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There was a time, when the city of Los Angeles was
resplendent with vintage listening posts: modern
sounds bistros attended by customers with enriched
musical intelligence. Such is not the case anymore.
These jazz rooms have been replaced by newer
versions of music emporiums along with audiences
who seem, also, to have been dislocated due to ensuing
cultural assaults on both American contemporary
music and language art.
1. For Openers
(LOST JAZZ BARS In Four-Time)
Why can’t poetry readings be attended by only those
who used to drink at Dino’s, or Dante’s, or Billy Berg’s Swing Club, The Angel Room,
Parisian Room, The Copper Room,
The Captain’s Table, Zardi’s, The Encore, the Tally-Ho, The
Beverly Cavern, Club Alabam, The Hillcrest, The Summit,
Ivy’s Chicken Shack, Jack’s Basket, The
Surf Club, Strollers, The Cloister,
Tiffany Lounge, The Trade Winds, The Hi-Hat, The
Parrot Cage, Memory Lane, The
Downbeat Club, The Dunbar Hotel, The LA
Jazz Concert Hall, Concerts By The Sea?
What was full has become a baleful cavity in the tooth of
music. Why is it no surprise to see poets in LA, standing at the edge of a tremendous
and treacherous gorge? Do they stand in some
gnarly perpendicular manner between Barstow and the
blue burgeoning breakers at Huntington Beach? Or, maybe,
Rainbow Bridge over the banging blue surge of Big Sur?
Let me be like a bridge: I think it would be the
best way......... to be run-over.
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2. |
A Simple Ode
03:17
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Eric Dolphy was a revered Alto saxophone player (played all the
reeds, actually) and who many critics expected would surpass
Bird in terms of his innovative musical mind. Feeling he couldn’t
make it, anymore, in New York moved in European jazz circles,
where he eventually died in a typically predictable atmosphere
of abject poverty. Abstract expressionist painter Grace Hartigan
whose allegiance to many New York City poets including Frank
O’Hara (one of the ones integral to her creative process) had been
exhibiting her wall-size murals with titles like Finland, Germany,
Sweden, &c.
2. A Simple Ode
(To Frank Ohara)
Frank, you died just like your poetry
as horizon crushed the bones of sunset: oh Christ!
In your love song to 23rd Street you begged the
gods to let you lie down and be run-over.
We never met you but we knew you, walking
with Daisy Aldan along 2nd Avenue. She
talked about the way you bled back the knives
of urban nostalgia.
Frank, your death is madness.
Your death is Che Guevara trapped on a tramcar
suspended over Disneyland.
Your death is Antonioni directing Doris Day in a
perverted Florentine montage.
Your death is Bing Crosby dreaming of a white
Christmas while Eric Dolphy drowns in a vat full
of Minute Maid Orange Juice.
Your death is Grace Hartigan painting
Coney Island.
Your death is hanging in the Museum Of Modern
Art unguarded. Do you realize that?
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3. |
Waterfalls
03:13
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This presents a sort of free form attempt at turning
the new Millennium into another funeral ritual; yet,
instead of icy derision or parody, something in the
nature of a syrupy, sugary farewell: an imperfect
and sentimentalist finish, as a footnote to transform
and begin, again, the next 100 years.
3. Water Falls
(21st-CENTURY GOODNIGHT)
As the hearse waits
At the gates
Of the gothic church
Just before we give ourselves up
To the journey............
Rain rolls out of
The mural windows of our
Stained glass visions
And waterfalls
Down our Faces
After what we’ve just been through
Will we ever be able to look each other
In the ears, again?
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4. |
I Dont Want To Go
03:31
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I composed this in 1972, 3 days after the prize-winning poet
John Berryman jumped off the bridge which separates the cities
of Minneapolis and St. Paul and, in cavalier fashion, indemnifying
the fact that music had taken a left turn, circa 1964. And, because,
since 1984,I have collaborated with some of the most universally
acclaimed, genre-proof players in musical history, conceits of my
commentary are made that much more ironic than I, originally,
intended.
4 I Don't Wanna Go
(Said The Suicide)
If you insist I become popular by setting it to
music: that is, if you advise big money in white
rock rip-off of black blues lyric lingo
by some cornball drughead twanging
Bob Dylan imitations, well then I must tell you.
I refuse to be one of those
those dimpy frauds filling the pockets of pimps
in the media whorehouses with these dry baptisms
of born again greed, because in spite of all the
potential riches from that religious experience
I’d rather be a deluded fool than some skuzzy
fame-junky crooning on commercial stages: for
madam, I fear you do not know the truth about
humanity.
