45 record, 33 speed

Tiny scratch on the motorcycle gas tank.

I am caught on that insubstantial score 
that skips the record back—

Might as well face it 
might as well face it 
might as well face

the collection sewn together
with needles and handlebars
and parkin sons and bloodlessorders 
and aqua nets of age that catch all 
and never lose their hold.

This scratch joins the loop,
jarring at the start, jagged at the end
across one thousand eight hundred twenty five and two 
plays alike in the same,
the same, the same,
the same;

I watch the best go down,
the pure, the strong, the virtuous; 
slow, in a drag,

the world purges its favorites.

There’s a tiny scratch in every thing. 
Every surface,
every tank
wears an inscrutable flaw,
hidden to all but the eye 
fixed on the fissure
that some giant
used for a toehold
to kickstart his ascent,
listening for the right tune to ride. 

sandy strips

The façade slips off the building,
a satin négligée puddling on the floor. Opulence uncovered,
rich, dreamy areolae, browning pink seducing the eyes;
a lavishly appointed cross-section dances for the other half’s pleasure. Rain soaks the naked breasts
and floods the underpinning,
bulging with sudden fullness. Flashing lights, sirens
bring the heat, rhythm, danger
and all is swaying in unison
and touching itself
clandestinely,
titillated,
rapt,
until
a pair of eyes
catches the imperfection,
the stain on the dropped lingerie,
a tiny blood stain,
an unanticipated period stain,
the disgusting remnant of an unfulfilled potential,
a hand through the bricks,
a pimple in the pornography;
the carnality ripens,
the lust rots. 

forward

The future tempts like a gardenia

browning around the edges,

fragrance ripening into the

sweet rot of old bananas,

unappealing to look at but

overripe with potential,

add rum and flambé

for a favorite dessert,

concluding a sumptuous feast

that sits too heavy on the stomach,

edging toward repeating,

egged on by the tantalizing,

sickening smell of the 

favorite flower, the

gardenia on the table

that will have to be thrown out

tomorrow.

sarah lisanick

Sarah Lisanick

"Pick up your wrists," she told me again.
    She nodded her head with the suggested rhythms of the piece I was butchering.  When I blew an accidental and trotted past the legato marks, she circled them and insisted I repeat the surrounding four to six measures until I no longer needed the music. 

    Sarah Lisanick played the piano exquisitely.  She was a bespectacled, short-haired blonde with a love of floral prints and pearls. She taught more than technique; she nurtured the unteachable.

    In the second week of my study with her, she figured out my secret: I was a lazy sight reader. Instead of working out the rhythms and actual notes, I would ask my teacher to play a piece once for me, then I would play it by ear.  I had never progressed in my sight reading abilities because my old teachers hadn't figured out what I was doing.  Mrs. Lisanick nailed it in week two.
    The work of sight reading was excruciating to me.  I think it utilized a part of my brain that would’ve rather been left alone.

    She studied with Béla Bartók.  To me, this makes her something akin to royalty.  In the genealogy of musical training, this makes her my pedigree. 

    My ear pulled away from Beethoven and Chopin; no matter that these are the masters to learn when developing technique, she eschewed them for my sake and brought me Erroll Garner.  She filled my head and ears with Johnny Mercer.  She introduced me to Stephen Sondheim. 
    "You need to work out the counterpoint between the hands.  There is a slight syncopation toward the end of the measures that is truly his signature style."
    "I'm really not seeing it.  Would you?"
    She acquiesced and took the bench. 
    "Right here, and again here.  Once more, and then we repeat."
    And then I played it perfectly, not reproducing her nuance but creating my own.  There is great intelligence in the balance of Sondheim's harmonies, but the beauty of his lines can be devastating.

    I saw her for the last time a few months before she died.  Her ex-husband John had moved back in with her for the end. 
    "It's so sad," he told me.  "All the time we were apart.  Now something wonderful has happened, but it's too late." 
    She looked the same as I remembered; short, blonde hair, large, thick glasses-- except she wore a housecoat instead of the usual florals and pearls.  We sat for tea and I told her that while I was still studying music, I had switched from piano to voice. 
    If she was disappointed, she didn't show it.  I played a bit for her, to prove that I was keeping up with the piano, even if I was no longer studying formally. 

