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Year: 2009

Apocalypse

October 30, 2009 • • 3 Comments

The day the desert was destroyed, water
sucked from distant rivers sprayed through the sky,
and cars bore pilgrims, dreamers to Mecca,
sedated by slot-machine lullabies.

The stars all tumbled to earth, outshone by
neon casinos and fountains of light
while roulette chances to change everything
spun against the darkest of desert nights.

Now, unheeded prayers to dollars drift down
from the mouths of those ghostlike survivors,
mumbling dreams into urns full of quarters
as taillights depart in night’s brightest hours.

Boys with flyers for prostitutes jostle
the stars, shouted down from celestial heights.
Barely burning, they stagger slow down the Strip
cursing this blaze, this apocalypse of light.

—

I tried to come up with something for Read Write Poem’s latest image prompt (#98) which involved writing a poem based on an image of swirling lights at a fair. I fixated on the lights and kept thinking about this poem I wrote back in April (I think). So this one is sort-of off prompt, but I offer it anyway.

I wrote it for a (not-quite-there-yet) chapbook of road poems called Highway Sky. I’m still tinkering with some of the poems, but two have been published at Bolts of Silk and Ouroboros Review #3.

Some of the lines are lifted from the manuscript of my novel A Short Time to Be There. In the novel, the characters are driving into Las Vegas after a week on the road and find themselves alternately overwhelmed, excited and disgusted by the city.

Read what others did with the prompt at this week’s Get Your Poem On at Read Write Poem.

The Bear Comes Home

October 23, 2009 • • 1 Comment

I recently read Rafi Zabor’s 1998 debut novel The Bear Comes Home. Zabor’s tale of an up-and-coming NYC saxophone player and his quest to create a personal style that will build on, rather than imitate, his heroes Coltrane, Monk and Mingus, happens to be a walking, talking bear with opposable thumbs. His name’s The Bear, but friends call him Bear.

The Bear has the sensitive soul and single-minded obsessiveness of an artist struggling to find his voice. He’s also in love with a human woman, the law is after him for being an unlicensed bear, scientists want to study him and the record companies want to screw him. Through all that, The Bear just wants to find some transcendent truth inside his music.

The book is brilliant. Zabor’s prose sparkles like stage lights on a sax, moving effortlessly into and out of The Bear’s consciousness, which is fully human but also fully ursine. The Bear’s story is rendered with wit and a keen sense of the absurd, reminding the reader of the constant alienation The Bear feels in the human world. Little details had me laughing out loud such as The Bear’s nervousness before a recording session leading to a “light” breakfast of eight bagels and a salad bowl of coffee.

The real joy in Zabor’s novel, though, is the way he writes about music. Many of The Bear’s struggles and battles are fought out while improvising with other musicians (Charlie Hayden and other real life jazz legends make cameo appearances) and the pages-long descriptions of solos and jams allow the music to become a beautifully wrought metaphor for The Bear’s internal struggles.

If you love jazz and love bears, The Bear Comes Home is a must read.

First Paragraphs

October 13, 2009 • • 4 Comments

Now that I’ve finished (and revised and revised and revised) my novel A Short Time to Be There, I’m starting the process of putting together all the things I’ll need as I begin to query agents and publishers. Things like lists of promising agents and publishers, query letters, pitches, long synopsis, short synopsis, author bio in third person. All the fun stuff.

There’s a wealth of info to be found online including a number of blogging agents who give useful advice about how to do these things. One is Nathan Bransford, who is currently running his 3rd Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge. Simply post the first paragraph of any work-in-progress in the comments section of the contest post on his blog. So far, there are 1387 entries.

It’s a good exercise because it’s always good to be reminded of the importance of that first paragraph. I always tell my students not to sweat the first paragraph (on a first draft!) because you can always go back and fine-tune it. Or cut it altogether and have the piece start with the 2nd paragraph, which with student papers often works nicely.

