SINATRA & BONO

At the reading I did the other night in NYC with Terence Winch, friend and fellow poet/prose writer, as well as a well known traditional Irish musician and songwriter, I felt blessed to be in the company of so many creative souls whose work I admire. I won't name them all for fear of leaving someone out, but I can say among the poets and artists and writers and friends who all are creative in some way, each has a distinct voice that is expressed in their lives and work, the telling mark of a true artist for me.

Terence of course first of all. He read from his memoir about life as an Irish musician/songwriter—THAT SPECIAL PLACE—and even sang one of the original lyrics that pepper the book, his song in praise of Baltimore. And in a voice that is inimitable. Others may sing in the same style Terence does, after all it's an Irish music traditional style, but no one with his unique sound and emphasis and personality all wrapped up in a way with a melody that is uniquely his.

His prose was the same, distinct and compelling, drawing you in with wit and perceptiveness. Others there just to listen included artists and poets whose work I've written about on this blog, whose voices are so original I could pick out a poem or work of art or publishing project or art project or peice of prose as easily as you can a song sung by Frank Sinatra, who was the second voice I could recognize as a kid out in the wider world, after Bing Crosby's.

Bing because of what he meant to Irish-Americans of my father's generation and well beyond, all the way down to my older siblings and then me, and Frank because he came from nearby Hoboken and was known simply as "The Voice" during the first wave of his popularity when he left the Dorsey band for his solo act.

One of the challenges for any creative person trying to make something of their own is to find their own voice (in the broadest sense of that term, meaning your way of expressing yourself) in the work. We all generally have our own voice in our regular lives, not too many people sound exactly alike. But channeling that through whatever form your creativity takes is another matter.

I was always mystified by the capacity of human creativity when it came to music, once I realized as a kid studying and playing piano and other instruments, how limited the range of notes (at least in the Western European harmonic scale) and yet how many variations on those few notes continues to be revealed! It's the same in any art form, especially when the limitations are tight, as in say an Irish reel. There's only so many possibilities, and yet new reels are written all the time, Terence has written many himself.

Anyway, not to belabor the point, just to point you to today's New York Times in case you didn't see it and this op-ed article by Bono (another unique voice) who writes about the influence of Frank Sinatra, not so much on singing or music in general (which Sinatra had an impact on greater than most) but on life, and living in this precarious moment in time.

Check it out, I think it's worth a read.

AS A FRIEND & 2666

I don't read as many novels as I used to. But for Christmas I was given these two by two different friends (the 2666 I suggested to my daughter-in-law, who also happens to be one of my favorite artists and friends, the other was an unexpected surprise from my oldest closest friend, TPW), and so, as when confronted with any printed material, I began to devour them. I also noticed that both were getting extremely good reviews and lots of attention (2666 much more widely).

AS A FRIEND was easy to finish quickly. Not because the writing is slight, it's actually very substantial. But because it is a very slim novel. The author, Forrest Gander is known, at least by me, mostly as a poet. Not that I was that familiar with his work, but it's made its mark on the poetry world.

I won't tell you what it's about except in the broadest terms—love, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, etc.—because I hate reviews that reveal story and plot points that the author has carefully created to unfold in the book's time, not be jump started from reviewers' summaries or handpicked revelations.

What I can say is Gander sets up some pretty impressive juxtapositions of perspective and language and the structures to carry them in four distinct chapters or sections that make up the book. Any one of which would make a terrific little book.

Though I must admit at first I resisted it. Maybe because of the blurbs and the praise I'd already heard and read, maybe because the opening seemed a little precious, like college workshop writing, or maybe because the opening section of the story just didn't grip me. But, it didn't take long to draw me in.

If I were to compare this book to a movie, it'd be one of those quirky little independent handheld digital camera character studies of young people's confused relationships and discoveries about themselves and each other. One of the heavier versions of those stories.

It's definitely satisfying story telling as well as writing that satisfied my taste for original uses of language and structure. It works, and works well. But, my only caveat, I'm not sure it's the kind of book I'd keep around to dip into again over the years, but I'm uncertain enough about that to keep it for now.