    In every musical experience I carry her mark.  I feel her love of music, I remember her emphasis on interpretation and her rejection of histrionics.  Interpretation, as an art of the musician, crosses the span of all instruments.  In the drift from piano to voice to guitar and around again, I have discovered something fundamentally changed. On the good nights, when the technique is strong and little more than impulse, my hands and throat have become conduits for something greater. Mrs. Lisanick molded me into an instrument.

the beginning of autumn

this is a piece I started working on last fall. It contains adult content, so read it after the jump.

another instrumental

Same movie, next track.

an instrumental

I wrote the score for this short film I was in about ten years ago. This was the opening.

lecture

st. lucia (demo)

seven random questions with emily flake

I conducted the following interview via email back in 2006. Emily Flake remains my favorite comic artist.

1. Name a musical act that you would enjoy destroying. What is your preferred technique?
Sufjan Stevens. Immolation.

2. Where is the best place to get shitfaced when one is visiting Baltimore, and how many times have you been thrown out of there?
There are so many great bars in Baltimore that it's difficult to pick just one... if you held a gun to my head I guess I'd have to say Hogan's Alley, nee Cox's, which is so cheap and friendly that it'll make you weep giant salty tears into your two-dollar cocktail. Oh, did you ruin your cocktail by crying into it? No matter - IT'S TWO FUCKING DOLLARS. Maybe like $2.50. But still.
I'm proud to say that as of this writing I have never been thrown out of a bar. I have fallen straight on my ass in a bar, I have engaged in quiet, desperate vomiting in the ladies' room in a bar, I have threatened to break someone's nose in a bar, but never have I caused myself to be ejected from the premises. Maybe "proud" is the wrong word here. It is not as if this makes me a good person.

3. Lamer of two lames: Bil Keane or Brad Anderson?
Anderson. Bil Keane's preachiness and ghostly grandpa bullshit is irritating, but there's just nothing there in the Marmaduke. Plus I've always hated that fucking baby. Whatsername. Trixie. Ugh.

4. What is your favorite food that takes less than five minutes to prepare?
Five minutes for me or five for someone else? 'Cause those fuckers at Rice Thai Kitchen can serve up a duck in about 4:40. But if you mean the former, I like a big whack of Dubliner cheese and some avocado. Or carrots and hummus. Or bell pepper and goat cheese. Or HEAVY CREAM STRAIGHT FROM THE CARTON.

5. How would you build an alarm clock for deaf people?
Why, genital electrodes, of course. Next!

6. Speaking of deaf people, you have just come down with selective smallpox, a rare (but heart-wrenching) disease that makes you choose one sense to lose. What's it gonna be?
Well, if it's smallpox, I guess I'd go with touch, 'cause maybe then it wouldn't itch so bad. I can see that having some really disastrous side effects however, so I'll go with taste. Lose my fat ass some weight maybe.

7. The Michael Jackson song "Billie Jean" was inspired by a crazy woman jumping the fence at Jacko's house and insisting that one of her twin sons was his child. For whom would you go off the deep end, and what is your preferred method of Heche?
Pruitt Taylor Vince. Best of all, he's got some fucked up eye condition that makes it hard for him to see, so I probably wouldn't even have to be very crafty to get close. I think I'd just creep very quietly into his lap, curl up, and take a little snooze.

Thanks, Emily. I feel the need for some bourbon and cookies.

_______________________________________________

Emily Flake is the creator of Lulu Eightball, my favorite comic of all time. You can peruse more of her work at eflakeagogo.

careful, young queers!

Careful, young queers--
Be loath to judge your fellow sistren
          by those same standards of chastity
          to which they hold the feminine race
For you have adolesced with restraint
          and now, advanced (with caution)
          you have permission to defy presumptuous morality.

Break bridles, brothers--
Do not tame your hot, rosé flame
          as though to broadcast yourself
          were unforgivable
For you stand on the graves of your fathers
          and bare(naked)backs of your uncles
          who fought for you to be not ashamed.

Persevere, dear hearts--
Deny the God who denies you
          and teaches his flocks of followers
          to act with such callous indifference
For you are God’s great creation
          and your love is further (undeniable) proof
          of glamour in divine design.

blue springs

Cason and Virginia Callaway “discovered” Blue Springs in 1921, and it was the extraordinary beauty that brought them from LaGrange to live in the Hamilton area. However the spring has an unwritten history extending back centuries and beyond. In the late eighteenth century, a hospital on-site utilized the pure water. Prior to that, Native American people knew of the spring and clearly visited it with some regularity. The spring’s location is peripherally marked with trees, centuries old, that were bent in their youth to point toward the water source. The water ranks among the cleanest in the world, as it has since Franklin Roosevelt first commissioned a study to determine drinking sources around Harris County.

At the front entrance, the wood and stone gates blend seamlessly into the grove of giant magnolias. More impressive still is the rear entrance, loping through pine forests and over a mountain ridge from the log cabin home of my great-grandparents. However you get there, the swimming pool will immediately pull you in.