I’ve played with A Short Time to Be There‘s first paragraph quite a bit over the past 3 years and will probably wind up fine-tuning it some more. The original 1st paragraph became the 1st paragraph of the 3rd chapter when I made some dramatic changes to the structure. Then it was cut altogether when I eliminated the 3rd chapter during a later round of revisions.

Here’s the first paragraph as it now stands, which is what I entered in Nathan’s contest. From A Short Time to Be There:

Chip clutched the armrests so hard his fingertips had gone numb twenty minutes earlier. He glanced at his knuckles, white and straining against the worn leather of the chair, and wondered if knuckles could burst. How many other condemned men had sat in this very chair while adrenaline and fear coursed through their veins like electricity? At least they hadn’t strapped him in. Yet. Perhaps they should have. He stared past the doctor and out the window at Houston’s shining towers and glass buildings that glittered bright against the May sky. His teeth ached from clenching them together, and he hoped the doctor wouldn’t notice his tightened jaw and throw a tetanus shot at him for good measure.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

Austin City Limits Music Festival – 2009

October 7, 2009 • • 3 Comments

ACL Fest 2009 - Livestrong Stage

The pictures are all from Friday evening and came off my iphone, so make of them what you will.

Friday – The Perfect Day

This was my 7th ACL Fest, which means I have spent 21 days at ACL Fest, and in all those days, last Friday was hands-down, the nicest day ever. We arrived around 2:00 to catch Medeski, Martin and Wood, and we were immediately thrilled by the sight of the gorgeous new lawn, all soft and green under our feet.

After some meat pies from Boomerang’s, we heard MMW’s set, which was as good as I had hoped it would be. That was the 2nd time I’ve seen them at ACL, and it was cool to see they warranted a larger stage this time out. After that, we headed over to see The Walkmen, who were good and then Phoenix, a band I really enjoyed. It was the largest crowd they’d ever played for, and the singer was very appreciative of the audience’s enthusiasm.

Afterwards, we were stopped in our tracks by Bassnectar opening with Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days (I’m Going to Cut You Into Little Pieces)” and stayed for a bit of his set. After that I caught a few songs of Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3’s before heading over to Thievery Corporation, which was the high point for Friday.

Post-Thievery, we caught the end of Them Crooked Vultures hard-rockin’ set before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs came on. I thoroughly enjoyed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs dramatic set and consider them the big discovery (for me) of ACL 09.

ACL Fest 2009 - Sunset 1

Saturday – The Day of Rain

Yup. It rained. It hasn’t rained at ACL Fest since 2003, and it wasn’t bad. I don’t mind standing out in the rain anyway as long as I’ve got my poncho. We arrived in time for Citizen Cope, who I liked, but when we went to the other side to see …and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, I caught the end of Flogging Molly, a Pogues-ish Irish folk punk band, I wished I had come over earlier.

I was excited to see Trail of Dead as this is a legendary local band whose CDs I have and whose live show I’d never seen. They rocked as I hoped they would. Next up was Mos Def who came on half an hour late, but still put on a terrific show, rapping from behind a drum kit. The set culminated with some break dancing on the edge of the wet stage.

After Mos Def, the rain started coming even harder, triggering an exodus from Zilker Park. It let up shortly thereafter, a good thing since Sound Tribe Sector 9 turned out to be so good, jamming from the very back of a soggy stage so as to avoid electrocution.  They were as good and electrifying as I remembered them from a few years ago, though with a little less funk and a little more hard-edged jazztronica along the lines of Particle. This is a good thing.

By the time Ghostland Observatory started, we had had as much rain as we could stand. We stuck around for a few tunes underneath the twisting Lasers, but left long before the Longhorn Band joined them onstage and went home where chili had been simmering in the crock pot all day long.

There is absolutely nothing in the world to make standing in the rain all day worthwhile like a few hot bowls of fresh homemade chili.

ACL Fest 2009 - Fish Flag

Sunday – The Day of Mud

I guess we were lucky. All the shows we intended to see were on the hill where there was still grass that hadn’t been tromped down to mud by the combination of 65,000 people and steady rain.

