The Last Unicorn (multitrack a cappella)

Up with People 1991

'poems about anything' and 'all the brass awkwards'

a while back i was walking out of a grocery co-op in berkeley, when i saw a young person with a little typewriter in his lap and a cardboard-and-marker sign that read 'poems about anything.'

he was writing a poem for a group of girls, and they looked on smiling as he joked with them and pecked the keys at a tiny, irregularly torn scrap of paper. 

he would adjust the scrap with his fingers when he ran out of space, which happened about every four words. 

after the girls had their poem, he started on one for me. as he typed, he looked around, said hi to scruffy hipster types who he knew ("pacman" and "mouth"), called "poems about anything! would you like a poem today?" to the passing grocery shoppers.

the poem he wrote for me was about trombones, because it came up that i used to play trombone. 

here is the poem:

the most awkward and
forgotten of all the
brass awkwards ska
band and nineteennine
ty something means we
are participating in
culture larger bigger
than we are and back
when instruments were
expensive and strictly
for the upper crust
or those who serve at
their behest and since
then as pleasure has
become less of a what
we make of it and more
of a pervasive state
maybe the non electric
audiblast trombone makes
a comeback for its ability
to slide from sound to
sound like situational
ethics and classical music
needing modern relevance so
rich people give free sound
to willing participants

my housemate jen, who is a new music composer, had been having an existential crisis about the relevance of new music in the modern world, so this was surprisingly apropos. 

i mentioned this, and he brought up "noise music," saying that it drew a solid following of punk kids. he wanted to encourage jen, through me, with the fact there are indeed people out there who are interested in wild new music. 

i agreed with him wholeheartedly, even though i knew the academic and avant-garde classical world that jen was facing was a lot different than the world where punk kids lived.

i gave him a dollar for the poem. then he was off, with his little avocado-colored typewriter, cardigan sweater, and orange beard, to try his luck in rockville. "i'll see you again," he said.

culture and the senses

recent note: i like this giddy post, and the idea of 'fifty ways to walk':

**

I'm excited about a recent tantalizing find at the library. I haven't looked into the book at all yet, but the back-of-the-book description is exciting as it is. Culture and the Senses, by Kathryn Linn Geurts (University of California Press, 2002). I've typed up a sizeable chunk of it below, and I've bolded the bits I'm most interested in:

. . . Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense and balancing (physically and psychologically as well as literally and metaphorically) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally, feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo-American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent.

Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. She demonstrates this through a careful analysis of language, then by focusing on the attention given to balance and the body in childcare and the way child raising instantiates properties of balance as moral code. The body's ways of knowing extend to culturally relative ways of moving and walking, so that the repertoire of more than fifty "ways to walk," for instance, literally embodies socialization and identity, status and well-being. . . .

The phrase "ways to walk" cues in my mind a reference to an Anselm Hollo poem. I'll have to look up the exact lines, but the title is, I think, "Preface," and it goes something like this: "the poet Vallejo discovered new ways of walking / while living in Paris . . . / the following poems are a record of his discoveries"

this is our time

at the library today, i found this:

The next fifty years are a special time. Between now and 2050 we'll see the zenith, or very nearly, of human population. With luck we'll never see any greater production of carbon dioxide or toxic chemicals. We'll never see greater species extinction or soil erosion.

So it's the task of those of us alive right now to deal with this special phase, to squeeze us through these next fifty years. That's not fair—any more than it was fair that earlier generations had to deal with the Second World War or the Civil War or the Revolution or the Depression or slavery. It's just reality.

We need in these fifty years to be working simultaneously . . . on our ways of life, on our technologies, and on our population.

The period in question happens to be our time. That's what makes this moment special, and what makes this moment hard.

—Bill McKibben, from the facing page of The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century, by the Environmental Careers Organization, published by Island Press, Washington D.C., 1999,

marketplace

...what modernism and Western capitalist expansion meant to traditional peoples. In the New World, people became items of commerce, their talents, their labors, and their produce thrown into the market place, where their best hope was to bring a decent price.

--Nathan Huggins, Black Odyssey, 1977.

i found this as one of the (three) epigraphs to The Making of New World Slavery by Robin Blackburn.

i thought, our best hope is still that our talents and labors will bring a decent price.