As for 2666, if you're interested in books you weren't able to miss this one lately. Everyone's been touting it, Which is amazing in its way, because Roberto Bolano, the Chilean poet who wrote it before he died (and intended it to be five novels rather than this one enormous one broken into five huge chapters or sections) writes about academic and literary matters in the context of stories that have elements of mysteries and crime novels as well as of meandering philosophical disputations.

I only discovered him recently, as I reported in a post last year, when my friend, the artist Susan Napack, passed a copy of THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES on to me and I fell in love with it. No small novel itself, though puny compared to 2666, it too was concerned with literary matters set in the context of an unsolved mystery, or mysteries.

Something about Bolano's language (as translated by Natasha Wimmer) and the way it flows ends up mesmerizing the reader, or at least this one, into surrendering to its languorousness, and its intellectual curiosity, and it becomes very difficult to put down. I haven't finished it yet, but am well enough into it (beyond the first section) to be able to declare it another favorite book (though so far it hasn't surpassed the delight and surprise and deep connection and affection I felt instantly for THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES).

With original skill and commitment, Bolano manages to make the concerns of literary scholars and writers at work as compelling as a LeCarre spy novel or a Raymond Chandler mystery, but with the added weight of intellectually challenging subject matter and references, that it isn't absolutely necessary to be familiar with, but if you are, it's the amazingly unique seasoning in the whole endeavour.

As i said about THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES, any novel that refers to the poetry of Ted Berrigan and can also attract a mass audience is worth paying attention to. Bolano is now up there with Rilke and Whitman and W.C. Williams and Blaise Cendrars in my pantheon of poets who also write novels and prose books that are as compelling as their poems and which I will continue to read and reread as long as I am able to.

[In response to some challenges, Whitman did write novels early on, not as good as his poetry or later prose, so I shouldn't really include him, but his self-edited mostly Civil War journals—SPECIMEN DAYS—is as good as any novel for my taste.]

QUICK THANKS

I want to briefly thank everyone who came out for the reading Terence Winch and I did last night at the Telephone Bar in Manhattan [and poet Lisa Duggan who's reading there Monday for the photo of Terence and me]. Especially in that bitter cold wind, and especially Mary, the best friend of my oldest sister Joan (God rest her soul). It was a great crowd of poets and writers and artists and musicians and old friends and new. Felt almost like a party. Thanks to all for making it that way.

LAST MINUTE REMINDER

For anyone in Manhattan tomorrow, here's a last minute reminder, the press release from the organizers of the reading Terence Winch and I are doing:

MICHAEL LALLY and TERENCE WINCH

in a tag-team reading
you won’t want to miss

Thursday, January 8, 2009, 6:30 [boldly prompt!] to 8:30

The Telephone Bar & Grill – 149 Second Avenue btw 9th & 10th Streets

All trains to Union Square, 6 to Astor Place, F to Second Avenue

MICHAEL LALLY is author of 27 books of poetry and prose, including underground bestseller Rocky Dies Yellow, Cant Be Wrong (winner of the 1997 Oakland Pen Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature), It’s Not Nostalgia (2000 American Book Award winner), It Takes One to Know One, and March 18, 2003, the anti-Iraq war epic first delivered on what turned out to be the eve of the U.S. invasion.

“March 18, 2003 is at once as simple and commonplace as a handshake and as complex and varied as a hypothetical dissection of the strata that might compose the geological terrain of some distant planet.” wrote Larry Sawyer in Rain Taxi

Lally has held jobs from college teacher to limousine driver to book reviewer for The Washington Post and The Village Voice to screenwriter on films including Drugstore Cowboy and Fogbound (for which he was honored as co-writer at the Thessalaski International Film Festival in 2003). His longest running day job has been acting in TV and film, with such roles as an artist on NYPD Blue, a psycho detective on JAG, and a crusty cavalry captain on Deadwood.


