"...and Grace too" : How Grown Up Songs Make Me Behave Like A Teenager

Today is the final matchup of the Hip64 tournament for 2008.

‘Emperor Penguin’ versus ‘Grace Too’.

What exactly is the Hip64 tournament? I hear you ask.

64 songs started out two months ago and rounds of head-to-head voting have whittled them down until there is only two. Tomorrow there will only be one.

Last year (the first year the Hip64 was run) the winner/survivor was ‘Nautical Disaster’, which I blogged about in February.

Sure, it’s geeky, artificial, solipsistic, and probably pointless in the greater scheme of things (though if it makes the Hip play Emperor Penguin live more often, it will have made the world better place)… but it has been fun.

I voted for Grace Too, by the way. It might not be my favourite Hip song at the moment, but it was the first song I heard on the first Hip album I listened to, and I knew after sixty seconds that this would be the beginning of a beautiful thing.

Being marooned in NZ, then Australia, as I discovered the Hip (who themselves are marooned – the only place they are “big” is their native Canada) meant I developed attachments to songs based purely on the songs. I didn’t know which tracks were released as singles, which ones were played to death on Can Rock stations, which ones were mainstays of their live show -- I didn’t even know which of the faces from the album covers actually played which instruments.

Looking back, I could have found all of this out on the internet (as I have subsequently), but back in my first 24 months as a Hip fan, there were still albums to buy off eBay, still new songs to discover and absorb – this other information wasn’t necessary.

And one could argue that it isn’t necessary to ever know anything about who makes the music you like, or what other people think about it. Just as you don’t need to know what an author looks like, or what a politician does behind closed doors.

Those who take the pursuit of secondary information about an artist to the extreme – let’s call them superfans – always seem immature. Adolescent. Even when it’s with obsessing about Chopin or Proust.

But to ignore all the other factors at play and just listen to the music – that too seems like adolescent behaviour. A failure to grasp the whole. It speaks to a more innocent time when all you knew about the Beach Boys was the tape your parents played whenever you went on a long drive.

Somehow I have gone from innocence to superfandom with the Tragically Hip. My response has been, and will remain, adolescent, even when I go ahead and analyse a song with a serious expression on my face...

[I’d actually never seen the video until today. It’s not very interesting, but at least it doesn’t bombard you with unnecessary secondary information, eh?]

As I type this it looks like it will win the Hip64 2008, but to look at the lyrics, the song seems thin and insubstantial. Aside from the epigrammatical “The rules of engagement are hard to endorse / When the appearance of conflict meets the appearance of force,” the song looks like a dialogue between two people.

He said I’m fabulously rich
C’mon just let’s go
She kind of bit her lip
Geez, I don’t know

But when I began my relationship with this song, I was not reading the lyrics, I was listening to the song. The 45 second intro is a great album opener (and live opener) but foremost it leads the listener into the sort of world where someone could say, “I’m fabulously rich. C’mon just let’s go.”

The dialogue is highly stylised (who would ever profess to being armed “with skill and its frustration” in real life), but embedded in this song, in this aural template, it works.

The one area where reading the lyrics mirrors the experience of listening to the song is the confusion of who says what. Just as there are no speech marks on the liner notes, there’s only one voice (Gordon Downie’s) on the track. Downie doesn’t make a point of differentiating the speakers because a) this is mid-nineties rock not Queen at it’s campest and b) it isn’t supposed to be clear cut.

The opaqueness of the lyrics means that it takes several listens for the scene in the song to congeal, but also that you could listen to this song forever and not be entirely sure of your footing.

Here is my reading of the scene. There is a man, probably a pimp or a wannabe pimp, who is trying to coerce a girl into doing something (a life of prostitution or a one off? with the fabulous rich man or one of his clients?).

But, if you attribute everything from, “Geez, I don’t know,” onwards to the girl, the scene is more like: rich guy propositions prostitute, she plays coy for a moment, then talks shop.

Either way, this seedy, cinematic tale is the perfect opener to an album (Day For Night, 1994) which is full of film references (including the album’s title) and dripping with that other cinematic term: noir.

It was Hunter S. Thompson, I believe, who coined the term Song Noir, and this is as apt a term as any for ‘Grace Too’ and it’s Day For Night brethren.*

Thompson was actually referring to the songs of Warren Zevon when he came up with song noir, and there is one particular Zevon song with which Grace Too shares some striking similarities.

