by Camden Joy
Pavement, Part One
When Marie says she loves me I know she does—and yet I wonder, how can she? Someone so good love something like me? How? By forgetting the importance of character, integrity, civility? By impossibly lowering her standards? By sidestepping that intuition which tells her, again and again in pounding refrains—wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong? Has she lost all sense of smell? Is it the love that a chime tower bears for the dead or a mountaineer for thin air; is it the love each seismologist carries for temblors or a youth fascinated with a Glock pistol? There is only one thing I love anymore—it is not you or me or her but a band you don’t even know—but how I love them, with a closet’s shadowy purpose and depth. The band is Pavement and only I know them—you may own all their CDS but so what they are mine alone and I am theirs all theirs, they do not write for you as much as evoke to me (they do not even know you, my friends). I saw them give the most astonishing concert when least expected—they did it for me!—and they hauled their own equipment and tuned their own instruments and listened attentively to one another closely and finished most everything they started. (Note that I gave up making music myself so they’d have more room to maneuver about onstage!) She says she loves me what does she (who is not Pavement) know of love—she was not tasty enough to make me retire—she does not “captivate the senses like a ginger ale rain.” [Pop song musical words? Yes, yes, I know! The dreams she details each morning sound doubtless no more dry and dull, and dull and dry, and stupid stupid stupid, to me than the rock lyrics which I, in turn, quote out of context to her. I must learn to be better! I know!] She did not issue the sprawling challenge of Wowee Zowee as a follow-up to the tight-knit pop-crammed Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, she does not haul her own equipment or tune her own instrument—where may I set down this bulky item she terms “love.” (I would so like to!)
Pavement, Part Two
I hereby suggest the American President of the United States and all them U.S. trade reps haul Pavement to the trade talks. They are our grandest export, our finest product, infusible in hot weather, our best materials. Pavement should be carried on our shoulders and emblazoned on our backs and ushered unto waiting planes at the last minute and with an almost effete, deliberate importance, their bellies bloated with our very best meats.
Pavement must be not dismissed as sell-outs, hear me now! Nor shall they ever be taken for granted, never! They might seem to you lazy and overrated but they work very, very hard and are very, very good.
That they have not become household words is testament alone to their genius for craftily sidestepping the Romanovs (but certainly I do recall “pavement” as a household word, I remember hearing it offhandedly employed many times in less enlightened circumstances).
Pavement (we clamor) and once more: “pavement.” Listen how they mature LP to LP—if Hitler had ever learned of their existence he would’ve ordered Pavement to be kidnapped and called them his “ultimate secret weapon” and brought the world to its knees—instead they are ours and thank God for that!
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It is always imprecise, dreadful, wrong, evil and stupid and unjust and filled with sin to compare literature to music and quote one in the hopes of arguing the other but yet here I am to do it. (Watch Me Now!)
Marina Tsvetaeva, when you hanged yourself at the Brodelshchikov’s house nobody noticed (it was Russia, late ’41, with Nazi invaders a few miles off). The landlady who discovered your body said you were “round-shouldered, skinny, grey-haired, like a witch of some sort. Not at all attractive.” Pardon her! She did not know, watching your unsteady cadaver creak there to and fro on its heavy rope, that she was describing one of Russia’s greatest poets. When I saw (late ’94) you teeny-tiny singer Mary Timony sing before your band Helium you too were skinny and like some sort of dead witch withdrawing right before us, performing less than is possible, nobody could be so stiff and still but some corpse, your eyes contained nothing, you remained flat, unaffected. Not at all attractive. I grew worried. Of all of today’s tired bands of noise that nobody notices, why should your particular one compel me so utterly? You looked to be dying from something (love?). You appeared as if you might set down the guitar, step backstage, kick out a chair, and dangle to your death. Teeny-tiny Timony (I wanted to shout): no!
Marina Tsvataeva, Mary Timony: you bear identical initials, the same bite and disinterest in theatrical falsity, the same self-destructive stubbornness. Marina, you hailed a revolution which then subsumed and wrecked you, and proud haunted Mary could easily do the same—witness Helium’s first release (Pirate Prude; love leads to betrayal, prostitution leads to vampirism). “Careful your pretty face,” runs the refrain of one song which Marina could have composed: “Your love is like small change.”
