Strange Victory, Strange Defeat

I've been listening to the Silver Jews' Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea for about a week now, and it's very good...an extension of the more upbeat direction Berman took on Tanglewood Numbers, but--to my ears--more coherent and enjoyable. Below are the lyrics to "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat." The lyrics pretty much describe the way I felt a couple of weeks ago when Taylor Swift's bus pulled into the parking lot outside of Preston Auditorium for a concert at RU. Hundreds of 18-21 year olds dressed in Aeropostale or American Eagle eagerly anticipating her stepping off the bus...strange victory strange defeat, indeed.

Strange Victory, Strange Defeat

Squirrels imported from Connecticut
Just in time for fall
How much fun is a lot more fun
not much fun at all

What’s with all the handsome grandsons
In these rock band magazines
What have they done with the fat ones
The bald and the goateed

Strange victory
Strange victory
Strange victory
Strange defeat

Tale is told of a band of squirrels
Who lived in defiance of defeat
They woke up in a nightmare world
Of craven mediocrity

They said
We’re coming out of the black patch
We’re coming out of the pocket
We’re calling into question
Such virtue gone to seed

Strange victory, strange defeat

I know nothing, and I'm overjoyed

When you finally scaled the wall, thinking you heard the sirens singing, what you really heard was a broken bird

Pulaski, VA
Pulaski, VA

A poem I wrote way back when...

Learning to Swim

At thirty-four,
and still shaken
by the thought of water,
I enrolled in a swimming course
at the local Y.
Try not to struggle,
the instructors told me,
imagine each ripple
as an extension of your arm,
let the water carry you.
Weeks later, after countless strokes
across clear blue waves,
I felt the tension ease
like rain settling into pools.
I learned to glide over the cool surface
like a gull wheeling through the open sky,
to relax my limbs
into the water’s gentle flow.

Tonight, though, it is different.
Lying in bed,
I can hear the river rising,
gnashing its teeth
against the muddy banks,
threatening to flood over
and into my life.
As the storm builds,
shadows sweep across
my window, dark birds
drawn by some unseen force—
twisted limbs reach out,
beckoning me to plunge into
the raging current,
to learn what I do not know.

I throw my thoughts like tomahawks into this world which I disown

drug store print over mom's bookcase, not sure of the artist...Hudson River School?

Allen Smithee's review of the Silver Jews' upcoming Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea:

Nevermind a light, Silver Jews fans now have an end of the tunnel, period. The wait for David Berman and co.'s sixth album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, will end with its June 17 release on Drag City.

The follow-up to 2005's Tanglewood Numbers is the first Silver Jews record played by the touring lineup that formed in 2006 in defiance of Berman's previous refusal to tour: Berman, his wife Cassie, Tony Crow, Peyton Pinkerton, and William Tyler. Lookout Mountain's tracklist has been rearranged a bit since our initial report, and one thing we didn't know then was that "Open Field" is a cover of a Maher Shalal Hash Baz song.

Back to touring, the Jews' May appearances at the Primavera Sound Festival and the Explosions in the Sky ATP are just a couple of stops on a spring European jaunt. Then, for the fall, the band is planning a tour of the U.S. And according to The Tennessean, Berman will give a poetry reading at Nashville's Watkins College of Art and Design on March 12.
pitchforkmedia

"Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea sees David Berman once again as our tour guide into the void, all a-sweat and working hard, rumbling with terror and humility like old Johnny Cash, pointing out spots were some dreams died and other conceits were conceived. Almost alone out front at the top of "What Is Not But Could Be If," he's joined by the band; together their opening trot deceives us into fantasies of easing into Berman's latest head bath. But no dice as David has a head of steam and smoke, as evidenced by the antic pistol-pumping rhymes n' rhythms of "Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer."

"Suffering Jukebox," and "My Pillow is The Threshold" strike one as the latest and most formal Silver Jews entries into the realm of the chart-worthy (and chat-worthy) song. One will not ignore the wide-hearted power of the chorus "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat" or the ear-pleasuring chime of "Open Field," (a Maher Shalal Hash Baz cover,) which might recall to old-timers their carefree days of R.E.M. fandom. . . for the days of '80s-'90s flavor are aflame again in these tunes!

"San Francisco B.C." is the centerpiece of the penultimate part of the climax of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. A dramatic panorama of music history is on epic display behind a tale of dovetailing fates. Classic Bermanisms signal our arrival into "Candy Jail," an institution overflowing with assorted titular sweets as well as a few bitter treats too. Which leads us to the launch of "Party Barge" and then back to a Silver Jews' state of nature for the finale, where we wave goodbye to David Berman and his bunch, edified, intensified, stronger and ready."

