some words in recollection of Rich Guenette

some words in honor of the memory of our pal Rich Guenette -

tho lumpy and inadequate, this is what I read at the gathering in Northampton on 20 Oct. '13...

****

Despite the fact that R was without question one of the most thoroughly vexing annoying human beings imaginable, who took being a pain in the ass to world-historical dimensions, he also had one of the most extraordinary minds and imaginations I’ve ever encountered.

We were allies in opposition to almost everything, all established practises and recieved opinions – but he was less able to enlist allies in constructing an alternate reality than I’ve been.

he wanted to reframe the world, whereas, after awhile, I was content merely to reframe my own existence

his enthusiasms were wide-spread, incorporating carp-based aquaculture, redesigning the computer interface, fly-wheel cars, alternative energy schemes, rail gun-based anti-missile systems, various Oenida-like rural communitarian set-ups, and finally an idea for electrifying the national hiway system I never completely understood.

He did always hanker after elusive community – perhaps he thought that once his notions of social & global transformations were  put into practice in Ecotopea, a lifetime cynosure would be granted him by a grateful humanity as a Hero of the Revolution

but he was a sort of Boddhisattva, not only unwilling to enter paradise ahead of others but hardly looking after his own well-being until the world was reconfigured according to his dreams. ..

was he ‘on the spectrum’, or just nuts? I think that the tide had gone out on any sort of functional ad-hoc counter-culture that might have picked up on him... he was ahead of the curve on computers but was too much the loner mad scientist to join that culture, or to work with others enough to get a start up off the ground, or join one. For him computers seemed to create a cognitive closed loop that made working with others seem unneccesary. In some ways he’s a cautionary tale for the internet age, awash in the informational corucopia but absent true collaborators, he fell prey to self-reinforcing ideas, heeding only those to which he already agreed.

Failing any productive traction he went idea-mad, spitting them out one after another, any one of them potentially valuable and workable, but he never got the R&D lab he deserved to try them out, or after say Farley and the Hampshire County Energy Project in ‘80 never again found any productive social context in which to try them out , and that may be the central tragedy & sadness of his enterprise.

it’s obvious, but bears repeating, that when someone close to you dies, some part of you is hung up forever, like a costume for a party you’ll never have again. Because you can only be that way with that person, and they’ve taken a permanent powder. I’ll never quite again experience the exhileration of conceptual lift-off we got in our verbal improvisations, spiralling off in conceptual jetties opaque to others but perfectly visible to ourselves.

Rich was a complex cat –

i’ll remember his dogged, almost relentless persuit of some practical fix for humanity’s ludicrous fiascos and perilous predicaments

his loyalty to his friends

absolutely fearless in his willingness to reconfigure any and everything for more advantageous result

but contentious, combative, a natural contrarian – who’s attitude toward friendship almost seemed to be ‘if you loved me, you’d fight with me,’ but we who loved him persevered, if often at a safe distance.

here  are some tales in my memory locker – they may not particularly speak to character but they do stick in my mind

1.      Mayday Medic,  1971 - DC

mayhem and chaos swirled around at the big ’71 Mayday demo in DC, but somehow we surfed it, caught up and weirdly in sync with the whirlwind. I dont remember how it happened, but we were offered a tour of the riot in the back seat of a psych van that was picking up the walking wounded, mostly acid casualties, mostly freaked out young women. We were at the other end of the spectrum, bobbing on the surface, babbling away happily like a couple of illuminated imps – doing a sort of meta-commentary as extended free-jazz/comedy riff – the medics said they enjoyed having us there as a sort of lunatic shield agains negative energy – we kept it up for what seemed hours, effortlesly reeling out the most inspired, far-fetched flights of the imagination, cracking up ourselves, the drivers, and frequently the baffled rescuees. When we got together this summer at Dubois’, Rich recollected this episode to us.

