Ricky told me in the car, he’d guard me if I dosed. Didn’t.
I went into the pit at X, drunk & on acid. Must’ve been ’85. Not cool, very sketchy.
Yeah, amusement parks are surreal venues for punk-rock on psychedelics.
Ricky told me in the car, he’d watch me if I dosed. He didn’t & I wandered.
That same decade I jumped off the Roseland stage at Sonic Youth! Landed hard, Jim Beam! Ouch, but amusement parks on psychedelics are more scary venues for punk-rock.
No one caught me? Sure, so what? I did ecstasy at Husker Du & years later at Afghan Wigs.
That same decade I jumped off the Roseland stage at Sonic Youth? Thanks, Jim Beam. Then it was the Nineties. I crowd-surfed a moment at Megadeth.
No one caught me! Sure, who cares? I did ecstasy at Husker Du & years later at Afghan Wigs. The Eighties & Nineties shimmer in my memory thanks to the stage diving, booze & drugs.
In the Nineties, I crowd-surfed a moment at Megadeth.
I fought to the front at Pantera in L.A. (sweat-soaked) & Hole in N.Y.C. (fire-hosed).
The Eighties & Nineties shimmer in my memory thanks to the stage diving, booze & drugs; dropped bogus acid at Lollapalooza, a perfect day, although, drank too much other nights.
I fought to the front at Pantera in L.A. (sweat-soaked) & Hole in N.Y.C. (fire-hosed).
Drank too much most nights, but almost no regret. I was free.
Dropped bogus acid at Lollapalooza that perfect day; drank too much the night
the hot Smashing Pumpkins bass player wanted to hang out. Sorry.
Drank too much most nights, but almost no regret. I was free.
Left the Cherry Tavern with my cousin, ’96, for the Afghan Wigs, Irving Plaza, guest list.
The Smashing Pumpkins bass player wanted me to stay. I smiled, “I wish. Can’t tonight, too drunk.”
Silence; walked into Irving Plaza, E kicking in with strums of their first tune. Crime Scene Part One?
Left the Cherry Tavern with my cousin, ’96 for the Afghan Wigs, Irving Plaza, guest list.
Other memories? Social Distortion at CB’s, Ramones, Pogues with Joe Strummer.
Silence; walked into Irving Plaza, the MDMA washing over me. Their first tune exploded: My Enemy?
Shane McGowan in East Village, Metallica in Barcelona, Beastie Boys in Los Angeles.
Other memories? Luscious Jackson at Nell’s, The Replacements, Circles Jerks, Nine-Pound
Hammer. Near the back of the crowd, cold beer in hand for Helmet, Ice-T, RHCP again!
Remember Big Black? So loud, it hurt. Still can’t hear right.
Shane McGowan in the East Village, Metallica in Barcelona, Beastie Boys in Los Angeles.
I’m sure you agree that hearing live music matters —
Julia Brennan: Have you listened to Taylor Swift’s Folklore? I am curious to hear your thoughts.
Rick Moody:
I have only just scratched the surface, so my answer is not comprehensive. The first part of my very preliminary reaction is: 1) I really hate The National. I have always found The National truly mediocre, like America’s answer to Coldplay. They are like the Hootie and the Blowfish of contemporary “rock” music. I was given their first album by a guy who is closely associated with them back in, uh, 1999 or something, and I disliked it then, and I have disliked every album since (even if I occasionally like Matt Berninger’s lyrics). So, 2) the fact that Folklore is produced by one of the National masterminds is not, in my view, such as to recommend it. 3) It still has tons of audio massage on the vocals. Maybe even some auto-tuning. This, in my view, suggests that it can’t coexist with a “more organic” sound, which is its selling point. Even if *some of it* was recorded at home, it still sounds like a Hollywood soundproof booth, the purpose of which is to shear off anything that sounds human. Such an approach is the opposite of “more organic,” and though you can, reasonably, make an argument about “organic,” about whether such a thing exists, the solution to the conundrum is not massive audio artifice along with, well, some acoustic piano, to indicate that you are more human than you have seemed in the past. 4) Above all, I think the album is a sort of professional imitation of Fetch the Bolt Cutters, which is not only the best pop record of the year, but, excepting maybe the new Dylan album, the best pop record of the last several years. The reasons why Fetch the Bolt Cutters is so good are numerous. It was recorded at home, it has tons of group percussion playing, it is sort of fucked up and poorly assembled in some ways, the lyrics are outrageously good, she is one of the greatest singers in contemporary music, and this is especially the case now that her range has grown a tiny bit less robust at its edges. There’s something desperately beautiful about Fetch the Bolt Cutters, like Fiona Apple is a person who is unable to avoid telling the truth, and as in all great art the deep truths are contradictory, impressionistic, from the distant past, and so on. If you watch Fiona Apple over the course of her career, she has done just what great artists do, gotten more individual, more unpredictable, more uncompromising, more singular, more strange. It’s all deeply admirable.
It seems natural to me that other artists, artists of any variety, would hear the Fiona Apple record and want to explore, amplify, the gestures of that album. Of course, having said this, Taylor Swift or surrogates will insist that of course all these songs were written before Fetch the Bolt Cutters or TS has never heard Fetch the Bolt Cutters or National guy has never heard her, either, and really he thought he was exploring themes he used on the Frightened Rabbit album he produced, or the Mumford and Sons album he produced, or he thought he was imitating Dusty In Memphis or something. Of course. In a way, all “sophisticated” recordings of the present moment sound like Folklore, the mix of acoustic and laptop-based effects is the sound of the moment. Is it organic? It is the very opposite of organic, really, and if you want to hear “organic,” try listening to Homegrown, the recently unearthed Neil Young album, or Rough and Rowdy Ways, which, one can assume, was largely recorded live. Just because Folklore has an acoustic piano on it does not mean — etc., etc.
That said, well, yes, it is the best thing ever recorded by Taylor Swift. When I hear (THE GUARDIAN, e.g.) saying, wow, we sure hope she goes back to writing pop songs after this worthy experiment, I must pronounce myself surprised. Because the difference between this and, for example, Lover, which I thought was hectoring and vapid, and Reputation, which had no discernible melody writing of any kind, is very significant. I think “The Last American Dynasty,” for example, though it does leave itself open to a critique of Swift’s own significant class blindness, and “Mad Woman,” are both relatively ambitious lyrics, both attempts to broaden the range of lyrical interests—which has more frequently been of the boys-I-have-known variety. I guess, at this point, “Cardigan” is the hit, and I actually think there are many interesting things happening in “Cardigan,” from a lyrical perspective. The way “When you are young they think you know nothing” line is reused and repurposed over the course of the song is definitely genuinely more powerful than, e.g., the rap break on “Shake It Off.” There is narrative happening, there is an interesting use of time, which, you know, is the secret weapon of narrative activity. I surely appreciate aiming higher. It’s funny, it crossed my mind to think about songs that I wrote when I was thirty or thirty-one years old, because I was writing songs then, and I had no grip on how to tell a story in song, nor about how to use the progress of themes across verses. I wasn’t smart, about human beings, at all. Whether it’s the having to grow up in public, or having to produce songs in such ridiculous amounts, year after year, Swift has grown enormously (or maybe we have simply grown alongside her and can see more plainly talent that was there all along, in terms of songcraft).
In all honesty, this is never going to be a songwriter that I want to listen to a lot. And I think there is now, and probably will always be, an aspect of Swift’s career that is about attempting to persuade people that she’s not entirely manufactured, a synthetically assembled machine of contemporary song. Is she not ever donning some garb of authenticity so as to make herself, from a marketing angle, more accessible to an audience and less manufactured? And who is that audience now? It’s not twelve year old girls anymore, and it’s not going to be women in their twenties much longer, and that’s when you have to start thinking about what songs are for and what music is for when adults listen.
PS I have this idea, because your inquiry (and my response), which has got me really thinking about the Swift album, that I should make a piece entitled “In Which I Talk to My Former Students About the Taylor Swift Album,” including our exchange and maybe a couple of other students who are good on such things. Any interest?
Julia Brennan: Definitely interested. Still working on my reply to your first email!
Linzie Lee: I have listened to the new Taylor Swift album. I would love to participate in your piece. I received the blessing of my friend, Julie, who is a Taylor Swift fanatic, to participate. I hope you are prepared for the onslaught of her army. And yes I promise to respond to emails faster.
Rick Moody: If you hate the album, too, that is fine, and appropriate, but I still want to try to understand. That is my goal.
LL: May I just ask— will I be cited by name in your piece? And is this a piece you are planning to place in a publication?
