Carry The Fire: Contemplating The Road

I.

There I was, reading my magazine in bed. My wife next to me finishing up Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Both of us tired from a weekend getaway.

Sniffle.

My wife always keeps a tissue close by. Allergies.

Sniffle. Sniffle.

I wonder if I should get her another tissue. Still reading my magazine. Haven't looked up.

Stuttered intake of breath. Sniffle.

At this point, I look over. I am not prepared for what I see.

She's a wreck.

I've seen my wife cry before. I've seen her fall apart before. I'm always amazed by this because she's such a together person--- strong like an Amazon. But when she falls apart it's all I can do to keep myself from joining her.

I jump up. Run to the bathroom. Unravel a handful of toilet paper.

Hand it to her.

It's the book, of course. The Road did this to her.

It's no surprise that she didn't sleep well that night. I fell asleep next to her with a ghoulish anticipation.

Any book that can do that to a person, I've got to read.

II.

Last week was a trying one.

My wife lost a dear friend to cancer.

She's also been organizing a major event for her workplace and hasn't had much time to slow down, process, rest. I've been the vigilant husband with not much to do.

The summer has so far been good to me. In between work and a feeble attempt to get back in shape, I've been catching bits of The Road. Yesterday, I had an uninterrupted pass at the final pages.

At first, I sat outside. Smoking a cigar. The sparse but brilliant imagery of a post-apocalyptic journey, the best worst-case scenario I've ever encountered, walked ever closer to a conclusion that should not have been a surprise.

I thought that. When is it going to happen? Where did it get my wife? Will it get me?

There was a tenseness in my posture. Due in part to the heat and the plastic outdoor chair. But it was coming. Quickly.

I finished the cigar. Went inside. Would I have time to finish before my wife got home? Would she catch me? In between chasing a fly, the cats circled and wondered what was wrong.

Then it happened.

Sniffle. Oh god.

For all it's pace and predictability, the ending opened up the world and I slipped in.

Two tissues later. Head in hands. Eyes red. I heard the lock turn on the door downstairs. Open and close. I went to the landing.

Oh god, what's wrong?

I just finished the book.

III.

Above, I mentioned a ghoulish anticipation. Both of these brief accounts of finishing The Road don't exactly speak volumes of joy, ice cream and puppy dogs. Why the hell would anyone want to read a book that so deeply moved-- and not necessarily in the way that many are so often moved? Why would anyone voluntarily take such a trip?

This is not a book of hope. Well, not in a traditional sense. I'll come back to that.

And, having suffered the loss of my father two years ago, it might seem like down-right idiocy to long to read this book of a father and son on the edge of the end of the world.

My wife was-- understandably so-- very hesitant to hand over the book!

But there's something in that kind of-- for lack of a better word-- visceral experience that I appreciate. I discussed this in my thoughts about The Sopranos finale. It can also be found in my current obsession with the new Battlestar Galactica. My wife and my dear friend, Gerald, will back me up on all of this: In a world so completely full of itself, it's comforting and indemnifying to watch, read, and/or listen to something that has humility, frailty, humanity.

Popcorn only teases the stomach. I need real food.

And so, I burned through Gatsby's Girl and turned to The Road.

I was not disappointed.

IV.

Faith, hope, and love.

On some level, this book is a rumination on the intricacies that connect this oft used combination of words quoted from Corinthians.

See, a few weekends ago my wife and I went to a wedding where this verse was intoned. Last week, I went to a funeral service where the same verse was solemnly quoted. The connections, the parallels, the cycle of things, are not lost on me.

But I am contemplative and combative at the moment.

The phrase "the greatest of these is love" jangles. Certainly, I would not want my wife to misconstrue my meaning! But this is the crux of humanity here. In the past, my assertion has been that without love, faith and hope cannot exist. Indeed, what is faith without love? Can one hope in an apathetic state?

From this rather simplistic line of questioning, I have previously determined (for myself) that love comes first-- as "the greatest of these"-- and the others follow.

What happens, though, if I turn it around?

What good is love without faith and hope?

We might race into an argument that "love" without hope and faith leads to miscommunication: divorce, death, murder, suicide, etc.

But, circling the wagons yet again, it becomes clear that, in truth, all three are intrinsically connected, inseparable. They cannot exist without each other. In as much, might I suggest that they are one in the same?

The problem, then, rests in our definition of those words (or our separation of them; in the din of Derrida's deference).

Or, rather, our inability to spot a faker in the bunch!

V.

Carrying the fire.

I can't stop thinking about that phrase. It echoes Prometheus. It echoes the universalism of fire theft myths.

McCarthy, though, doubles, triples the meaning: Fire is what keeps humanity alive. It is the tool by which all others are forged and foraged. It is also the agent of destruction in the world of The Road.

It is the destroyer; it is the life giver.

When the man, then, proffers that he and the boy must be the carriers of the fire, he means guardian, survivor, etc. But he also references the fire within.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: To be, or not to be?

In the barren wasteland of The Road, McCarthy sings to us that "to be" is the only answer. In spite of hope. In spite of faith. Inspite of love.

We must live.

To choose not to live is the greatest sin. About this the existentialist and the devout Christian concur. To deny life is to deny the dearest thing humans have been given.

What makes The Road so powerful, though, is not some dogmatic perseverance and hope for life. There is no hope. McCarthy never lets us forget that.

And yet…

In the end, this is, in fact, a book of hope.

In the intervening time that it has taken me to finish this, I had a talk with some old friends-- one is a McCarthy fanatic. He told me that there are two schools of thought about the ending (I've not read any reviews or criticism; I choose not to poison myself). The school of the majority reads the ending as a downer. A no-hoper. This to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of the central conceit of the book.

Much like my words about The Sopranos finale, this book confounds expectations-- not simply as an exercise in "Ha, ha! I fooled you!" but as a matter of deep principle. The book's very essence (ash, wood smoke, and rosemary oil) bespeaks a theme that runs true.

Let's talk Sisyphus. The Road is a deep rumination on what Richard Taylor (in his essay "Is Life Meaningful?") points out in regards to meaning: "Meaninglessness is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite. Activity, and even long, drawn-out and repetitive activity, has a meaning if it has some significant culmination, some more or less lasting end that can be considered to have been the direction and purpose of the activity."

It's as if The Road takes this thought and mulls it over-- and over. The repetitious journey, the rhythm and pattern of it, exemplifies this notion of meaninglessness. It begs the reader, of course, to be expectant of a payoff. We must (as I would argue is our nature) find meaning in the novel's end. Otherwise, what have we taken the journey for? Why did we bother? Why did the man and his son bother?