When we arrived on Sunday afternoon in time for the B-52’s, the weather was pleasant if a bit humid, but not enough to get in the way of enjoying the B-52’s who rocked their set and closed with a “Love Shack,” “Planet Claire,” and “Rock Lobster” trifecta.

I could have gone home after that, but we turned our chairs to the XBOX stage to listen to White Lies after which we turned the chairs again for Arctic Monkeys and then one more time for Passion Pit. All three of those bands were new to me and enjoyed them all, especially White Lies.

By now, it was time to go to the lower part of the park for Jack White’s latest project The Dead Weather. That’s when we saw the mud and, good lord, it looked awful. The lovely green beautiful grass from Friday was covered in an oozing sea of mud. Rather than venture out over that expanse we parked ourselves under a tree with some grass and listened to The Dead Weather from all the way back there. They were loud enough to hear. I enjoyed their heavy blues sound, and decided that The Dead Weather is probably my favorite of the various Jack White projects.

Being neither fans of mud nor Pearl Jam we left and called it a year.

On balance, this was probably once of my favorite ACL years. Weather-wise, I’ll take mud and rain any day over heat and dust. As to the music, once Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys dropped out of the lineup, there wasn’t anything I was dying to see, which made it easy to just enjoy whatever was happening while discovering new things.

My favorites for the year? Thievery Corporation, The B-52’s, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, STS9.

There’s been a lot of griping about the mud and ruined grass and how long that part of Zilker Park will be closed for repairs to the lawn, but it will get repaired and the ACL Fest sponsors have said they will cover it. Had it not rained, the grass would have withstood the weekend. As it is, it’s probably still alive under that mud and soon The Great Lawn will look as gorgeous as it did on Friday.

ACL Fest 2009 - Sunset 2

Scene from a Bar that Closed Ten Years Ago

October 1, 2009 • • 24 Comments

I swear to God it happened in slow motion
the way you walked in that night, like a movie,
like Jimmy Dean, like a record scratch jukebox
breakdown—
or maybe it was just me
someone, anyway, no one could believe.

Dark walls and faded posters of traveling bands
from years gone by seemed somehow fresh alive,
the smoke of years dissolving as you smiled
and dropped quarters on the table—
even Jesus stopped to stare
a shining pile of silver for anyone who dared.

At the foosball table, your hands clutched the levers,
red and blue pinwheels spinning to your command,
counterclockwise against the nature of my heart,
you were kicking ass—
I sipped my beer, losing time
you took every name but mine.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s Prompt # 94. It’s an image prompt. A detail shot of the red and blue players on a foosball table called “My Angel and My Devil” by Thomas Hawk. Check out other people’s responses to the prompt here.

Let’s Hear It for the Gecko Supergirl

September 29, 2009 • • 1 Comment

I was out on my run this afternoon when I saw a car stop in the middle of the road. The woman behind the wheel jumped out, frantically looking at the pavement under her car. I slowed and turned to make sure she was okay and saw that she was shooing a small gecko away from her car and toward the sidewalk.

Another car sped past, bearing down on the gecko. The woman screamed and jumped back, but the gecko managed to run clear. After taking a deep breath she began trying to catch the gecko again. At this point I had to help. I jogged over and bent down in the road to try to catch it myself. “Is this a pet lizard or something?” I asked, trying to make sense of the situation.

“I just don’t want it to die,” she said.

We couldn’t catch the lizard, but we were able to herd him across the road, over the curb and into the grass beyond the sidewalk without anyone getting hit by any cars. She grinned and said, “We did it!” before high-fiving me and hurrying back to her car.

I’ve stopped in many a road to help a turtle amble across without getting hit, but never a gecko. I’m not even sure how she knew it was there, but I have to say I was impressed. One could debate the wisdom of slamming on brakes and stopping in the middle of a busy road to help a 1-inch lizard scurry across to safety, risking not just car but life and limb.

But I won’t.

I’ll just say, let’s hear it for the Gecko Supergirl.

And, Gecko Supergirl (whoever you are), thanks for the reminder that all us creatures deserve safe passage across the highways.