When my great-grandfather Cason purchased the Blue Springs watershed in 1930, he had already envisioned the swimming pool that he would build seven years later. Drilled out of the native hollis quartz, the pool at Blue Springs stretches just over two acres. The water shares an exquisite blue color with its source, though not the same intensity. At the south end of the pool, the water reaches a depth of twenty feet, at the north it is as shallow as one foot. The majority sits at roughly eight feet deep, with quartz bottom shining through the pristine water. A swim pavilion constructed from hand-hewn oak, salvaged from a barn on the property, has hosted many thousands of guests over the past seventy years. A matching pavilion atop the overlooking ridge seats eighty guests at an arc of long oak picnic tables, surrounding a twenty foot barbecue pit and combination butler’s pantry / kitchen, built from the quartz taken from the pool. The architecture of the structures compliments the extraordinary landscape, cultivated over decades by dedicated horticulture enthusiast Cason and his equally green-thumbed wife, Virginia. Cason and Virginia were well-known for their hospitality, and frequently entertained their friends, including Mr. Roosevelt, at Blue Springs.

The pool and the pavilions make an ideal party spot, but their beauty dulls in comparison with the spring itself. Approximately one-hundred yards north of the pool winds a trail, at first paved with stone then worn dirt tangled with rhododendron roots. Mountain laurel lines the sides of the trail in thick walls, and their bloom in late spring delights the eyes and the nose. Continue down the trail for thirty yards, and quite suddenly, the spring will appear. The deep blue color of the water is shocking, almost as shocking as the temperature of the water. A moment in the spring and skin immediately looks blue through the water. Five minutes in the spring and lips will turn blue from the cold. Moss banks line the wall of the ridge that embraces the spring and provide vantage points for jumping in. The visible bottom begins at a depth of fifty feet and slopes downward into infinity. Divers sent to examine the caves below have reached three hundred feet, at which point the undertow and the narrowness of the caves make continuing all but impossible.

Here, in these waters, on these grounds, my family marks every major milestone. When we marry, the showers, rehearsal dinners, and receptions thrown here bring us back. When we are baptized, it is with the cold, blue spring water. When we die, it is to this sacred spot that we repair, with our family, resting in the beauty and strength of those who came before. It couldn’t be more fitting that the family mausoleum sits atop the mountain ridge overlooking the watershed, emblazoned with the family crest and motto: “St. Callaway, Ora Pro Me.” Made from the same native quartz, it currently houses five beloved greats of the Callaway family, four inside the mausoleum and one, my grandfather, outside in the north center plot of the graveyard, where he will watch over his grandchildren as we, one by one, come home.

sweetie

Coloring by Chuck McKinney

ribbons & bows

Three decades in,

So we calm our breath,
put pause to our fear,
and rest on the progress
of the last thirty odd years?

Do we vilify Gaëtan Dugas, the peripatetic lover?
Or David Carr, or Robert R.,
petrified, not knowing how they’re going
down?

We have made advances,
and we can breathe again (with caution).
Now it infects/affects only the willing
participants in grave sin.

But this 4H feller
ravaged Miss Kitty,
even took down the goddamned Marlboro Man.
Could Asimov have imagined?

Still.
Niggling whispers of Christian Ladies
whose closet-husbands
haven’t brought it home
                                              yet.
Still they believe it’s somehow
                                                      a fault
with a particular blame to be placed.

Putrid memories
of funeral homes and cemeteries
which refused to honor death
for fear that death was catching,
not getting the punchline.

And now
we subtext,
we remember
with clumsy, sad mnemonics:
          He’s bought a Home In Virginia
          She likes Asians In Denim Shorts
perpetuating shame
          Goddamn Right, It’s Death.

Are we so cavalier?

I am not innocent.
The unbelievable bravado
to tell my brother
it’s no longer so tragic,
unaware dear Joey was already cold.
There’s my shame.

And for every innocent,
for every victim,
for every Ryan or Elizabeth
there is a Zondi or Makgatho
and forty million more
who didn’t have the luxury
of the pretty white face
of normal,

And who left
much the same as they came
alone and quite naked
alone and afraid
alone and unsure
alone and alone.

Wrap it in quilts,
put a big red bow on it.
Just don’t stay silent.

And don’t fall for the line
that so many
were so smote
for making each other
feel good
feel loved
feel something.

gone

charley's stop

It hit me like the Staten Island Express Bus.