Well… McCarthy gives us just enough to ponder and answer for ourselves those questions. The father dies. The boy moves on. The hope is in the memory and the teaching. There is still goodness in the world and the boy continues to carry the fire.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Well… maybe. It's hard to hold this view for long. The man dies without knowing if the boy will live or die. He has, on one level, let himself down for not having the courage to kill the boy before dying himself-- thus saving the boy any future molestation. I say on one level because I don't think the man necessarily believes he's done the wrong thing. The other simple reading is this: The entire journey is a teaching. The man can die knowing that he's given the boy the necessary skills to survive-- to continue the journey, carry the fire.

Except we know better, don't we? Yes, the boy has wonderful eyes. He can see. He can forage. He can survive against the elements. But he is not without compassion. And his compassion, the novel throughout, hampers his ability to survive. McCarthy gives us that final sequence wherein we are left thinking that the people the boy encounters are "good." But had they not been? The boy would surely not have survived his father by much.

This, I believe, must be where other readers find fault-- or at least telegraph a fouler end.

I cannot. Here's why. The line that got me the most-- that reverberated into an uncontrollable sob of understanding-- was when the boy thinks of his father instead of God. Again, the obvious parallel is that his father was/is God. Such is the way of men. Zeus overthrows the Titans. Oedipus slays his father. Theseus wears his father's sandals. These are the models of fatherhood that guide us. Though, mister postmodern is reminded of the line from Fight Club: (approximation) "Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?"

The man, then, is the boy's god. Just as is the case with our fathers.

And that's the reading. That's where the hope is. We become our fathers. Our sons become fathers. We die so they can live.

(And the colored girls go do, do, do, do do do)

Divorce the gender from the thought and humanity is born of humanity. Life and death are intrinsic. This is the only truth of existence. As such, it should be the source of our hope and comfort. We must live so that our deaths have meaning.

None of this is new, of course. But what is so beautiful about the novel is that McCarthy strips those concepts-- those models-- of their cliché-ness. He bares them new and raw for us. Huh?

I'll go back to the phrases that so often accompany death:

Why did it happen?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

It's not fair.

We have become accustomed (at arm's length) to the tropes of fate and destiny. We cast our confusion at God in hopes of an answer but accept silence in lieu of accountability. This is the easy part of dealing with death. We shed some tears, we rail at the unfairness of it, and then we get sidetracked by living again. We don't think about death until it comes close to us again. Our lives, then, are a constant paddle-ball game of coping and escaping.

The Road, however, gives us a few hundred pages to ponder.

We are confronted with the most complete rending of the earth and existence. The Road's world is completely and utterly stripped of meaning. There is no meaning, no solace here for the suffering. There is only silence, ash, and the inevitability of death.

VI.

No. Wait.

There is fire.

There is life-- however tenuous and fleeting it is. To carry the fire is to, well, to quote Dylan Thomas, "rage, rage against the dying of the light." And this is where McCarthy forces us to seriously ponder what that means. He has stripped the world of everything else.

What is left? The most elemental of all human things: A father's love for his son.

In that love there is faith. In that faith there is hope.

There ain't much of it, mind you. But goddamn it, it's there.

The father thing is particularly poignant for me. What's so sublime (deeply beautiful in its tragedy) about the final sequence is that as lofty as those notions are (God is father, etc.) they are rendered in a way that is elementally human. I was, in that moment, connected to my father-- and his death-- in a way that I had not yet been connected. There was a powerful catharsis in the sorrow McCarthy invokes.

See, my father died unexpectedly. I mean to say, my father unexpectedly got cancer. His death was expected shortly after that. I even wrote a poem about that inevitability (see previous post titled "Upon Learning of My Father's Cancer"). That poem deals in much of what I've been writing here. Read it if you like.

But the point is, that I was not prepared to deal with his death. Again, we might all say that we're ill-equipped to deal with it. For me, though, I had taught death before. I'd been through a few iterations of a mythology class wherein we discussed how underworld and apocalypse myths are ways of coping with death. In fact, as my father was dying in a hospital bed, I went into my classroom and spoke-- in the same way I had done semesters previous-- about death and coping with death.

I am partially ashamed (partially-- and this is the selfish me my wife knows well-- proud) of how I handled my emotions at this time. I approached the whole thing intellectually. And, for the most part it worked.

I was a mess during my father's funeral service. I was completely and utterly incapable of speaking at his service. When we drank wine and poured his share over his ashes in the woods behind our house, I was only slightly less affected.

But there was (and I imagine, always will be) a space between the emotions and my own sense of mortality that McCarthy's novel so eloquently spanned.

My wife sent me an article from CNN.com that summed up McCarthy's appearance on Oprah. In explaining where the novel came from, McCarthy said this: "I just had this image of these fires up on the hill ... and I thought a lot about my little boy."

The pervasiveness of that bond-- father and son-- illuminates The Road.

I thank McCarthy for giving me this last journey of father and son.

It lets me know that I can carry the fire now…

Upon Learning of My Father’s Cancer

I wanted to be the teacher,
the one who lectures on mythology and the
existence/non-existence of god—- that cold space between
reason and fear, that apparition so many hapless louts cheer
from the pews, that creator of all things who doesn’t
have to answer for his mistakes.
But I couldn’t.

Instead, I sat at my desk, thumbing through
Internet pages for engagement rings.

I am in love and my father has cancer.

I will marry, have children, and take my
place in the parade of fathers.

I wanted to drink and smoke, and pretend that I wasn’t affected.
Or rather, I wanted to pretend that I was affected more than I was.
I wanted to be my brother, terrified of my own human failings,
nauseated by the site of my own inter-workings—-

blood and shit, eyes and entrails.

But I couldn’t.

Instead, I sat at my desk in a state of general discomfort,
wondering if there was something foul growing within me too.

Of course, there is,
which is why I was able to hold back
the glaze of tears.

There is something terrible growing in all of us.

My father will die. This is certain, though when—-
and from what—- I am not sure.
But he is human.
My father will go, as did his father, as will I.

And this is not my malaise.
No. I am apprehensive.
I am anxious to know if everything will have its
reason and plan.
Will my railing at fate and destiny turn on me?
Will God with a capital “G”
shake his head at my unmoved reason and insistence—-
or better yet,
laugh at how weak I truly am?

Thinking About Poetry On A Monday

This morning, on my way into work (how many times have I used that line?), I heard a bit on WFDD about a new poetry journal that's being put together and published in Greensboro. It's called Cave Wall. They have an up-and-coming website here: Cave Wall Press, LLC.

This got me thinking about poetry. I've written a lot of it-- even published some of it. Oh, and I won a contest for it many moons ago.

