This manifesto begins with love. For my mentor and close friend, Faye Moskowitz, who passed away in February. A love that can no longer be expressed, directly, to the person whom I love. Faye changed my life, through hundreds of interactions. Teaching, listening, sharing, crying, singing, even smoking weed once, yep. What does one do with grief that keeps ringing outward? Understandably, loss can turn to outrage, given the subtractions we must endure.
I listen to “In My Head” quite often. I’m jealous of the group, Gilla Band (or “Girl Band”), who hail from Dublin. This song is emblematic of the music I’d like to make: short, powerful, and aggressive. It’s the group’s first single, from 10 years ago. When the vocalist, Dara Kiely, screams toward the end—well, that’s how I feel, about losing Faye. You transport your feelings to a song and make them fit.
I did something similar on a piece, “Uh Huh,” I recorded
with Joy on Fire, the band I collaborated with to produce States of America,
an album which we released in June. In the middle of the tune, when our saxophonist
Anna Meadors (above, left) tears the building down, I do some shouting. But it’s not like
Kiely in Gilla Band. I think he means it a bit more. And it’s something,
frankly, I need to work on.
I listen to John Coltrane’s composition “Equinox” (recorded in
1960) every day. He’s more famous for other compositions but I keep returning
to this blues because of the gravity established by the pianist, McCoy Tyner, and
Coltrane, too, when he enters the song on tenor sax. Of course, Coltrane’s notes
become brighter, the brightness of grief, because he was a cerebral and sweet individual,
I would imagine. Don’t take my word for it, though. Go listen to “In a Sentimental
Way” released in 1963 by Trane and Duke Ellington.
You could look upon the1963 Ellington & Coltrane album
as a “super-group” effort. I do. Together with my friend, Emily Cohen, I’m assembling a “super-group”
to help tell the story of the folk song “Liza Jane.” (Above: find a conceptual
trailer featuring harmonica player Phil Wiggins.) It’s not public yet, the
super-group, so I can’t reveal the identities of the musicians, but they’re amazing.
We’re going to film them, extensively, in performance, in 2023. The group is
older and younger, men and women, Black and white, folk and blues and rock, banjo
and fiddle and violin and slide guitar and quills . . . .
2023 will also see the release of POOR GAL: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane, forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi. I wrote the book during a torrid six months, while the pandemic raged. Above, I say “the folk song ‘Liza Jane’” but it’s a family of songs, an extremely unruly lot at that. This book’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written, and undoubtedly, flawed. But I mean it, the writing. Just as much as Kiely means his yelling in Gilla Band. The story of this family of songs, well, is bigger than me. And that’s part of the supermanifesto. Writing is not about “me.” Rather, it’s bigger than “me.”
I did okay as a writer in 2022. A book of poems, Metacarpalism,
appeared from Unsolicited Press, out yonder in Portland, Ore. The Washington,
D.C. press Primary Writing Books produced my prose-and-photography collection, The
Fox Who Loves Me. Grantmakers, literally, kept me afloat: the Maryland
State Arts Council and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County
(Md.) I am indebted to the kindness and professionalism of these presses and organizations.
A few weeks ago, my close friend Doug Lang (above) passed away. Doug
was a poet, and a teacher, who inspired people with his writing, Welsh wit, and
comprehensive knowledge of American culture. We grew especially close after his
childhood football team, Swansea City, climbed into the Premier League for a
few years. A group of us became hooligans upon this development, often getting
tight off stout at 10 am in pubs, and listing out into the sunshine, to crow
about our worldview. Doug enjoyed this “bloke” activity quite a bit, and now,
once more, there’s love that can no longer be expressed, directly, to the
person whom I love.
I will always be Swansea, “O City Said I.”
One of the Swansea City hooligans (Casey) turned me on to Gilla Band and another (Rod) turned me on to Dry Cleaning, a group from London. I’m a bit obsessed with “Magic of Meghan” and with the singer, Florence Shaw. She projects so much tragedy at the microphone, and of course, the lyrics are often spoken, which is what I tried to do with Joy on Fire. She has amazing timing, and often delivers scathing satire. The “whoops” (all three of them) are quite nourishing.
I was once at a reading facilitated by the English
department where Faye and I taught. Since students were there, it was a “dry” event,
but I’d bootlegged-in a bitteen of the spirits, and, having extensive knowledge
of the domicile, I snuck through some secret passageways and doorways, where I
would situate myself in a private enclave, where I could partake of a “nip.” Privately,
or so I thought, because once I stepped-through into the ostensible safety of the
enclave, there was Faye, smoking a joint(!)
At a party once (but not the one depicted above.) Doug with
an “ass pocket of whiskey.” I have to put it like this: an “English aristocratic
sort” had insisted that Doug’s hometown of Swansea had not been bombarded during World War II. Doug retorted that he’d lived through said bombardments as a very
young boy. (Wikipedia, et cetera, confirms Doug’s account.) Anyhow, this “English
aristocratic sort” had attended the event with his trousers rolled very high,
and Doug made sure that the fellow understood the folly of the trouser-rolling,
as we were on the second floor, in a city that wasn’t bracing for a flood. It
wasn’t even raining.
When your best friend from the animal kingdom emerges from
the mist. The scoundrel. The trickster. The beautiful vixen. She knows she’s a good-looking
fox because I tell her as much every time I jog with her after sunset.
It wouldn’t be a true “Blood And Gutstein” without an old
R&B number that will rattle your windowpanes. Behold: “Big Bo’s Iron Horse”
from 1962. This has been a longish, searching, raking post, one that expressed despair,
and yet, there is much vitality ahead of us, in 2023 and beyond. Let us jump.
Let us flounce. It’s hard to know where the manifesto leaves off, and where the
supermanifesto begins. Where our hands touch, and where we embrace. Most of all,
let us acknowledge the love that’s still around us. Even in sorrow, the love we
feel for those we’ve lost will inform the very next love we develop with a new
soul, and if that soul is you, my friend, then I want you to know how much I love
you, and maybe, in some small way, you can see just where I’m coming from.
discographic
information for “Big Bo’s Iron Horse”
Big Bo and the Arrows. Willie “Big Bo” Thomas, Jr. (tenor sax).
Other musicians, potentially including organ, bass, drums, guitar, horns: unknown.
Gay-Shel Records, 1962, Dallas, Tex. “Big Bo’s Iron Horse” 701A b/w “Hully Gully”
701B.
