The Breaking Time

Poems for Friday: Where the sidewalk ends

A favorite since childhood, and Shel Silverstein is perfect for a busy week.

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Poems for Friday: A History Without Suffering

Rainy Streets of London on a Quiet Night, by Eric Magnuson

After blasting Frank Zappa's Trouble Every Day this morning, I settled down and decided that this piece by E.A. Markham was better suited to the times at hand.

In this poem there is no suffering.

It spans hundreds of years and records

no deaths, connecting when it can,

those moments where people are healthy

 

and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter,

maybe a Volume, shorn of violence

consists of an adult reading aimlessly.

This line is the length of a full life

 

smuggled in while no one was plotting

against a neighbour, except in jest.

Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She

is in a drought-fisted field

 

 with a hoe. This is her twelfth year

on the land, and today her back

doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity

and of murder have declared a day’s truce

 

in the Civil War within her. So today,

we can bring Nellie, content with herself,

with the world, into our History.

For a day. In the next generation

 

we find a suitable subject camping

near the border of a divided country:

for a while no one knows how near. For these

few lines she is ours. But how about

 

the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed

body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes;

anticipation of the young, the edited memory

of the rest of us? How about thoughts

 

higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes.

Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes:

they have their own privileged history,

like inherited income beside our husbandry.

 

We bring our History up to date

in a city like London: someone’s just paid

the mortgage, is free of guilt

and not dying of cancer; and going

 

past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline

advertising torture. This is all

recommended reading, but in small doses.

It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.

Magnifying a subculture, pt. II (or: why are there no more feathers?)

El Circo took them.

A little while ago, Jenka Gurfinkel wrote a brilliant post linking the fashion-induced feather shortage to the emergence of the Circus subculture and style, coming out of Burning Man:

Our story begins almost 12 years ago, in a little town in Oregon, by the name of Ashland, where a group of kids came together to start a circus performance troupe called, El Circo. The group would gain recognition within the Burning Man culture for the extravagant parties they threw at the festival, featuring lavish fire performances, a large, geodesic dome venue, and a top-notch sound system that attracted world-renowned music acts to perform there. In a 2005 San Francisco Bay Guardian article on the effect that the various groups within the Burning Man community have had on San Francisco nightlife — an impact which now extends to the entire west coast’s, and arguably global, dance culture — the writer paid particular attention to the influence of El Circo...

The whole history's fascinating, and it brings up something I've touched on here before: how a relatively small subculture magnifies its influence. In the previous case, I focused on the reasons aging Hollywood narcissists show up in so many productions.

El Circo's case is very different, and more positive. But something of the same underlying process is at work, with a difference.

Now, Ashland has a population just over 20,000. Unlike Hollywood, it's not a metropolitan hub plugged into media that can quickly magnify the influence of its cultures. However, El Circo were really damn creative and instead plugged into a subculture, in the form of Burning Man, that could magnify that in its annual, temporary metropolis.

Their panache and style is unique enough that others pick it up after the citizenry of Black Rock City dispersed to their separate corners, including those in aforementioned metropolitan hubs. More mainstream art subcultures, always craving an infusion of the hot new thing, pick it up. Given time, you have Steven Tyler in feathers, pissed off fly fishers, and one tribe out of Ashland that's spurred a larger movement while changing the way people dress around the world.

There's a reason why the third word in Coilhouse's alt culture mantra is INFECT.

Now, fringe artistic subcultures gaining massive popularity is not new, despite the fact that every generation or so the same subcultures seem to forget the process occurs. However, the incubator of Burning Man is, relatively speaking, as is the way that more globalized communications decrease the necessity for El Circo or similar groups to plug in to more mainstream cultural networks to get their message out. There's other ways to magnify now, and they're seemingly less dependent on location than before.

More food for thought.

Update: Talking with Gurfinkel via Twitter last night, she added an important caveat: the tipping point for the El Circo style came after some of its designers moved to Los Angeles. Metropoli remain important, and LA in particular remains a major magnifier for entertainment/fashion subcultures, as its been for a number of decades. As with any time of turmoil, old and new methods of spreading an infection are at work at the same time.

Poems for Friday: Ulysses

I must apologize, readers, for the fact that I've let the last few Fridays go by without a poem here. Alfred Tennyson's Ulysses is an old favorite, to the extent I can't believe that I haven't posted this here before. It's old-school: long and word-rich in that way that leaves the reader stuffed, almost too much. But, hell, they're incredible words.

July's simmered over the landscape, from D.C. to Asheville. One might be forgiven for the bits of this poem that drift up, complete with a sense that younger days are long past, and the sword rusted more than any want to admit.

It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole 

Unequal laws unto a savage race, 

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink 

Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd 

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 

Vext the dim sea. I am become a name; 

For always roaming with a hungry heart 

Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men 

And manners, climates, councils, governments, 

Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,-- 

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 

I am a part of all that I have met; 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades 

For ever and for ever when I move. 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! 

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life 

Were all too little, and of one to me 

Little remains; but every hour is saved 

>From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus, 

to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,-- 

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill 

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild 

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 

Subdue them to the useful and the good. 

