Human Touch

I have only, only seen Bruce Springsteen live three times, and all of them since I have lived here in Vancouver. I discovered Springsteen when I was fifteen, through a friend who had a copy of Darkness on the Edge of Town – my own first album was The River, although by 1980 I had bought all there were, and even found a bootleg – but I lived on the Canadian east coast and didn’t really have the means or the access to find my way to a concert back then. Springsteen was in the distance. Like so many, though, I know I felt as if his raw, fiercely lyrical and driven songs both belonged and spoke directly to me. One of my finest possessions was and still is a small, cheap mirror I won playing whack-a-mole at the Nova Scotia provincial exhibition in the summer of 1980; it has a brownish screen print of Springsteen’s headshot from the cover art of Darkness on its reflecting surface. You can check your look in the mirror, and have Bruce himself look back at you. As you. It changes your clothes, your hair, your face, and lets you remake yourself temporarily in his image.

("I check my look in the mirror.")

The concert last night at Rogers Arena in Vancouver was pretty tremendous for me. Springsteen at one point admitted into the mike that he was getting to be “an old man,” but his energy, his commitment to the music, or better to the event of that music never flagged or wavered. His songs, as tenacious anthems calling for renewal, express a vital need to keep going, and draw their energy in performance from a committed, fully engaged crowd that wants to share in what he famously and romantically, no doubt about it, calls a last-chance power drive. His audience desires him, and desires what he desires – buoyed up on waves of all that faith, that hope, those dreams. His lyrics seem to have become over the years increasingly pious or religious, often in Wrecking Ball, for instance, as he acknowledges his musical and cultural indebtedness to African-American traditions and idioms, but his music was always overflowing with religiosity, a form of belief that sometimes seemed even to turn back on itself: “I believe in the faith . . . .” Of course, he’s singing not about any one American religious tradition, but about music itself as participant belief, about forging communities in and through song, as we sing and clap and shout and woah-woah along with him. You need to be there to experience it.

(I snapped this shot of the stage just as the lights surged; 

I think they were playing "Streets of Fire.")

This immediacy is undoubtedly better experienced in the mosh-pit near the stage. This past year, Springsteen appears to have been even more inclined to ford out into his audience, shaking hands and high-fiving his way through the crowds – “in the crowd I feel at home” he sings in “Out in the Street.” But he has also taken to body surfing, which he did last night early in the show, during the third number, “Hungry Heart.” Like so many others, it’s a song about recovering desire after loss, but as people’s “strong hands” (as he puts it) pass him bodily overhead, supine in the arms of a multitude of strangers, that desire soon converts into contact. What people want most is to touch him, to feel just a little of his humanity, his human touch.

(Springsteen with overhead screen.)

Our own seats, however, were high up in the nose-bleeds. Our closest contact with him could only be virtual, through his image projected on huge screens suspended over the stage. These monitors are a ubiquitous feature of any stadium-sized rock concert, letting everybody see what’s happening far off and loud down there. And they work: my memories of this, and all, of his concerts are of seeing him close up, of proximity not distance. The screens are a version of social media in situ, of concert YouTube videos being put up for everyone to take in in the immediate present. They function, I think, a lot like my Springsteen mirror, as a kind of overlay, but they work as virtual surfaces, as image, in a way that’s very particular to Springsteen, to the experience of him. His concerts have become not rituals of counter-culture or rock’n’roll rebellion, but of shared community – they’re all-ages, family affairs. Last night, he pulled a girl who looked about 12 or 13 on stage to sing “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” and he danced the “Courtney Cox” coda of “Dancing in the Dark” with an 80 year old woman. Springsteen sings for everybody, becomes everybody. A key moment in the concert happened during “Born to Run,” when they had turned the house lights up as they do whenever they play it; after the saxophone and guitar solos, when the music is surging in a kind of chaotic miasma, Springsteen – his iconic, wood-grained Fender Stratocaster strapped on – leaned out over the lip of the walk way, and let the crowd strum his guitar. A welter of wild, arrhythmic fingers stroked at his instrument, making it growl, twang and hum: a feedback antiphon. The screens over the stage caught and projected this moment of flailing hands up close; the whole stadium roared. The music became, in that passing moment, not an illusion of the virtual, but a noisy, shared promise, a human bond. For real.

