Brass Kings at Grumpy's

This was Saturday; we were walking to Grumpy’s. On 22nd Ave., we saw a woman taking pictures of the switchlights at the train tracks. She saw us a looked a bit flustered, then she said, “That’s a Griswold,” pointing at a switchlight. “And that’s a Raymond. They used to all be Griswolds, back in the thirties, then they started changing them, and you don’t see them much any more. I just had to take a picture.” She was down from Brainerd, partly to look at old railroad equipment, partly to visit some friends. We commiserated about the need to indulge ourselves once in a while, and then pointed out to her the switching yard just down the way. Her husband sat in the car, patient and smiling, then held up his hands in a what-are-you-going-to-do gesture, but he didn’t get out of the car.

So we moved on the Grumpy’s, the tiny bar that packs a music stage, four booths, a patio, a video game console, a wickedly well-stocked jukebox, and full bar into a space not much bigger than a basketball court. They were holding their annual Northeast Minneapolis Folk Festival, so they’d opened up the side gate into a courtyard that runs the length of the building on the north side, where a tent held the musical acts, and the guests stood under low eaves of lilac trees.


Soon enough The Brass Kings had set up under the tent and were ready to play. The Brass Kings, when you hear about them, sound like a novelty act. One guy, Mikkel Beckman, slaps and scratches ringed fingers against a vintage washboard, and another guy, Brad Ptacek, has cobbled together a single-string bass out of a battered galvanized steel washtub, a broomstick, and a length of rope. The only semi-legitimate instrument is an ancient metal guitar in the hands of Steve Kaul, which he'd plugged into a buzzing, dangerous sounding amp. So you sit down and think this is going to be some kind of frazzled old jug-band, dead-enders playing the Old Grey Mare, and then they start jamming. Kaul sets up an arpeggiated blues riff, and Ptacek plugs out the basics of a chord structure – root and fourth and fifth, pulling the rope taught with a hand kept from blistered ruination by a thick leather carpenter’s glove. The washboard is a soothing scrape in the background.

Soon enough Kaul starts singing Muleskinner Blues, about as standard a folk tune as you’ll find. But there’s something intensely different about their sound, and when Kaul stops singing and starts exploring what his resonator is capable of, the music moves from Appalachia to the middle east, a resonating otherworldly sound like a not unlike a sitar. It wouldn’t be far off the mark to say The Brass Kings are a jam band, a spiritual heir to Jerry Garcia, out there exploring the reaches of the sonisphere for rare treasures. Their own MySpace page describes them as “Split Lip Rayfield jamming with Ravi Shenkar.” The oddness goes mostly unnoticed, such is the aura they send over the crowd. When Beckman pulls out an old piece of refrigerator facing for one song, no one even bats an eye. We just sit in the sun and listen and drink, then put down a couple demon dogs, and let the evening flow.

Other bands were less successful. They were mostly kids with downy long beards and new guitars, their shoes barely scuffed. They growled some but were unconvincing in their passion. A guy on a washboard got lost in the six-piece band, reduced to obligatory old-timey ornament. Time would take care of these kids, turn them into artists someday, or not. But it was Saturday night, and we didn't have time to wait.

On the way home we didn’t see the switches or the lady who loves them or even notice that we'd crossed the tracks again; we just walked quietly in the dark night. But the old ways, man, they were all around. The Griswold switches and the found instruments, the washboards and tin-tub basses - they go away, they come back, some of them stay where they are forever, blinking away, resonating into the night.

The Brass Kings at Memory Lanes:

Self-promotion

I wrote a poem on Northography, Britt Fleming's on-line workshop/funhouse. Go take a look at it. Also please read all the other fine poets on the site, and go make poetry yourself.


http://northography.com/responses.php?stimulus_id=193#3435

Short Story Review: Rhonda Discovers Art, by Katherine Dunn

Rhonda Discovers Art
by Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn is most famously the author of Geek Love, which, like a great many popular books, I have not read. I do know that when I was on the Internet dating circuit, it was one of the most popular 'favorite books' among the single ladies, along with anything by Barbara Kingsolver, whom I have also not read. Having read its description, and having a few unfortunate first dates with her fans, Geek Love became something of a warning sign to me. It's about circus freaks who willfully take poisons that breed more circus freaks, and about the family they create, and the chaos they bring to the 'norm's who come to visit them.

"Rhonda Discovers Art," the new short story by Katherine Dunn, is in the latest issue of The Paris Review. Interestingly, it's her first published piece of fiction since the release of Geek Love, over 20 years ago. Since then she's been laboring on a novel called "Cut Man," and writing web pieces, often without pay, about the Oregon boxing scene. A collection of her boxing writing was recently released by tiny independent publisher Shaffner Press.