In ‘French Inhaler’ the woman is a wannabe actress, and the persona Zevon adopts for the song suggests the actress will have to put herself “up for sale” to “make her way in the world.”

Basically: another case of a man trying to cash in on the sexuality of a woman. Or perhaps: a man seeing the cash value of a woman’s sexuality.

In terms of lyrics, ‘French Inhaler’ is a longer, more complete song than ‘Grace Too’. Whereas the Hip’s song is essentially two repeated sections of eleven lines each (the last seven lines of each section being virtually identical), Zevon’s song sets its scene, builds to a climax (“When the lights came up at two / I caught a glimpse of you…”), and even has a kind of dénouement (“She said, ‘So long, Norman’…”).

I am not going to take a (maple) leaf out of the Hip64 tournament’s playbook and vote for which is the better song: ‘Grace Too’ or ‘French Inhaler’. What I’m interested in is this concept of song noir. And that two of my favourite songs feature men trying to turn women into whores - - What does that say about me?

Well, um, back to the song noir thing: the appeal of darker, more twisted songs is in no small way related to the alternative on offer in the mainstream. When Zevon wrote ‘French Inhaler’ the kids were lapping up Abba and Chicago. When the Hip released Day for Night the grunge flare up had already made its way to the mainstream (flannel shirts in JC Penny’s etc) and the two biggest selling singles of the year were from movie soundtracks. As I type about these songs, the video playing on The Hits (UK Freeview Musioc Channel) is September ‘Cry For You’ (I’m not sure if I got the artist and song title the right way around and will be damned if I’m going to look this up).

Sexuality has never been more pronounced in popular music, but it also has never been more adolescent. Music videos are the same kind of ‘You can look but not touch’ as being a geeky kid at high school and ogling the pretty girls. Quote-unquote love songs in popular music rarely strive for more than a memorable hook (2008’s biggest selling example: ‘Bleeding Love’ by Leona Lewis).

It is with all this noise in the background that one stumbles across a ‘Grace Too’ or a ‘French Inhaler’: songs which deal with love, sexuality, or mortality in adult ways. ‘Adult’ here doesn’t mean right, or even clear-cut, just as being an adult doesn’t give you all the answers. Adult just means something you probably weren’t interested in when you had bad acne. I can’t speak from everyone, but when I was fourteen, putting myself in Zevon’s shoes was beyond my ken.

I touched on this distinction between adolescent and adult themes with reference to Monster Magnet, a band whose songs oscillate between the two worlds. As I drill ever deeper into my musical tastes, and their evolution, I always seem to strike this adolescent/adult vein…

Which brings me back to the Hip64. There may be intellectual reasons why I the Tragically Hips’ songs, but the reason I love them, and constantly return to them, goes beyond the intellect - - or more correctly, kicks in before the intellect even gets a chance. The themes of ‘Grace Too’ may resonate because they speak about something that is elsewhere unspoken, but they ultimately lead me back to the form of adolescence that is fandom.

*Appendix: An incomplete list of noir-ish elements in Day For Night

@ The pessimistic coda of Daredevil: “And the real wonder of the world is that we don’t jump too.”

@ “Greasy jungle, metropolis noir,” and the ensuing song about a grieving friend in ‘Greasy Jungle’

@ Again, the whole of ‘Yawning or Snarling’, which features the line “Night time when the shadows cough”

@ “Just then a stripper stopped in a coughing fit / She said sorry I can’t go on with this” (‘So Hard Done By’)

@ “Everyone's got their breaking point / With me it's spiders and with you it's me” – the first lines of ‘Thugs’ which are taken straight from a film called "The People That Time Forgot"

@ The nautical disaster in, uh, ‘Nautical Disaster’, and it’s echo in ‘Scared’: “Defanged destroyer limps into the bay / Down at the beach it's attracting quite a crowd / As kids wade through blood out to it to play.”

@ ‘Emergency’ and its scungy diner scene: “We're sitting in the Baby Bar bereft / at a shadowy table out past the sentence’s end.”

…

Translation - April Experiment #1

As I alluded to in my wrap up of my March Experiment, I was thinking of doing something with translation next.