I've been writing my wife poems. I made a vow to her when we first became serious about our relationship: I would write her a poem for every season. By that count, we should be up to twelve poems. I don't think I've got them all. I think I still owe her two.

Anyway, I haven't written a whole lot of poetry in the last five years. I've gone through a couple periods where I was consistently crankin' them out, but work and life have been conspiring to keep me from penning at a satisfactory rate.

This bit on WFDD has got me thinking, though. And while I haven't been producing a lot of it, I still value it and hope to write-- and publish-- more of it in the future.

Having said that, I've decided to post one here. I may post more. This is one I wrote close to three years ago (the title is "Approaching Thirty" and I am now "Approaching Thirty-Three").

Approaching Thirty

I have no desire to recreate the past, 
or invent the future.

The present is raw, 
cut from mistakes and intuition--
       apple seeds and bank statements.

This is where I live, happy for distraction--
       books and song,
       movies and roller coasters--
But these only mark the spaces between--
moments suspended in a network of thoughts 
and associated feelings.

A picture that reminds me of past drunks.
A shirt that doesn’t fit like it used to.
A song that no longer brings me to tears.
A book half forgotten, quoted without passion.

But life is raw, 
and continues to chafe, rub, and tickle.

Each successive avenue is brilliant 
with simplicity.

And this is where I live, 
amongst memories and currents 
cool and new.

This Is Not A Review Of The Sopranos Finale

Art is transformation.
Art is transformative.

These two thoughts ran through my head as I drove into work this morning, thinking about The Sopranos finale and what I might write about it. Given the nature of the show, its fan base, and its shocking finale, I will no doubt be amongst the thousands (millions) to blog about the show.

But I can't resist-- partly because this episode (this show) epitomizes everything I love about art.

ART IS TRANSFORMATION

The tourist looks. Cocks his head a bit to the left. Wonders, "What the hell is it?"

One of the worst classes I ever took as an undergraduate was a course entitled "The Philosophy of Art and Beauty." The instructor was an old hippie who had a habit of laughing at his own inside jokes, much to the class's consternation. We started the semester with the question, "What is art?" and ended the semester with no real answer.

One of the common answers to that question: Art is expression. This is the one that satisfies the tourists. Probably because it's the easiest answer. It's the one that allows us to say we like something without having to penetrate its surface. And when pressed further, we simply say, "Well, it's what the artist wanted to express!"

But expression isn't enough. It makes art of everything.

No, thank you. I need more than that.

Here's the thing: Once art leaves the inner sanctum of the personal, it ceases to be solely the artist's creation. That is, once you show something to someone else, you relinquish control of it. This is the cornerstone of reader-response criticism.

Now, what does this have to do with art, transformation, and The Sopranos?

See, art has to be more than expression-- otherwise, the term expression would be synonymous with art. It isn't. So, art has to be more than expression. This is the point where all avenues of thought begin to subtly (or not so subtly) diverge.

For me, I turn to that word I started with: transformation.

Art is transformation. It seeks to take one thing and make it something else. This works for all art: From Bob Timberlake to Marcel Duchamp (and all points between). Something gets changed. One thing becomes something else, whether by the act of creation or a simple shift in context.

The variety and degree to which something has changed is what gives us viewers (critics) cause for deep reflection and/or dissension.

Transformation impels expression (and now we begin to have a definition of art!). The artist no longer simply expresses but transforms.

Transforms what?

Well… that's part of the fun of interpretation (and what gets us all worked up). How much? How so? Why? These are not the province of the artist but the critic. And we are charged with the task of taking a transformed thing and giving it meaning. The artist can intend meaning, but we are wise not to be too presumptuous of the artist's intentions…

Art is transformative

The tourist looks. Cocks his head a bit to the right. Squints to see the name of the artist and the title of the piece. Looks once more. Moves on.

Let's talk about art's transformative power: I was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City several years ago and I became entranced by several pieces. One in particular was by Rene Magritte titled "The Menaced Assassin." I sat on a bench in front of this painting for quite some time. As I sat there, I watched several people filter by. This one individual, with a camera around his neck, made his way through the gallery with a speed and purpose that intrigued me. I watched as he moved up to each piece, inspect the placards, then moved on again. He barely glanced at the works themselves. Finally, he came to a "famous" piece, stood back, looked and, horror of horrors, took a picture.

There I was, contemplating the tableaux of Magritte's painting, trying to imagine the events that led up to this very odd moment caught on canvas. To this day, that painting haunts me. It's not a favorite; it's not one I'd hang in the house. It's not even one that I would drag my wife halfway around the country to see in person. (Believe me, there are some that I would and will!) But there it is, lodged forever in my brain, a signal light to introspection.

And this tourist only had eyes for capturing a famous painting with his camera!

This represents a most fundamental human failing: The inability to recognize things, great and small, that have the power to transform us. Movies, books, television, the internet, magazines-- the whole lot of human communication, for that matter. These are the makings (trappings) of our lives. All have (greater or lesser) influence.

Our problem is that we only have eyes for fireworks and not the spark of the match that sets them off-- or, for that matter, doesn't.

One need only look at the current slew of summer blockbusters to see what we expect from our art: Uncomplicated characters (or at least easily defined complications). Clear, unambiguous endings. Fireworks.

But for all their bombast, fireworks rarely transform us.

Wait a minute. Summer blockbusters are art?! And what does this have to do with The Sopranos?

See, this is where we can move away from simply defining art and begin to make some sense of it. Great art is rarely entertaining and rarely meets our expectations. Great art not only transforms its subject or medium, it transforms its viewer.

But not all art is great.

If art seeks to only to entertain and meet our expectations, then it can't truly transform because no real change occurs in us. Great art should terrify, engage, illuminate, confound, and reduce us to a shambling mass of emotions, thoughts, and misfiring electrical impulses.

But let's face it. For all my bravado, we usually do get exactly what we expect from our art.

Call the babysitter! Get the popcorn!

We've spent the last century blurring the lines between "popular" art and "high" art (yay!), but we've also been hoodwinked into blurring the line between "good" and "bad" art (boo!). This goes back to that lazy definition of art.

If art is simply expression, then we are left with lots of art and no boundaries by which to demarcate value, quality etc.

Everyone is an artist and it doesn't matter if any of it is good. And, frankly, there's always going to be more bad than good.

And so, without the hierarchy of judgment implicit in definitions of high and low art, without a concrete definition of art, and without any real desire for real transformation, we turn to the telly…

ALWAYS LEAST EXPECTING IT

Enter Tony Soprano.

For seven years, viewers of The Sopranos followed this man on his (anti)hero's journey. We followed the family-- foils, foibles, follies and all. We were promised by our own expectations that the ending of the series would justify our attention, our fanaticism, our addiction. This was how we chose to be entertained and, over the years, we were often repaid with water-cooler worthy ponderings.