In here there is no comfort in realizing that it’s a man’s world because although men have so thoroughly botched it yet still too few women will acknowledge it or step to the fore. “I shall walk with this bitterness for years across mountains or town squares equally, I’ll walk on souls and on hands without shuddering.” When beauty at last flees, it leaves one as a ravaged remnant to recite things that sound written on the back of one’s hand in a pique, in a smelly dark closet, with magic marker: “I may be very small but you’ll never lose me at all.” Blood tastes like wine, love makes you money, hearts are devoured candies or disengaged lockets. In this sick sad and yet wonderful world airwaves criss-crossing the globe with sorcery spells and mean wishes it is always imprecise, dreadful, wrong, evil and stupid and unjust and filled with sin to compare literature to music and quote one in the hopes of arguing the other but yet here I have done it (watch me now).
Kill The Movies
You heard me right! Now that we have hounded the networks off the air and tossed each TV off each motel balcony and now too that we have made the politicians reveal their most true, least flattering colors (their intense opposition to any culture) which displays them at a square disadvantage in a stuck-up stance of unenviable weakness as insipid cowards stuck in broke-down cars, now that we have almost wrested our lives back from those who might want it otherwise, let us finally collect ourselves calmly to finish the task at hand: and let us at last turn to the big screen, undisguised fervor glimmering from our held-out knives, and see us now race down the popcorn-dirtied aisles to cut those overpaid models right out of there, hack those bigheaded hipster snots and their glamorously large thirty-foot Hollywood faces from the projection screen, and like some circle of soiled fabric simply roll them up, make them long trumpeting tubes in our hands, which we could raise to our nothing mouths to amplify our puny voices (and thusly steal back the recognition they deny us) as we broadcast to the world: Kill the Movies and Set Yourselves Free. We can be quenched no more by your poisoned milk. Give to us time and money instead of demanding $8.50 to spend two hours with you, no one is worth that kind of dough (except anyone who is not you). Ah, the life I have expended wastefully in dead-dark cinema houses waiting for something to happen, in that escape-land I once so adored, and which once adored us for that matter. But no more!
Bring Me the (Fat) Head of Fred Fatzer
Know that I once was a bigger fan of Freedy Johnston than any of you, and that I felt assured—in hearing his soaring Can You Fly? second record album—that we had a good thing on our hands yet now I must reverse myself as I command unto you now: Bring me his bored bald head with a fat fork stuck in the forehead, and let us decant into it the heady broth of his betrayals, and drink! Yes, Pinochet and CIA slaughtered the modern socialist movement and we forgave them; yes, LBJ betrayed his pledge to the Good Society and we shrugged it off, yes, Nixon snapped the constitution like a dry stick over one knee and he was pardoned—still This Must Not Be Forgiven!
Freedy now is not even reminiscent of who he used to be, gone is his voice, gone is his inner life, gone is his subtle poetry, gone is him looking at you, hoping you like him. Now he wears leisure suits! Hear him now praise famous crap! Now he cynically croons “
Autumn in New York” everytime I see him lately, and what—is this funny to you, Fathead?
Your name was once Fred Fatzer—hear that, world?!—and you were once six hundred pounds with no ego—where have you gone, fat Freddie friend? I liked you better then. Now you are thin with a five ton ego and an embarrassing inability to convey complicated phrasing. Oh Mr. Big Star, look at yourself. When next I pass you on the street Freedy I will bump you (I promise!) into high voltage wires—there must be some way out of here! It would be a mercy killing for you are like Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest after the operation and your old self would be disgusted at this alien now passing itself off as “Freedy Johnston world-famous Elektra Recording Artist.”
I would crawl through glass to claw your eyes.
I would offer a hug if my suit were explosive.
I would send you poisoned orchids
(if I knew you would sniff of them deliciously).