2.      Memorial Day 1976 - Northampton

We took a couple classes together @ UMass in the mid 70s when we were both back in school – one was comedy, and we studied the classics. One assignment was to mash up the styles & characters of Moliere and  Chekhov in a play. It required internalizing their manners and interlacing them somehow in a non-farcical way. This was almost impossible, a real ball-buster.

and of course we’d both procrastinated horribly and now it was due the next day.

we decided to collaborate.

I had scored some dexedrine from a Smithy I was dating in my mind.

We picked our characters and had at it, spelling each other for hours at the machine in my room.

We started for real  around 5 pm. It was fun for a while, but bogged down eventually in its own absurdity, descending eventually to the condition of gibberish. We gamed it out endlessly, but were clearly in over our heads.

around 2 in the morning we began to glaze over. 

We ate the speed. We stumbled on for a few more hours, our characters hopelessly lost, wandering in the labyrinths of our desperation. Eventually we realized that although we were technically awake, are brains really weren’t – we were auto-zombified.

Dawn.

we sat vibrating and doomed in the smoke-filled room. Typescript lay everywhere in anguished piles. Across the street a giant memorial day american flag hung from a porch, framed in the bedroom window.

Then Larry entered the room.

Larry was a 6 foot giant not terrifically bright Vietnam veteran from Watertown Square with a ruddish complexion, PTSD, a volatile temper, various weapons and a synthetic morphine habit. He’d ‘come with the building’, living on a landing in the 3^rd fl. stairway, and paying no rent, because no one could face telling him to leave.

He sat on my bed framed by the giant flag and began to weep.

O jesus, what now?

“They lied to us, man!” he said.

“We know, we know,” we said, not wanting to die.

“The bastards lied to us, I lost buddies, MAN...” more weeping.

“We know, we know.”

It took an hour to talk him down from his violent sorrows and steer him back off to bed on his landing.

We’d been trying to consumate an unnatural marriage between these 17^th and 19^th century literatti and here we were, in our own Sam Shepard play.

Evidently we’d taken the wrong class...

LUPE VELEZ WITH A BAEDEKER: IRVING THALBERG WITH A CIGAR

The smoky candle end of time
declines. On the Rialto once.
With Lupe Velez. Prepared the crime.
But Irving's valet was no dunce.

Had seen Tirolean dances there
before. And though she was no whore.
Perhaps was hired by the state.
Yet would not scare. And knew no fate.

Time's thick castles ascend in piles,
the witnesses to countless mobs.
Each with intentions, torches, throbs.
Bequeath the coming dawn their wiles.

Yet Irving was not meant for this.
He books the first flight to the States.
He suffers to receive Lupe's kiss.
While all around the chorus prates.

There's something does not love a mime.
Tirolean castles built to scale.
There was a mob. There is no crime.
These modernisms sometimes fail.

T.S. Eliot with a Baedeker

T.S. Eliot's famous poem Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar is a kind of fantasy, a hallucinated joke, at the expense of everyone. The plot of the poem is deceptively simple and clear. A Burbank--on holiday in Venice--takes up with a Princess Volupine--in a romantic episode on a "shuttered barge" that "burned on the water all the day." Even the boatman smiles to see her. Meanwhile, the Chicago Jew Bleistein takes it easy in Venice. The great episodes of diurnal history are erased. Burbank thinks: "Money in furs." Men are willing to pay a lot to keep women; it is a lucrative market for the fur dealers--here, presumably Bleistein. Then--just as suddenly--Princess Volupine is entertaining another admirer, Sir Ferdinand Klein, presumably another Jew, an English Jew, and Burbank is out. The punchline of the joke comes in these lines:

Klein. Who clipped the lion's wings
And flea'd his rump and pared his claws?
Thought Burbank . . .