We stand on the bridge with John Berryman
but we relinquish our inclination to jump
and it has nothing to do with
religion: it is simply
as we grow older
we discover
there’s not that much left to kill!
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5. |
Mars Is America
03:54
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Sometimes, one has to imagine inhabiting another intergalactic
region, in order to survive subtraction from all of one’s life that
had been, before, so insignificantly earthbound.,
5. The Retreat
Possible - "Mars Is America" (THIS IS A POSSIBLE TITLE)
(Reasons Why There's LIfe On Mars)
Wishing to deny attitudes of impatience and
dissatisfaction, I decide to move to the planet
Mars.The weekend I arrive crystalline kids
throw stolen plutonium stones at glass houses every
night. During the day, with hands marked by a
leprosy of spiders, they applaud themselves
through truant alleyways.
There is treachery in every tree they climb: it’s a question now of
how much hostility I can stand in one sitting.
I lock my door from the inside of a Galaxy 6
Motel, then boost myself over the sill of a
chink’d window.
Winter blisters in my hair: pink
moonlight wobbles on a shrinking canal. I swim
across to the other shore side: what’s left of my
identity becomes debris that mixes with drainage
underwater. My senses turn into anthropological
ghost stories: my star eyes go Cro-Magnon.
It isn’t long before scrawny lavender branches begin to umbrella my
primitive head. I am armed only with sticks and a butane lighter
from the Jupiter boutique on Europa. I build a fire:
I crouch and dream with other disillusioned tourists.
Suddenly, we’re surrounded by radar cars, placed in
plastic cages, then paraded through the narrow
streets of transparent towns. It doesn’t take anytime
at all to admit to the truth of a well-entrenched
Martian aphorism.
The grass is always redder on
the other side of the senses.
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6. |
Sleeping Underwater
02:37
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The Dalles is named for that section
of the Columbia River running slow
between walls of a gorge Northwest
of Bend, Oregon
6. Sleeping Underwater
Not really swimming underwater,
But more like sleeping underwater
Just like day before yesterday
When we became amphibian
Water bearers
As our soaking dream
Of the language of sleep
Begins dripping
Among moorings of
The Dalles
As a violet-tinged sunset
Is turning the
Columbia River into an assembly
Of mirrors
Creating crimson reflections
Of what resembles a long wet
Orchard full of
Plum trees
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7. |
Making Out
03:13
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As if one were looking through a fog, trying to make
something out, like when it was, still, a village: before
urban renewal construction destruction obscured
West Coast horizon and suffocated the sun.
7. Making Out With Westwood Village
Pegasus: the stuff of myth even though
I know it’s advertising something: some
gasoline station logo slow motion twirl:
This flying red horse
as if it were a flaming ballroom
horse-head strobe globe for a few
gods and goddesses in an enflamed
tribal romp
In my 4-year old brain I realize
someday the gods and goddesses
of urban renewal will bring that lofty
plastic beastie down / down / down
from it's flamboyant perch: it's
West Coast blue sky smog-free open air
mythic farm yard will be grounded forever
In mindless 1970’s inertia to
pin it with paint to an idiot aluminum slab
tomb never to spin again on its fiery
flagrant and towering Mt. Olympian immortality
The long slow slide down Wilshire Boulevard
the simple symmetry of a flying red horse
So, we watch: don’t we: in our imaginations?
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8. |
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This is designed to prove there really is life before birth - BASTILLE DAY
8. American Bombs
(Autobiography of an American Bomb)
my French grandmother sees impressions
of Renoir children, in the form of a frolic
of vaporous games in Grant Park. I am a
fetus-balloon! when they, finally, let the
air out of my mother’s fuselage,
I wonder,
like a dud firecracker,
will I die in the sky?
sometime in 1939 Poland
Hitler’s modern
the king being
old school Europe is
old-fashioned and must
be bewildered by threat of sea war
headlines
then, I crown in Illinois
with everyone going into full-tilt
patriotic revenge
join the world and see the Navy!
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9. |
Wartime Carol
04:40
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Sometimes, the homefront is more horrifying than
any battlefield. This is, here, highlighted by a
Jordan/Steinberger ironic musical refrain
recollecting a familiar and, in a sense, lyrically
ominous Teutonic Christmas carol quote.
9 War Time Carol
(Bringing The War Back Home)
Remembering, when the U.S. President: George,
the senior Bush got food poisoned in Japan, and
hurling all over the Nipponese flag :in retrospect,
a perfect metaphor, perhaps, for the perpetration
of Operation Desert Storm.
