Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  I don’t trust moralists who can’t hear Britney Spears over the roar of their prejudices, but this record is the guitar equivalent of the final shoot-out in The Wild Bunch.

  Elizabeth Bishop

  The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (1983)

  It’s hard to get a handle on Elizabeth Bishop, because she will remove the handle and stick it in a poem, and soon she’s telling you what tree the wood comes from, and what she saw on the road to the village where the woodcutter lives, and what objects were lying about in his yard, and who was playing with them, and what the town where they were manufactured is most famous for, and how it got its name. Watching closely, looking and looking her “infant sight away.”

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  “The Blackstone Rangers” (1968)

  Brooks first presents the Chicago street gang “As Seen by Disciplines,” or by those whose concern is order, categories. To cops and sociologists, the Rangers are simply “[s]ores in the city / that do not want to heal.” This image is countered in the following section, as the gangsters “construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace” in the “translations of the night.” But it’s the “Gang Girls” of the third section who bring Brooks to a boil as she urges them to give up their delusions of glamour:

  Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps!

  for sudden blood, aborted carnival,

  the props and niceties of non-loneliness—

  the rhymes of Leaning.

  Like Stevens and Frank O’Hara, Brooks inherits “Leaning” from Whitman. Here it rhymes with “gleaning”—gathering and valuing the discarded, overlooked bits. Those whom America leaves behind lean on, prop up, rhyme with, shoulder to shoulder, one another.

  Peter Brötzmann Octet

  Machine Gun (1968)

  In college, this and the first Clash record were my I Hate Everything music. No one I’ve played the opening blast for can believe they’re hearing saxophones.

  Anne Carson

  “Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)” (2000)

  The speaker is in love with a girl, a student in her seminar. Life is a movie, or at least something staged, outside her, her role played by Catherine Deneuve. The girl is a mess, crazy with missing her boyfriend in Paris. Deneuve asks about him, and the exchange captures desire’s particularities with the concision of a Pet Shop Boys lyric:

  What do you want?

  Want to be in the same room with him.

  I admire your clarity.

  Gottago.

  Shaun Cassidy

  Shaun Cassidy (1977)

  The first record I ever owned. I was obsessed with “Da Doo Ron Ron” (I didn’t know it was a cover, hadn’t heard of Phil Spector), so my mom took me to a record store. Wichita, the summer of Star Wars. Is it possible I stood in that light, beneath an Ace Frehley poster, among Kansans with major hair, such unlikely cars coursing past outside? Chelsey Minnis: “When I die a bunch of images from the ’70s will pass before my eyes.”

  Ray Charles

  Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)

  Together with Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and an Otis Redding compilation, this record flipped my teenage script. Between Charles’s “Well, you know if I could mmmm-mm-mmm-hmmm-hmm like a mourning dove” and Aretha’s stratospheric free flights into the wordless on “Baby, Baby, Baby,” it was months before I listened to Hüsker Dü again.

  Lucille Clifton

  “[surely i am able to write poems]” (2004)

  whenever i begin

  “the trees wave their knotted branches

  and . . .” why

  is there under that poem always

  an other poem?

  “By emphatically separating themselves from the empirical world, their other,” Adorno wrote, artworks “bear witness that that world itself should be other than it is; they are the unconscious schemata of that world’s transformation.”

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  “Frost at Midnight” (1798)

  “For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS,” Coleridge wrote. The final lines of his greatest poem are proof of life:

  whether the eave-drops fall

  Heard only in the trances of the blast,

  Or if the secret ministry of frost

  Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

  Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

  John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman

  John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (1963)

  The dreamiest, creamiest sounds ever made by the mouths of men.

  Miles Davis

  The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 (1995)

  My favorite Miles records—Milestones, Jack Johnson, Get Up with It—astound and disconcert, but they’re not hard to understand. This music, though—seven hours from a two-night gig in dead-winter Chicago, with Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams playing like gods—I’ve been trying to figure out for two decades. It helped when I stopped thinking of it as “jazz.”

  Death

  The Sound of Perseverance (1998)

  In the state with the prettiest name, the late Chuck Schuldiner (who found Satanism silly and loved animals) basically invented death metal. My favorite metal record after Slayer’s Reign in Blood—proggy, sinister, with on-a-dime swaps: rocket-to-Siberia melodies for minor-key riffs for smokestack brutalism.

  Lana Del Rey

  Honeymoon (2015)

  The camera discovers Gene Tierney floating facedown in a swimming pool, her white dress billowing in waves of light and shadow. It pans up and through a window into a dim ballroom, tracks slowly toward the stage, on which a young woman stands swaying beneath a spotlight. Her white dress sparkles like champagne. She’s singing a song—hesitant, languorous—not to the sparse audience, but to someone inside her: “And we could cruise / To the news / Pico Boulevard / In your used / Little bullet car / If we choose.” A few men at the table nearest the stage look at one another with arched eyebrows: “Is this broad for real?” She is, she isn’t—it’s a distinction for fools. The camera slides away from her, back out to the shimmering pool, now empty. Did someone remove the corpse? Was it a corpse? The camera lifts, revealing the broad galaxy of Los Angeles glitzy beneath the Hollywood sign. The singer’s voice, fainter now, drifts off into the night.