RM: Yes and yes, but probably just publication in a backwater somewhere where only 17 people will read it. If you want to use a pseudonym for the piece I will understand! No problem at all! Can you discuss an early awareness of Taylor Swift, and whether you liked her in your early life, and can you give particular instances? Is there a duty to like Taylor Swift owing to her ubiquity in your youth? I am very interested in specific examples, and specific autobiographical moments of Swift awareness.
LL: First time I learned about Taylor Swift was through Disney Channel because they were promoting “Teardrops On My Guitar.” I think that was her first single. The ingredients of a classic Taylor Swift song were already there. We all know Drew and the forlorn yearning.
Then, I listened to her through these lyric videos on YouTube with bad font and transition slides, and every comment had some iteration of “It’s like Taylor Swift stole my diary.” I didn’t listen to her with other people. I wasn’t a vocal fan, but I think I listened to her almost every day when I was younger.
I don’t have a duty to like Taylor Swift.
RM: Can you speak in a little more detail to a particular song from your youth and its relevance to your youth? When you think back on that time does a Taylor Swift song have a mnemonic capability? Does it help to create and recreate memories?
LL: Truthfully, I’ve been trying to type out an adequate answer for a while now. I was going to bring up “Enchanted” which was my favorite song by her. It makes me think of high school hallways but that’s because I think that she captures adolescent yearning well.
Rick, I apologize but I don’t think I’m the right person for this interview. I’m trying my best to answer your thoughtful questions, but I realize that I don’t think Taylor Swift figured in my life enough to provide interesting answers and contribute to your conversation. All I can think is how successful she is and how artistically uninteresting she is to me. I even relistened to the new album in preparation for this conversation and I was bored and felt nothing.
I apologize.
*
RM: Do you have any wisdom, or feeling about Taylor Swift? I am conducting correspondence with various people on the subject, maybe for a piece on the subject. Can you speak at any length on this subject? Like about some of the songs on Folklore?
Preston Sachs: Here it is:
“The 1”:
Her stuff is always about relationships. This shit is corny. ‘You be the one . . . Meet a woman on the Internet and take her home . . . greatest loves of our time are over now . . . roaring 20s . . .’ is she chastising society for the lack of depth in romance? I feel that such problems of the past still exist now—in fact I think we’ve made more progress in this day and age than previously.
It’s a simple riff. Good on her, she knows her base loves her voice and her style so I’m sure someone jammed out to this.
“Cardigan”:
This is too white for me, man. This is the type of music I hear at Barnes and Noble. I’m sorry but this song made me think of my white friends back in Ohio. I didn’t listen as in depth because it more had an ‘evocative’ vibe/experience to it. Also I need to Google her? Is she still in her 20s?? I don’t like this type of music, but I can see myself listening if I were reading or studying. It’s just so formulaic, like I don’t think there are any risks being taken with this song or the lyrics or the conversation as you might witness in others . . . (e.g. “WAP,” by Cardi B or Megan the Stallion’s “Savage”) . . . It’s so plain and formulaic. There is nothing memorable from this, my brother.
“The Last Great American Dynasty”:
Again, it was sunny… saltbox house on the coast . . . the town . . . it’s so suburban white. This is meant for white women. I can’t relate to any of this, and I don’t want to. Her songs have a conservative like straight edge feel to them. She appears to be empowering women but I don’t know what to think about how she presents the roles of ‘boys’ and ‘women’. If I didn’t know who she was I might have thought this is Christian alternative rock. Rick, I honestly just don’t know where she’s coming from. I feel like this is supposed to be feel-good at the end of the day?
“Exile”:
This is soooo cliche. I know someone who is this cliché and unoriginal and I feel now like they copy and paste this stuff in real life conversation. ‘Seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending.’ I mean there is always conflict in her material and emotions being expressed but the nature or the ‘legitimacy’/exploring this beyond mere dissatisfaction with a relationship seems to be lacking . . . I feel like this was a melody played over a soap opera relationship argument. What I hate is how it romanticizes broken relationships by simplifying them. This is adult Disney.
“My tears Ricochet”:
This seems to be the most layered one . . . Likely because it involves mortality. It’s definitely her most insightful endeavor that I’ve listened to thus far in this album. There’s a genuine exploration of the emotions associated with the loss she describes here and the chord progression (I don’t know shit about music) accentuates the effort. I think that the rumination of the conflict that the ‘significant other’ feels during the loss of their counterpart was very realistic and aptly romanticized in what I thought was her most genuine endeavor yet. There was still a formula involved, but it was a bit more ‘provocative.’ It’s very formulaic, bland, and ‘safe’. It’s not my vibe, but it can serve as respite for many people in this country—after all, that’s why she has the following she does!
*
Rick Moody: Are you ready to begin? Ground rules: you are allowed to ask me questions, too, and you may answer at any length that feels organic, and I will do the same. What is your evaluation of Swift’s new album, Folklore?
Abram Scharf: I listened to tracks one through five about a week after it came out, and then forgot about it until you emailed me. So it’s forgettable, at least.
I’ve got a couple of semi-discrete ideas about T.S. and Folklore, but if the question is how I liked it, or how I would compare it to her previous work, then I’d say that it’s better than her last two records, but much less interesting or fun than anything she did before those.
In short, it’s corny. It doesn’t hold up to rigorous examination along axes of originality, virtuosity, variety, allure/intrigue, unpredictability, or even sincerity (talking about Red here), but despite all of this, I still find it enjoyable to listen to. I wouldn’t tell you that it’s good because it reminds me of my youth, and my sister’s youth, and girls I knew in grade school, even though it does all of those things. I would say that if you found the center of the center, the least interesting person in the world, they would see themself fully reflected in that record, and a lot of Taylor Swift’s music. And that a part of me is that person. Which is humbling.
RM: Can you give me a particular song from Red, and give particular mnemonic interactions, therewith? (I have to say, here, in the spirit of total honesty, that my disregard for Red is complete.) PS, your gloss on “good” is excellent and powerful.
AS: Sure. The album came out during my freshman year of high school. I talked about it with a girl at a football game, and then a couple days later she posted the lyrics “chose the rose garden over Madison Square” on my Facebook page. We started dating the next semester; the song is called “The Lucky One.”
RM: I find the spot-quote-as-interpersonal-marker thing very odd, but I think it’s because I did it a lot of it myself in my middle teens, and then went fleeing in the opposite direction. Now it’s hard for me to remember. Does this memory indicate that the song has merit for you? Does it add to its merit? Or is the memory value neutral?
AS: The turn of phrase is ever so slightly more complex than the similes that Swift usually falls back on, and it’s nice that we were able to recognize that, but the memory doesn’t have much bearing on my evaluation of the song now. What’s funny, though, is that the football game and spot-quote thing is exactly the kind of dorky, adolescent anecdote that I would look for in an early Taylor Swift track (perhaps even the earliest). If I were to make a case for her oeuvre, I would say that she tapped into a very basic kind of millennial nostalgia, writing these kinds of “Landslide” type songs about missing a youth wasn’t even really over yet, at least for the people listening to them.
Also, I think her Folklore persona is supposed to be more reflective than nostalgic. She questions the decisions that she made in her twenties, and tries to figure out how those moments shaped her instead of just mining them for their sentimental value. Still, she could have tried a whole lot harder.
Was there anything you liked, or that surprised you?
RM: I am really interested in whether the current gesture should be understood as artistic ambition or persona maintenance, and in particular I am interested in whether it’s ever possible with Swift that there is NO persona maintenance. Obviously, I am suspicious of her, as an artist. But I also take seriously the idea that she is not 22, now, and she can’t go on with an audience of teenagers.
I want to urge attendance to the stripped down version of “Cardigan,” which is called the “cabin in candlelight” version. And I want to discuss whether it is organic, or a simulation of the organic.
When I was young I used to say: if it feels like there are credibility issues there ARE credibility issues. But now I am suspicious of intuition, which I suspect can be as much of a social construction as anything else, like, say, political belief, or religious certainty. I believe and disbelieve in intuition at the same time. I always feel like there are credibility issues, with Swift, but I have also been just enough in the public eye myself to know how confusing it is to have motives attributed to oneself that are precisely the opposite of the motives intended. The “cabin in candlelight” vocal goes further in turning off the auto-tune, and all the processing on her voice. Does that make it better? What would constitute “good” on Folklore? Reflective?
The other thing is, as I said to another correspondent, is this whole organic thing not, in some way related to what works so well on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, but does not entirely work here?