Video for Ola Podrida's "Photobooth" , directed by Michael Tully, who also directed Silver Jew

Alissa and Dylan

Up through bright blue blocks of sky

ALISSA AND DYLAN, MARCH 22, 2008
Alissa and Dylan by the creek behind my house
Dylan making one of his mean faces
Alissa displaying the creek water on her fingers for the camera
Dylan making another little boy face
Alissa looking pensive, perhaps a little shy, certainly beautiful
Dylan, angry because I asked him to pose for a photo when he wanted to be digging up rocks and throwing them into the creek
Alissa crouching in front of some ripples
Dylan's face concealed by a big rock he's getting ready to hurl into the creek
Alissa studying her ballerina shadow and Dylan closing his eyes after asking me (again) to put away the camera

KEIRA, MARCH 9, 2008

Keira chillin on the couch with Emmy
Keira's nails (she painted them the day before using her grandma's brightest nail polish)

Your life is a painting in a dark museum and sometimes you examine it closely

Bluefield, WV

--4 poems by Jack Gilbert

The Lord Sits With Me Out Front

The Lord sits with me out in front watching
a sweet darkness begin in the fields.
We try to decide whether I am lonely.
I tell about waking at four a.m. and thinking
of what the man did to the daughter of Louise.
And there being no moon when I went outside.
He says maybe I am getting old.
That being poor is taking too much out of me.
I say I am fine. He asks for the Brahms.
We watch the sea fade. The tape finishes again
and we sit on. Unable to find words.

Trying to Have Something Left Over

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

Foraging for Wood on the Mountain

The wild up here is not creatures, wooded,
tangled wild. It is absence wild.
Barren, empty, stone wild. Worn-away wild.
Only the smell of weeds and hot air.
But a place where differences are clear.
Between the mind’s severity and its harshness.
Between honesty and the failure of belief.
A man said no person is educated who knows
only one language, for he cannot distinguish
between his thought and the English version.
Up here he is translated to a place where it is
possible to discriminate between age and sorrow.

The Spirit and the Soul

It should have been the family that lasted.
Should have been my sister and my peasant mother.
But it was not. They were the affection,
not the journey. It could have been my father,
but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg
and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me,
and the newness after that, and newness again.
It was the important love and the serious lust.
It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog
and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl,
but the black-and-white winters with their girth
and geological length of cold. Streets ripped
apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when
the snow finally left in April. Freight trains
with their steam locomotives working at night.
Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy,
I saw downtown a large camera standing in front
of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann’s
Department Store. Usually around midnight,
but the people still going by. The camera set
slow enough that cars and people left no trace.
The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan
did not last. But the empty streets of Perugia,
my two bowls of bean soup on Kos, and Pimpaporn
Charionpanith lasted. The plain nakedness of Anna
in Denmark remains in me forever. The wet lilacs
on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen. Carrying
Michiko dead in my arms. It is not about the spirit.
The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul
is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged
under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.
The way a child knows the world by putting it
part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw
my way into the Lord, working to put my heart
against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night,
letting the rain after all the dry months have me.

I've been listening to this band lately--a pleasant discovery. Dave Wingo, the man behind the band, has composed music for several movies, including David Gordon Greene's George Washington, which, if you haven't seen, I highly recommend.

I wander around from town to town just like a roving sign

Bluefield, WV

--two poems by d.a. levy

the bells of the Cherokee ponies

i thought they were
wind chimes
in the streets at night
with my young eyes
i looked to the east
and the distant ringing
of ghost ponies
rose from the ground

Ponies Ponies Ponies

(the young horse becomes
a funny sounding
word)

i looked to the east
seeking buddhas to
justify those bells
weeping in the darkness

The Underground Horses
are rising

Cherokee, Delaware, Huron
we will return your land to you

the young horses
will return your land to you

to purify the land
with their tears

The Underground Horses
are rising
to tell their fathers

"in the streets at night
the bells of Cherokee ponies
are weeping."

to Jim Lowell's goldfish

there is little or nothing
of the minds nightwork
so there is pretending & amusement
a goldfish in a toilet bowl
a piece of the captured sun
the heart of a melons wisdom
if of the Spanish marauders
a ripping up of alabaster by its iron roots
carries this treasure off to store in a
galleon that is to die young

instead, i anchor him with old memories
and change his water by day
he thinks it is the tide

I called you back (to a place beside me)

Wade School, Bluefield, WV

video for live version of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "I Called You Back," animated and directed by Mike Aho...definitely worth checking out.