Last night, though, our expectations were not met.

Entertainment. That's the word that gets us all confuddled. I've been talking about art, transformation, and the transformative power of art. I've bemoaned human failings. All systems tend toward chaos because all humans look for the easy way out, the lowest common denominator, the lowest bid. Spiderman 3 broke box office records and is truly a piece of shit.

But we bought it. And so I've come down this road with the intention of illustrating the disconnect:

We need (spiritually) to be transformed by art, but all we want is a quickie.

Our culture has delivered. For the most part.

But here we are, at the end of something great, wondering why our expectations weren't met.

Here's why: The Sopranos was provocative television. It was a show that entertained and mystified. It promised us the things we expect from good fiction (exposition, plot, rising action, climax, character development). It gave us well-rounded characters, interesting storylines, subplots and switchbacks. And while it bogged down now and then (so say the critics), it always managed to deliver. We invested time and energy-- even money-- into the show and into its characters.

And so, we expected a payoff for our investment. Sure, Tony was (is) a bastard, a sociopath (o the labels!), but would we have been so entranced by him (for seven years) if he was only a cold-blooded hood? From the very beginning, we were introduced to the idea of change (transformation?!) through Dr. Melfi's therapy sessions. And for seven years, we've seen... what?

Change? Has Tony been cured?

Well, that's what we expected (even if we knew better).

And if we were not expecting psychological growth, then what were we expecting?

Fireworks?

If we weren't invested in the show (emotionally, intellectually), and we were looking simply for bad things to happen to good-not-so-good-bad people (Ralphie's head in a bowling ball bag; Bobby keeled over on a toy train set), then we got plenty of that, too.

The finale should have been the ultimate payoff for our dutiful morbidity.

Why?

Well, we're back in the province of art. It is everything life cannot be. It's ordered. And with the right tools, it's discernible. It makes sense. It's happily ever after. It's justice. Or it's a lot of shit getting blowed up.

We go to the movies. We watch a romantic comedy. We are anesthetized. We get the love and fate and destiny that we so desperately seek in our own lives. We are pacified. We are entertained.

As such, most art isn't about meaning; it's about entertainment. It's not supposed to make us think. It's supposed to make us cope with our shitty lives. We watch football and drink beer to escape. We watch television to escape.

We watched last night, with glee (call it horror if you prefer) as that big SUV tire rolled slowly but inevitably toward Phil Leotardo's head.

That's what we expected from the show's finale. That's the water-cooler scene.

And that's why we were so disappointed with last night's episode: It couldn't deliver the ultimate water-cooler scene.

Would our expectations have been met if that one gruesome scene had lasted 45 minutes?

It Ain't "We" No More

I've been writing (at least in the last few paragraphs) about a collective "we" that was disappointed last night.

That "we," of course, is a lie.

I was not disappointed. Not in the least. The fact that I've written so much about this episode without actually referring to it that much should illustrate a deep desire to justify my final conclusion about the show:

Last night's episode was deeply transformative.

See, I could have saved you all the bullshit and just gotten to the main point(s):

Great art has nothing to do with expectations.

People are happy when expectations are met. People are glib when they're right. But great art isn't about getting it right. Great art isn't about getting what you want.

What we got last night was exactly what we should have gotten: Lots of questions, lots of thoughts, both good and bad, both big and small. We got suspense, we got humor, we got horror.

We got life.

I guess that's where I'm going with this: Most people expected fireworks. We got a few blown out matches.

I'll go back to Tony and his hero's journey. We were led into the show with the notion that he would be transformed by the end. We were expecting that. Either that, or we expected him to get whacked. Saved or damned. No in between.

And, we were right to expect it because so many other stories have given us winning odds on such a conclusion.

But Tony's transformation was so subtle that we almost didn't get to see it. Hell, we may not have seen it.

Can we read Tony's single tear for Uncle Junior as a sign of compassion for the man who shot him? Can we read his recognition of his role in scarring his family as true transformation? Or are we to side with Dr. Melfi? Is this all just a matter of learning a few new tricks of the mind game?

Great art leaves us with more questions than answers.

The Sopranos did just that.

Additional Thoughts about that last sequence

1. Stereotypes. This is something that my wife mentioned and I still think it's the best "interpretation" I've heard: The show has always been fixated on stereotypes. What we got in the final sequence last night was a final, jam-packed daguerreotype of types. Every possible conclusion we could imagine for the show was summed up for us in one final family portrait. And yet, not a one of those endings really works without us conveniently forgetting that we're buying into a genre trope. It's as if David Chase wanted us to remember that the show is about people and family not expectations.

2. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks. When Tony sat down at the diner table, I couldn't help but think of Hopper's painting. Okay, this is a stretch. Everything in diners gets linked to Hopper, but there's something there. Something about modern America, I'm sure.

3. What's with the onion rings?

Fitzgerald's Follies: A Rambling Regarding Gatsby's Girl

My wife and I recently took a trip, by train, to Washington, D.C. We each brought books to read on the train. She finished hers a few hours shy of D.C. I, on the other hand, am a slow reader and was not even close to finishing my book, Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. I was far, far from the end of the book when the train rolled into Union Station that evening.

Upon departure back to Greensboro, Mandy was faced with no reading prospects for the train. We stopped in the Barnes & Noble in Union Station and bought a couple books. She settled on Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I found an interesting book entitled Gatsby's Girl. Even though I was surely not going to finish Thirteen Moons on the trip back, I still couldn't resist a good book purchase…

Interestingly enough, I ran into a snag in my reading (about an hour south of D.C.): I read to the bottom of a page, moved up to the next and stopped. I went back and tried the sentence again. Nope, didn't make sense. I tried it one more time before glancing up to see that I was missing about forty pages. Mandy had bought Thirteen Moons for me earlier this year, and I'd started it on a bed and breakfast trip for her birthday. For whatever reasons, though, I'd put it down and didn't return to it until this trip. So much for finishing it on this trip, I thought.

I picked up Gatsby's Girl and dove in.

Isn't it a wonderful thing to be deeply engrossed in, say, pre-Civil War North Carolina, following a tale of Cherokee removal, and then, with the close of one book and the opening of another, find yourself a hundred years removed and in suburban Chicago? That's fiction for you!

Anyway, Gatsby's Girl was excellent. It's reminiscent of a really good biopic. It has that feel of history and truth without actually being true. Caroline Preston did her research, and the novel swims expertly in the myth and man of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the roaring twenties. Much like my viewing of Julie Taymor's Titus, I followed the narrative with an every-so-often head nod of complete approval. In addition to breathing life into the myth of Fitzgerald, Preston also manages to create a unique, multi-dimensional female anti-hero in Ginevra Perry.