AS: I don’t buy the reflective stuff, but “Cardigan” is the worst of it, in my opinion. The few lines that place the song in the perspective of someone who’s supposed to be older/wiser become mostly irrelevant by the end, when she opts to validate her imagined younger self, saying that she actually did know what she was doing. There›s no real reconsideration.
Everything about the “cabin by candlelight” version fits too nicely into the whole cottagecore thing, which is itself a corporate trend, as well as a tired shorthand for lone artists doing whatever lone artists do when they’re alone. Fiona Apple took eight years between The Idler Wheel and Fetch the Bolt Cutters, and the latter succeeds because she allowed herself to work slowly, on her own terms, outside of the neverending album cycle that governs the professional lives of most artists. You have to give it time, I think, or else the persona will become this weird, proscriptive thing, writing its own press.
To this point, even the bad songs can now be said to serve some role in the greater narrative arc of Swift’s project, so any organic bits are bound to end up either buried or contradicted. “Good” on Folklore would be an actual commentary on what it means to have a persona, and the toll that it has taken her to maintain it—something that “Mirrorball” does, to a degree.
RM: Now you’re talking.
What would you think of “Cardigan” if it were written by someone not named Taylor Swift? Or, let’s say, by a totally unknown singer-songwriter doing a cottagecore thing because s/he/they actually lives in a cottage? Would it change the song?
Next I’m going to ask you about “Mad Woman.”
AS: I imagine I’d find it confusing for the same reasons that it confuses me as a Taylor Swift song. Is it trying to be sexy? Wistful? Wistfully sexy? That “sensual politics” line, for example, is so weird and unsensual, it makes the stock romance imagery seem insincere, at best. As for the cottagecore angle, who knows. I don’t think it aligns much with the song in the first place, so the question of whether this person actually lives/writes/records in a cottage doesn’t seem too important.
RM: I’m sure I’m going to be alone in making the comparison, but why is “Cardigan” not to be understood as heavily influenced by Weezer’s “Undone—The Sweater Song?” Or for that matter, why should it not be seen as an allusion to the sartorial styling much admired by deceased punk icon Kurt Cobain? If I’m right that the “cottagecore” simulation and presence of a Dessner at the top of the credits is a bid for artistic credibility, then why should we not think that she knows her indie rock? To reiterate, the problem for Swift is audience. If you look at an example like Madonna, which is not an entirely accurate comparison, but still, Madonna’s last truly brilliant album was Ray of Light from 1999, produced when, roughly speaking, Madonna was forty. At a certain moment in the pop music world, unless you mature your audience alongside you, you age out. This is arguably a greater problem in a bubblegum or top forty context, because the audience is that much younger. Swift has to plot a route toward some more reliable audience in the next ten years, give or take, or watch her enormous clout diminish. No doubt these ageist issues in the popular song are even worse if you’re a woman—look at how Linda Ronstadt was treated when she tried to opt out. Note the absence of a Grace Slick on the platform that can still be so successfully exploited by Bob Dylan—see how hard Christie Hynde has had to work just to stay the same. The dynamics are even worse in Black music or R&B. Aretha Franklin’s last high impact crossover pop song was “Who’s Zoomin’ Who,” when she was 43. And she was perhaps the greatest and most original singer in popular music history. In hip hop you’re mostly done by forty, in K-pop probably even younger.
So Taylor Swift has ten years, according to current projections, to find an audience outside of her current home, with which to mature. She could easily make a “country” album again, and I bet she will at some point, though I imagine given her political tiptoeing recently—into Democratic ranks—that may not seem like a truly comfortable fit. She wants to be taken as a “serious songwriter,” in the way, perhaps, that Neil Diamond always did. But with the added feminist angle: she wants to be taken as a serious songwriter like Carole King, or Carly Simon, or Janis Ian, or to take a fine contemporary example Erykah Badu, and that’s the struggle in this album.
I actually think “leaving like a father” in “Cardigan” is really good, and reminds me of Westerberg’s “you might be a father, but you sure ain’t a dad.” A lot of this album seems to be about a bad affair with a much older person gone wrong (maybe the older songwriter she wants to be is Alanis), but what do you think about “Mad Woman,” which, you know, kinda has some literary references.
Here’s an addendum: I was driving children around this morning for a couple of hours, and I had a revelation (a false revelation, but still) that “Cardigan” is definitely about Kurt Cobain. It would be a really interesting development if true. Because then, instead of the song being an autobiographical “confessional” lyric (when we know, really, that those confessions are heavily scripted) it is actually a fantasy, in which the narrator, a songwriter, is metaphorically ravished by a God of Song, then you really have something going on. “Leaving like a father,” then is an indication of how songwriting lineage is like the Electra Complex. There are many ways to tease this idea, that Swift is invoking Cobain at the beginning of Folklore sort of the way Dante encounters Virgil at the beginning of the Inferno, at the mouth of hell. Swift requires Cobain to take her into the underworld of song, to which we will get in subsequent missives. The question is what the word “folklore” means in this context. Does she mean “folk” to be taken literally as a sign of the folk idiom (the album has almost nothing folky about it), or that it is the music of the people, as opposed to, say, Red or 1989, which was the music of . . . girls. There was a dumb advertisement in the late eighties (around when TS was born, let’s say), actually the mid-eighties, and it was for Miller Beer, the worst of domestic beers, I would say as a person who was actively alcoholic at the time, and in this advertisement, for some reason, was the Boston band, the Del Fuegos (one of them is now Dan Zanes, the guy who does quite sophisticated children’s music, and the other was Warren Zanes, who wrote the Tom Petty biography), and there is a voice over and Dan, I think, says, something like “We think of rock and roll as folk music, because it’s music for folks.” I’m constructing this all from memory, but the advertisement is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5MMct8efwE. I can’t bear to watch. But maybe TS is using “folklore” in this way: as a gambit for the other half of the audience, and thus the presence of a Dessner, and also Bon Iver guy. Anyway, that was my interpretation in the car, “Cardigan” is all about Cobain.
AS: Re: “Madwoman” and literary references, the influence of The Crucible is clear, and generally well-handled, though I’m primarily interested in the chorus, and the more post-war, suburban flavors, like “do you see my face in your neighbor’s lawn?” or “good wives always know.” Am I correct in assuming that you’re thinking of Plath, or, more specifically, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”? Because that’s definitely the lane that Swift wants to be in, I think, and one that could be a good fit for her, once she stops making music videos with magic pianos. My biggest issue with the record–taken here to mean all the songs, bonus tracks, remixes, videos, photographs, and, as of yesterday, chaptered “Selections from . . .” albums that orbit this thing called Folklore — is how she’s still betting hard on the TikTok crowd, and giving them exactly what they want, more often than not. The Taylor Swift Extended Universe, so carefully plotted up to this point, will eventually need to rest on the back of a record that is just a record, and not a breadcrumb trail of (self-)references and creative bona fides.
I thought about bringing up Carly Simon earlier, especially with that “cannons all firing at your yacht” line, but Alanis Morrisette seems less obvious, and more resonant with Plath’s jagged melancholy. Staying in that realm, why not talk Courtney Love and Hole, formed in the ever-relevant year of 1989? I think you’re right on about the titular cardigan, but it irks me that we as listeners have to go back to something so glaringly superficial as her (and Kurt’s) fashionable anti-fashion, something that I now can’t think about without also remembering the six figure sum that it got at auction, and the fact that it was last worn onstage by a mannequin at a Hard Rock hotel.
RM: Okay, you have to clarify, unpack, the TikTok comment for me, because as an elderly person I know about TikTok only two things, 1) that it is a trojan horse for Chinese hegemony, or so a certain political figure says, and 2) that it is a medium where people my age imitate people who are good dancers, occasionally, and then these “parents” lose all dignity. I gather it involves music after a fashion, but I don’t really know how. My kids showed the whole to me for five minutes, but it did not seem to speak to my life experiences.
AS: Dancing and data-mining are integral to the thing, though it’s so much more than that, and I, as a non-user, can’t really speak to the multitudes which it contains. Suffice it to say that you only get fifteen seconds per video, with a maximum of four videos playable back to back, so viewers are only ever hearing a fraction of the song in question. That fraction of the song gets used over and over again, and a visual language develops around it, or gets grafted on from another song or soundbyte.
With this in mind, I mostly meant that on TikTok, a song is not a song, but a cataloguing device meant to reinforce dominant aesthetic and commercial trends. Presenting her music as #cottagecore, by, say, rereleasing certain songs as “Folklore: the escapism chapter,” can only be read as her pushing those tracks which have viral potential, and hoping that people take the bait.