"Rhonda Discovers Art" is excerpted from her forthcoming novel, and it's told in two parts, the first of which takes place in Rhonda's childhood, and concerns the accidental death of her brother at the hands of a neighborhood bully, who also meets his fate at Rhonda's hands. The second half, years later, never mentions this first half. It follows Rhonda's emerging obsession with a performance artist whose outrageous pieces include sticking his head in urinals at the ballpark, and slaughtering trained pigs onstage. When his latest performance is to sit in a full bathtub with several household appliances, a giant lever near the crowd set to supply power, Rhonda's interest/love is more than piqued: the end is, well, should I say shocking?

I read this story with a distantly morbid eye, always just a bit dis-engaged, always wondering what might happen next, a slightly guilty grin on my face. I could not commit to fully liking this story, or really approving of it, but I doubt I'll ever forget it. I felt almost as if I were reading a Roald Dahl story, one where character was secondary to the morbidity of the events and the author's own cleverness, where the distant narration holds you back and above the action. Wicked good fun is the phrase, I think, and it applies just as well to Katherine Dunn.

Reviews of "Geek Love," and book-group guides, always talk about 'definition of family' and 'questioning the concept of other' or the 'relation between appearance and power' when they talk about Geek Love. I find it interesting no one does that for Dahl. They just read him and have fun, reveling in morbidity with no attempts to be socially redeeming, and I'm all for that. Fun is fun, I want to say to all the book club groups looking to justify getting their freak-gawk on. Enjoy what you like, and don't sugar-coat it with English major rhetoric.

As an aside, I'm curious to know what Katherine Dunn thinks of her work being fodder for book groups, complete with pre-digested study questions. Isn't that sort of group-think exactly the kind of conformity Geek Love was written to satirize? Unfortunately, her contact information is non-existent. So if you read this, Katherine Dunn - if you ever get to the Internet (she seems to be kind of a luddite, with a man to type her manuscripts, and no personal website or Blog or anything, God bless her soul) - feel free to let me know. Your comments will remain off the record, I promise.

Dead before 30: Pocahontas

Pocahontas: 1595-1617

Born in the late 1500’s, Pocahontas was the youngest daughter of Powhatan, chief of the tribes whose name he took years earlier, after he had waged a long campaign to unite the southern tribes into a society not unlike the Iroquois confederacy of the northern territories.

The complexities of what Pocahontas did or did not do to spare the life of John Smith have filled volumes I can only begin to recap here. It was 1607, and on an expedition up the Chesapeake bay, Smith – a notorious adventurer, raconteur, blowhard, and general thorn in the side of authority everywhere, was taken prisoner by the Powhatans. He was held captive while the chieftans tried to figure out what to do with him. Powhatan eventually, perhaps, chose to kill him. Or, just as likely, he chose peace. In either case, there was a ceremony, a symbolic (or literal) clubbing of Smith, during which Pocahontas played the role of Smith’s savior, rushing from the crowd, throwing herself on him, and begging her father for mercy. It was granted, and Smith gained a symbolic membership in the tribe. He returned to the Jamestown Colony, and Pocahontas became the emissary and mascot of the settlers.

Whether this was an initiation ceremony welcoming Smith to the tribe, an actual execution she prevented, or even whether any of that happened at all, nobody actually knows. Pocahontas never spoke of it; Smith’s is the only account, and even then he did so ten years later, in his third volume of memoirs, and details of the encounter echo a similar story he recounted from one of his trip to the Orient, years earlier. Such is the record in the pre-blog era.

But what of Powhatan, whose dream was to become father of a great nation? His fate was sealed. By choosing peace he unleashed waves of settlers who eventually spelled the doom of the people he had worked so hard to unite. But I think of this fact: his daughter Pocahontas eventually married John Rolfe, another settler, and emigrated to England. There, she toured the royal houses, converted to Christianity, and bore a son to John. On her return trip to the Americas, she took ill and died in 1617. She was not yet thirty years old.

But Rolfe and the boy returned to America, and their descendants became one of the premier families of Virginia. In this way, Powhatan’s vision of founding a great empire in the south came true, and his bloodline flows through prominent American families to this day. Which makes Pocahontas - who was captured, converted to Christianity, and carried around the globe to wonders beyond her father's imagining, a woman, essentially, without a home or a country except what she forged from circumstances she could not control - this woman who died before 30, a princess of aboriginals who saw more of the world in her short life than the King of England - was one of the founding mothers of America.