Your last release stunk so bad I couldn’t even finish it—damn you, Mistah Freedy you maked a liah outta me and done broke my heart! To even sing this “Disappointed Man”—how dare you! You have disappointed me (for that last time!) and now you dare to sing-song of it?
Remember who you were if you want to live, Mr. Fred Fatzer, remember and make good on your promise—or else!
Yo La Tengo is Good to Eat
Who dares to suggest unto me that Yo La Tengo are not great like Chinese food?
Can you not understand?
Chinese food, so reliable no matter what is ordered, whether you’re thinking budget or palate, whether you’re sitting on naugahyde or at a cloth-covered table: the steam off rice rising, tea and cookies, the exquisite exotic, the comforting otherness, garlic and ginger—our home? Why, it’s in every Chinese restauarant anywhere, that’s where. And this, like them our Yo Las, our friends in feedback or in soft tones, who perhaps cannot do everything (make that one clear: Yo La Tengo can do little with their voices and appear incapable of hitting consonants—they are not always straightforward or tender enough—they wear their damn pants too slippery low on their hips and slacker disrepair adorns their most every move—yet there is Chinese food too at times which falls short arriving half-cooked or grease-smothered yet always reassuring and kind) but I defy you to find another Yo La: their two “perfect” record albums (Fakebook and Painful) are more than most any band ever ever could . . .
Listen to “Drug Test” (the greatest something masterpiece).
Listen to Ira figure out distortion and sweetly worked moods.
Listen to Georgia when they heft the song onto her back and make her carry the whole damn thing . . .
So remember: when the waiter says “What’ll it be—chow fun or lo mein?” always order “Yo La Tengo,” the most distinctive vodka in the world.
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O! Frank O’Hara! It may be silly to call across to you so cold in the casket you inhabit but I am hopeful you are not for reals dead but rather that was you who was spotted beaming in the colored jewels of Nike Town, penning ad copy while smushed against a candy shoppe window and taking the sorrow sympathetically, hard but happy. Where have you been all my life, frank one? (Dead, is the answer.) Have I always had you but not got you till now? O!Hara (as in Frank) how I wish you had been there pressed against me in those cheerless years of yore, with sugar hard-pressed to find and days airtight and lead-lined as a safe and skies grey as a fort and hope like some bon-bon in wartime which we cherished and brought out to polish but never dared to consume—
Sing to me of deep-fried airplane wings, sing!
Oh! Frank OH!ara! Now you are my brother, it seems. Will you phone me up soon? I am listed in the city directory. You, the saint of accidents yet robbed from us by the biggest accident of all, if you had only lived—if you had lived, how I would hug you and gin drink with you.
Oh, Frank O’Hara, your bones were pulverized to make ink for this pen and others similar to it and thank you.
Dear History
You are no quaintly fickle aunt but a greasy dunderhead lavished with too much brandy diplomacy and festooned with honorary degrees, stretch limos there to pick you up and drop you off, private cellulars and wine cellars and silk collars at your instant disposal—how might we instantly dispose of you, though, Mister History? Killing you is one thing (a cinch! consider it done!) but disposal of the body (a mess). One day we will all be dead and what sort of lives will it be said we led, steered through the hopeless Radio Free Afternoons with bowlfuls of medicating Rolos and pretzels, compromised hourly by today’s etiquette of evil, the last boss I ever expected to obey, taking luxury abundant for granted, overstuffing the aisles in every pop star’s superstore, piggish and kingly lives while in other parts peasants were being marched into fields and shot, left to whisper final wishes at the Lord’s retreating back—are you even listening, History?
The MJ-97 wanders loose amongst us! He is making moves on Ms. Madonna—she has leaked to the tabloids her desire for an heiress, a youthful replicant to further besmirch the family name. Ah, History, your bodyguards and silver canes are no match for the Jack of Hearts.
It is time you tottered off to bed, my friend, with a baggie of barbiturates into some garage filled full with carbon monoxide—you are forgetful of your responsibilities, old man, and have let us off too too easy. That not one of us is conversant in the Lincoln Brigade or the WWI vets robbed of benefits by Doug MacArthur, that communism has gone down as a failure—why not also Love, old bastard? Love too hurts and disappoints, why not as well murder it, foolish History? But no—arbitrarily you steal from us communism and leave us Love! ARRRRRRGGGHHH!