RM: Ah, I get it. A sort of hashtag culture spreading out. I feel like the hashtag is the ultimate triumph of Aristotle–things are of note only for their ability to be catalogued and curated, and for no other reason. I curl up and die any time anyone says such and such a hashtag is trending on Twitter (which I ignore), because I don’t care what anything is when rendered as a word or two, but only how this thing, or this sequence of things, this dynamic of things, feels. I assume, to some extent, that this is a post-hoc marketing gesture by Team Swift, but you never know. You never know to what degree people actually want to be integrated into this world of reductive taxonomies. More on “Mad Woman” tomorrow.
AS: Some grist for the mill: T.S. still doing a Target exclusive (likely contractual), but sending signed copies to record stores.
RM: I did hear this. I guess it’s a fine gesture, like her sticking it to Spotify. One has to enjoy any effort to stick it to Spotify.
“Mad Woman” has a few good lines in it, like: “You’ll poke that bear till he claws come out/And you find something to wrap your noose around.” And also: “The master of spin has a couple of side flings,” etc. I suppose our tendency is to want to treat this lyric as an autobiographical lyric, and to want to treat it hermeneutically as though one might figure out exactly which record company exec or publicist guy is being referred to. “Illicit Affairs,” another song on the album seems to cover similar material, but in a more despairing and less angry way. They both, certainly, have a sort of Morisette-ish incision to them, probably “Mad Woman” more than the other. People seem to be treating them as merely confessional. To me, they are less confessional and more about consistency with an idea of femininity in the popular song, especially with certain “auteur” singer-songwriters. The originality, if there is some, is in the severity of the rendering of the feminine subject.
And that’s why I wanted to introduce into the conversation Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman In the Attic, which alludes to Jane Eyre in the title, but is more concerned with rendering the feminine characterization, and the role of the woman writer in the 19th century beyond simply the Brontes. What if Swift is less about confessing about her private life, and more about having a nuanced conversation about whether or not women can sing about this stuff in a way that is genuine? The problem with “Mad Woman,” if it’s about her life, is that the character gives away all of her agency to the married “record exec” character and retains no ability to have power in the relationship (except insofar as she gets to write a song about it). It’s psychologically rich, if strange, that one of the most culturally powerful women in popular music has no power in a relationship with some record company exec, etc. Unless her relationship is with Elon Musk (who seems taken) or similar, it’s hard to imagine a relationship in which she is not a complete player, although, of course, anything is possible. The human animal is strange. But as a departure from, and an elaboration on, how women are rendered in song, as related to how they were rendered in literature, “Mad Woman” is sort of genius. If she’s making it all up, that is, it’s kind of genius.
By the way, if you want to hear a really grim and true song on a similar subject try “Private Life” by Pretenders. That’s a song I really love. The use of reggae, so rarely brought off well by white musicians, somehow works here, is really loving, and the sentiment/anti-sentiment of the song is fierce, but unperturbed at the same time. There was a time when Chrissie Hynde was one of the greatest narrators of romantic complication ever, like try out “Birds of Paradise,” if you haven’t heard it. It makes me cry every time. “One time when we took off our clothes/you were crying/they say nothing lasts forever/ we were happy together.” Now that’s a love song. Why so good? Because everyone is implicated, everyone is sad, everyone longs, everyone takes responsibility. Of course, the Pretenders are also powerful because everyone in the band passed into the beyond about when that song was recorded, and so the aura of regret everywhere, in everything.
Or, you know, what about “Buckets of Rain?” That’s a guy’s point of view, yes, but has anyone ever said it so well? Or what about Jolie Holland’s “Mexican Blue?”
I will note that this morning there is also the news about Jerry Falwell, Jr., and his wife, Trump bundler, Becki Falwell, had an affair with a twenty year old, and now he’s coming out with it. Somehow the third-wheel quality of the story bears some resemblance to “Mad Woman,” and in this context it’s hard not to identify with poor Giancarlo Granda. Definitely check out the text messages that Granda gave to the press.
AS: I agree with everything you’re saying about “Mad Woman,” except not about “Mad Woman.” To my mind, “The Last Great American Dynasty” does the same work but with greater humor and nuance, as Swift seems to genuinely identify with Rebekah Harkness, and sees herself in the ways that she was represented by her high-society neighbors (i.e. your record execs or pop stars) and the press. By parroting her (Harkness’s) detractors, Swift places us outside of the relationship, and so manages to ironize the gold-digger/mad woman archetype while maintaining some mystery vis. the subject’s private life. See lines like “The doctor had told him to settle down/It must have been her fault that his heart gave out,” which have a kind of sweetness about them, in that glib, Austenian parlor-speak way.
And I hope Granda writes an album about it. Perhaps he already has.
RM: All the news, the incredibly grim news, has crowded out the Taylor Swift indie rock juggernaut. On Sunday, the Trump auto processional came through Edgewood, Cranston, RI, blowing their horns and advertising their guns. Fun times.
Somehow this reminds me of the period in which people tried to smoke Swift out on her political beliefs, and she tried not to be clear (owing to her remaining foothold in a country, one supposes). Nowadays she is more open, at least she is very open about LGBTQ+ stuff, and she seems to have said a few mild things about the frustrations of the present. It does seem, however, that it’s hard to keep her accomplishments in the forefront of cultural perceptions, right now. I agree about “The Last Great American Dynasty,” by the way, that it is frankly more novelistic in its set of concerns. It does seem to imagine some provenance of her house in Newport. It’s kind of incredible, in a way, that she is advertising her big house in Newport, in this way. Here’s the article from House Beautiful, with photos: www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/a33417436/taylor-swift-holiday-house-folklore-last-great-american-dynasty/.
I think it’s fair to say that the house, and the song about the house, while admirably continuing the “mad woman” theme from the earlier song, are not like unto the indie rock thing. Talking about your big house, however truthful, is an odd choice, unless you’re the kind who thinks real-estate display is admirably American. And it does sort of pull back the curtain on the studied aspect of the album, its generic marketing.
I guess I want to sort of talk about the sound to you. What do you think about the sound?
AS: It doesn’t bother me so much, though I do think that Aaron Dessner’s compositions suffer when he forgoes live percussion. On his records with The National, Bryan Devendorf’s drumming breaks up the more claustrophobic productions, and gives them direction, which Folklore seems to lack, especially near the end. If you check the album credits, you’ll find that almost all of the tracks with live drums were produced by Jack Antonoff, whose record on Taylor Swift songs is spotty, but whose choices on Folklore are less showy than Dessner’s, and play to Swift’s strengths (once again, see “Mirrorball”).
The main pitfall of the faux-glitchy electro-acoustic thing for Swift is that she, like many contemporary pop singers, will end up taking it and doing this sprechgesang thing that approximates the most basic elements of rap, but is delivered in such a way as to not trip that wire. “Seven,” for example, is passable until she goes “Sweet tea in the summer / Cross your heart, won’t tell no other” and then, even worse, “Your braids like a pattern / love you to the moon and to Saturn,” with the rhythm and inflection of a jump-rope or clapping rhyme. I get that it’s supposed to sound kind of juvenile (later: “Pack your dolls and a sweater / We’ll move to India forever”) but it hits my ear so wrong, I can’t let it go.
Maybe part of it is that Dessner’s default mode as of late is dreary and inorganic, something that I found to work well on The National’s High Violet, Trouble Will Find Me, and Sleep Well Beast, but which first got so tall, dark, and looming on Boxer. There you can hear the band getting away from the big guitar sound that they’d been working on with albums one through three, and implementing the synths/preprogrammed elements that they favor now. You see it on “Mistaken for Strangers,” which might be a bit brat-packy, but coheres, and even rips, in my opinion.
Since we started this conversation, I’ve been thinking about the phrase “Another uninnocent, elegant fall / into the unmagnificent lives of adults” from that song, and wondering if Swift didn’t choose Dessner just for his “sophisticated songwriting,” but his single minded commitment to stony, adult aesthetics. At the very least, it was a spectacular choice press-wise.
RM: Detail from a John Cage score, herewith. More soon.
RM: Did you see this? pitchfork.com/news/watch-taylor-swifts-debut-performance-of-betty-at-the-acms/
I have to speak to my intense dislike of this song, in the context of the other songs. If I’m right that the purpose of the new album is to try to build bridges with people who care about adult music, viz., adults, the only thing this song has to recommend it is it’s first-person-gender-not-my-own trope, which we don’t even know about till the bridge. Clever, in that creative writing exercise way. Only problem is that in every other way it’s light and insubstantial, and especially in this version, in this attempt to curry favor with the country audience by playing the acoustic guitar live (I am always, I should say, fascinated by her guitar-playing capabilities–the more primitive the better I like it), and by having a harmonica on there, by some poor bastard standing off in the wings. Why can’t the harmonica player be onstage? It’s sort of an Elvis gesture, which is to say a Vegas gesture, not allowing the harmonica player onto the stage.
