and, I suppose, a certain sort of mask for) Robert Barbara. To you---whoever you are.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

#3 - Flushing, Utopia, Joseph Cornell

“Utopia Parkway” – Fountains of Wayne

I just realized that for this blog to have much meaning to anyone who doesn’t know me, I should provide some backgound information.

Obviously, my name is Robert Barbara. As I wrote earlier, I just celebrated my 33rd birthday. I live in Queens, New York, in a neighborhood that lacks a name.

Let me explain. The Post Office insists that our 2 x 20 block strip of post-war houses is part of Flushing---that name being enough of an insult even if it were a correct designation. (For the record, it's the imprecisely Anglicized version of Vlissingen, a port city in the southwestern Netherlands.) But Flushing proper is a couple of miles northwest of us, a bustling urban neighborhood with large Chinese and Korean populations and many excellent home-style Asian restaurants, as well as a cemetery that’s now home to Louis Armstrong and Bohemian writer/music critic Hermann Grab.

Fresh Meadows, another neighborhood we are sometimes mistaken for, is a collection of moderate-scale high-rises and garden apartments, and single-family homes that lies north of 73rd Avenue, a street we are in fact south of. Built largely during the ‘50s, the apartment complex has a network of sub-basement bomb shelters that my friends and I used as a sort of imaginary post-apocalyptic clubhouse back in high school, and which I still occasionally visit, mainly for reasons of nostalgia.

Holliswood, which lies a block south of us, across Union Turnpike, is an upscale neighborhood which has been home to many famous people over the years, including Groucho Marx, who kept an impressive mansion there in his later years, and former longtime Queens borough commissioner Donald Manes, who killed himself with a chef’s knife in his kitchen in the mid-‘80s when an official inquiry was beginning to uncover some serious civic corruption (I’d eaten Entenmann’s coffee cake in that kitchen with his daughter, who I had a tremendous crush on, only days before, but that’s of no consequence at this point).

The only moniker which specifically targets my phantom neighborhood is quaintly ironic: Utopia. But thihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs too is an incorrect designation. Coined no doubt by a go-getting real estate agent, it’s a riff off Utopia Parkway, the north/south thoroughfare that borders us to the west and (since I’m clearly bent on trying to boost the profile of my cipher ‘hood by association) made semi-famous by shut-in artist Joseph Cornell, who lived on it for forty-three years---died on it, too, in 1972, the year I was born---in a small, white-shingled Dutch colonial with his widowed mother and invalid brother.

As a metaphor, even Cornell, who made it a personal Utopia by sheer force of creative vision, understood the street name was ridiculous. In Deborah Solomon’s definitive 1997 biography Utopia Parkway, he was quoted as as observing that “these suburbs are dumps in the accepted sense.” Cryptic. Meaning our neighborhood a place to dump garbage? Dead bodies? Large quantities of objects other people see as worthless clutter?

(I’m a little obsessed with Cornell, since there are some fascinating, if unfortunate parallels in our lives, about which I’ll write more later.)

It should also be said that, as a description of a neighborhood, Fresh Meadows is a dubious designation as well, though it may have been correct at one time long ago. In my lifetime the largest open space was the parking lot of the Bloomingdales (then K-Mart, now closed) where we once shoplifted pricey t-shirts---although Cunningham Park, south of Union Turnpike so not Fresh Meadows properly speaking, was indeed dominated by a huge meadow-like lawn ringed by baseball diamonds, where on summer nights (or even winter nights, when the snow fell softly on the city) myself and my neighborhood friends would, after divining the field’s approximate center and smoking or swallowing whatever drugs were available, lie on our backs and stare up at the streetlight-bleached sky, the widest expanse of sky I can recall seeing before I moved to the Midwest briefly during college, and feel the world turning beneath us, life’s possibilities swirling and beckoning like sirens at the edge of our vision until the drugs wore off or we got too cold and headed home to our bedrooms.

That was as utopian as it got---which was by some measures, I know, not bad. But in the end, the name is wishful thinking, as it was for Todd Rundgren’s okay but hardly transcendent mid-70s art pop-fusion band, just a marketing term void of even municipal validation. As the Postal Service (the government agency, not the band) will tell you, “Utopia” doesn't even exist as a mailing address.

Fountains of Wayne, a bunch of very smart smartasses from who took their own name from a lawn-ornament store in New Jersey (491 Route 46, on the westbound side) that subsequently made some cameos on The Sopranos (the store, not the band---at least of this writing), commemorated Utopia Parkway in the title track of their 1999 album of the same name. In interviews they’ve talked about choosing their band name in order to capture a certain suburban ennui---tied to a specific place---that groups like The Kinks and The Smiths did in their heydey. (Or maybe FOV said they WISHED they could claim they chose the name for that reason, but really, in the manner or many rock bands, chose it because it would strike their friends and locals as a funny in-joke. I really can’t remember, and I don’t have time to Google it at the moment, because I have to get to my job at the day-care center, and it really doesn’t matter much anyway. Rock bands invent themselves with their histories, as they do in their music, and who’s to tell if even their admission of uncalculated actions are not calculated?)