What brought this on was a short story I wrote with a Spanish main character. I showed it to some writer friends and a few questioned the language. They wanted the English of the 3rd person narrator simplified, so there was less of a gulf between narrator and main character. I didn’t really agree with their reasoning, but figured it was worth trying the story with a Beginner’s English narration.

To do this, I tried the expedient of translation the first paragraph into Spanish using an online translator, then translating the Spanish back to English. The result was clunky, as expected. Lots of extra bits—the, of, he, in, at—appeared, but surprisingly, the internet could manage “stalk” (cazar al acecho) and “so-and-so” (fulano).

Anyway, I gave up on the idea of translating my whole story into Spanish and back, since it would mostly add a lot of articles and prepositions, and I’d end up going back to my original word choices. But I could see some utility in this technique.

The key, I think, is to start with someone else’s words.

Today I heard Jorge Calderón’s version of Keep Me In Your Heart (written by Warren Zevon and Jorge Calderón; originally performed by Zevon on The Wind) as I walked home from work. This was the final track on Zevon’s final album. You can press play and listen while you read the rest of this post if you'd like to:

This line really got to me:

Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile

When I got home (after checking my email, reading some blogs, and setting my fantasy basketball lineups), I read over the lyrics, and cut and paste the lines above, and two more couplets into my online translator. These other lines were:

If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less
Keep me in your heart for awhile

There's a train leaving nightly called when all is said and done
Keep me in your heart for awhile

I then translated these six lines into Spanish then back to English then into French then into English then into German then into English then into Italian then into English then into Dutch then into English then into Portuguese then into English then into Russian then into English. I would have gone further if my online translator had more languages.

The final version was a bit of a garble:

When I it negligence, that I they, that want, do not wish to tell for end outside, that me tratterrebbe in their one heart

From time during the correct moment then they simple things where also probably it has made houses, tornou-se-me and its smile hung up

It leads to a train which it has told good-bye rather nocha which I have, I am appointed, when all have told and become - directly in its heart small me deteve

It was a bit strange that some words could be translated into Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but not back into English, but that's machines for you.

The tone was really set by the first translation (French), so I tried starting with Russian and it went somewhere slightly different...

After a few more iterations, I had a stockpile of 1,200 words of translations of the three original couplets. The clunkiness of the translator cursed any couplet from being completely comprehensible, but also blessed me with some interesting phrases which seemed in the spirit of the original text (and song), but unique in their own right. I then copied and pasted every interesting phrase into a new document, culled and crimped, until I ended up with a poem.

A poem? I don’t know what I thought I was doing this whole time, but I didn’t begin with the intention of writing a 44 word poem (small mercy: this swollen blog entry counts towards my word count).

But that’s what happened.

Here it is:

Translation
After Warren Zevon

when all I said becomes a small
heart—
I am named

*

the simple things within the house
that you make of me:

the dependable action in this heart

*

I am appointed

when all have told and become
is hung to a smile

What do you think? I like it. But then I tend to like poems tinged with death (see Tuesday’s post). Good thing I’m not a full-time poet—there might be some slit wrists in the cheap seats.

Got a million dollar bill but they can't change it

I’m still on my Warren Zevon earworm bender. One song in particular: ‘The Rosarita Beach Café.’

This song sat in a trunk in a storage space from about 1976 until Zevon’s son discovered it (and a hundred other recordings), and it was eventually released on last year’s Preludes – Rare and Unreleased Recordings compilation.

The song itself is a gem. The lyrics are in a similar vein to ‘Desperadoes Under The Eaves’ (drinker drinking in a bar, mordant sense of humour):

I've got a million dollar bill but they can't change it
And they won't let me leave until my tab is paid
So I might as well settle down
And buy the house another round
You can send my mail to the Rosarita Beach Café

I find it encouraging that this song sat in a trunk for thirty years.

Either it got forgotten or Zevon didn’t rate it.*** Either way, I love it, and this reminds me that with songs and short stories, taste is everything. An unconvinced creator can pull of song that others respond to. That story at the bottom of your desk drawer could strike a chord with someone if it ever made it into print (though this would require finding an editor with whom it strikes a chord…).