Just for the sake of exploiting potential differences of opinion I aspire to write about my dislike of the National, but it seems time consuming. I do, however, love Clogs, the side project of Bryce, which seems mothballed now. It involved actually playing the instruments and not using so many computers. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX88PgjtLs
AS: Another thing about “Betty,” which I wouldn’t mention except for the circumstances of the above performance, is the queerbaiting element that here hooks the conservative faction, only to let them breathe easy with the, ahem, gender reveal. Though the album’s been out for almost two months now, and any confusion re: Taylor Swift’s public sexual orientation has surely been Googled away by those who may have found themselves in doubt, her bringing the almost-gay-sounding song into the Grand Ole Opry feels like a classically non-transgressive transgression, to say nothing of the fact that there wasn’t anyone else in the room to cut away to, save for the Harmonica Schmuck.
Does this mean that we’re not going to talk about the John Cage score?
RM: Yes, let’s talk about the Cage score, for sure.
And I totally agree about the faux-LGBTQ thing, which is unfortunate, disappointing, calculating. But even the “kissed a girl” meme, which might have been, which is only verses one and two, is tired and borrowed from LGBTQ+ persons who risk a lot more, and always have. If you follow the Katy Perry “Kissed a Girl” controversy, you may remember that it was preceded (perhaps borrowed from, though without paying up) by the transitionally-immense “Kissed a Girl,” by Jill Sobule: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUi11Cz4ZUg. Jill didn’t have the dilettante-ish qualities that Katy had and has, and wasn’t tweaking conservative Christians, but living her life, and if you assume that Swift’s aping is aping a gesture that was itself aping, at a certain point, you have to acknowledge that the signifier is part of unlimited semiosis and no longer has a relationship to an original denotative gesture. It’s just part of a code, or advanced capitalism. Jill Sobule meant something. One might also speak of the Madonna-kisses-Britney gesture, as similarly vague, and non-controversial, or even pre-digested for a male gaze. I did think it was good when Flea kissed Dave Navarro on Guitar magazine though. That was a passage through and beyond, even though it would perhaps not be considered that revolutionary in this day.
The Cage score is for a preferred or imaginary version of the Taylor Swift album.
AS: Preferred how? When I think about Cage, I think about stochastic processes, indeterminacy, the I Ching—methods and perspectives that represent the opposite of how contemporary pop hits are thought of and engineered. To that point, Folklore is certainly an attempt to distance Swift from the idea of “the formula,” and I can see how picking Dessner might be seen as just a bid for a more complex formula instead of an attempt at realizing more personal/organic/idiosyncratic modes of expression.
I’ve never read or heard her talk about putting constraints on her own practice, but perhaps that’s what needs to happen, if she’s to progress artistically. Like, no similes. Roll a die, and that’s how many chords you can use. Tune your piano to the value of your water bill, in Hz. With some intermediate calculations, maybe. Who knows what the plumbing situation is like in “Holiday House.”
P.S. I got a host gig at this restaurant that’s set to open in Chapel Hill next month. Kind of fancy. I’ve been going in for training every night with the rest of the FOH staff, which thus far has meant sitting at the tables and taking notes on things like “The Steps of Service” and “Hospitality as Dialogue.” Feels like a grad seminar for waiters. SERV2200. Also— and I just saw this, as I was typing— have you ever noticed how similar the words “writer” and “waiter” are? Spooky.
RM: Vis a vis Swift and the stochastic, which are two things not frequently conjoined together into one spot, I should probably admit that at one point I did embark on a project in which I made a list of every word that had occurred in a Taylor Swift song up to 1989. I would, according to this plan, then make a new song, or at least a discovered poem, a stochastic, freely-arrived at poem, out of the Taylor Swift words, by reordering them. I did not get very far, because, well, my deeply-felt process-poetry mood has found less creative time since I arrived at Brown.
But I will attach a short excerpt here. It will be obvious that this project was heavily influenced by Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho:
1899
1.
{ }
{ }
garden of the
perfectly watched
{ }
actually . . . { }
bleachers
{ }
{ }
charming
{ }
glow hold
{ }
{ }
horse
isn’t
known
{ }
{ }
{ }
night jeans
2.
{ }
bulletproof daydream
{ }
every fix is
{ }
magic
3.
mascara
opened
{ }
passport
red
she
screams thorns
till
snow means
{ }
heartbreakers
{ }
goodbye:
flash castle
4.
breathless boy cages
of December:
{ }
{ }
I’m a glow hospital
I’m an insane lock monster
I’m a permanent sidewalk
I’m a sky necklace
I’m nothing’s kiss
I’m heaven in green
I’m your dance classroom
I’m a torture weekend
I’m a wonderland of scars
I’m scarlet problems
I’m a phone mistake
I’m Miss Laughing Hindsight
I’m fragile and gone
I’m a crystal bullet
I’m your forever ghost
{ }
RM: That was it, anyhow. So maybe it is possible to conjoin John Cage and Taylor Swift into one project. PS, that was really funny about “writer” and “waiter.” I remember, in my unemployed period in 1983, really spending a lot of time thinking about the words “no experience necessary.”
AS: I love that the word “bleachers” features so prominently. She only uses it twice, I think, with one in each pre-chorus of “You Belong With Me,” first rhyming with “T-shirts,” then “sneakers.” It’s also the reason that we’re even talking about Swift right now, as a kind of bookend to your original criticism of Red, which was inflammatory, but hardly as much as the kinds of “bleachers” that you compared it to. I’m listening to it presently, Red. It’s the last CD of hers that I bought, or plan to buy.
I just had to skip “I Knew You Were Trouble.,” in part because it’s ridiculous, but mostly because the next track is “All Too Well,” which is the closest she gets to earning that Joni Mitchell comparison she was angling so hard for. And now I turned the CD player off, because the song after it is “22,” which I can’t listen to without feeling like my brain is itching. So I understand where you were coming from.
As stated before, my interest and allegiance lies with the early Swift, who gave us “She’s Cheer Captain and I’m on the bleachers,” and then donned a brown wig to play that Cheer Captain in a music video intercut with scenes of her singing her own music into a hairbrush. It’s juvenile in the best way, which is to say, sincerely juvenile. She knew what made a Taylor Swift song great, and I think she could very well find that again at some point, as an older, more thoughtful writer, musician, and performer. It would have to be something new, and honest in a way that could be very disarming, coming from an artist whom myself and many of my friends actually learned how to be jaded over. I look forward to it, the music forged in the Swifty of my soul.
I first came across a sizzler called Such Devoted Sisters: Those Fabulous Gabors in the late 80s, and the book just slayed me. Sisters, Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva were born in Budapest in the late 20s early 30s, to mother Jolie and her lame husband Vilmos. Jolie was a frustrated actress, and the girls were furiously groomed to enter society as the best companions a tycoon or ambassador could hope for. The first Gabor I ever saw was Eva, on Green Acres – she threw the dishes right out the window so she didn’t have to wash them! The comic timing, the hair, a disciplined structure of white gold, the chiffon, the make up – This was beauty to me, still is.
I spent one winter day at the Museum of Television and Broadcasting, and watched clips of Zsa Zsa on quiz shows. She was a quick witted stage version of a ruthless courtesan. As I cracked up in late model headphones, perched in a nothing cubicle midtown, I knew in my soul that this was glamour, and glamour doesn’t come easy. It’s not normal, well balanced, or in therapy, though it can be in jail, as she briefly was after slapping a dumpy nothing of a traffic cop in Beverly Hills.
Guessing Zsa Zsa was spinning out pretty badly when she flung her valuable jewels out the window of her Bel Air home, a renunciation of everything EVERYTHING her life was about. Then the fits, the happy pills, the straight jacket, and having to get sprung.
It doesn’t take too much research to find out that Zsa Zsa was what they’d call ‘bipolar’ these days. It’s always so triumphant sounding, like the key to a solution – ‘my ex-wife is Bipolar!’ but in other days there were different words or no words and it’s a hard diagnosis to live with. Guessing Zsa Zsa was spinning out pretty badly when she flung her valuable jewels out the window of her Bel Air home, a renunciation of everything EVERYTHING her life was about. Then the fits, the happy pills, the straight jacket, and having to get sprung. Nowadays they say ECT is a much more delicate instrument, fine tuned tinkering with just one side of the brain, but a lot of difficult ladies were given the strong stuff, old fashioned Shock Therapy, a hammer to both sides of our heads, when we/they couldn’t shut up or escape. Close call.