TERENCE WINCH, poet, songwriter, and short story writer, may be best known for his compositions and performances with the award-winning traditional Irish band Celtic Thunder. He’s also a much anthologized author of poetry and prose, often drawing on his upbringing in Irish-Catholic New York: Irish Musicians/American Friends (1985), which won an American Book Award; The Great Indoors (1995) winner of the Columbia Book Award, The Drift of Things (2001) and most recently, Boy Drinkers (2007).

Winch’s prose works are collected in That Special Place: New World Irish Stories (2004), Contenders (1989), and Total Strangers (1986). The CD of Winch’s original compositions, named When New York Was Irish after his best-known song, was released by Celtic Thunder Music in 2007.

“With his musician’s ear and Irishman’s humor, Terence Winch pokes fun at the Holy, makes sacred the mundane, and redefines the meaning of ‘grace.’” --Meg Kearney

“Terry Winch writes.... in a voice that manages to be understated, precise, and casual all at once.” --Mark Wallace

The reading takes place in the comfortable backroom Lounge of the Telephone Bar, serving fine vegetarian and carnivore fare, and all usual liquids.

Admission is free, but we pass the hat. All proceeds go to the readers. The series is curated by Martha King and Elinor Nauen, and offers prose readings usually on the first Thursday of the month, from September through June.

For more information or to be added to (or dropped from) the e-mail list, contact Elinor@ElinorNauen.com or gpwitd@aol.com

COWBOYS & INDIANS

In my last book, the long poem MARCH 18, 2003, written for a reading on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I wrote a little "what if" scenario toward the beginning about our government forcing native Americans, or Indian peoples, onto small areas of land, making agreements about that, and then breaking the agreements by letting "white" settlers build homes etc. on that land and when the Indians object, building fences and manning the perimiters of the new settlements with the military and then taking more land and giving it to white settlers and when the Indians protest with demonstrations that turn rowdy, bringing in more military to crush the protests. And when, out of desperation at the imbalance of military power against rocks and stones, someone comes up with the idea of arming themselves with bombs and setting them off in crowded white areas and innocent people die as a result and our government escalates the military response so that innocent people die on the other side etc. etc.

You saw where this was going, I'm sure, from the start. But in the poem, I end the much more detailed and extended "what if" with the question, "—who/would be the the innocent ones in all that/—and the guilty?" And follow that question up with another: "Is that question anti-Semitic?"

One of the problems of dealing with the current escalation of the violence and hatred in the Middle East is getting around the obvious and less obvious prejudices all sides have toward all other sides (not just Arab-Israeli, but Sunni-Shiite, secular-religious, fundamentalist-moderate, etc.) and not letting solutions be couched in those prejudicial terms.

It's obvious that Israel wants to destroy or at least weaken Hamas. But throughout the history of this conflict, every time Israel manages to destabalize what it sees as the worst faction among the anti-Israel Palestinians, it either strengthens their support, by casting them in a sympathetic light, either as victims or righteous warriors against the common enemy, or even worse, it weakens them (Fatah is a great example) to the point where they become ineffectual giving rise to, or making room for the rise of, even more militant factions, ala Hamas.

It's so obvious that this strategy is a nonstarter. That no matter what short terms goals are achieved, in the end, it only adds fuel to the fire. Hamas should be held accountable for the rocket fire into Israel, but by the international community in the form of U.N. peacekeeping forces in the disputed areas and sanctions where necessary, and Israel should be held accountable for its continuing encroachment on Palestinian lands with settlements and concrete barriers and check points that seperate farmers from their fields and family's from each other etc. And they too should suffer U.N. sanctions if they violate that, after they remove all settlements.

Israel's argument is that Hamas doesn't officially recognize Israel's right to exist. But Hamas negotiated a truce with Israel, obviously those very negotiations prove that Hamas recognizes Israel, just as it does that Israel recognizes Hamas even though the Israeli government would not recognize Hamas' right to run Gaza despite being democratically elected to do so.