Here's the thing, though. I think I liked the book so much because I have a graduate school connection to F. Scott. I had the pleasure (long pause… soak in sarcasm… continue…) of taking a modern American literature class my second semester in graduate school. Lucky me, I drew Fitzgerald from the hat and had to research him, his work, etc. for a presentation to the rest of the class. It was also my job to lead discussion of Fitz's Tender is the Night.

I did what so many graduate students do: I smoke-and-mirrored my way through the "project." I did my "research," which involved lots of photocopying and very little actual reading. I skimmed a less than authoritative biography and then read the novel. In the end, my presentation was certainly not the best in the class, but it certainly was not the worst.

Nobody in the class liked Fitzgerald (Hack! Hack! they screamed), and only a few actually read Tender is the Night. Now, it's important to point out that English graduate students can be a pretentious bunch who think an awful lot of themselves. My classroom experiences boiled down to either intellectual group masturbation sessions or pissing contests.

Or both.

How could a self-respecting (puffed out chest, upturned nose) English graduate student claim to like the elementary prose of a short, overly self-conscious ponce like Fitzgerald? Famed for publishing stories in the Saturday Evening Post?! Why that's like publishing a limerick in the Reader's Digest!

Now, James Joyce…

And let's face it, Fitz had his faults. A self-proclaimed outsider, he never really fit in to either the life that had been given him (poor; crazy mother) nor the one he made for himself (popular writer; half of a nutty celebrity couple). All the faux glitz and longing in his writing came from a very personal place-- and, much like Preston's novel suggests, he was never really able to completely distance himself from himself in his work.

I guess you can say, though, that I developed an affinity to Fitzgerald that semester.

I'm not a champion of the underdog; rather, I like to think of it more as a symptom of my empathetic heart. And so, I clicked with Fitz-- and Tender is the Night. I found something worth attending to in the book and the man.

Plus, he looked good in a dress (see pic).

He was a wonderful, tragic failure. His success only punctuated the weaknesses he saw in himself. His relationship with Zelda was a grand escape that always circled back to a truth too shocking: This world isn't built for deeply caring or deeply affecting people.

Interestingly enough, that last statement circles us back to Gatsby's Girl and the other point I made earlier about Ginevra Perry. In some ways, Fitzgerald represents the extreme outside, the man who can't find self-love and so caterwauls through a self-destructive life. Ginevra Perry, on the other hand, is full of self-love, but the results are much the same (if a bit more mundane and a little less self-destructive).

Huh? Well, I'll take that "deeply affecting" part.

Ginevra is a hottie. Everyone falls in love with her; everyone is entranced by her. But that doesn't mean that she's got it made, that she's fulfilled. Fitzgerald, with his nose pressed against the glass looking in, sees only the pretty girl-- and uses her as a cypher for his own thoughts and insecurities.

I'm reminded of comments I've made in regards to the myth of Cupid and Psyche. I like to call Psyche the "poor little pretty girl." Everyone loves her for her looks but not for her inner being. The "Don't hate me because I’m beautiful" thing.

Here, though, we have Ginevra who doesn't realize that being loved for her looks isn't fulfilling. (This is probably Preston's greatest achievement: the creation of a truly selfish character with which we can identify and sympathize.) It comes as quite a shock to her that she's not happy-- because everything in her life has gone exactly as she thought it should. She throws Scott Fitzgerald over because he's not a solid match-- he's not the tall, handsome aviator. She gets her aviator, but that doesn't make her happy. She has daddy's money, kids (that she doesn't really want), an affair, and an outwardly "perfect" life.

But her secret longing (her unfulfillment) manifests in her greedy savoring of herself in Fitzgerald's published works.

It's as if she loves her fictionalized self more than her real self.

Eventually, she gets it. We get it.

Hmm… Yeah, that works. But… Where was I?

Fitzgerald appeals to me because of his tragic flaws. He was obviously talented (despite boos from the bleachers), but as part of that "lost generation," he had no way of balancing his inadequacies with his talents. There's something deeply human about that.

And despite the morbidity of it, I'd add that there's also something comforting about that.

Random 8: Things You Don't Want To Know

I've been tagged. My dear friend and colleague, Gerald, recently caught the blog bug, and has been so kind as to pull me down the rabbit hole with him. I was initially hesitant to perpetuate this blog "chain," but after reading Gerald's eight random things, I couldn't resist the call to self-pillory.

Here we go:

1. I don't eat seafood.
   
   This extends to all freshwater fish as well. I consider myself to be a "foodie," and have grand notions of my cooking abilities, but I just can't bring myself to eat and enjoy seafood. My brief stint as a cook in a fine dining restaurant cured me of many food aversions-- I even tried some very strange things… And the restaurant where I worked was on the coast-- had access to some of the best, freshest seafood available (mahi-mahi, yellow fin tuna, halibut, grouper, sole, etc.). But I never ate any of it. Hell, I spent six months living in Naples, Italy-- where you can buy fresh cozze (mussels) from the side of the road, where polpi (octopus) and calamari (squid) are standard players on antipasti platters. And while I did try these "delicacies," I didn't make a habit of eating them. When my wife ordered a big plate of fresh prawns on our honeymoon in Praiano, I took a picture of them, but didn't touch them!
   
   And so, I will never be a culinary maven, a master chef.
   
   All because I can't stand the smell and taste of seafood.
   
   And just for the record, I don't care how fresh it is, it still smells like fish…
   
   
2. When I was eleven or twelve, I ratted out some guys on my swim team for peaking over the wall into the women's locker room.
   
   This incident, though minor, was kind of pivotal in my personal growth: It reveals my self-consciousness and desire to be liked; it illustrates deep-seated guilt in regards to keeping secrets (or not keeping them).
   
   The first part is pretty easy to explain. I told on the guys because I wanted to impress the ladies. I was searching for favor. An awkward, butterball of a teen, I had no skills, and no chance in hell of ever dating any of the girls. In my mind, revealing this bit of information some how seemed like my way in. They would all love me for telling them-- and maybe, just maybe, they would let me look for free…
   
   It makes sense that this might simply have been a form of sabotage, but I don't think I thought of it that way back then.
   
   The other part is trickier. See, as much as I wanted the girls to want me, I knew, even then, that my lot in life was different from that of the other guys, the star swimmers. I was good, and I loved (still do love) the water, but I wasn't a jock. I wasn't going to get the cheerleader. I wasn't destined to perform keg stands at high school parties. And so, my deep desire to be liked probably had less to do with my revealing of the secret than it did my shame at not having the balls to look myself.
   
   And, believe me, I wanted to. Oh did I want to.
   