My gift might be motivated by something more than friendship. Crossing Seventh Avenue with the framed Buckingham Nicks album perfectly gift-wrapped under my arm, I knew full well that it would be the most thoughtful and appropriate present Mikey would receive this year. His 30th birthday would be indelibly marked with thoughts of me. My subconscious was a sneaky fucker.
          I liked his new boy, Ryan. He was nice, but more importantly he wasn’t as good looking or as welloff as I. This was petty, sure, but it felt good to win my own self-comparisons. And there was no way in hell that he would have as specific and rare a gift as mine.


Reality check: this was Mikey’s birthday, this was his night, not my opportunity to sashay in and create bar theater. I paused to collect myself on the corner, took a few breaths, and launched into the monologue I had written in the first months after our breakup.
There are reasons-- good reasons-- why we are not together anymore. And his success is more important to him than my success, than our relationship. And he is not a bad person, just an unsuitable candidate for the long haul. And being with Mikey means playing a supporting role in “The Mikey Show.”
The inevitable coda:
And he screwed more guys when we were together than I have in my entire life.
Okay, that brought me back a little.

But my heart still ached. Badly.

I got lost in the window of the Urban Outfitters, fixated on the bottle-opener necklace on the mannequin. God, that period of my life-- Mikey and I were separated, and I clung desperately to the last vestiges of twinkdom: knee-high tube socks, wife beaters, and that goddamned bottle-opener necklace, declaring my obvious devotion to the bar scene. Sometimes... sometimes it amazed me that he took as long as he did to leave me. He had barely scratched the surface of his ambitions and I had already resigned to complacency. He would be the toast of the art world, and I would be stuck here, forever haunting Chelsea with memories of what I should have been.

This was precisely the loop that my therapist, the unfortunately named Mr. Block, had warned me against. I was too sensitive, placing grave importance on the opinions of others to the point of obsession. And with profound rejection, the what-ifs could be crippling. When my relationship with Mikey dissolved, so did I. My mother came to New York and dragged me home herself, nursing my heart to relative health before sending me back north.

Mikey and I had several missteps and misunderstandings along the path to civility. On more than one occasion, when meeting for a few friendly cocktails, one of us would make a move on the other and invariably be shot down. Then there was my birthday party, where he assumed I was over the whole thing and brought a boy with him. I was not amused, and it did not end well. After each awkward lurch forward, we would take a two-week (or so) breather, and try again, eventually getting to a place where we could be happy for each other.

But my heart still ached. Badly.

It was time to regroup. No one would notice if I was late, but I could not show up to the bar looking so disheveled. A few tears swiped away, and I was almost good to go. It really wasn’t so bad. We were good friends now, with little jealousy or bitterness. When either managed to creep into play, we were good at acknowledging it and moving on.

Still if I pulled at just the right threads, I could unravel myself enough to see what was still happening inside.

Shit. I had dropped the album. The glass on the frame was broken and the wrapping paper torn. Perfectly appropriate. And the tears were unstoppable. I bent down to salvage what I could. Cursing and muttering under my breath, it didn’t surprise me to see the young boy staring at me. I was the crazy man arguing with himself on the sidewalk. The boy held his mother’s hand and cocked his head, staring intently. I gave him a half-smile and a little wave. His mother pulled him over and joined a crowd forming around the front of the express bus stopped partway into the intersection. Such a hush seemed quite out of place, as if something devastating or criminally beautiful happened. I followed the spooky boy’s gaze as he turned from me to the horrible tableau and back again. I shuddered when I first noticed the brown Cole Haans, certainly a common enough shoe. Curiosity turned to quiet bewilderment as I realized that I knew what I was seeing here-- I would undoubtedly see it for the rest of my days. And quiet bewilderment gave way to gratitude as the kind man in the paramedic’s uniform bent over, and with a tender, deliberate motion, closed my eyes.

follies

cordelia restoration

I'm restoring this photo of my great-great-grandmother, Signora Cordelia Truett Smith. Click to enlarge.

birds in the sky

My father's garden

The earth will cut hard under the shovel
that snags on old root clumps beneath.
The sole of my foot usually gives up after the third jump.

I’ll work in some rot with my hands,
amending the soil for the winter clover.
It is all preparation, this step and the several that follow.


The packed clay will be full, rich, and scented sharp,
but without the regular revision
it will not allow new roots to take hold.

I’ll till by hand and not machine,
mixing my sweat with the compost
to fully invest myself in the dirt.

Each year that I come back,
turning the remains of last year
back into their ground,

the fruits will grow sweeter and more plump
and the crops will bear more product
and the earth will near its potential

and my belly and heart will swell.