we've been raised on replicas of fake and winding roads

A-Z Flea Market, Pulaski, VA

I took this shot at the A-Z this past Friday night. There's a stage at the front of the store, and every Friday and Saturday night a couple of bands come in and play old time gospel music. Couches and chairs with 20-40 dollar price tags dangling from their arms provide the seating, and you can buy a hot dog and a large slice of made from scratch cake for less than 2 dollars. On Friday, a lady playing an out-of-tune piano was the highlight. She played a kind of rollicking, honky-tonk style akin to Jerry Lee Lewis playing a ballad or Earl Balls' playing on The Byrds' Sweethearts of the Rodeo. Great stuff. If you're ever in Pulaski on a Friday night, it's worth checking out.

video for the Flying Burrito Brothers (the band Gram Parsons fronted before joining The Byrds on Sweethearts of the Rodeo)"Sin City." Parsons died in a hotel room at the Joshua Tree National Monument in 1973 at the age of 26, apparently of a drug overdose. If you haven't heard the story of his death and the odd events that followed, you should read this.

I want to take a ride on the back of a sunbird, up into the highest number

Bramwell Visitor's Center Boxcar, Bramwell, WV

--a few poems by Richard Brautigan

Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork

Loading mercury with a pitchfork
your truck is almost full. The neighbors
take a certain pride in you. They
stand around watching.

It's Time to Train Yourself

It’s time to train yourself
to sleep alone again
and it’s so fucking hard.

For Fear You Will Be Alone

For fear you will be alone
you do so many things
that aren’t you at all

The Curve of Forgotten Things

Things slowly curve out of sight
Until they are gone. Afterwards
Only the curve
Remains.

Lint

Im haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

Ive been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent

Photo by Christian Patterson, @ tinyvices.com

Forrest City, Arkansas, May, 2007

When my spring semester teaching ended last year, I took a trip down to Austin, TX with my friend David. We stopped in various places on our way down, one of which was Forrest City, Arkansas. I think we stopped for a bathroom break or to buy lunch or something, but we ended up walking around town and taking some photos. I liked the town quite a bit--it reminded me of Pulaski. I posted most of the shots from Forrest City during the summer, but I didn't post the above shot because the colors are off. The sky is too blue and blocky, and the pink of the mural is off, too. I suppose if I knew how to use photoshop I could make it look somewhat closer to how it appeared to my eyes that day, but I still haven't gotten around to using photoshop. I just take photos (making use of whatever limited technical knowledge I have) and hope they turn out well.

I had owned my Nikon for about a month when I took the shot. Before that, I was using a Canon A1 and shooting all black and white. Prior to August, 2006, I had barely even held a camera. I've always had an interest in art, but I just hadn't given much thought to photography. In any case, I took a photo class in the fall of 2006, bought a cheap Minolta (which was stolen, then replaced by the Canon), and quickly became hooked. Photography provided a nice way to be both outside and inside of things. I'm not a particularly social person, certainly not a joiner of groups, but I love the interactions I have when I'm out photographing. I like being a stranger in a strange place, making unexpected connections. I'm veering off topic here, something I'm prone to do...I suppose I intended this paragraph to explain how I became aware of Eggleston's photos, then later--through doing google searches for Eggleston--stumbled across some of Christian Patterson's work.

By the time I took the trip with David, I was aware of Patterson...I knew that he helped develop the Eggleston website and that he had lived in Memphis, but I had never seen his photo of the pink wall in Forrest City. I had no idea he'd ever been there. I didn't find his photo of the wall until a few months ago, when I came across a link to the tiny vices site, probably through a link from Patterson's now defunct blog. Patterson's shot is admittedly better than mine...also probably a good argument for the use of film over digital, particularly medium format film over a relatively cheap (not cheap to me) digital SLR like my D50. Of course, the 2 shots are different and there are factors other than the cameras involved...time of day and year, the angle of the shots, etc. Nevertheless, his sky is much better, and I like the way he got the curb and part of the adjoining building in his shot. He was also blessed to have the owner's Cadillac parked beside the building (how do I know it was the owner's Cadillac? He pulled up while I was photographing, told me it was his store, and asked my I what I was doing). In my photo the front of the Cadillac is barely visible just in front of the arrow. In any case, when I found the Patterson shot I thought it cool that someone whose work I admire had noticed something I also noticed.

If you're not the missing lug nut, well who are you?

VW window visors, Pulaski, VA

Os Mutantes "Panis Et Circenses" on tv in 1969

Rabbit of Lil
--Will Oldham

I drew you
from a pile of rabbits
your face framed in
rotting rabbits
like a saintly giant
buried to her neck
in the earth

you had freckles
and a wide face
light hair
and mottled hills
were crumbled in the sun
behind you

you looked
terribly innocent
so much
that i wanted
to eliminate you
from everyone’s memory

little little thing
made by the same
hands as me

(poem from OctopusMagazine)

more seagulls, Save-A-Lot parking lot, Pulaski, VA

Luna covering Velvet Underground's "Ride Into the Sun"

Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night
--Charles Wright

I've always liked the view from my mother-in-law's house at night,
Oil rigs off Long Beach
Like floating lanterns out in the smog dark Pacific,
Stars in the eucalyptus,
Lights of airplanes from Asia, and town lights
Littered like broken glass around the bay and back up the hill.