Saturday, May 07, 2005

#2 - Bjork, flora

“Ammæli” – The Sugarcubes
“Hyperballad (live at Tokyo Bunkamura Orchard Hall, Japan; 12/5/01)" - Bjork

I’m a little embarrassed about these first two song postings, but they were inevitable. The first is the Icelandic version of The Sugarcubes' 1988 single “Birthday,” from the Bjork box set Family Tree , a sweet little fetish item with five 3” CDs inside elfin cardboard sleeves stuffed into a pink plastic compact that’s wrapped in a handmade paper sleeve embossed with weird little figures. As I wrote, my birthday was last week. And Bjork may be my all-time favorite singer/musician. I know this is not unique, that it’s virtually a cliché, that there are millions of men like me, obsessed with pop music to an unhealthy degree and supremely obsessed with her, who adore her for being so uncompromising in her art, for working with venerable free jazz musicians like Oliver Lake (of the out supergroup the World Saxophone Quartet, among other projects; he did the horn arrangements on Bjork’s Debut) and harpist Zeena Parkins (who has been part of New York’s downtown scene for years, turning up on recordings with guitarist Fred Frith (Henry Cow, Art Bears)(yes, I know I’m putting parentheticals inside parentheticals; if you are an editor and have a problem with that, well, fuck you) and alto saxophonist/duck call player/composer John Zorn) and also guys like Tricky and those adorable boys in Matmos who make beats with textures and timbres so visceral you feel like they’re coming from your insides (Matmos, in fact, once made a record of beats constructed largely if not entrirely from the sounds of surgical procedures, which is probably where I’m getting that metaphor from, along with the fact that my ulcer is acting up a bit at the moment). Men who also adore her simply for being a powerful creative hard-drinking woman who is also small and impossibly cute, who have perhaps like me visited Iceland solely for the purpose of seeing where she comes from, to eat whale blubber and strange seafood dishes made with cheese and visit geysers and glacial waterfalls and sit in blue-green algae-clotted thermal hotspring pools set in moss-flecked volcanic fields and marvel at how marvelous a place it is, and imagine faintly how cool it would be to meet an Icelandic girl, but they are all too beautiful and European-seeming and won’t give this sort of cliché---an American music fanatic with a minor weight problem who comes to Iceland to see where Bjork is from---a second glance, so said guy buys a big stack of Icelandic art rock discs at the suggestion of a clerk with a condescending air and then returns home to play them and fill the void in the usual ways.

But there you have it.

The version of “Hyperballad” comes from a bootleg recording of a 2001 Kyoto concert (titled Feel My Breath and issued by a dubious enterprise called Coffee Tea or Me Records) given to me by my yoga teacher/dealer, who, since I keep him supplied with new age music that doesn’t suck, tries to reciprocate. “Hyperballad” may well be---and in this moment of my typing, at least, I can say assuredly is---my favorite song of all time. It is about someone so violently happy that they wake up early to contemplate throwing themself off a cliff in order to heighten the happiness at returning to bed with the one who is making them so happy. To me it represents a kind of a platonic ideal of the drive for happiness, a drive I try to absorb when I listen to it, something that I think has informed my decision to do this blog. When those ecstatic 4/4 house beats kick in halfway through, I still get chills, even after the ten thousand-and-fifteenth listen.

Oh yeah---about the title. Loosestrife, purple loosestrife specifically (Lythrum salicaria L., also known by garden variety names like Morden Pink, Dropmore Purple, and Morden Gleam, all pretty good names for a prog-metal band) is a non-native plant introduced to the Americas in the 1800s that grows wild across many parts of the United States. It’s very common across marshy areas in the Catskills, an area I frequently visit, and in bloom it’s absolutely gorgeous. It grows in dense patches, washing huge expanses with a pink-purple hue that’s a couple of volume notches up from pastel. Not garish, but rich, deep, just loud enough to startle your senses to attention.

Too much loosestrife, however, is not a good thing; it is, in fact, a very bad thing. Though it’s widely used as a decorative plant, it breeds like a weed, and infestations spread quickly, choking out nearly everything else in their midst, especially in aquatic sites, where loosestrife displaces wetland plants like cattails and native grasses that support local wildlife. It isn’t much good for food (songbirds don’t bother with its hard seeds; even muskrats snub it) or for nesting (it’s too dense to offer cover; waterfowl, especially ducks, avoid wetlands that have been taken over by it). In short, it suffuses ecosystems with beauty, and simultaneously wrecks them.

As a metaphor---given my present situation---let's just say it resonates.