Dr K, my playful now transwoman medication doctor in New York, only recently brought up the idea of ‘bipolar’ with me a few months ago, sandwiching it between our urbane banter. That’s how relatively lightly I’ve been handled, helped, and steered. I couldn’t leave my apartment much for about 8 years, so so down, trying to hide it until I couldn’t anymore – when I run into former students from Marymount Manhattan they say “We were so WORRIED about you!” I was trailing in, sitting in the tiny chapel for solace, disorganized, but due to the corrupt adjunct system of complete negligence I was able to hung onto that job for about five semesters, finally toppled by an unwholesome appearance on HBO rather than my near complete failure as a college teacher.
Desperate as hell, I took all my money – $150 cash! – to an internist in the West Village and asked him to test me for every disease, ‘cuz I was just not making it. He sported me a bottle of Prozac, and it helped. Helps. A couple of times I’d be at my clinics shaking, unable to problem solve, and ask about going away somewheres – “They’re really pretty bad places, Jennifer” the low paid clinicians would warn me. “Can I help you send a fax? X Ray your ankle?”
I met a reader of my old Maximum Rock’n’Roll column, and he was training to be a social worker – “You’re not psychotic, you’re counter culture!” he sputtered, pained at watching me be a zombie on Zyprexa, Risperdol, what have you.
When I spent a missing couple of years on anti-psychotics, I met a reader of my old Maximum Rock’n’Roll column, and he was training to be a social worker – “You’re not psychotic, you’re counter culture!” he sputtered, pained at watching me be a zombie on Zyprexa, Risperdol, what have you. I went off the mind numbing stuff, and continue stay off over the years. I stop anything when my cognitive powers slip. The thought that I may be bipolar stings, it’s such a tired label, and I’m glads that Zsa Zsa was never saddled with that one.
The men Zsa Zsa liked were smart, and good at living in the world – the Ataturk, actor George Sanders, an Argentinean polo player called Porfino Rubiroso who just seemed to have gotten with every high profile woman he wanted to get with, way more than once. The man at the end was a sad case, the self named Prince Frederick Van Anhalt III – he chose the first name of Prince as it was royal sounding, bought a knock off dukedom, and insinuated himself into her life when she was very old and he still had some game. What a jackass! Zsa Zsa was almost comatose the last decade or so of her life, and had a few head injuries, and he pulled such classy stunts as: trying to have her frozen and propped up at the dinner table (not in the will I’m guessing). He held two bit press conferences in Palm Springs and suggesting he was the real father of Anna Nicole’s child, had some love connection with Paris Hilton, a relative of one of Zsa Zsa’s earlier husbands, Conrad Hilton. At some point every hustler slips up and marries another hustler, and really Palm Springs must be crawling with them, waiting for the first sign of dementia to make the moves. Hell, I know guys who’d be with a woman just to get out of the rain. Elder abuse happens all the time just for rent controlled one bedrooms, but the cryogenics bid by Van Anhalt III was really really low. Zsa Zsa had to know how sad and terrible this final husband was. When she could speak clearly and not fall down all the time, she was a lady who had once spurned Frank Sinatra, who was not at all her idea of class. George Sanders was articulate, abusive, alcoholic, and a working movie/stage actor. Sometimes straight people are just in a fetish relationship without the word ‘play’ involved, though, and they had that going on. As for Porfino, the Argentinean Polo Player, I mean lets face facts – that guy knew how to make a woman feel good, and he didn’t need any place to live.
I believe that the fact and term of Gigolos is much more flexible than the sorry mistake a head injured and lonely Gabor might make at the end. People are sometimes hustling for soul, or because they were born to hustle. My late ‘lady doctor’, a glam Viennese who piled on the make up, had a receptionist, Scott. He looked and sounded like a Soap Opera actor, and he broke down when she passed – he lived with Dr Mary, had sex with her, went with her to the doddering private club she belonged to and partied with the glam seniors of another era, cuz he had no problem with that. He loved the set up, he loved her, she loved him, he is a fan of the eccentric woman and a gigolo and if I was any kind of playwright I’d have taken him myself, because he says more cool and wild shit in his salesman on acid voice, reliably, than most people say in a lifetime.
I had a gigolo who I’d call a ‘location whore’, and maybe he was worth it but he would have also killed me. Ghetto Clooney wanted my apartment without me in it, but there was something else. He gave me some mojo, and he knew how. Women are an inside job, it’s how men make us feel that’s sexy, and that’s an almost intangible skill and the same application, craft, and drive is brought to that skill as to anything worthy. So he was both, Ghetto Clooney – some good inspiration, and a downfall if I let it be. But man he was good company for a while there. I feel the Gabors were here to be good company. Eva was Merv Griffin’s close friend and ‘beard’ – they could attend functions as a straight couple! He was so gay and everybody knew it but a master negotiator, showman, just all around brain. Merv so won the game of life and chose Eva as some kind of platonic playmate. His jacket lining alone inspired standing ovations and devout loyalty. Diamonds and languages, the Gabors were nobody’s fool, right up until Zsa Zsa caught Alzheimer’s.
After all, none of is offered a level playing field, and none of us have any right to expect one. I am poor but smart and in good company much of the time, and when I need a little pick me up I leaf through my extensive Gabor archives. “How can you commit champagne to paper?” Zsa Zsa’s frustrated diva-ographer, Gerold Frank, former reporter, war correspondent, and writer for hire asked rhetorically, but he went and did it.
Setup: A stranger who looks like John Coltrane, but has no memory, arrives in New York in the year 2000. Searching for clues to his identity, he finds his way to a septuagenarian Juilliard professor named Albert Hill and two young jazz students (Peony and Les), who join up to help him find his way home. First stop, the Village Vanguard.
A combo from Los Angeles was taking the stage. It was a tiny stage, so it was easy to take. Anyone could do it. The Gene Czernak Group, GCG, had made their name at the Lighthouse, a hot little coal in Hermosa Beach. Classic West Coast bop. Gene was seventy, round about Hill’s vintage, but in far better shape. Reedy and spare, stretched out like a long divan, Gene still had a stout clump of straw-blonde hair, grayed for atmospherics at his temples, and an open, sunshiny manner. His teeth were bright, and he wore his chestnut-brown chinos like the thoroughbred he was. Hill hated him but kept it to himself. God could have channeled his genius through ugly men, but he didn’t. Hill hoisted his pants as high as he dared, catching the waistband on his belly.
“Mack Morris stopped by and told me a story,” said Mavis.
“I bet.”
“That the cat?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not paid to think.”
“You’re not paid.”
“Oh, so I guess that means I can think.”
“Give it a shot.”
“I don’t know what’s playing here,” said Mavis. “Is the guy for real?” Hill inhaled. The air in the Vanguard lacked O2, but it more than made up for it in the perfume of sweat, smoke, and whisky sours. Mavis was tired, and what she really wanted to do was count the house. Hill crossed his arms.
John’s back was to the wall, his face turned towards the bright patch on the stage. Gene blew into his sax like a man who had just paid off his mortgage. His jazz was uncomplicated jazz, and Czernak was smooth—too smooth—and sounded rehearsed. He never faltered, so he never fell, and his risks were the decorous kind. Out in that summer sea was a swimmer who would never be carried past the point of his energies. No one had ever seen Gene Czernak wave a weakened arm, spent and triumphant.
Just behind John, Mavis poked Hill with the tine of her elbow.
“Is he yours now, this cat?” Hill stroked his goatee. It felt even grayer since the last time he’d touched it.
“Mine? Don’t be ridiculous. We’re trying to help him get home, wherever that is.”
The room had gone quiet. For how long, Hill had been too sunk into himself to notice. Gene had stopped playing and was staring from the stage straight at Trane.
“Couldn’t be…” he whispered. Gene forgot to compose his manner. The chestnut-brown chinos bagged at the knees; the confidence of his easy life escaping him in gusts.
“Couldn’t be what?” said his drummer, the legendary, but now papery with age, “Bub” Boswell.
“That you, Trane?” Gene said from the stage. John did not move.
“Where’s Mack Morris? Get him down here to prove it.” Voices were calling from the dark corners of the Vanguard. “Yeah, we heard all about it!” “Heard what?” “Why’d you stop?” “What gives?” Hill could not see their faces. John took a step backwards and bumped up to the wall.
“Would someone tell me what is going on?” This was a woman’s voice, hastily aggrieved, as if she’d been waiting a long time for explanation. New Yorkers, thought Hill. Irritation first, patience second.
She had a monstrous head of frizzy blonde hair backlit by the pool of light on the stage. Nasty people always have nasty hair.