This has two meanings: 1. Women have men whipped, and are the motivation for their grooming themselves for the game, and competing with each other, and 2. The rich Jewish merchants have beaten the English, as the Rothschilds did when Britain turned to their financial assistance as a last resort: this extends even to their being knighted and monopolizing beautiful women. Burbank would seem to be English. Like a good Jewish joke, the joke is on the Jews, on the English, on the Americans, on men, and on women, all at once, with the poem's greatest animus being reserved for a sexual resentment directed towards women. This is not inconsistent with the seeming misogyny of a number of Eliot's poems from this period. Burbank "meditating on Time's ruins" is on one level reflecting on losing Princess Volupine so abruptly. I've forgotten what "the seven laws" alludes to. I make no attempt here to explicate the local details of the poem. The sexual metaphor of the horses that "Beat up the dawn from Istria / With even feet". The reference to Cleopatra. The juxtaposition of classical beauty with modern decrepidness. The jazzy demeanor of Bleistein. The "protozoic slime" which represents Bleistein's location in sensibility, and the primitive origins of mankind. The reference to all that is lost to history, and the way in which such a loss relates to the primitive origins of mankind. The poem is a sort of academic joke, that takes things as they appear to be, without taking sides, except in a generally distributed animus towards life in general. Or so it strikes me. The joke appears to be largely built on the deceptive blaming of Jews, which is only then abruptly disintegrated--or diffused--into an even greater animus towards women. But it is Burbank's meditation. A little hallucinated drama played out in his mind. Such beauty as the poem possesses is contained in the exquisiteness of its form, its perfect demonstration of the art of joke telling in a lyric form. In the fine suggestiveness of certain details and the evocative simplicity of their statement. And in such truths as are inexecrably contained therein. The ugliness of such truths is merely pondered, and not so much as judged quite. At least the poem wears gloves.

Inman Square Stroll By.

I've been a denizen here now for as long as anywhere in Cambridge that I could call home.

It is a strange vain place, a kind of stage within stage for various flavors of yuppies to have their various mating and conspicuous consumption rituals. And, beyond the hardware store and a few other improbable practical things it has devolved into fluff. 

Billy Ruane

On the night it became known, my phone went nuts at around 9pm. "The Phoenix is reporting that Billy Ruane died...." The news moved through the system very fast. 

And I flashed to one of our last face to face moments. He stopped by the gallery to give everyone food and make arrangements to get a disc of the night's concert with Junko Simons. My mission was to get it to him. We talked about getting old and he gave me an excited description of his disagreement with his physician about the meaning of blood pressure data and what was more important, with him insisting the opposite of conventional medicine's outlook was true. I had a feeling this would be a problem, in the back of my mind, but also thought, maybe he's right. 

He wasn't and now he's gone. Billy loved his salt and his fatty stuff and had gained more weight than his short frame really wanted to handle. And he had three flights of stairs to traverse. I oughta know, I lived there myself. He also loved caffeine. Not coffee, no, his Eucharist was Vivarin and he was despondent when it was discontinued as No Doz would not do. 

One of my regular chores as his sidekick was to do vivarin runs to 7/11. I imagine whatever substitute he found..,red bull?? counter nostrums?, was the detonator in the ticking bomb of his poor old heart. I assumed he was sturdier.

He wasn't and now he's gone.

Swing Circa 1857, Jazz Robespierres and Boston’s Undiscovered Wax

a very nice posting from my pal Andrew Sammutt's jazz blog Clefpalette, highlighting my jazz record memoir for the Battersea Review, linked within.

http://clefpalette.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/swing-circa-1857-jazz-robespierres-and-the-search-for-lost-sounds/

Swing Circa 1857, Jazz Robespierres and Boston’s Undiscovered Wax

Posted on June 23, 2013 by Andrew J. Sammut

I got to know Rob Chalfen through his work directing Outpost 186, an intimate space for progressive jazz in the Boston metro area, and through conversations about early jazz where his knowledge and insights never degenerate into dry encylopedism. It should also be mentioned that the recordings of WC Handy and World War I Puerto Rican municipal bands never sounded better than coming out of his turntable and speakers.

The impresario, record collector and audiophile shared some of his memories and a few war stories from a fifty-year love affair with jazz online at The Battersea Review. From childhood discovery to the tireless stone turning, with side trips through the civil rights movement and the elitist phase we all go through, Chalfen wittily and warmly describes how music and life don’t just intersect but grow from one another. Enjoy.