Note: This is part of an ongoing series of prominent people who made their contribution to society, then died in their 20's. My fascination with such people has, as yet, gone unexplained.

My feet in Times Square

The symbolic heart of New York City, Times Square is the intersection of Broadway with West 7th Street. It is also in the heart of the theater district and a classic tourist destination. On my first visit, I stayed in a tiny hotel/closet just two blocks from this area. The SuperShuttle from the airport made it from JFK to midtown Manhattan in 45 minutes. Also on board was a college kid from West Virginia, up for a day to see the Mountaineers play in the Big East basketball championship game; an hour later, still a half mile from Madison Square Garden, the kid got off and walked. Half an hour after that, I was dropped off at my hotel. The next morning I wandered, dazed, over streets I'd only seen on TV and movies. New York, being the most filmed city in the world, seemed a semi-familiar dreamscape, a return to a hometown I'd never been to. I started taking pictures of my feet as a way to prove there was a way to photograph New York in a way that I hadn't already seen. This is one result.

West Virginia lost to Syracuse, 68-59.

20 under 40: a roundup

I've been out of town, and work is piling up, and other projects are eating in to blogging time. Despite this, I've put together a round-up of the other six stories in the New Yorker's 20 under 40 collection. Here they are, with my sometimes warty synopsis:


Rivka Galchen: The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire
Another quirky break-up story. A pregnant writer's husband dumps her. Apparently he was keeping a blog that was a list of grievances against her. A friend comes over to console her. Their conversation wanders around, eventually coming to the great Tunguska blast of 1908. They ponder mystery and uncertainty. End story.

Gary Shteyngart: Lenny Hearts Eunice
A hilarious, heartbreaking love story set in the near future. Lenny works for a company that provides immortality services to those lucky enough to qualify for the treatments; he himself is 40, and aging quickly, a misfit in his job and life. On a sabbatical to Rome he meeets Eunice, a nice Asian girl, and falls in love. He returns to an America that has been taken over by the American Restoration Authority. He invites Eunice to join him, and after a breakup, she does. Their romance is heartbreaking, if unbelievable, but the world Shtyengart creates around them is a perfect match: rigidly conforming, politically savage, and bitingly real.

ZZ Packer: Dayward
A former slave, 14, escapes from the oppressive South to New Orleans. In the first scene, he is being chased by a dog; to escape he shoves his hand down the dog's throat, choking it but mangling his hand. By starting with the highest point of action, Packer loses all tension except the seeping wound of the boy's hand; her prose is tense but often confusing; the narrative is clipped and loses its own train of thought - Packer has probably done better work than this.

Salvatore Scibona: The Kid
A simply amazing story on themes you'd need nerves of steel to go near.  Probably the best story in the collection. A soldier in Latvia falls in love and has a son with a local girl. Things go bad, they break up. Five years later, she wants him to take the boy to America. Along the way, he gets cold feet. Reading as the man abandons the boy in a Hamburg airport and drifts back to his life in New Mexico, and the boy is held by airport security, is harrowing, riveting, and disturbingly real. There's precious little information about Scibona on the web, but I'm going to look for his novel The End and read it some day.

C.E. Morgan: Twins

A lyrical portrait of 1980's Cincinnati, about a set of twins - one light, one dark, born to a single mother in a working-class neighborhood. I need to take a closer look at this story. Instead of a proper review, I'm putting in her picture and a link to her interview on the New Yorker website. It's interesting that her first novel took 14 days to write, and that she revised it over two semesters in graduate school. My first thought was that she was lucky to have the time to write, that oh, here's another golden-cage writer of privilege. Then I realized that was about the same thing that happened to me, and I never ended up in the New Yorker. I guess we all have our path.





Summary of the collection:
Like any collection striving to present the best voices of a generation (or two?) there's a lot of variety here. Which is another way of saying The New Yorker must have felt there were a lot of critical slots to fill: Campus intellectuals, urban minorities, feminists, immigrants, goofballs and valedictorians. A Breakfast Club of writers. But variety isn't the spice of youth alone. This collection, then, is a perfect cross-section not of young American writers, per se, but of the major themes of contemporary American writing. That they're under 40 is just a nice hook for marketing.

But write on, fellow scribblers and strivers, don't worry that you've crossed the New Yorker's rubicon of fame. Bukowski was 50 when he published his first novel; Raymond Chandler wasn't published till he was 49. Harriet Doerr was in her 70's. It's never too late to become who you were meant to be.