Back in June I gathered up all my finished short stories, including four that were at least three years old, edited them a little and sent them out to New Zealand and Australian literary journals before I switched hemispheres.

I think I liked these older stories well enough when I wrote them originally, then entered them in competitions in which they didn’t place, and I moved on.

It took The Big Move to make me send them out again.

So far, I’ve had two appear in print and one more is forthcoming. The fourth I never heard back from the Wellington-based journal that has a history of not responding to my submissions (they’ll never hear from me again). So, ignoring this last one, that’s a 100% success rate for stories I had effectively locked in a trunk and thrown into storage.

This post is in the interest of balancing out my last one where I complained about having written nothing in 200,000 words. There is a part of me (temporarily in ascendance) which believes all the stories I’ve worked on so far this year (guesstimate: eight) will have their day in the sun. But for now I’m back to Clydesdales.

A.K.A. the novel.

The problem with novels is an unconvinced writer can almost never produce a novel that strikes a chord with a half-decent reader.

A novel is like forcing a person to eat the same dish every day for a week. If there’s something slightly off, they might notice the first time, but it’s no biggie, they’re hungry and they come back the next day… but with every plate, the ‘off’ elements become more pronounced until that’s all they can taste.

That’s why I could only write bad things about The Gum Thief. The epistolary approach might have worked for those characters in a short piece, but being forced-fed their “letters” for 260 pages gave me indigestion.

Sorry, I’ll put that extended metaphor to bed now.

I don’t have much confidence in the two novels I have “in storage” ever making it into print and striking chords. Not in their current states.

And Novel B? I’m just diving back into it now, so thinking all these straight-backed thoughts about believing in your narrative is probably bad for the nerves, but it’s better to think about these things now than afterwards.

I’ll be taking a pen and paper with me to Norway over the long weekend to a) keep Novel B ticking over and b) avoid some goose eggs on the word count front.

No promises though. I hear it’s beautiful

Footnote

***A third option exists. ‘Desperadoes Under The Eaves’ is actually an evolved form of ‘Rosarita Beach Café’. They are quite different, but so are a puffin and a stegosaurus.^^^

^^^Preludes does include an alternate version of ‘Desperadoes’ so maybe they were contemporaries: dinosaurs and crocodiles…

Status Report: Week Three

Today I heard two songs mentioning Lichtenstein – Warren Zevon’s ‘Seminole Bingo’ and Fountains of Wayne’s ‘New Routine’. I’ve been to Lichtenstein (& took this photo). It doesn’t really deserve to be mentioned in any more songs.

With that public service announcement out of the way, time for week three’s status report.

Well, looking at the numbers, it wasn’t too shabby. But as I alluded to yesterday, I haven’t really been rocking the fiction boat. In fact, fiction only took up a third of my words this week, with much more being spent on non-fiction. If any one goes through the effort of counting how many words I’ve posted on this blog and how many I’ve attributed towards my weekly word counts, you’ll see something is off. This is because some entries take a few days and a few false starts. I’ve been trying to write something about cover versions all week, but it just hasn’t crystallised yet.

The real story is I wrote only 359 words on what is supposedly my main project (Novel A). So thumbs down there, but otherwise, the numbers look healthy.

Week Three – The Stats

Wordcount: 22,409 words

Average: 3,201 words per day (compared to 2,205 last week, though I did go to Spain for the weekend)

Most productive day: Wednesday 16 Jan, 4,426 words (the day before starting work)

Least productive day: Thursday 17 Jan, 1,806 words (the day I started work)

Year-to-date: 58,185 words (a day and a bit ahead of target [54,845])

Note: "Other" consisted of emails to individuals (I'm sticking to that 'email=letter writing=part of a writer's work' theory for now) and actual letters (cold contact and luke warm contact approaches for jobs... I can't be a file clerk for ever).

Resolution for week four: more fiction!

Falling Flat: Forced Reference in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Sillyhow Stride’

i

I came across Paul Muldoon’s elegy for Warren Zevon, ‘Sillyhow Stride’, as a Warren Zevon fan first, a reader of poetry second. This is kind of like a pottery expert seeking out ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ or a scuba enthusiast reading ‘Diving the Wreck’. Niche interests are seldom catered to by poetry because poems and poets tend to have other things on their minds.

And so it was with ‘Sillyhow Stride’.

