WORTH WATCHING

If you don't have HBO, you'll have to see clips from YouTube taken from smart phones where the sound sucks (must have been bad in the hall). But if you can get to see it on HBO, the 2014 Rock'n'roll Hall of Fame tribute to Linda Ronstadt by Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Riatt, Sheryl Crow, Emmy Lou Harris and Carrie Underwood was beautiful. (As the youngest and still in top voice, Underwood was impressive.)

I've been catching pieces of the show over the past few nights and digging most of what I've seen. As always, there's a giant schlock element to shows like this, but there's also always a lot of poignancy, seeing music stars of old now old themselves. It's impressive how some in their sixties and seventies can still pull it off, and in other cases heartbreaking seeing those who can't but try anyway.

It's also always a trip for me because of my years in "Hollywood" and New York (and DC, where I first met Emmy Lou Harris, though I doubt she'd remember). I always see people I've met, or known, or worked with (or more) either on stage or in the celebrity packed audience (this year's ceremony was in Brooklyn so it had an East Coast star-studded flavor).

Hopefully better quality clips of the show will be available soon (another highlight was Joan Jett with Nirvana, she nailed the essence of Cobain's vocals) for those who don't have HBO, but if you do, check it out and be delighted.

YET ANOTHER FAVORITE OLD QUOTE

"Yet for all this philosophy and this setting the face forward, the heart turns back."   —Joaquin Miller (from Notes From An Old Journal)

ENEMY OF THE STATE

How have I not seen this 1998 flick before? Anyway, I caught it tonight for the first time and pretty much enjoyed this tense action thriller. And how can you go wrong when it has a Gene Hackman car chase? Will Smith is his usual, back then, entertaining self, and Hackman is almost always riveting to watch.

The big surprise was not that this is a thriller about how NSA spying was already destroying our privacy, a very timely subject in 2014, let alone 1998, but how the outrage it is obviously meant to generate over losing our privacy in our homes due to that spying has become almost irrelevant with our smart phones and laptops tracking us so intimately the NSA of 1998 is more like one of those giant computers that filled a room back in the 1950s compared to the easy access we are voluntary giving not just spying agencies but corporate overlords every minute we use a digital device.

It'd be like watching a movie today based on an idea I tried to pitch to studios before the end of the Soviet Union about them being able to create destructive weather as a weapon but it getting out of hand, when we already know that it didn't take some traditional nemesis to create that kind of weather havoc, we did it ourselves.

What we need now is a movie about how we cleverly turn all these spying devices against the spy agencies and corporate overlords. Wait, did they just see me write that?  

JUST A HEAD'S UP

Coming up in June, I'll be one of 37 readers celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Frank O'Hara's LUNCH POEMS by each reading one poem from that book at the St. Mark's Poetry Project at 8PM on June 11th. For a list of the readers and location click here.

On June 17th at The Cutting Room in Manhattan, I'll be reading my own poetry with a great line up of poets, comics and music makers and more, as you can see from this flyer:

Hope to see you.

MORE FACEBOOK FINDS

[click to enlarge if like me you can't read the above at that size...]

JEROME SALA'S THE CHEAPSKATES

I'm an old friend and an old fan of Jerome Sala and his poetry. Ever since his first books, SPAZ ATTACK and I'M NOT A JUVENILE DELINQUENT. Because he's a very smart and a very smart ass poet. But I have to say his newest collection, THE CHEAPSKATES may be his smartest and most smart ass book yet.

CHEAPSKATES just may be my favorite book of Sala's. To my mind it's the one where all his intelligence and insight and brilliant cultural assessments (you can check them out on his blog ESPRESSO BONGO) combine to make an incredibly intellectually satisfying collection of poems.

Here's three of the shorter poems in CHEAPSKATES as examples:


UP CLOSE

when I looked at
the Chuck Close retrospective
the giant black and white photographic heads
I noticed that the swirls
in the hair and face
of the Philip Glass portrait
resembled his circular music
and I wondered if the painter
had reinvented the medieval notion
that the eyes and the face
mirror the soul —
or that the body
like Schopenhauer said
was a mere embodiment
of the Will — a Will you never
had the pleasure of meeting
or that every square inch of the Real
was an allegory
when you looked at it
up close —
or that the truth
looks like a painting
a photo
a put-on
when it first turns its eyes
on you
so much bigger
and blinder
than your own sight


PROGRESS

It's good phone booths are disappearing.
People I grew up with
would catch the unsuspecting caller there
and beat the shit out of him just for fun.
A pair of them charging through the single door
like cocks doing double duty in a porno
bashing the dude's head into the glass
banging his temples with the club like receiver
using the chrome chord as a silver noose
and finishing him off
with the old steel-tipped combat boot to the nuts.

Now people like that
probably only steal your iPhone on the subway platform.
That is, unless they push you on the tracks.


THE CELEBRITIES

It's true they got to do more
of what we wanted to do
and with who, and when

but for all that, we didn't feel
they were better than us
more beautiful, sure, but

wasn't that bionic anyhow?
So the perennial question was
why them? Followed by why us?

Who did we think they were
when they were most like us
in their everyday lives

and who were we, stars
in our own tiny dramas,
living fully without them,

but needing them, at the same time,
as a reminder that even the great
weren't all that special?


There are longer poems and more dense poems that contain  much more surprising juxtapositions of philosophical inquiry and pop culture symbolism, or metaphoric economic commentary and real politik etc. but the above three seemed like quick and easy synopses of Sala's attitude and perspective, crisply clear statements of poetic intent. Pick up the book to see more poetic slight of hand than you may have expected.

THE LITERARY LIFE ADDENDUM

I may have posted this previously, can't remember. But it's a favorite. I have no idea who took the shot, my copy is a slide from which I had this photo made and then scanned it. It's the great film actress Mary Beth Hurt caught reading my book HOLLYWOOD MAGIC. Not sure when, but the book came out in 1982, just after I moved to L.A. and Mary Beth still lived in New York, as I remember it.

I visited her apartment there once when she was dating Kevin Kline, I think, or just afterwards, before she married the director and screenwriter Paul Shrader, and while I was sitting in perhaps that chair, I noticed a big flower pot with a plant in it had words painted on the side and they seemed familiar, so I asked where they were from. She thought I was messing with her but finally realized I wasn't and said they were from a poem of mine.

I no longer remember what they were or which poem, but I remember how happy it made me. I was just at the beginning of the change that would later come from which I would grow into the understanding that it isn't how many people read your work or see your work, or experience your work in whatever way they do, but simply that someone who does, actually gets it. Which Mary Beth did, and for which I am eternally grateful.