I think it best that you should let me have your job now, History. You are weary and near-blind (it has been a long century, we sympathize) and now ruddier blood must be permitted to flow down your hallowed halls, if you please.
Please contact me soon.
The Other Greatest Record Album of the ’80s
When from the Nineteen Hundred and Eighties I fell as might a safe from a bank, awakening as an inmate released, my feet in someone else’s shoes, it was to taste Reagan on the tongue like a breathmint gone sour, everything at once beckoning and mocking me, in America.
We concluded that decade by clobbering a country called Panama, in an invasion nobody much remembers, because the leader called us names, and when that leader was eventually found cowering in the Pope’s Palace the army pummeled the place with punk rock songs, which also nobody much remembers, until the leader materialized. I liked punk rock that called people names and so did the Mekons, yet oddly this news did not cheer us.
I spent my time then alone within windows painted red-then-blue by the blinky-blink of a bowling alley’s neon in that uncommonly clean city where jobs could not be had and no beer was cheap, and when I finally made a good friend its name was The Mekons Rock and Roll, a cassette recording which automatically flipped over and over all by its lonesome, and I made it to the present thanks to that friend!
TV today bears relentless testimonials about how “Rock and Roll Saved My Life” but in this instance The Mekons Rock and Roll saved my life, and that makes some considerable difference. Because Mekon lives had not turned out as expected, and neither had punk rock, and neither had I, and so they built this loyal friend, this ultra-fine record album, out of disappointments and disputed memories, and each song gets wilder and madder than the last, though you cannot listen without weeping, and rock and roll (itself) inhabits every track, is mentioned by name a whole lot, as a character and a curse, and again and again you meet its promise and betrayals.
And now my loyal friend is still here beside me, still going and going and then flipping over and over now that I have emerged barreling from beneath ground like some train. If you see the Mekons, say hello. And when you get close to them, kiss them once. For me.
Son Volt Trace (Warner Bros.; CD, Cass)
I’ve come to feel that I was once a heroin addict, though in public I pretended I wasn’t by drin
king vodka straight and calling my subsequently numb self satisfied even though I wasn’t—not really—not satisfied—without the heroin to help me past—and one time I believe I was broke, I really needed it, I had no vodka, no money, and I comforted myself with the thought that we’re all addicts, all of us (addicted to something) though not all of us really just those of us addicted to skag, this was my comforting thought as I cruised bodegas hitting up suckers and friends for change and getting nowhere so eventually I held someone up—I’m ashamed but I needed five more dollars and some comfort and had no more friends but I had David’s bowie knife—and it was a mother pushing a stroller which genuinely upset me (but I was a junkie what did I really care, really) her eyes scared to death and baby screaming but I got my five dollars (plus!) and bought that disgusting skag and went home afterwards walking like a whisper through the unloosed dawn and pink high-boughed sycamores (barely able to walk) and I laid in bed with the ocean rolling over my face, waves crashing on my head, down and withdrawing, the ocean inhaling and exhaling and so on—and I thought how life was actually okay in fact—quite okay, quite okay I murmured to myself underneath the sea—and this is the junkie hope that is called up when I hear Son Volt over the loudspeaker at the laundromat, and perhaps you must experience it (don’t do me any favors).
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Let us now sing (as public men) of private things: how we buck and how we groan, and climax yes when told we’re tyrants (mess with us, such happiness! yes and yes! ah yes! we’re tyrants!). And let the happy pictures of toy-filled folks lead us to trust our inescapable selves, embraced in baseness while yet looking heavenward to pornographic priestesses aloft in their cathode-ray holiness. So tiny are we beneath this eternal celebrity balloon parade and our frantic gesticulations go unnoticed. . . . Let us now praise hot dogs and finger pies and stuffs which garner sneers! We are encouraged to believe we are above simple joys, naughty joys, camden joys—Ah! but the shivery feel of them coins of temptation, the comforting rankness of freshly chloroxed floors!