Posts by: Fred Shaw
“Evil has become a product of manufacture, it is built into our whole industrial and political system, it is being manufactured every day, it is rolling off the assembly line, it is being sold in the stores, it pollutes the air… Perhaps the way to cope with the adversary is to confront him [...]
Lighthead By Terrance Hayes 95 pp. Penguin Books The Irish poet Michael Coady once told me that a collection of poems should be enjoyed in small tastes, as one might enjoy a glass of brandy, rather than devoured in one big gulp like a cheap beer. So, it’s no lie when I tell [...]
I was born in Pittsburgh nearly five months to the day before the Immaculate Reception occurred on the hard Astroturf of Three Rivers Stadium, Dec. 23rd, 1972. My father, now deceased, claimed to have been on his way out of the stadium before Franco Harris made his miraculous catch. It was only the [...]
While some people are suspicious of portent and presage, sometimes it’s best to embrace the urge to inquire wherever and whenever you find it. While watching the first episode of the second season of Mad Men a few weeks ago, I was struck by the use of Frank O’Hara’s book of poems, Meditations in an Emergency, as a plot device. While I was already hooked on the show, I now felt a poetic urge to immerse myself in the verse of the New York school’s most celebrated writer.
In HBO’s new drama, Treme, creator David Simon’s uses music as a bold accompanist to elevate the meaning and atmosphere of a story. A story that becomes increasingly more interesting over nine one-hour episodes as it builds to a bit of closure in the first season’s finale. From the opening credits which feature John Boutte’s “Treme Song” (a tune that sounds a bit like the blues song “Turn On Your Love Light”) it quickly becomes clear that music is the driving force. Significant storylines are developed that focus on the lives of musicians and music-lovers in the birthplace of jazz. Radio DJs and musicians rattle off the names of songs, some obscure, some old standards. New Orleans’s hip-hop in the form of the city’s own Juvenile and Mystikal are in the mix as well. In fact, song inhabits nearly every corner of the show, much like the humid August air of the Gulf region itself, as each episode is packed with a soundtrack of more than two dozen fantastic tunes, most with a New Orleans connection.
The music in Treme comes at the viewer from all directions, whether it is played in some of New Orleans’s finest clubs or on the streets of the French Quarter. Sometimes it is a song coming out of a car radio or a house party. In one scene, an ensemble of down- on- their-luck musicians
*Broken Flowers, a strange and wonderful little film by Jim Jarmusch, stars Bill Murray as a long time bachelor who receives an anonymous letter informing him that he has a grown child…As good as that is, the music by Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian Miles Davis, as he’s been called, is truly a revelation here.
Another writer once proclaimed Patti Smith to be the “Godmother of Punk,” and it would be tricky to dispute that she doesn’t deserve the title. Her 1975 debut album, the seminal Horses, uses an effective blend of well-crafted poetry and three chord guitar rock with beautifully placed feedback to set a standard for a generation of rockers. Bands such as R.E.M. and The Smiths, which fielded influential musicians of their own, have remarked on the impact of Smith’s music on their own development.
In a shoebox of cassettes the scrawled-in-pen names of DJ’s are spelled-out on thin, white stickers. These faceless heroes of our forgotten scene have taken day jobs or managed to tour Europe with only their decal-covered travel case of vinyl records to spin in still-happening clubs, like minstrels carrying pairs of turntable needles instead [...]
“I stuck out my palm…/ the snow the pine needles / hit lightly // I thought it was rain for a minute / I thought the game had been called” (On The Rush) I got turned on to the poems of Jim Carroll in late spring, 1993. I learned that Jim Carroll was [...]
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