   But I never did.
   
   See, it worked like this. The locker rooms at the pool were pretty much like they are everywhere else-- with one exception. The cinder block wall separating the two rooms didn't go all the way to the ceiling. It was high enough to separate the two spaces. In fact, there was only about a foot of open space at the top. However, if you climbed up on the side wall (the one that separated the showers from the hallway leading to the pool), you could stick your head through that small gap and look down into the women's showers.
   
   When we finished practice, we would all shower off. The enterprising gentlemen who did the peeking would wait a few minutes and then hoist themselves up onto the wall, squeeze their heads through the gap, and enjoy the view.
   
   My fear of getting caught kept me from ever looking. I used to imagine what I would see, and I would long-- in my pervy adolescent mind-- to climb that wall. I'd seen Porky's. I knew the sight would be glorious. And, at various points, I had had crushes on damn near all of the girls on the team.
   
   But I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
   
   The more I think about it, dropping the dime was probably my way of punishing those guys for having bigger balls than me.
   
   Now, where does the guilt come in? Well, from the moment the words came out of my mouth, I regretted tattling to the girls. The repercussions of that admission reverberated far and long. Hell, the fact that I'm writing about this now shows that this still doesn't sit right with me.
   
   It doesn't feel good to be an informer. It might be the right thing to do, but it doesn't necessarily feel right… I know that from experience.
   
   
3. I'm afraid of cockroaches.
   
   My parents' house in Greensboro was backed up against some gnarly woods (we used to cut trails through them and cut the trails up with motorcycles), and so we always had problems with bugs. We would get those big ass flying cockroaches-- the kind that can carry off small children.
   
   I spent many a sleepless night imagining one flying into my mouth…
   
   
4. Continuing with the fear: I couldn't watch scary movies until I was in college.
   
   In keeping with the swim team memories, I'll relate this trivial story: We were at an out of town swim meet (can't remember where). After the first day's events, we all went out to eat and then went to see Pet Sematary. I didn't sleep at all that night-- kept imagining Gage walking around my bed with a scalpel. The next day I swam horribly from the lack of sleep…
   
   This isn't so much of an issue anymore, though I do get spooked pretty easily.
   
   
5. In the heyday of the hair band, I saw most of the "celebrated" acts.
   
   I distinctly remember going to see Whitesnake (Great White opened for them!) because I spent a portion of the show on some strange dude's shoulders. We had floor tickets (one of the first shows I went to where the floor was general admission) and I was (still am) too short to see over the sea of rednecks and metal heads in front of me. This guy standing next to me offered to lift me up so I could see.
   
   I have to admit that at many of the shows back then, people were usually good-natured and generous-- despite the hard-living aesthetics of the music. Years later Guns n' Roses incited fights in the crowd for making us wait two damn hours between the opening act and their performance…
   
   
6. I was a Boy Scout, but I never made Eagle.
   
   For years, I've claimed that by the time I was ready to do my community service project to make Eagle Scout, I'd had enough of scouts and didn't really see the need to finish. The truth is, I was lazy. And despite the fact that I was a model scout (fair number of merit badges; member of Order of the Arrow; patrol leader and senior patrol leader), I didn't quite get the whole civic duty part of the Eagle. Sure, I knew the scout motto-- and followed it as well as any teenage boy can. But the whole purpose of the community service project was lost on me.
   
   I'll say this, though: I guarantee that there are many, many Eagle Scouts out there who understood the whole community service thing less than I did…
   
   
7. I own a Kylie Minogue album.
   
   
8. I fell asleep watching the X-Files movie in the theater.
   
   To be fair, I wasn't really a fan of the show…

Twenty Five Albums For Twenty Five Years

Twenty Five Albums For Twenty Five Years*

This will be a list in parts. It won't be a "best of" list so much as a soundtrack of the first twenty five years of my life. This is a tenuous project-- and a slightly misleading one since the first five years of my life are a bit fuzzy. However, I have devoted a considerable amount of thought to this list (still thinking, that is).

This is my life with music.

I say this isn't a "best albums" list because even the haze of nostalgia can't mask the embarrassment of a Dokken or Stryper album. However, there is no doubt in my mind that the albums presented here merit rumination. Like the memory of my father sprawled out on the living room floor with a stack of lps perched above the record player needle, these albums are pieces of my life.

I am not ashamed.

Before I launch into my first selection, I'll add that I don't intend to share these in chronological order. Much like a smell can trigger long forgotten memories, these will be fragments as I find them.

Here we go.

25. Blood Sugar Sex Magik - Red Hot Chili Peppers

My senior year of high school isn't memorable in the ways that are typically associated with the "best years of our lives." I've never thought kindly of high school.

That year spanned 1991 and 1992, and it was marked primarily by Fifth Wheel, Wayne's World, C.S. Lewis, a rejection letter from NC State, and the chicken pox.

I remember the onset of the chicken pox pretty vividly because I'd driven without my parents to a swim meet in my father's white Silverado pick-up truck. A team mate went with me and we both shared a room with our coach, Ray, an interesting character whom I will probably write about at some later date.

I swam fine the first day, but started feeling a little feverish that evening. We went to see Wayne's World that night and I started getting hard core shivers. I barely remember watching the movie (I'd already seen it, anyway). I was too busy trying to stop my whole body from shaking. On the way back to the hotel, the shivering became uncontrollable. I'd never had a fever like it before. I didn't sleep well that night, but didn't tell anyone I was feeling badly.

The next morning at the pool, I noticed a spot or two on my stomach. My coach asked me if I'd ever had chicken pox and I said I thought so. I thought I had. I made a collect call to my parents and when I asked about having had chicken pox, my father simply said, "No. Why don't you go ahead and come on home."

I spent one horrible week in pain, trying everything to stop the itching, freaking out at the horror that was me covered in nasty little blisters. At one point, my mother gave me a Percocet leftover from when my brother had his wisdom teeth pulled. Fever, horror, and the drugs mixed with my reading of C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and induced some heady delusions.

The pain, fever and spots turned to scabs and embarrassment. I stayed home for another week.

What does any of this have to do with the Red Hot Chili Peppers? It was the soundtrack for my trip down to and back from the swim meet. My brother had introduced me to it a few weeks before, but I'd only recently bought my own copy of it. It bears mentioning that my first copy of Blood Sugar Sex Magik was a cassette tape. And even though it bore the Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics badge, I had no problems purchasing it at the now defunct Record Exchange in Greensboro.

1991 and 1992 were good years for me, musically speaking. Though Blood Sugar was released in '91, it didn't get heavy rotation until the spring of '92. I'll add that it figured prominently in my first year of college as well.