What drew me to the poem – the references to Zevon, especially his songs – were, in fact, the parts I enjoyed least.

When I read Paul Muldoon poems in the past, I often felt like I knew too little to appreciate fully what was going on.

Reading ‘Sillyhow Stride’, there were still moments where I felt ignorant, but, when the song references started to pile on top of one another, I actually felt like I knew too much.

The poem abounds with references, but here are just a few:

that excitable hula-hula boy

(reference to the songs ‘Excitable Boy’ and ‘The Hula Hula Boys’)

all those years of running amuck in Kent

(lifts lyrics from ‘Werewolves of London’)

you tipped the scales
for the Everly Brothers,

Frank and Jesse, while learning to inhale
through a French inhaler

(reference to ‘Frank and Jesse James’ and ‘The French Inhaler’)

And my reaction to these references: cringe.

For me, renaming Don and Phil Everly as Frank and Jesse to echo Zevon’s ballad of the wild west outlaws is a contrivance. Perhaps Muldoon’s whole poem is a contrivance, I simply am not clued in enough to get all the references to 42nd Street and diacetylmorphine.

It is this tension between knowing too much and not knowing nearly enough which tainted my first few excursions into ‘Sillyhow Stride’.

But is my cringe reaction a valid reading of the poem? And why am I cringing?

ii

The following was an ad featured under ‘Sillyhow Stride’ as it appeared on the website of the Times Literary Supplement:

Choosing a religion.

Which religion should I choose to believe in?

www.peace-of-mind.net

The ad is funny taken in isolation: the way believing a religion is made to sound like having car insurance. (Then again, not all of us have cars...)

But it is also comic in the context it appears. I suspect readers of the TLS, readers of Muldoon’s poetry, and/or admirers of Warren Zevon are not the easiest people to usher into religion with a handy pick-one-and-be-done-with-it website.

But you can forgive ‘Ads by Google’ for throwing up www.peace-of-mind.net when faced with a page featuring the phrases:

dragging a full-length cross… on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Such a pilgrimage … the blood-bath / at my Twin Towers… our mother’s death from this same cancer… as Christ broke with Iscariot… in the afternoon, televangelists, / push up and bench press with Buddhist and Parsi… the Everlasting Life we bargain… your Russian Jewish father…your Scottish Mormon mother…

Indeed, the other two ads at the bottom of the page (as it appeared for me) seem much more tangential:

* an ad for “Horse and Rider Performance Analysis” (presumably because ‘Sillyhow Stride’ comes from Muldoon’s 2006 collection: Horse Latitudes); and

* an ad for Bad Drawn Boy’s new single, ‘The Time of the Times’.

It has always been easier to get laughs with the unintended. The funniest home videos, the Freudian slips of newsreaders, watching your mother learn to ski. Some movies – I’m looking at you, post-1990 Jackie Chan – I have endured purely for the promise of the outtakes at the end.

And it was the same intentions that I signed up for Google’s AdSense on this blog. Before I even had content, I had ads. This was not, and will never be, a pecuniary measure (no one has ever clicked an ad – why would they when it would mean tearing themselves away from my riveting discussion of word counts?). I was simply curious what sort of ads my ramblings would call forth.

Sometimes the ads on the top right have been mildly amusing, but it has mostly been the sort of ‘Get Your Novel Published’ ads which always make me feel like I'm discussing writing with my mother.

Aside: I fear I may be contravening the terms of my AdSense contract by discussing this, like talking about the future after a one-night stand will doom a relationship. But I guess that’s my policy: if something is going to do me in, it might as well be my own words.

There are deep thinkers out there who describe laughter as a response to the perception of incongruity. While this doesn’t cover contagious laughter or the fact babies laugh before they can speak, it does explain the little chuckle I get from incongruous ads thrown up by well meaning machines.

The thing is though, the incongruity must appear incidental, otherwise, the response is not to laugh but to cringe. This is why great comic writing is harder, and infinitely rarer, than great serious writing.

iii

As someone reading ‘Sillyhow Stride’ for references to Warren Zevon songs, it is no wonder they fall flat. I’m expecting them. And when they come, often they feel random. Like I am reading Google’s first foray into poetry.

The references do not appear seamless because they are surrounded by flashing lights. Some of this is my own fault, but some if it is Paul Muldoon’s.