Obama seems to, or at least he did during the campiagn and before, have the capacity and the intelligence to understand that enemies can talk, and that it's usually better when they do. But if Israel and Hamas and whatever other entity they think they're going to control but have proved unable to, won't talk, then the U.N. and other international organizations have to step in and make sure Gaza and the West Bank have complete autonomy from Israel, including air and sea and other access routes for goods going in and out, and set up peace keeping forces on the borders of Israel and the Palestinian lands.

I know, I know, easier said than done, especially since the U.N.'s arcane ruling bodies usually include at least one Arab state or ally that will block anything seen as pro-Israel and Israel will not accept anything it views as anti-Israel.

Israel has been able to invade neighboring countries, or the Palestinian lands, pretty much whenever it wants to (e.g. the not so distant disastrous invasion of Lebanon, that once again only strengthened the hand of the Arab faction they were going after, Hezbollah in this case) because its military, largely supplied and paid for by US taxpayers, so outweighs any Arab counterpart. And because the USA has backed its play pretty much without question. Or with very few questions and never any reprimands or sanctions.

But sooner or later an Arab state will acquire nuclear capability, and Israel's position will become less overwhelmingly superior, and compromises will have to be made. In the meantime, life for the Palestinians will continue to be so much more confined, squalid, deprived and cut off from any way out of it, mostly by Israeli policy, somewhat from their own intransigence and lack of vision, that it will remain a breeding ground for future militants with revenge fantasies against their oppressor.

One of the main reasons that the troubles in Ireland subsided was because the perrenially impoverished South, suddenly became the Celtic Tiger, more prosperous and more productive than the North. The answer is almost always some kind of financial and political equity for those desperate enough to wage unending campaigns against what they see as the oppressor.

So as my friend Tom G. suggested from California the other day: "Let them build casinos," which is the only thing that's worked in our own country to restore any kind of financial equity and even some political balance of power in a lot of states to our own version of the Palestinian problem.

He meant it as a joke, to some extent, I assume, and also as an indicator of his own belief that the situation does have many parallels with the USA and its original inhabitants. But there's a kernal of truth in it. If ordinary Palestinians could live even half as well as Israelis, there'd be a lot less anger and resentment to draw on to fuel the ongoing conflict.

MASTERING THE MELON

One of many books I missed on my "three-word title" list a while back. I hadn't seen MASTERING THE MELON yet. Subtitled PROJECTS BY ALIX LAMBERT, this is an art book highlighting exactly that. Art projects might be a better term, but they would be difficult to categorize in any familiar way, or even unfamiliar.

Lambert's art is whatever she takes an interest in, and the projects are anything from making a film about it (THE MARK OF CAIN, a 1999-2000 documentary on prison tattoos in Russian prisons) to marrying and divorcing four different people in less than a year (three men and a woman, though the woman was "only" a legal domestic partnership agreement, 1992-93) as an exploration partly of how easy it was or not to do, and of a lot else subtle and not so.

They also go from using her physical presence, including having a miniturist paint her image on surfaces as small as a fingernail cutting or piece of rice (the exihibition left many viewers bewildered on discovering what they took for an empty gallery, not spying the pin stuck in an otherwise empty white wall with Lambert's image painted on its head) or shaving her head to duplicate "Male Pattern Baldness" and photographing the results in suit and tie with a basketball, looking like John Waters playing his idea of a basketball coach, only more intrusive, more disturbingly confusing and obvious at the same time, and then pushing it further by completely shaving her head and drawing lines on it to look precisely like a basketball, to projects in which she isn't even involved, except as organizer or generator, as in an exhibit of paintings produced in answer to an invitation from her to various painters to follow the instructions on a tape by Bob Ross of the TV show "The Joy of Painting" (she sent canvas with the instructional tape as well).

There's a lot more, all of it uniquely different than the rest. I've mentioned Lambert before in posts, mostly as a poet and a filmmaker, but her creativity is so much vaster and braver and more unique than whatever those words imply, it's impossible to, as I said, catergorize.