Cross-blog dialogue!

[The following is a transcript, sadly partial, of a dialogue between two obscure men, Jotan Whitman and Matcha Bailey. The original conversation took place at an institution of higher learning, and the sides of each man's perspective were posted upon a sort of lightbox. The recorded words of Bailey may exist somewhere else in energy records. We present the Whitman sections and hope you will find them illuminating.—Ed.]

So Matcha, how have the scenic vistas of the Badlands sculpted your soul? Is your soul hard like marble, or squishy like putty? Can you sculpt with putty? Or do you just glue with it? In that case I hope your soul is neither like putty nor like grout.

Matcha remarks on his soul and the Badlands, and my recent acquistion.

It's true, I was pretty much soulless all the way through high school and then Carleton. I wish I could say it "budded softly" or "slowly unfurled" like in Joycean prose, but really, here's the true story. Last year I went to the old used bookstore in the town in which I was later employed as a gas station customer service representative of the people, and I picked up a dog-eared, chewed-on soul from the discount bin. I don't really want to talk about it. It gets me through the long nights. An entirely adequate soul. Anyway. Whatever. Matcha, where did you learn to be so piercingly trenchant in your commentary?

Matcha provides trenchant commentary, with emphasis on gas stations.

Isn't that the problem — a confluence of too many secondhand souls. Yes, I feel the gas station gives me some sort of working class street cred. At least I've had plenty of contact with cigarettes, but unfortunately my gas station was a rather chaste one, lacking in alcohol and pornography. Sad! The gas station I worked at Previously (in high school) did have alcohol, such as Mike's Hard Lemonade, and also what I think were 40s, although I didn't know what they were at the time. This Native American guy with bloodshot eyes and flannels would come in and buy like four at a time, and my attempts to draw him into conversation (What's not to like about "Hey," and "Have a good night?") never inspired him to elaborate on his life story.

Matcha reminisces about short stories past and bemoans his street cred-less-ness.

What was the title of the short story collection? Don't leave me (us) hanging like that! Hopefully reading it won't be like reading The Sun Also Rises, which compelled me to solitary imbibement on more than one occasion. I wish one could be as trenchant in the temporary classroom situation as in the pub or bar, and no nonsense and tempermental as well. I don't know if working at the gas station helped my personal street cred in my few substitute teaching gigs, mainly because I ran into a couple of my students in said gas station. Although really that provided a more relaxed venue of conversation, and I got to see them as they more naturally were, rather than "the annoying kids who don't want to be in class." More naturally they were like most everyone else who came into the gas station. They bought beef jerky; they spoke in low manly grunts; they talked about fishing. Perhaps, they trimmed trees.

Matcha paints the South Dakotan scene, brainstorms about 'sub,' and drops reference to Catcher.

I like that you have a ritual for being at the Badlands. I read a book when I was young about a class that hates their substitute teacher, and the recurring phrase was "Sink the sub!" Which metaphor I didn't really go for. Or maybe I just was too much on the side of the authorities and not sympathetic to stupid kids. Let me tell you about trimming trees -- it's a booming business for the pothead community. The adults I saw trucking around with high schoolers down to the Cities in their pickups definitely looked like grownup stoners. People need their trees trimmed so the trees don't reclaim the earth like in some anarchic Greenpeace tract. And they're willing to pay a decent amount to prevent that. Oh, Catcher in the Rye. Your rambling paragraphs strike so many chords! What is your favorite part you remember from our dear Mr. Salinger's work? And, by the way, do you begrudge him his solitude and artistic inactivity much like my friend Browning does Watterson his? (I swear those last words make sense...to me...)

Drugs, trees, and high school friends. The providence of memorization in oubliette-esque situations.

That's funny, my first encounter with Catcher came from a girl who did part of it as a speech, who was in a summer camp theater class with me. I don't remember which part except that his brother, baseball glove, and bloody hand were mentioned. My dad has also mentioned the reports of the benefits of knowing things by heart: specifically prayers, specifically in the midst of trench warfare-inspired terror. I hope you take up a Herculean task such as memorizing all the Sonnets, or Moby-Dick, or Finnegans Wake.

Matcha affirms the mediocre and wraps it up.

Delightful indeed! Back to the Rueb!

The two scalliwags retire.