  Diane di Prima

  Revolutionary Letters (1971)

  How I learned to stop worrying and love poems about “molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, bombs.”

  Dan Fogelberg

  “Leader of the Band” (1981)

  This is not a good song. This is the worst song, a sodden tribute to Fogelberg’s father. But one February night in 1983, we lost power to our modest A-frame house near Woodland Park, Colorado. It was twenty below outside, and we kids slept huddled in front of the fireplace. My dad, a little drunk, put a song on my battery-powered boom box and told me to pay attention to the lyrics. The lyrics are gunk: “a thund’ring, velvet hand,” “his gentle means of sculpting souls.” But I didn’t hear that then; I heard what my dad heard in it—love and loss, fathers and sons.

  Franco & le TPOK Jazz

  Francophonic, Vol. 1: 1953–1980 (2008) and Vol. 2: 1980–1989 (2009)

  The DNA helix of intertwined electric guitars—Skynyrd, Crazy Horse, Funkadelic, Derek and the Dominos, Drive-By Truckers—is my favorite sound. So on the several comps I own featuring the Congolese colossus Franco Luambo Makiadi and his soukous band, originally named OK Jazz, I listen for the sebene, an instrumental bridge on which guitarists repeat hypnotic hooks or improvise. “On entre OK, on sort KO,” as an early song title has it. It’s barely a metaphor.

  Future

  DS2 (2015)

  More proof that “avant-garde” has become a meaningless descriptor. This alienated industrial clatter shot to number one on the Billboard 200 chart. Future’s clouded mutter matches the medicinal desolation of his lyrics: “I know the devil is real, I know the dev
il is real / I take a dose of them pills and I get real low in the field.”

  Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben

  Gil e Jorge (1975)

  I love Tusk, Exile on Main St, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Innervisions, Pink Flag, Best of Dolly Parton, Jack Johnson, Led Zeppelin IV, Fun House, Master of Reality, Tonight’s the Night, Superfly, Darkness on the Edge of Town, One Nation Under a Groove, Pretzel Logic, Another Green World, Dixie Chicken, a hundred disco and punk records. But this undomesticated jam session is, I insist, the best pop record of the ’70s.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963)

  Jack Palance, playing an American film producer, hires Fritz Lang, playing himself, to direct an adaptation of The Odyssey. “I like gods,” Palance says as they watch a rough cut. “I like them very much.” He’s talking to one. Another is behind the camera. A bust of Homer flashes on the screen.

  Al Green

  The Belle Album (1977)

  In college, we played the equally mighty Call Me on an ill-conceived nightlong drive through Wyoming until my friend’s Dodge Dart’s tape deck vomited it in ribbons. I return more often now to this airy record with its beat made out of light. “The academic study of prayer may lead a man to pray,” H. A. Williams said. Listening to these songs may lead a person to believe in grace.

  Guns N’ Roses

  Appetite for Destruction (1987)

  Some of my friends were too cool for this band, but the first time I heard “Sweet Child o’ Mine” on MTV, I would’ve traded all my Ramones records to hear it again.

  Donald Hall

  “Weeds and Peonies” (1998)

  Hall’s poems are well-behaved meditations on love and snow and loss and barns. I hate them. This one concludes a series of elegies for Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, dead of leukemia at forty-seven. The peonies she planted have bloomed after her death, an irony too cruel to resist. The final lines find an objective correlative whose metaphorical and syntactical precision blasts my aesthetic objections away:

  I pace beside weeds

  and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge

  where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots.

  “Hurry back. Be careful, climbing down.”

  Your peonies lean their vast heads westward

  as if they might topple. Some topple.

  Jimi Hendrix

  “Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)” (1971)

  If the extraterrestrials have their priorities straight, when they get here the first thing they’ll want to know is what rock and roll is. I’ll play them this.

  Hole

  Live Through This (1994)

  It’s twenty years ago and I’m looking across Zapotec ruins. On my Walkman, Courtney Love snarls and shrieks and finally whispers:

  And some day you will ache like I ache / And some day you will ache like I ache / And some day you will ache like I ache / AND SOME DAY YOU WILL ACHE LIKE I ACHE / AND SOME DAY YOU WILL ACHE LIKE I ACHE / AND SOME DAY YOU WILL ACHE LIKE I ACHE / AND SOME DAY YOU WILL ACHE LIKE I ACHE / Some day you will ache like I ache.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  “Spring and Fall” (1880)

  Dedicated “to a young child,” Margaret, who is “gríeving / Over Goldengrove unleaving.” It’s a bit false (“not founded on any real incident,” you don’t say; has any child ever wept over fallen leaves?) and a bit sententious (all sorrow springs from man’s Fall into original sin). But the poem, my introduction to literature’s favorite Jesuit priest, is a high-tension-wire act—a rhythmic-syllabic riot of measured, melancholy calm:

  Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

  What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

  It ís the blight man was born for,

  It is Margaret you mourn for.