In a lot of ways, Blood Sugar represents a pretty significant shift in my musical tastes. Until this point, I'd been listening mostly to the other "big albums" of the early '90s-- specifically, Pearl Jam's Ten and Nirvana's Nevermind. I was also enamored with The Replacements and Drivn n' Cryin'. So the funk/rock fusion of the Chili Peppers was quite a departure. That could be why I loved it so much. It was new and different. Powerful, raw, funky, and dirty. There was something quite innocent about a 17 year old virgin belting out the lines of "Sir Psycho Sexy" with passion and longing.

The world at large latched onto the softer tracks from the album. Do you remember the really silly video for "Under the Bridge"? I do. But I also remember the hard beats and crunchy guitar of "Suck My Kiss," the anthemic pulse of "The Power of Equality," and the strut and jive of "Apache Rose Peacock." It wasn't until years later that I got down to New Orleans, but it was already familiar-- filtered through Anthony Kiedis's visceral imagery.

For the bulk of my late teens and early twenties, this album remained high on my list of all time favorites. And any time I pondered a "desert island top five," it would always be there. In fact, when I began listing albums for this project, it was the first one that came to mind. This is an album that I can always go back to and enjoy. It not only represents a time in my life, it remains an all around great, cohesive collection of tunes.

24. Outlandos D'Amour - The Police

The memory is one I cherish-- mainly because it is one of the few that I can still call to mind from that long ago. I don't even remember how old I was at the time. The time frame is somewhere between the release date of this album (1978) and 1984, the year the Kapicas moved to North Carolina.

That puts me somewhere between four and nine…

Here's the memory:

Some neighbors from across the street were having a yard sale. I think maybe they were moving. We went over to peruse the junk and found great treasure: two reel-to-reel tape recorders. One was larger than the other. The smaller of the two was "portable" because it had a black plastic strap by which it could be lugged around. My parents bought both of them, one for me and one for my brother.

My brother, Jon, took the larger of the two. I think because he thought it the better of the two. Even at that age (between seven and twelve) he had a knack for all things with wires. He'd already broken a screwdriver in an electrical socket trying to "rewire" the basement. Years later, he spent hours in the music studio at Weaver Education Center in Greensboro recording local bands, as well as his own.…

Anyway, at the time of our tape recorder acquisition, Jon had already started borrowing albums from a friend's cool older brothers. This is where The Police come in. Jon had borrowed Outlandos D'Amour. It was already on heavy rotation in the Kapica household.

Keeping everything ultra hi-fi, I recorded Outlandos onto my new tape recorder from our record player's speaker.

The highlight of the memory:

With my tape recorder, I would close myself in the closet and listen to The Police. My favorite song was "Be My Girl (Sally)." I would listen to this song over and over again, repeating as best I could the spoken word part-- British accent and all.

So there I was, a small boy in a closet singing a song about a man who finds love with a blow-up doll.

Episodes like this convince me that Tipper Gore's tirade against indecent lyrics was time misspent. Not only didn't my parents care, but I don't think I actually understood the lyrics until I was in my late teens…

*****

Jon bought his first cd player in 1987. This was long before cd players became household items and cd purchases eclipsed tape sales. Hell, this was long before they did away with the long box (do you remember the long box?). Cds were still expensive-- a good five to ten bucks more than tapes-- and since I didn't have a job, I had little room for such extravagancies.

So, after a particularly good, cash-filled birthday, I made my way over to the now defunct Peaches on High Point Road in Greensboro and bought two cds-- the first two I ever bought. One of those cds was Outlandos D'Amour.

I still have that cd, though the case is cracked and scratched.

Like my first entry on this list (Blood Sugar Sex Magic), Outlandos D'Amour is an album that I have no trouble going back to. Every time I listen to this gem of late seventies ground-breaking reggae-infused punk, I feel like a kid again. In fact, whenever I teach William Carlos Williams poem, "The Danse Russe," I mention Outlandos. The poem is essentially about those moments of joy (and horror) that we experience when there's no one else around. Williams writes of enjoying some alone time in the wee hours of the morning ("Who shall say I am not / the happy genius of my household?"). Whenever I listen to Outlandos-- alone at home, really loud-- I dance like a bloody fool. And it feels good, and right.

Outlandos is full of great tracks; the pace is set with the opener "Next to You," and it rarely slows from this point on. This is not a bad thing.

A majority of the songs deal with typical rock themes of unrequited and spurned love, but there's also the red light classic "Roxanne." And dare I suggest that "Be My Girl (Sally)" smacks of a modern Pygmalion? Sting, the school teacher turned rocker, was always more literate (and pompous) than the usual bounty of rocker-wanna-be-poets (take that lizard king!). I am particularly fond of "Born in the 50s." True, it speaks of a different generation (for my generation, think Fruit Bats's "Born in the 70s"), but I have always been encouraged by Sting's assertion "We were the class they couldn't teach / Because we knew better."

Having said that… What the hell is a "Masoko Tango"?! Well, frankly, I don't care. Sometimes all a song needs is some incomprehensible yelling. Or rather, sometimes all I need is to do some incomprehensible yelling (and dancing…

I'll add this as well: I'm getting too old to dogmatically remember every song lyric of every album I purchase, but there was a time when this was simply the norm. Outlandos? Yeah, I can sing-a-long to every lyric on this album-- while waving my shirt 'round my head nonetheless!

*****

Last week's Entertainment Weekly printed a sidebar about upcoming (rumored) reunions and I was surprised to see The Police listed. I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised (to quote Bruce Hornsby, "that's just the way it is"), but I have read about The Police-- and watched the Behind the Music. I know that these guys didn't exactly part on good terms. They made great music because they all had such strong personalities-- and because they never really agreed on what their sound should be. Sting was the pop and cheese. Stewart was the reggae and rhythm. And Andy was… well, just weird. Together they rocked. But they also fought. And so, only a handful of years after Outlandos, they broke up. Even their short-lived reunion was, well, short-lived.

But if they do decide to join the ranks of the reunions? I will definitely be there.

I'll end this second installment with this:

Outlandos D'Amour is one of those rare musical finds that will always reduce me to a singin' and dancin' fool.

23. Small Change - Tom Waits

My transition from boy to not-quite-man is probably most marked by my introduction to Tom Waits. While I can claim an easy handful of life influences ranging from all walks of art, music, and literature, Tom Waits helped move my mind and writing from adolescent fascination with fantasy and science fiction (oh, the poems, oh the horror) to a floundering adult life--- drinking, staying up late, smoking cigars, and identifying with the "beats" as reflected in Waits's travelogues and jazz balladry.