Old Yiddish Curses (via Jonathan Scheuer)

Old Yiddish Curses

Eyn imglik iz far im veynik. One misfortune is too few for him.

Shteyner zol zi hobn, nit kayn kinder. She should have stones and not children.

 Azoy fil ritzinoyl zol er oystrinkn. He should drink too much castor oil.

 Oyf doktoyrim zol er dos avekgebn. He should give it all away to doctors.

Zol er krenken un gedenken. Let him suffer and remember.

 Zalts im in di oygen, feffer im in di noz. Throw salt in his eyes, pepper in his nose.

 Shteyner af zayne beyner. Stones on his bones.

Trinkn zoln im piavkes. Leeches should drink him dry.

Lakhn zol er mit yashtherkes. He should laugh with lizards.

A hiltsener tsung zol er bakumn. He should grow a wooden tongue.

 Krugn zol er di (town name here) brokh. He should get the (town name here) hernia.

Fransn zol esn zayn layb. Venereal disease should consume his body.

Farshporn zol er oyf(tsu)shteyn? Why bother getting up alive?

Er zol kakn mit blit un mit ayter. He should crap blood and pus.

A kramp (a kram, a kortsh) im in layb (in boyakh, in di kishkes, in di gederem, in
di finger). A cramp in his body (in his stomach, in his guts, in his bowels, in his fingers and toes).

Meshuga zol er vern un arumloyfn (iber di gasn). He should go nuts and run around (through the streets).

Vi tsu derleb ikh im shoyn tsu bagrobn. I should outlive him long enough to bury him.

Got zol im bentshn mit dray mentshn: eyner zol im haltn, der tsveyter zol im shpaltn un der driter zol im ba'haltn. God should bless him with three people: one should grab him, the second should stab him and the third should hide him.

A groys gesheft zol er hobn mit shroyre: vus er hot, zol men bay im nit fregn, un vos men fregt zol er nisht hobn. He should have a large store, and whatever people ask for he shouldn't have, and what he does have shouldn't be requested.

 Ale tsores vos ikh hob oyf mayn hartsn, zoln oysgeyn tsu zayn kop. All problems I have in my heart, should go to his head.

 A meshugener zol men oyshraybn, un im araynshraybn. They should free a madman, and lock him up.

Es zol dir dunern in boykh, vestu meyen az s'iz a homon klaper. Your stomach will rumble so badly, you'll think it was Purim noisemaker.

Migulgl zol er vern in a henglayhter, by tog zol er hengen, un bay nakht zoler brenen. He should be transformed into a chandelier, to hang by day and to burn by night.

Ale tseyn zoln bay im aroysfaln, not eyner zol im blaybn oyf tsonveytung. All his teeth should fall out except one to make him suffer.

 Hindert hayzer zol er hobn, in yeder hoyz a hindert tsimern, in yeder tsimer tsvonsik betn un kadukhes zol im varfn fin eyn bet in der tsveyter. A hundred houses shall he have, in every house a hundred rooms and in every room twenty beds, and a delirious fever should drive him from bed to bed.

Vifil yor er iz gegangn oyf di fis zol er geyn af di hent un di iberike zol er zikh sharn oyf di hintn. As many years as he's walked on his feet, let him walk on his hands, and for the rest of the time he should crawl
along on his ass.

 Zol es im onkumn vos ikh vintsh im (khotsh a helft, khotsh halb, khotsh a tsent kheylik). Let what I wish on him come true (most, even half, even just 10%).

 In di zumerdike teg zol er zitsn shive, un in di vinterdike nekht zikh raysn af di tseyn. On summer days he should mourn, and on wintry nights, he should torture himself.

Finstere leyd zol nor di mama oyf im zen. Black sorrow is all that his mother should see of him.

Oyskrenkn zol er dus mame's milakh. He should get so sick as to cough up his mother's milk.

Gut zol oyf im onshikn fin di tsen makes di beste. God should visit upon him the best of the Ten Plagues.