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere 

Of common duties, decent not to fail 

In offices of tenderness, and pay 

Meet adoration to my household gods, 

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. 

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; 

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,-- 

That ever with a frolic welcome took 

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 

Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old; 

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. 

Death closes all; but something ere the end, 

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; 

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep 

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 

'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,-- 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

 

A walk-on part in the war: Heavy Metal East goes to battle

Photo by Anja Niedringhaus, Associated Press

Back in 2008, I wrote a piece for Coilhouse on the heavy metal subcultures in the Middle East, and the amazing bravery of the young people participating in them. It was a trend that

As the protests, uprisings and revolutions have rocked that region this year, I wondered what happened to those same metalheads. It was their generation, after all, that forms the core of the protests, and given their fire for a different world, I figured many had to be involved.

In this piece from the Atlantic, I found my answer, or at least part of it:

MANY MEN HAVE psyched themselves up for war by listening to rock and roll or heavy metal. But how many have sung Pink Floyd’s “Mother” within earshot of the enemy in the dead of night? “When it got really quiet, we’d play guitar and sing ‘Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?’” said Abdulfatah Shaka, 22, his rocket-propelled-grenade launcher at his side. “The snipers would get furious and start shooting everywhere.”

---

Less than three months earlier, Shaka was an engineering student who had never even held a gun. Bassam Essraity, a handsome 23-year-old with gelled hair and a trim beard, who now sat opposite him cradling a Belgian-made assault rifle, was doing media studies. They would play guitar together, jamming on the beach or hanging out in parking lots at night in their cars, doors open, drinking strong coffee or bottles of non-alcoholic beer.

After asking me to sit on his left—firing RPGs had destroyed the hearing in his right ear—Shaka explained that his introduction to pop and rock, and to the English language, came via the Backstreet Boys. As he learned to play the guitar, and broadened his musical horizons through Internet downloads, his taste grew more refined. “Neil Young, Metallica, and Pink Floyd, especially Dark Side of the Moon,” he said. “Iron Maiden and Nirvana too,” Essraity added. “We were just young guys enjoying music, dreaming of freedom.”

Then, in the third week of February, the revolution began. Shaka stuck close to his uncle, who had fought in Libya’s war with Chad in the 1980s. His uncle grabbed an RPG launcher when Misurata’s armory was overrun. After blasting two of Qaddafi’s tanks, he was shot dead. His weapon, still stained with blood, was handed to Shaka. Essraity, whose house had been hit by a tank shell, joined him on the front line, as did Hazim “Haz” Bozaid, a powerfully built 29-year-old with a goatee, a stocking on his head, and a black Sepultura T-shirt. An import manager, he was also the lead vocalist and guitarist in a local thrash and death-metal band called Acacus. “I was inspired by Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Chuck Schuldiner’s Death, that sort of stuff. It was not easy to find in Libya, so if you got something on tape, you guarded it like gold,” he told me.

The whole piece is emotionally wrenching, to say the least, and I was on the verge of tears by the finale.

Here's a country under the control of a psychopath for decades, with a radically different culture. But music is still music and humans are still human. It's spread past its original borders to something far more univesal. I don't know of any more potent symbol of a Breaking Time at its bravest than Libyan rebels goading a tyrant's snipers with Mother do you think they'll like this song? Another world is coming, bastards.

For the Heavy Metal East, it was just about living their lives and finding some expression for what they felt. But it wasn't that easy. The music was banned, but they listened to it anyway, and made their own. They wore the shirts and threw the horns, even if it meant a beating or jail. When they wanted their tyrants gone, they protested. When it was clear that wasn't enough, they picked up weapons and fought.

And here they are, a long long way from their smuggled tapes and garage bands, in a besieged, desperate city, many of their friends already dead, fighting. Singing "Mother" to taunt the snipers and "Wish you were here," well, just because.

Now, with Tripoli Street liberated, Shaka and his men were enjoying a day of rest before heading off to battle elsewhere. Bozaid talked about the metal festival he wanted to stage when Qaddafi was finally defeated. “It’s my dream—Hazfest,” he said. “It’s going to come true, if I’m still alive.”

I hope it will. The world, that world, is a fine place, and worth fighting for.

\m/

Poems for Friday: Campaign Speech

Poetry Daily featured this piece by Erika Meitner today. It is perfect enough to require no further introduction.

There are those who say we are up all night 
with the highway on. There are those who say 
we are as peripatetic as every red planet in orbit. 
But summer is always barefoot and adhesive, 
then wanders off in the most unattractive 
flip flops. Slip-slap. With something jammed 
between our toes like that, it's hard to feel inviolate.

There are those who say the Good News Gospel must be 
spread in schools. There are those who say this country 
is in the autumn of its time. But each and every one of us 
already learned in early grades to wind our breath through 
mangled versions of pilgrims' feet and Mary tunes 
on the recorder, no matter how many times we had to stop 
and suck our inhalers, yellow as caution tape.