The 1980s were going away and I was catching
a green light walking across the terminal
illness of Pico Blvd. then over to my
neighborhood street, hoofing down the
driveway, passed the main house used-to-be
pool shed dressing-room attached to the former
‘40s bungalow residence, there, where I’d been
living for the past 19 years.
The refugee woman from Central America who
escaped being skewered by CIA-sanctioned fascist
police in Nicaragua was cacked-out in a garden
chair in front of the apartment compartment
adjacent to mine.
She’s always been rather decent and friendly and
is, now, holding up this morning’s edition of the
Los Angeles Times, pointing at one of the sub-
headlines reporting what the Bush man did on a
visit to Japan. “Your president is sick,” she said.
I answered: “They’re the only kinds who
get elected.”
I stepped into my room. took a vintage
water pistol off its easel and thought
about my father’s brother who came back
from World War II, moved to Utica,
New York, using a similar toy
held-up a liquor store for two bottles of
Jameson 's Irish, was immediately
apprehended and sentenced to doing a
nickel for armed robbery.
Yes, that’s the way this country treats its brave
and damaged veterans of foreign conflict: so,
thinking about all of it, putting the barrel of the
water gun against my right temple, nudging the
trigger and washing out my version of
Vincent van Gogh’s other ear.
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10. |
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10. Whatever Happened To The Orange Grooves Grandma
Oh
Just more landscape rape: more planned obsolescence
replacing 40,0000 orangegrove acres {151 acres on
rented family property} along Route 66 with tract
housing, follow-the-dot parking lots and shopping
mall hell: all this healing verdant fragrant oxygen-
producing eco-system bulldozed down. And, now, it’s
as if Eastland suburban Los Angeles itself has been,
with sinister precision, delivered dead-on-arrival.
Inland, East: Aunt Louise and Uncle George
lived in the middle of miles of a scattering
scent and shade of oranges.
Upland, Ontario: 15 years, later turning into 151
acres of supermarkets and cement vicissitudes
of blossomless parking-lots. Eucalyptus trees
peeling and weaving in a suburban
cemetery dance of the living
dead.
The rotten Goodyear tire-swing is gone
replaced by fiberglass illusions, Formica
jungles, pastel quads and television lobotomy.
Oh, you sun-pocked, smog-drenched din of
silence! Trapped in the tract, stuck in the
stucco, dreamless in the bad beds of our own
making.
Though Dubious rituals under the dooms of
porticos in Southern California cannot convey
real orders of enlightenment. Can they be less
fulfilling? Can they be less life-fulfilling?
In Phoenix, Arizona? Yet, although there are these
postures of put-downing, grandma, sometimes, even with
all this, oh grandma, sometimes,
the signatures of poets are put upon patches of blue sky
and the breezes blown thru our bodies sound like Bach fugues!
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11. |
Float of Drive
04:05
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Three random selections from a work-in-progress entitled
One Southern California Concerto After Another.
11. Suburban Freeway Triple By-Pass
One
rain has always been capable of
muttering soft songs against a
window-whirl of glass over tin
portico rooftops, over sidewalk
suburban purgatorial concrete
or on the asphalt wet of
dinner-bound gridlock
yes, these metallic deities against the
whole freeway drag: a toll road: a
Rosemead road just another swinging
watch-fob in our hypnotized eyes
was Arcadia ever a long Saturday
matinee of memories and our thoughts
ever tall transcriptions telling us: catch
a radio on Garden Grove grass: sound
waves in green fumes: maybe there were
too many manhole covers, too many cisterns,
because look now at how foggy air is
informing us that it’s the no of not knowing
anything about the old Oak Knoll road going
the race of the driving rain: the driving trance
of it: the float of drive on Huntington Drive
TWO
an inflection of intermittent
Eastland suburban showers a few
vacant lots for a few vacant people
are all chained to too infrequent
changes in the weather chained to
this collective brain rain tropical
around the real Route 66 environs
the ears of the rest of us are tied to
a soundtrack of emotional wisdom
incurable diseases of isolation are
captured as significant spies in the
scree of the San Gabriel Valley
THREE
in San Marino we were breaking up
behind invasions from relatives
cracking up due to these human
jokes: too long without strong
reservations at the Huntington Hotel
wow we had reservations too because
of this insane coincidence of invisible
corners on the Santa Ana Freeway: that
point of too many returns where Santa
Fe Springs and Norwalk and Downey all
coincide in one long intense and terrible
assault on each other
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Michael C Ford Los Angeles, California
This album marks a reunion and the last recording for the three Doors members, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore, backing up Pulitzer Prize, Grammy nominated poet Michael C Ford. Vocal performances are added by Tommy Jordan (Geggy Tah) and Angelo Moore (Fishbone). ... more
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