I can thank my good friend Michael McDonald for introducing me to T. Waits. I first borrowed his cassette of the Asylum Years (now out of print in the U.S.) when I was a senior in high school. This borrowing soon led to Nighthawks at the Diner and Rain Dogs. I listened to all with growing interest. But it was "Tom Traubert's Blues," collected on Asylum Years, that haunted me. When it came time to make my first CD Waits purchase, I hunted down and bought Small Change.

Anyway. I was a freshman in college. Glad to be there, but a bit disoriented. The usual freshman bonding experiences eluded me. My orientation wasn't entirely orienting. I didn't connect to my floor mates. And, true to form, I snuck out of my "orientation" activities early--- to go to Lollapalooza (I still have my Pearl Jam tee-shirt). My father drove me back up the mountain early in the morning (NPR and Bojangles biscuits) and dropped me off just in time to make my very first (and only) eight o'clock class. Was it Freshman Composition? I can't remember.

Anyway, it didn't take long to settle into the rhythm of my college dorm life. Soon I was ordering pizza from ASU food services, swiping my ID card in the soda machines, and gaining weight by the week.

This eventually led to late night card games on the hall. I wasn't out there at first. I was shy. Actually, I was in love with some blonde tart from back home and spent a lot of my time pining in my room alone, listening to The Cure on my Sony Discman and playing Solitaire and Mine Sweeper on my amber-screened PC.

When I joined the din in the hall common room (an alcove by the elevators, a couple couches and chairs), the "boys" were playing spoons with taped up plastic-wear from the cafeteria. These teenage boy-men, left to their own devices, had been playing so hard that they kept breaking the plastic spoons.

It is with some pride that I admit my influence on the lot of them: I suggested that, instead of taping up cheap spoons, we play Spades. After that, the spoons disappeared and the Spades tournaments began.

I took as my partner a loveable lug named Tim Mead. He didn't make it past that first year. I bought his GT mountain bike before he packed up and went back home, and he gave me my third Tom Waits disc, Closing Time (I've since replaced the album three times).

Where was I? Okay. So I settled into dorm life, college life, etc. I wound up bombing two classes that fall because of irresponsibility and Spades, but I spent a lot of time listening to Tom Waits. I quickly went from Small Change to Bone Machine (an odd jump that shows, I think, a deep resonance with the Waits-meister's entire catalog), then to Foreign Affairs. I distinctly remember Tim telling me, after I'd made him a copy of Foreign Affairs, that listening to "A Sight For Sore Eyes" helped calm him down while battling it out with his parents. He found Tom's line about "palookas" particularly comforting.

All of this is to say that Tom Waits infiltrated my adolescent mind (somewhere between high school and college) and helped me make it through my freshman year (and beyond). He helped me understand what it meant to be, not necessarily adult, but grown. True. I didn't have a life like his, or even like the lives he rhapsodized in his songs, but that was kind of the point. His drunken travelogues grounded me. All it took was bombing "Intro to Psych" and "Geology" to get my ass on track. I made the dean's list my second semester. My floor mates playing cards until four in the morning? Most of them were gone by the end of that first year.

Hell, I can only remember one from that floor who graduated on time with me.

My point? I figured some important things out that first year (things I now share with every class I teach), and I attribute some of my success in college to the "lessons" I learned from Tom Waits. His music offered an escape, and it was (still is) seductive. But, had I simply taken his words at face value (read: drink a lot and often), then I might have wound up a fixture in bars and degreeless. Instead, I spent so much time with Waits that I found more than a glorification of boozing and endless roaming: Life is messy. Everyone has problems. Drinking helps with life.

But drinking doesn't fix life's problems. And drinking too much creates more problems.

In this, then, I was able to separate myself from the self-destruction that permeated Tom Waits's songs--- and, in turn, I side-stepped the destruction waiting on the other side of my dorm room door.

Let's take this moment to segue into one of the key tracks from Small Change, "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)." On the surface, this song plays on a simple conceit: The narrator performs a drunken piano ballad in which he tries to blame the piano for his own drunkenness--- while at the same time he criticizes everyone (and everything) in the bar. One can imagine a whiskey-soaked lounge singer lazily plodding through a simple melody while attempting to sing his failures into accusatory metaphors.

Any initiate into the world of Waits will quickly find parallels between the narrator of the song and Waits himself. He was a drunk and a self-styled beatnik. A piano player who played bars to more-or-less unaffected crowds. A musician who fully embraced the characters that he presented in his songs. As a result of this, the listening public pigeonholed him. He, in turn, milked it for all it was worth (which wasn't much, monetarily speaking). (Later, he scrapped the whole image and "style," got married, and proceeded to make some of the most inventive albums of the last three decades…)

But logic dictates more. Especially when you consider the breadth of Small Change. From its opener, the sweeping strings of "Tom Traubert's Blues," to the spoken word noir of the title track. From the booze soaked lilt of "Jitterbug Boy," to the swing of "I Can't Wait To Get Off Work," to the visceral, street-beat foot-stomping, lurid poetry of "Pasties and a G-String."

All of this adds up to a beautifully executed album, the kind we rarely get now that the limits of vinyl and CD have given way to mp3's and itunes. Small Change is a complete package. And it most certainly is not the simple ramblings of a drunken lounge singer. As I mentioned above, Waits's deep embrace of beatnik culture and his own artistic vision only served to perpetuate the myth of Tom Waits. But the album transcends that myth.

One need only look a little deeper, listen a little while longer.

I've been listening to Small Change for fifteen years now, and it still mystifies and entices me. It also reminds me of how young I was--- how stupid I was--- when I started college. It also reminds me of how much I got out of college.

I'll end with this: Tom Waits also inspired a significant portion of my early writing. I am going to include a hold over from that period, a poem entitled "Tom Traubert's Exit." It's not that good, but I think it does belong here.

Tom Traubert’s Exit

I felt like the opening bars of Ol’ 55.

Something about the combination

of notes,

of thoughts,

of feelings

cast into tense strings through

polished ivory.

And his voice,

an intense burning

turned to coals,

an ash dwindling

at the end of a cigarette, a somber

red mirrored in a swelled eye, diffused by

smoke filled light, glazed with knowledge

and motion.

Stars begin to fade like scattered headlights

and ‘Closed’ signs in

store front windows,

inviting contemplation of absence

and withered expectations,

like truckers welcome diners

and salesmen welcome empty rooms,

like poets fear the dark and paintings

of revolution.

But the piano keeps a steady rhythm in a

disheveled ear, warms a gut with simmering

affection and weathered

wisdom.

And then he was gone,

riding with lady luck on an empty

highway,

wishing he could stay

but knowing his ol’ 55 wouldn’t

let him.

---

* This blog contains three of the twenty-five albums. Future installments will be posted separately.