There are those who say accidents like the Pinto 
are unavoidable. There are those who say we have lost 
our pride, and quality is no longer a way of life. 
But after midnight the radio plays a steady ocean 
of mariachi music and sad almost-cowboy songs. 
After midnight our ministering angels do what they want, 
whisper Ticonderoga pencil, certain poppies, or summer squash

to each head on the pillow of morning, each mouth 
slack with sleep. Nothing can travel faster than light. 
What are we going to do about it?

Poems for Friday: Night at the Pavilion

Afghan police attached to the 101st Airborne Division gather before a night patrol. Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko, AP.

Once again, a poem by Du Fu seemed appropriate. He's one of the rare poets who lived through the beginning of a Dark Age, in the form of the An Lushan rebellion. While observers in the West tend to focus on "what if the Roman Empire had never fell" type of scenarios, Rome was clearly unsustainable long before its final catastrophes. The Tang dynasty, on the other hand, was still in its heterodox heyday when the rebellion occurred. By its end, the official population had declined by 36 million people.

"Night at the Pavilion" is from the later period of Du's life, and, beautifully humane, it bears the hallmarks of long weariness with tumult.

At year's end, yin and yang hurry the shortened day,
At sky's end, frost and snow clear the frozen night.
Fifth watch: the drum and horn sound out mournful and strong,
Three gorges: the river of stars casts its trembling shadow.
Countryside cries from a thousand homes hearing news of the fighting,
Barbaric songs here and there rise from fishers and woodsmen.
Sleeping Dragon and Leaping Horse both ended in yellow dirt;
Waiting for news of worldly affairs brings me useless grief.

Democracy is coming

I am an unrepentant Leonard Cohen fan, and one of the keys to his genius is his poetic brilliance. "Democracy," originally a good song, gains a new power spoken, in this old piece from the United States of Poetry.

It's today's poem and, I hope, tomorrow's.

Poems for Friday: Advice to a Prophet

Some poems need little introduction. This piece, by Richard Wilbur, is one of them:

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God's name to have self-pity,

 

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,

Unable to fear what is too strange.

 

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.

How should we dream of this place without us?--

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,

A stone look on the stone's face?

 

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive

Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost

How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,

How the view alters. We could believe,

 

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip

Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,

The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,

The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

 

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn

As Xanthus once, its gliding trout

Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without

The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

 

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?

Ask us, prophet, how we shall call

Our natures forth when that live tongue is all

Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

 

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean

Horse of our courage, in which beheld

The singing locust of the soul unshelled,

And all we mean or wish to mean.

 

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose

Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding

Whether there shall be lofty or long standing

When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Poems for Friday: Bourbon

Add for Ancient Age, 1961

It's long past time to return to this old Friday tradition (poetry, but if you want to add bourbon and firearms, have at).The superb Southern poet R.T. Smith has this story, fresh in any age, best accompanied with ice and a bit of bite.

My father was hooked on one brand, Ancient Age, 
always in pints, perhaps to stow snug in the glove box 
with the pearl-handled pistol, and likely to prove 
he was a moderate man, and he would tell stories 
of his partner Earl Thatcher, a devotee of excess, 
intolerance and wrath, who'd slip away from dinner 
to take a piss but slink back to the room, sneak a sip 
from my father's bottle and add water to hide his habit, 
but Earl was a steady liar who never in his life solved 
a single crime, to hear my father tell it, an improvident 
soul prone to nocturnal misdemeanors himself, a bald 
rascal who ran with underage women and ate Chinese 
straight from the white box with sticks, an imposter 
who didn't know a six-cylinder from a V-eight. 
He shortcutted the Miranda recitation, might slap 
a suspect in private and believed the cuffs' teeth were 
meant to maim. They both liked their evening drink, 
however, and would sit before the TV, sound down 
to a whisper and compare notes, plan the next day's 
interviews and crime scene searches. It was arson 
they were hired to unravel, usually by half-wits 
eager for the insurance, and I've seen many pictures 
of the pair in charred ruins, their coveralls streaked 
with soot, remnants of an oily rag lifted on a stick 
or pointing at scorched remains of some poor fool 
who didn't know his craft and chose the wrong 
accelerant or was overcome by smoke. They both 
smoked Camels, and Earl was portly, a smooth man 
who liked his sleep and told crude farmer's daughter 
jokes when he wasn't bragging, while my father 
held himself to one jigger's worth an evening 
and stripped to his skivvies to enjoy his routine fifty 
push-ups before retiring. Earl got fired, of course, 
and my father laughed at the ways he tried to justify 
his misdeeds, especially in expense account matters, 
but years later Dad confessed he missed the game 
of jockeying to see who'd leave the tip or rush 
into a firebug's house first, weapons at the ready, 
and then he would go back to the kitchen cabinet 
and pour a second dash of Ancient Age and prepare 
to reminisce until he'd circle back around 
to the ever-present pity that it was Earl who 
told me about the darker methods of law officers 
and who took me to the range with ample rounds 
to fire at human silhouettes until I could deliver 
a tight group in the kill zone, at which point I'd 
swear with all of Earl's extravagant cursing art, 
praising the rascal who taught me how to breathe 
and squeeze the trigger and shoot for the heart.