All I can really say is, her work has made her one of my new favorite artists as well as one of my heroes. I not only relate entirely to her sensibility and the broadness of her interests and the courage with which she pursues them, but also with the refusal to limit her creativity and intellectual and aesthetic curiosity to any one, or even two, or even ten, "art forms" or approaches [which is not to say that any kind of artist or writer, etc. who does stick to one particular method or approach or genre or form or etc. can't be equally as brave and unique, of course, but being one who has branched out in ways that have often confused and even alienated those who may have dug an earlier aspect of my creative activity, I'm senstitive to the "spread yourself to thin" critique].

I can't wait to see what she does next.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

The first time I tried to watch this movie, I couldn’t. The first ten or fifteen minutes left me feeling this is the most pretentious, slow moving, overdone piece of ham I’ve seen in a long time.

The second time I stayed with it all the way through, and was actually pretty pleased.

I’ve almost never been able to not finish watching a movie or reading a book once started. Only one or two times in my life. I’m compelled not only by the effort put into these works by their authors and collaborators and everyone involved in making a book or movie happen, but I also want people who pick up my books or see movies I had anything to do with to get the whole thing before making a judgment.

So now that I’ve watched the whole flick, here’s my response.

There are some pretentious things about BUTTON, but there are also some lovely things.

Bradd Pitt for one. A highly underrated actor, much the way Robert Redford always has been. Maybe because they’re good looking guys who seem to be blessed with the grace to make their success look easy and inevitable.

But in fact, they are both, for my taste, great actors. They aren’t the kind of shape shifters the Hoffmans are (Dustin and Phillip Seymor) or even the kind of consistently brilliant seemingly regular guy actor but actually interpreter of varied kinds of characters Jeff Birdges makes look equally easy. And they never play the kind of street savvy emotional ethnic roles of Pacino and DiNiro et. al.

But Redford and Pitt are consistently terrific, and from my experience, playing angry or emotional is a lot easier than playing ordinary or seemingly what you are.

And Pitt’s range has always been broader than Redford’s anyway. The first time I realized how good he was was his supporting role in THELMA AND LOUISE, where most of us first noticed him. But as an actor, the role that really caught my eye was the supporting one he played in TWELVE MONKEYS, one of my favorite flicks, in which he plays the wealthy but insane heir to Bruce Willis’ usual stoic hero.

And this year he played another great out-there supporting character in BURN AFTER READING. And was excellent, as well as very funny.

Now here he is carrying THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON and as far as his part goes, he pulls it off, beautifully.

Which isn’t the case for his leading ladies—Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton. As much as I love their acting, Swinton isn’t juicy enough to match the sensual ease of Pitt’s screen presence, and though Blanchett is capable of the same kind of sensual screen presence, in this movie she comes across more cool and even withdrawn than she should, except when playing her character as a young woman where’s she’s more goofy and pretentious than the character needs to be to prove she’s young. As they both “age” in their ways during the course of the film, Pitt’s character seems for the most part more believably whatever age he’s supposed to be, even incorporating the contradictions of the reverse aging of the plot, while Blanchett’s aging seems way too obviously theatrical rather than felt and lived.

There are a lot of nice acting bits by various supporting actors, though David Fincher (the director) for my taste, doesn’t make them serve the story-line and style of the film very well, so that many individual scenes work but could be from entirely different movies with entirely different styles and storylines.

That may also be partly the fault of the writers (Eric Roth and Robin Swicord are the credited writers of the story, and Roth the screenplay). Or the fact that it’s based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story and short story’s don’t usually lend themselves to the kind of epic ambition this movie is going for.

But there was enough scenes and shots and moments in BUTTON to end up not only pleasing me but moving me, Maybe I’ve just lived too much and experienced too much so that almost anything can resonate in ways that become emotional for me these days, or maybe some of the scenes and some of the acting and the dialogue really were done well enough to cause it, but for whatever reasons, I did get misty eyed several times, and had those little cathartic moments that can be one of the pleasures of movies and a necessary way for some of us to find relief from the daily deluge of bad news these days.

So, ultimate response, worth seeing for anyone interested in movie making as an art, for the attempt it makes but ultimately fails at. Anyone else can wait and check it out on cable sometime in ’09 I would guess.