I feel okay pointing the finger at Muldoon for the ‘excitable hula-hula boy’ type references because he illustrates elsewhere in ‘Sillyhow Stride’ that he can weave Zevon references into his poem in an unobtrusive and enriching way.

As a rule, the Zevon references work best when they are set lower in the mix.

The young John Donne who sets a Glock
on his dish in the cafeteria

(A reference to the image of the inside cover of Excitable Boy, though it was actually Zevon's .44-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver resting on a dinner plate filled with his wife's cooking…)

Or

realized it ain’t

that pretty, ain’t that pretty at all
to be completely wasted when you’re testing your chops, hint hint,

on a Gibson Les Paul
overdriven through a Fender Vibratone,
ain’t that pretty to crawl

to Ensenada for methadone.

Here, a Zevon song title and refrain (‘Ain’t That Pretty At All’), is worked into a powerful passage which, in its spirit and content, echoes Zevon’s own oeuvre: the humour and pathos of an addict-drunk.

The reader is not being asked to compare Phil and Don Everly (the brothers responsible for ‘Wake Up Little Suzy’) with Frank and Jesse James; nor are they bombarded with two song references in one line (“excitable hula-hula boy”).

The conversational nature of ‘ain’t that pretty at all’ probably makes it easier for this reference to appear seamless in contrast to others. Indeed, it’s hard enough to work Hula-Hula or French Inhaler into conversation, let alone a piece of serious poetry, but let us not forget: Warren Zevon is the (immortal) king of the implausible lyric.

In ‘Play It All Night Long’ he manages to cram incest, cancer and another name for undulant fever into the second verse.

Daddy's doing Sister Sally
Grandma's dying of cancer now
The cattle all have brucellosis
We'll get through somehow

Then, to close the third and final stanza, Zevon manages to transform the scatological into a timeless epigram:

There ain't much to country living
Sweat, piss, jizz and blood

Of course, Zevon has the benefit of music and his own delivery behind these words as they are presented in their intended form (1980’s Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School), whereas Muldoon’s elegy must live and die on the page.

iv

In researching this piece, I came across a discussion of Muldoon’s poem on the bulletin board at Warren Zevon’s website. The fact the bulletin board is still alive and kicking today is, in itself, a testament to the enduring appeal to Zevon’s songs, while the educated dissection of the non-Zevonian references in the ‘Sillyhow Stride’ thread is testament to the intelligence of his fanbase.

The discussion is notable for a total lack of criticism of ‘Sillyhow Stride’. Either no one else felt let down by the 'excitable hula-hula boy' insertions, or they didn't feel it was important enough to put into words.

While I have taken the time to try and pin-point the 'what' and the 'why' of my cringe response, I agree that it is wrong to dismiss this poem as a failed joke. It is clearly more than that.

There is the fact it is an elegy addressed to Zevon – someone Muldoon knew personally and professionally, co-writing many songs with him, including the title track on My Ride’s Here – and here I am, someone who only discovered Zevon’s music after his death.

But this is the nature of elegiac form: the turning out of the private for the unknown reader to remember that which they never experienced.

In terms of elegy, ‘Sillyhow Stride’ succeeds on many counts. It is at times powerful, hypnotic, poetic, heart-rending and appropriately inappropriate.

Without the pressure of squeezing in a song title, Muldoon turns several brilliant phrases to evoke the tragic side of the musician:

…that dank
spot on the outskirts
of Jerusalem where the kids still squeeze between the tanks

to suck the life out of a cigarette

Reading ‘Sillyhow Stride’ aloud - giving Muldoon the same odds as Zevon with his musical backing - there are moments of brilliance, like the blend of pathos and aural pleasure in:

I knelt beside my sister’s bed, Warren, the valleys and the peaks
of the EKGs, the crepusculine X-rays,
the out-of-date blister-packs

When, at the poem’s mid-point, Muldoon writes, “The flesh, Warren, is but a bruise on the soul,” the poem reaches its zenith, but this phrase could equally excuse, in epigrammatical form, the poem’s failures. The flesh of this elegy may not always work – the odd reference may be clumsy or Google-esque – but ultimately, the spirit is there.

I just have to swallow my inner pedant and believe.