THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT LOOK MIGHTY WEAK: COMPLAINT.

It’s 2001. The jazz pianist Tommy Flanagan has passed away. A radio station is interviewing a friend of his. He tells a story. In the story, it’s NYC 1950s or 1960s.

      “We was all playing gigs,” he says. “All the piano players.

      “At clubs around town, and when we was done, we’d go to the after-hours club.

      “This is where the REAL music would happen.

      “There was twenty or thirty of us.

      “Each guy got his turn at the piano.

      “This kid went up there, young kid, his hands was like birds on the piano keys.

      “He played boogie woogie, stride, modern, barrelhouse, avant GARDE.

      “Man, the place was going wild, everybody hollerin’, jumpin’, clappin’ they hands.

      “Then it was Tommy’s turn.

      “Tommy went up there.

      “He looked out at the audience, all severely you see:

      “He played the darkest, deepest key on that piano.

      “Everybody got damn quiet damn quickly.

      “Man, he wiped that cat out with ONE NOTE.”

Where is the Tommy Flanagan of today’s Democratic presidential candidates? Where is the Democratic challenger for the presidency who can wipe that cat out with one note? By “cat” we mean Trump, and by “cat” we mean the twenty or thirty hopefuls who are gathered at the “after hours club” also known as the Democratic National Committee, tossing their fedoras into the ring. Collectively, they are same-y, corporate, ageing, visionless, limpid, smarmy, air-brushed, elitist, tight-assed, and doomed. If your favorite isn’t exactly every one of those, then she or he is some of those. They open their mouths and “Trumpelstiltskin” comes out. We get it. Trump is a Russian asset. He has fornicated with Triple X stars, he has eaten a shocking amount of McDonalds, he has produced single-year tax returns that exceed the career published output of Joyce Carol Oates. Hasn’t this horror story—a cinema known as Trump v. Hillarious—played out before our very eyes, with the “basket of deplorables” triumphing in the Electoral College? Oh, this gang is very Photo Genie. They can run an impressive mile. (They have massive quadriceps.) The best of them will turn eighty in office, should he survive the process. (Should he achieve election.) Whereas the most enviable politician in the country—I speak of Alexandria—is seven years too young to establish an exploratory committee. 

The great Tommy Flanagan at the piano.

We turn to our panel of experts, The Machine, Sausages, and Fluffy, which is advising this blog during Complaint Week 2019.

         “Democratic,” insists Fluffy, “not ‘Democrat.’ Remember that.”

         “Everybody is so outraged about every little thing,” writes Sausages, “that they don’t exhibit proper outrage when something truly outrageous happens.”

         “We live in a country,” writes The Machine, “where elections are non-stop.”

Indeed. The Democratic group struggles to gain traction versus Trump. Outrageousness doesn’t lift any eyebrows. And the election to challenge Trump has been going on since December 2016, blah de bloo, blah de bloo. We need a candidate who can wipe this—entire scourge—out of the public domain—forever. With one note. How about Likability + Vision? Maybe that’s two notes, or maybe this clean candidate will be (shockingly? tragically?) a Republican? Complaint!

blood and gutstein complaint week 2019: no solutions—just gripes

monday: democrats

tuesday: education

wednesday: poetry

thursday: beer

friday: sports

WHY I LOVE POETS (EVEN AS I ASPIRE TO BE ONE).

I love poets, because they’ll phone me from a TJ Maxx dressing room—the muggy lighting, yes, the discarded sundresses, the sheer, sheer hosiery—only to imply that my leftist politics nevertheless don’t equal their own tilted-beret Marxism. I love poets, because they’re always crashing at my apartment, stealing turns in the shower, and pooping out odd little evergreens into my toilet, but never acknowledging our friendship after they return to their academic jobs, or their NYC jobs, or their mysterious positions grooming information for dubious conglomerates. They are gymnasts, these poets, they leap onto dangerous ledges, their frigid synapses medicated against the pervasive societal forces that would otherwise embrace them gently or roughly as the case may be. They are beautiful and handsome alike, they copulate in ways that mimic the backstroke or sidestroke or how people ride a two person (or three person) bicycle.

I love poets, because they equate anti-Trump Facebook postings to “taking a stand” even as this passive behavior contributes to the “white noise” that obscures Trump’s gateway fascism. Nobody is more qualified than poets when it comes to judging—arbitrating—the truth of a flawed system, and I love them, the poets, because we need them (finally, definitively) to scold us, to scald us with the righteousness we cannot perceive via our own faculties. They are poets, they compose poetry after all, it has rhyme and abstraction and non sequitur and metrical brilliance (at least what they dictate into a smartphone does), and after an appropriate interval, presses bind these poems into sheathes. Reluctantly, they read from these sheathes, they chant from these sheathes in a doldrums known as ‘iambics’, but don’t mistake their casual modesty at first, no, the poets aspire to give us readings, they are libraries unto themselves, they whip us with their oratory.

I love poets, because they’re the culprits behind a pattern of larcenies: the tip jar money, the vintage jacket, the autographed Tina Brooks album on Blue Note. They weep, the poets, while seated within the expanse of musty leather armchairs, the armchairs are endowed, they are named for other poets who wept in other armchairs, they wept, did the forebears, and they weep, do the contemporaries, for themselves, for their minimalist, pointillist dramaturgy, they weep until they are comforted by an administrator. There’s nothing like a repentant poet, simply put, since there are no repentant poets, only the word repentance, the sound of which approaches, curiously enough, the sound of the word “serpents.” I love poets, though, notwithstanding their record-setting selfishness, but because no other group of people can emerge from the cellars of isolation, after thirty minutes of exertion, wielding the high voltage of impregnable verse, and if I’m lucky, I should like to become just one such impossible person, a poet.

This Posts Is Part of New Home California Day. Also See:

east coast beard, westcoast beard

why i’m still swansea