  Skip James

  “Devil Got My Woman” (1931)

  Sometimes I think this song defines the limits of what is humanly possible. Sometimes I think it exceeds them.

  Kix

  “Don’t Close Your Eyes” (1988)

  The hair-metal power ballad was one of the few art forms of the late twentieth century to flirt successfully with transcendence. Hear also Def Leppard’s “Love Bites,” Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)” and “Coming Home,” and, of course, Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”

  August Kleinzahler

  “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” (2008)

  This poem is a hundred-car pile-up on a frozen interstate in a blizzard. It begins “On a 700 foot thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstone” and ends six pages later in “[t]he dead solid center of the universe / At the heart of the heart of America.” It’s “God Bless America” as Ginsberg’s “bop kabbalah,” the cosmos instinctively vibrating at Kleinzahler’s feet outside a “closed dinosaur shop” in South Dakota, where a Triceratops tape-loop roars through the night, where Kevin Costner cries “Tatanka, Tatanka,” where “[t]he Lambs of Christ are among us / You can tell by the billboards / The billboards with fetuses, out there on the highway,” where semis haul “toothpaste, wheels of Muenster, rapeseed oil . . . across the Cretaceous hogback” past “[t]he ghosts of 98 foot long Titans and Minutemen.” Bless the commerce, Kleinzahler says, bless Nixon and Mao and Crazy Horse, for this is “sanctified ground” and “We’re right on top of it, baby.”

  David Markson

  Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

  Kate is, or believes herself to be, the last animal on earth. And yet she spends much of her time traveling to the great art museums: “There is one painting at the Prado by Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, that I had wished to see again.” It’s the recurrence of a certain tag that most moves me: “Through another window at its opposite side the rosy-fingered dawn awakens me”; “The next morning, when dawn appeared, I was quite content to consider it a rosy-fingered dawn.” This idea harrows me: even if you were as alone as it is possible to get, art might continue to function as equipment for living. Is that true? What is art without other people? The Homeric signal pulsing from three thousand years ago finding one last grateful receiver continues to broadcast long after she is gone, ars longa, occasio praeceps, blinking, blinking into heat death and who knows.

  Mastodon

  Remission (2002)

  Riffage. Huge, mud-caked barn doors of riffage. Aluminum siding of riffage slicing through trees of riffage in a hurricane of riffage. The American mastodon (the name means “nipple tooth,” which would also be a good name for a metal band) weighed around five tons, which is exactly how much the Atlanta band’s debut record weighs. But there’s a progressive complexity here too—Bill Kelliher (guitars) and Brann Dailor (drums) trample forests then carefully diagram each leaf.

  Curtis Mayfield

  “Move On Up” (1970)

  July 28, 2016: retired marine general John Allen addresses the Democratic Convention at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. His bellicose speech is a paean to the American military—“the shining example of America at our very best”—and its “weapons and equipment.” When he finishes speaking, the auditorium fills with music. You think: They can’t really be playing this after that. But they are. On a popular social media platform, writer Elliott Sharp summed up the venality of the moment, of these people: “They played a Curtis Mayfield song after that fascist DNC war speech because nothing matters to them.”

  Mother McCollum

  “Jesus Is My Air-o-plane” (1930)

  McCollum’s slide guitar plunks two pebbles into a pond and she’s off riding ripples. No donkey this time around—the savior’s “coming through in an air-o-plane,” gliding downward to brightness on Easter wings.

  Chelsey Minnis

  “[Five Poems],” Coconut Magazine #12 (2008)

  I’m a fan of Minnis’s Poemland, in which a few of these pieces appear, and which says things like “If you want to be a poem-writer then I don’t know why.” But the line of hers I want on my headstone didn’t make the cut: “S
ome lives are too hard to be lived without cigarettes.”

  The National

  “Don’t Swallow the Cap” (2013)

  I know: no range, no risk, no rock. “Sad white man music,” a friend calls it. Matt Berninger’s clever lines are so calculated someone should give him an MFA. But I’m a sucker for the kicker: “And if you want / To see me cry / Play Let It Be / Or Nevermind.”

  New York Dolls

  New York Dolls (1973) and Too Much Too Soon (1974)

  Let the Dolls stand for all the bands that stood for freedom when I was seventeen—Television, the Clash, the Raincoats, the Ramones, LiLiPUT, the Pretenders, Gang of Four, the Mekons, the Jam, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, X, Wire, the Stooges, the Adverts, a dozen more—any of whom, despite their differences, could have said, with the Dolls’ David Johansen, that wanting too many things is what makes you human.