What was going on was that the crowd at the Vanguard, warbling and cooing like pigeons, stared at the stranger.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here.” It was Hill.
“It’s okay,” said John. “But who do they think I am?”
“John Coltrane,” said Hill.
“That’s what people keep saying, but I don’t know the guy. Who is he?”
“A guy who played well—as well as you.”
Wanting a thing to be true was its own drug fix, greenish and sweet, and as Hill’s blood sugar began to drop away, he wished such a thing could be possible.
The aggrieved woman stood up and flapped an arm. “Oh, this!” the gesture seemed to say. This is too much. “I paid a thirty-five-dollar cover charge and drove in from the Five Towns. So, could one of you get a move on, or what?” She had a monstrous head of frizzy blonde hair backlit by the pool of light on the stage. Nasty people always have nasty hair.
Gene stepped into brighter light on the stage, revealing his age. Even a life of comfort wears its grooves into the flesh. He did not look elegant now: his mouth hung open absently, the upper teeth and gums bared like an old sea wall at low tide as he peered past the stage lighting. His sax dangled from a cord around his neck, polished and fine, its owner fading behind its brass.
John dropped his gaze away from Gene on the stage and swung it to Hill who was now overpowering a wooden café chair that boasted only one sturdy leg. John couldn’t help but contrast his youth and strength with Gene and Hill’s dissipation. He approached the stage and held out his hand for Gene’s sax. Mavis held up a shot glass filled with vodka in which to dunk the mouthpiece.
His muscles asking for glucose, Hill imagined biting into a Milky Way. The bartender eventually came up with a bag of peanut M&Ms, which Hill dumped into his hand, and from there into his upturned mouth, flung in like seed for planting. The candy crunched down easy enough—with all the caps, his teeth were sturdier than Gene’s. Hill’s belly warmed quickly, and his digestive chemicals fiddled away like grasshoppers. It was enough to quell the anxiety over what might happen next. He felt culpable, as if knowing the mess would be his to clean up.
Gene hopped down off the stage, and his West Coast breeziness was traded for the humility New York always extracted from him. Californians came to the city and sensed right away that their East Coast peers had been raised in leather shoes, while they, half-real citizens of lesser places, had skidded around on rubber and canvas.
John rubbed that wide, unlined brow and looked down at the sax. A pleasing memory came to him.
“My Favorite Things,” he said. Then he blew gently into the saxophone. A familiar melody entered the room. A melody that moves on two planes, “My Favorite Things” found its targets without fuss, the higher spot of the intellect and the lower field in the terra incognita of middle torso. How playful it is, and how melancholy. John did not follow the melody, but rather he charted it with a series of pins on a map, winding a red thread around them, creating a delicate pattern. Here was the hopeful tone of the past, the child’s song, practically a ditty, which he had taken up and molded into a sculpture of shifting form. John held Gene Czernak’s gleaming saxophone and blew a piece of Venetian glass, clear and strong. But the shape was not finished; the sand was still hot and malleable. On he blew, and as he pushed the air along its pathway, he too went exploring.
That melody rode along. La la la la la la. The crowd kept the thread, stringing it around the pins, winding the red onto those silver posts. John took the eighth notes up to the corners of the room, seeking a hatchway to the chilly street above. Then he sent whole, held notes across the floor to wash the feet of the audience. “My Favorite Things,” thought Hill. This is one of my favorite things. The cat had the chops. Behind the man, the boys were keeping up. Any paper and scissors—Hill’s term for the drummer—should be able to hang onto this one. There was no one present who did not know well the map of this track. My favorite things, Hill thought again. Honor’s cardigans seemed to creep under his fingertips. Cashmere, with a round neck. Yarn in a tight weave that read soft. There must have been fifteen or twenty feet of city between him and the snappish cold of the street. And he had been snappish too. So very biting, impatient and unfriendly, there towards what they later called “the end.” But “it” had never ended. Thirty years after his divorce, Hill was waiting for that curious phase to conclude and lead onto the time when his next life would begin. For him, the scene had never gone dark, and he anticipated more to play amongst that furniture and in those now outmoded costumes. He stood forever waiting for another line, but the show begged for the heavy drop of a velvet curtain. Let the actors go home. Instead, the male lead blinked and shielded his eyes, and held fast to the spot in the center of the prop sofa, the prop chairs, the prop door that led nowhere.
La la la la la la… The melody was shimmering now. John’s eyes were closed, his white shirt open at the throat, and the saxophone unblinking under the house lights. Hill felt the notes strike under his breastbone, the curled fingers tapping gently on his knee. How weightlessly this tune bounced, like a small boat bouncing over foam. Hill’s head felt expanded, wide as the horizon. “And then I don’t feel so bad…” Aw, man, he thought, if this was another one of those blood sugar fake-outs, he was going to be pissed. And yet, his joints seemed to thaw. Those sclerotic acorns that joined his pitiable lengths of fingerbone softened, and Hill’s gnarled paw, which had previously only offered a crude rap on the table, started to unfurl. He looked down in wonder. They were only fingers. Just hands. Nothing really, if you thought about it, which you shouldn’t because it was a goddamn bummer. Hill could see that John was somewhere else. The sax held up high, and then dropped down, plunging ahead, the reflection of light off of the brass and the audience as dazzled as children at a fair.
Hill jerked to. He must have been lulled into dozing, escaped for once from a caustic present. The piece was over. It was Gene Czernak who first allowed himself to be frantic.
“Who…who…are you?” Gene said in a desperate gurgle.
Hill snapped upright. It was even worse than he imagined. The cat could have been an embarrassment, a joke, yanked and booed off stage. Instead, the room swiveled as one, eyes on Hill, all asking him to explain. John unclipped from the sax slowly, as if backing away from a cobra. Hill heaved his belly into motion, pushing towards the stage, pulling on John’s hand, bringing him down from the stage. “We’re getting out of here,” he huffed. John yanked backwards. But Hill pulled even harder and John went with him. Les and Peony fell in behind. Mavis waved her arms. Attention made Hill hot with anxiety.
On the street, the four panted in unison, the steam of their breath signaling the effort it had taken to hoist themselves from the cellar. The cold brush of winter still shading the city, chilling the night air. John paced.
“We have to go back down there. Someone may know me.”
“No one down there knows you.”
“Really? Because it looked to me like everyone down there knew me.”
“Come on Dr. Hill,” said Les. “We have to see what they say. Maybe someone can help.”
Peony crossed her arms.
“The Prof is right. Those people don’t know him. But they sure did love him.”
The door to the Vanguard flew open and the crowd from below spilled onto the sidewalk, knocking the bouncer off his stool.” Mavis grabbed Hill by the sleeve, “You can’t leave. Czernak’s losing his shit and this set is far from over.”
“Wrong. It’s over,” said Hill, sticking out his arm for a cab. One stopped rather than knock Hill down, and he pulled John into it. Les and Peony followed, sliding onto the bench seat and slamming the door with a tight smack. The cab driver set the meter and pulled into traffic.
Where, though, to go?
“I know a guy,” said Peony. “Cliff Riff. He’ll know what comes next.” Hill did not want anything to “come next,” but he let the kids call it. The night was no longer clear. Peony put her lips up to the window separating the private world of the driver and the public zone of the passenger. “Orchard Street,” she said.
The Half-and-Half had once been an Italian social club, but like so much of the land below Canal Street, had raised its sights along with the rents. The dirt on the floor was flown in from Portugal and the rust on the doorway painted by Julian Schnabel himself. Lighting the storefront was a murky, single rod of sickly green neon.
There was still plenty of time to run if the scene that lay behind the door offered what Hill thought of as “difficulties.” This Cliff Riff person was surely as ridiculous as his name. And then there was Peony Jones, an utter mystery to Hill. She’d been in his jazz history class, sitting in the center and contributing only sighs. A few times he’d caught sight of her practicing her drums. But once, he’d heard a voice that sounded like opals—bright, but not transparent—absorbing light, rather than refracting it. Milky and blue and changeable. He followed it right to the door of a rehearsal room. There, Peony sat behind the kick drum, her eyes closed, arms caressing each other, and she sang “How High the Moon?” Hill moved away noiselessly, vowing to ask her about vocal training, but she was no longer in his class, and he didn’t need the hassle.
The door led to a tiny vestibule bordered by red velvet curtains. Midnight was no longer a thrilling time to be abroad in the city. Midnight was just another way to look bad in the morning.
“Can’t you hear the music?” said Les. Hill put one ear up to the curtain and listened. John joined him, their heads resting side-by-side against the folds. Beats pounded low and deep, and the velvet felt soft and warm against Hill’s cheek.