In summer, dance music is borne up
On the sea winds from the hotel's beach deck far below,
"Twist and Shout" or "Begin the Beguine."
It's nice to think that somewhere someone is having a good time,
And pleasant to picture them down there
Turned out, tipsy and flushed, in their white shorts and their
turquoise shirts.

Later, I like to sit and look up
At the mythic history of Western civilization,
Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac.
I'd like to be able to name them, say what's what and how who got
where,
Curry the physics of metamorphosis and its endgame,
But I've spent my life knowing nothing.

Give me a little time to take what I know

Pulaski, VA

Loss
--CK Williams

In this day and age Lord
you are like one of those poor farmers
who burns the forests off
and murders his lands and then
can't leave and goes sullen and lean
among the rusting yard junk, the scrub
and the famished stock.

Lord I have felt myself raked
into the earth like manure,
harrowed and plowed under,
but I am still enough like you
to stand on the porch
chewing a stalk or drinking
while tall weeds come up dead
and the house dogs, snapping
their chains like moths, howl
and point towards the withering
meadows at nothing at all.

Prosser
--Ray Carver

In winter two kinds of fields on the hills
outside Prosser: fields of new green wheat, the slips
rising overnight out of the plowed ground,
and waiting,
and then rising again, and budding.
Geese love this green wheat.
I ate some of it once too, to see.

And wheat stubble-fields that reach to the river.
These are the fields that have lost everything.
At night they try to recall their youth,
but their breathing is slow and irregular as
their life sinks into dark furrows.
Geese love this shattered wheat also.
They will die for it.

But everything is forgotten, nearly everything,
and soon rather than later, please God--
fathers, friends, they pass
into your life and out again, a few women stay
a while, then go, and the fields
turn their backs, disappear in the rain.
Everything goes, but Prosser.

Remembered Morning
--Janet Lewis

The axe rings in the wood
and the children come,
laughing and wet from the river;
and all goes as it should.
I hear the murmur and hum
of their morning, forever.

The water ripples and slaps
the white boat at the dock;
the fire crackles and snaps.
The little noise of the clock
goes on and on in my heart,
of my heart parcel and part.

O happy early stir!
A girl comes out on the porch,
and the door slams after her.
She sees the wind in the birch,
and then the running day
catches her into its way.

it's a sad and beautiful world

Pulaski, VA

Both of these photos were taken yesterday in Pulaski. I needed to grade essays and do some work around the house, but when Josh called and suggested driving out and taking photos, I couldn't pass it up. The first photo was taken at what looked to be a salvage yard for Volkswagen buses. I initially stopped to take a photo of the Prayer Infirmary, a squat cinderblock church painted bright pink, and Josh walked across the street to get a shot of the rows of nearly identical VW's. I didn't really get any good shots of the Prayer Infirmary, but the buses turned out to be interesting.

After exploring the buses for 30 minutes or so, we drove down toward Magnox, a sort of jaundiced yellow colored 120 year old factory where rust is used to make coatings for magnetic tapes. About a half-mile away from Magnox, we found what looked like a set for a Western movie (imagine McCabe and Mrs. Miller), several unpainted buildings constructed of rough cut pine boards and knotted logs. I'd driven by the place in the past, but I'd never stopped to explore it. It turned out to be much more fascinating than I would've imagined. We found a room with several rusted pot-bellied stoves, a large carving of a bear, a few random boxes of sea shells, and a wall marked by "Konvict and Little Bit."

The seagull shot is from later in the day. Josh noticed the gulls in front the Save-A-Lot grocery, and we pulled in to see if we could get a photo or two. Messing around with the gulls turned out to be the best part of one of the best days I've had in a while. I walked over to the Dollar General and bought a loaf of bread, and we spent a couple hours tossing balls of bread a few feet over our heads for the birds to catch in their beaks. The idea was to get them to hover over us for as long as possible to attempt to get a good shot against the blue background of the sky. It wasn't easy. As soon as the birds grabbed the bread, which they are very good at, they would immediately glide away. I think I managed to get a few decent shots, and I had fun acting like Thomas from Antonioni's Blow Up (the gulls as Jane Birkin?), but it would've been great even without the cameras.

wonderful video for Sparklehorse's "Sad and Beautiful World"