Er zol altsting zen, un nit hobn farvos (mit vos) tsu koyfn. He should see everything, but have no reason (with what) to buy it.

Khasene hobn zol er mit di malekh hamoves tokhter. He should marry the daughter of the Angel of Death.

Tsen shifn mit gold zol er farmorgn, un dos gantse gelt zol er farkrenkn. Ten ships of gold should be his and the money should only make him sick.

 Zayn mazl zol im layhtn vi di levone in sof khoydesh. His luck should be as bright as a new moon.

 Er zol hobn paroys makes bashotn mit oybes krets. He should have Pharaoh's plagues sprinkled with Job's scabies.

 Heng dikh oyf a tsikershtrikl vestu hobn a zisn toyt. Hang yourself with a sugar rope and you'll have a sweet death.

 Me ois vaxen svi a tsibele miten cup in vant. You should grow like an onion with your head in the ground.

A Don Van Vliet Atomizer Air-bulb Invention - rob chalfen

Written for the LA Weekly http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2010/12/captain_beefheart_facts.php

“We're matter – the stars are matter – but it doesn't matter”

a fine artist before he was a musician, after his musical career ended he resumed painting and achieved an international reputation.

at 11 had his own show sculpting animals on LA tv. Won a scholarship to study art in europe, but his folks wouldnt let him go, as all artists were 'fags'. Folks moved to Lancaster to get him away from the decadent element, where he met Frank Zappa

Saw Gregory Corso read in LA at 13.

with Zappa reconfigured R&B along lines of monster movie fanzines & MAD.

in the late 60s fused delta blues, beat poetics, Dada/Surrealist techniques, avant jazz, R&B & the kitchen sink into a metaphysics of the imagination that tore a giant hole in the ozone of pop-artistic possibility. Like an american Van Gogh he seened to open up new landscapes of consciousness as much as of music.

Claimed shamanistic & supernatural abilities; on one occasion the drummer in my band, following around Don & Dr John, witnessed the glass panes of a hotel lobby mysteriously turn opaque as they passed. He was a life-long defender of the rights of animals & wildlife.

ran his band as a sort of hothouse commune/cult of domineering personality, one veteran later describing the experience as 'my Vietnam". He communicated musical ideas via cassettes of his piano playing, singing and late night whistlings over the phone. The musicians were then expected to transcribe these fragments verbatim, and assemble them perfectly into 4-dimensional musical constructions.

he composed implausibly complex solo guitar pieces like modern acid madrigals

Zappa produced the Magic Band's masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, in 1969, initially as a sort of Folkways-type anthropological field recording at the band's commune. Later Don insisted that it all be re-recorded in the studio, convinced that Zappa had been trying to do it on the cheap. (some of the home tapes made it onto the record anyway) . In the studio, he refused to wear phones, syncing his vocals with the band only via the faint leakage through the thick plate glass.

Opening acts, in Boston at any rate, included Mississippi Fred McDowell, the NY Dolls, Larry Coryell, Bonnie Raitt/Dave Maxwell, Dr. John & a trained monkey vaudeville act. "Did you like the Dolls? Oh, balls!"

in the mid 70s he wandered in an aesthetic wilderness - his label dropped him, he fell in with some sharp operators connected with the band Bread (!) and tried to record 'safe' pop. His Magic band left him, and he toured with a pick up group. One older cat Ellis Horn had played clarinet with Lu Waters Jazz Band in the 40s and had a feature playing 'Sweet Georgia Brown" on an old albert-style clarinet, upturned at the bell. "He sucked a cosmic particle up into his horn," opined Don.
Zappa helped jumpstart his career, incorporating him into his touring ensemble, though complained Beefheart couldnt cut the arrangements. Several of Zappa's sidemen later defected to the Magic Band.

In 1976 I interviewd Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys, who very enthusiastically claimed Don as a key influence. "A case of the punks!"

his 1970 & 1982 music videos, both rejected by tv as too far out, are both in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art.