“Well, of course there’s music,” said Peony, parting the long panels and stepping into a long hallway. As the four walked slowly through the club’s thorax, they felt the throb of the music grow stronger. Hill thought about the word ‘beat’ and felt a constriction of longing for the 1950s. The world had felt young then, and he’d been young in it. To him, the fifties were the beginning of all experience, but someone else must have felt saddened by its blaze and speed. There must have been an entire invisible population who had been old during his period of discovery, and maybe they’d felt as outrun then as he did now.
Around a corner at the end of the hallway, Hill and Les stepped into the belly of the club, Peony and John behind them. Small lamps on a few scattered tables gave the explorers handholds to guide them through the room. The sparse crowd was young, or so they appeared in the rosy light, and all sleeker than absolutely required. Hill surmised that the young no longer ate, and they certainly didn’t eat American candy. No Necco wafers for this crowd. The bar burned white. In fact, it was hard to tell what the bar was made of, if not light turned to matter. Beams shot from distant galaxies appeared to bear the weight of a vast assortment of Scandinavian vodkas.
Hill was so distracted by a surging anxiety about his age, the place, and the world he no longer understood, that he forgot why they’d come.
Hill feared he was going to be expected to know the names of the latest cocktails. “The Photon” and “Trans-Siberian Magma Stream.” Hill was so distracted by a surging anxiety about his age, the place, and the world he no longer understood, that he forgot why they’d come. He had gone with the idea, climbed aboard a possibility and sailed down here on a boat captained by a boy and girl he ought to have told to go home.
Looking out at the small, exquisitely hip crowd, Hill saw only young faces. These kids probably drink liquid alien intelligence. They take vitamins through their eyes, vitamins spiked with microchips that tell them which shoes to buy. Oh, man, he really wanted a handful of Raisinettes.
“There’s Cliff” “said Peony. She shot away from the group and towards the DJ booth.
Hill was afraid of this very thing. Cliff Riff? Come on. John stared with a frank expression and his face lit by the tutti frutti lights. A smile burst there.
Standing behind the spinning turntables was a young, lean, black hipster dude wearing a Mr. Bubble T-shirt. Peony was pointing, and then, crooking her finger to gesture John over. Hill was suddenly superfluous, succeeded by someone a lot cooler than he and demonstrably more comfortable leaving his home after dinnertime.
Hill opened his mouth to ask Les why Cliff Riff was the guy who’d “know what comes next.” Instead of his voice he heard an eruption from the sound system throwing out an audible puzzle. The pieces were from different patterns, but they formed a whole. Even he could identify the origins of some of the fragments. There were the Sex Pistols and Madonna tied in a smooth Windsor knot of high-polymer disco and hulking, crude guitars. But then, he wasn’t sure. He thought he heard Glen Campbell and Blue Oyster Cult. Hard rock had come to him through his best friend, another aging jazzbo with the even more preposterous name of Boy Wonder, who’d kept it by sleeping with a generation of groupies. The girls’ stories were never exactly credible. Didn’t matter. At heart, Boy was perennially a sixteen-year-old cheerleader on the day the yearbooks are handed out. His appetite for romantic detail was almost exhilarating in its pettiness.
“What do you call this?” Hill shouted to the bartender, a serene girl wearing a ruff. He pointed at the ceiling.
“Mashups!” she bellowed back. Hill leaned across the bar, soaking his shirtfront in sloshed cranberry juice. He did not understand her. “Mashups!” the bartender screamed more loudly. “Mash-UPs!” Hill turned back to the dance floor, blotting his shirt with a cocktail napkin and feeling like someone’s maiden aunt. Boy Wonder would be at home right now watching “Walker, Texas Ranger.” That sounded so good right now.
Across the room, Les and Peony shouted into the one ear not covered by Cliff’s headphones, Peony striking at the air with her articulate fingers. Hill struggled against the crowd to reach them. The crowd was gaining mass, maybe a hundred people—more!—filled the cube of the club. Hill watched the crowd expand onto the floor, bulging out from the bar in a molluscan surge, the body of the animal moving on a single foot. Lemon-colored lights blinked from somewhere. He saw the kids begin to sway.
Suddenly, their youth became the least interesting thing about them. Youth is a transitory state, not a personality trait.
Beyond Hill, John looked outward over the young heads. Feet, legs, arms, faces, and sinewy torsos bobbed in unison to the record on the turntable, and as the people in the club danced, he felt the connection between his body and theirs. Gravity pinned him to the floor, to the wall, and to the common ground of those around him. There was, he thought, nothing common about ground. The closeness to other humans had not told him much. The throngs on Fifth Avenue had oppressed him. The riders on the subway eyed him with dull curiosity, but they returned nothing useful. Now, watching these kids in this grooving mass, he became aware of a different kind of body, the one created by shared desire. Suddenly, their youth became the least interesting thing about them. Youth is a transitory state, not a personality trait. They were people—people on their way. Being young, they did not know this, and he recalled the sensation of feeling stopped at the point in life when it seemed the only things worth having were happening right then. He could not tell what was moving: the crowd or the room. Surely, he thought, he was not the first to look into a crowd at a disco and think of the theory of relativity.
As the record shifted into a higher plane, so did the crowd, and it struck him that music is not an external wave, but rather an internal spark. He did not know the song. Perhaps it was popular, familiar, and carried pleasant associations. Perhaps he ought to know it. Whatever was important here, it seemed to be rising up from the floor, like warm air filling a hot air balloon. And as the balloon filled, the loneliness of the past week began to leave him. The collective ringing of some kind of bell made him want to join in, but he was still spooked by the scenes at the Smokehouse and the Vanguard. Here, though, he did not feel exposed. Perhaps that was why the crowd had come.
Hill wanted to go. The music was getting louder, and the noise and jostling and airlessness of the club had worn him down. He’d better pull Les and Peony away from this Cliff dude, while thinking that if he did not get a piece of pie right then and there, he was going to fall into a dead faint.
Instead, Peony leaned into Hill. “Cliff has an idea. We need to hang out while he finishes his set, and then take him uptown with us.” Uptown with us? No. This was not going to be “what comes next.” What comes next is that they would all give up, and this nice but troublesome stranger would go back to where he came from, and if he couldn’t recall where that was, there were databases for that kind of thing, and Hill was not a database.
Except that he was a very particular form of catalogue, and if anyone knew it, it was Peony Jones.
“Let’s go. I’ll take us to a place we can chill while we wait for Cliff,” she said.
“Uh, no. I don’t need another hip parade tonight. I’ll take us to a place where you can tell me what’s going on.”
Louisiana announced its first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus on March 9. Two weeks later, the state reported 2,305 positive tests and 83 deaths from the virus.
Before
they led us astray and into the crowds
strolling our children half-asleep, dreams abuzz
with sugar-beats in rhythm
to our favorite marching bands
we stretched our arms, hoping to catch
blinking beads as we danced
with strangers who are never really strangers if only
in this moment
in this town
a crescent of so much laissez faire.
We drove around the remnants of the last devastation
parts still windswept and water-logged. Stopping along the tracks,
windows rolled down, hoisting a go-cup full
of giddy and one-liners from our days
as young editors, far-flung stringers, stylists and cooks,
we leaned deep into the train whistle.
We gathered for an early dinner at Thalia, our favorite neighborhood joint,
your gorgeous blond locks loose as we sipped and talked
mocktails and Mexican retreats while our dinner dates
spoke of past wars and new chapters; we always order
rice and beans here, with cured egg yolk shaved just so
and small plates with dashes of salt
a few petals here and there, an offering from the chef
to the muses.
On the last day of Before, we meet at the oyster bar, elbow-to-elbow
clinking glasses. You unstrap the vintage watch from your wrist,
place it on mine, a present to celebrate a future
birthday, an anniversary of our friendship, a memory of all the touching
possible that came before.
After speeds up on us as we rewind
searching for that moment/s when we, too, could have been
infected…Was it when the server leaned in to tell us,
like a juicy secret, how the catch of the day is served
with dirty rice and not to miss the oysters from Murder Point?
Was it when we spent the evening
sharing spiked king cake and Chablis, after walking arm-in-arm
in the late afternoon sunshine, not realizing
that on this end February 2020
with clear skies above and whole evenings ahead
nothing would ever be the same again?
Even on the airplane, after, no one wore a mask
no one thought to not sit close
as we slipped into sleep, sliced through the sky
crossing open borders.
How vast a sea between demur and demure.
Language, this heavy constellation
of dissent. A shining blister, sometimes a blessing.