Happy Man

I heard Bill Frisell’s Richter 858 Quartet perform last night at the Vancouver Playhouse (Frisell, with Hank Roberts, cello, Jenny Scheinman, violin, and Eyvind Kang, viola). They played two suites, composed specifically by Frisell for the group. The first half of the concert offered Sign of Life, a recent (2010) piece that seems to me to sum up much of Frisell’s deep enmeshment in Americana, with plenty of what sounded to me like overt gestures to the folksy melodicism and harmonic richness of Aaron Copland. That’s not to suggest that the music is merely derivative – the improvisational virtuosities in play in this quartet give the music, even when it seems to be through-composed, an immediacy and a vitality that never allow it to settle or calcify. Rather, their music moves – in the sense of kinesis, yes, but also with the emotional engagement that successive moments of aural intensity can offer. Frisell’s music has a melancholy brilliance that seems to me to depend on his, and his group’s, ability to accrete small surges of sound, and to carry listeners with them. They tap into a shared ruthmos, a flow. Even when he applies distortion effects to his guitar, or turns it up to produce a metal-laden snarl, Frisell’s vertical, fractured notes still incline toward this essential pulse, a give-and-take within the fabric of a common time. I think I heard a version of this movement, as rhythm, in occasional riffs from Hank Roberts, whose strummed cello seemed to blend the textures of a Gambian kora and Kentucky bluegrass plucking: human time at play. But what was most noticeable was how, amid all of what could have been serious and pensive high-brow stuff, Frisell kept smiling, at his bandmates and to himself. Despite the textures of pathos and wistfulness we were hearing, he found – and I think we did too – a kind of common joy in this music. In an age rife with cynicism, these sounds and songs still manage to affirm, and even heal.

(blurry i-snapshot makes the quartet look made of light)

After the intermission, the group played Richter 858, Frisell’s 2002 composition for this group. It’s based on his viewing of a set of paintings – 858: 1-8 – by the German-born artist Gerhard Richter, and images of the paintings are projected and enlarged on a screen behind the group as they play through the eight-part suite. As the music unfolds, the visuals appear to work as a form of graphic score, as melodic lines and colours seem keyed to the striations, smears and tonal palette of Richter’s non-objective images. They’re not playing the paintings, but they feel as if they are, and this too is an effect of rhythm, of a musical rhythmatizing of the gaze. I felt my eye drawn across the projected swells of pigment by the quartet, as if the music were trying to find its own through swathes of light. I’m not trying to romanticize the experience too much, but, like Sign of Life, Richter 858 is fundamentally affirmative rather than ironic – it affirms, for me, the potential, if fleeting, power of art to move us, to move.

For an encore, the quartet gave us a version of what was at first for me an unplaceable but uncannily familiar bebop tune. They staggered and looped the melody, played with it, to create a fleet four-part canon: the quick, improvisational melody – along with improvised counterpoint – skittering and weaving back through itself, upbeat, joyful. I thought it was a Charlie Parker line, but when I got home – the tune still in my head – I realized it was Tadd Dameron’s “Hot House.” Jazz, American folk and long-haired legit idioms intersected with and tugged at each other in this short coda to the concert, succinctly summing up how this group approaches history, approaches its own timeliness: by singing it, by making it sing.

Welcome to Us 1

In recent, post-Olympic months, Carol Ann Duffy has published what appear to be two of her laureate poems in The Guardian, poems that I want to gloss here and in a subsequent post. “Translating the British, 2012” was printed on August 10, and is an in-country paeon to the multinational London Summer Olympics. “White Cliffs” showed up on November 9, and is a celebration (in the guise of a crumbling sonnet) of Britain’s famous stretch of channel shoreline.

Her Olympic poem presents a postmodern species of choric ode, counterpointing an almost – almost! – saccharine, hyperbolic nationalism (“we … we … we …”) with a set of incisive swipes at the contemporary British banking crisis. At first pass, her mixed, even duplicitous tone can seem confusing, although it’s not out of keeping with the antithetical form of the classical ode. Duffy deliberately mimics, I’d say, the confused and contradictory reception of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremonies for the 2012 London Games, openly gesturing at Boyle’s spectacularly over-the-top dramaturgy: “The queen jumped from the sky / to the cheering crowds.” Erik Simpson notes what he calls the “double-edged weirdness” of Boyle’s “presentation of British cultural history,” a presentation that both feted and (playfully) excoriated English accomplishment. Duffy’s poem zeroes in on the crux of this contrariety by pointing, slightly more obliquely, to Kenneth Branagh’s peculiar recitation during the ceremonies of Caliban’s “The isle is full of noises . . .” speech from The Tempest: “We speak Shakespeare here, / a hundred tongues, one-voiced.” She’ll return to the nationalistic textual iconography of Shakespeare in “Dover Cliffs,” but in “Translating the British, 2012,” name-checking him serves as a metonomy for the globalization of English language and culture, or, even further, for what Harold Bloom grandly names the “invention of the human.” Translation, from this angle, means the assimilation and absorption of all that is other, as we come to re-discover – while we watch and listen, and even read – the genesis of a universally propagated figure of humanity in our own proxied and simulated Englishness; Britannia still rules the airwaves: “Welcome to us.” Branagh’s elocution provoked uncertain reactions, particularly from the English-speaking – especially, American – cultural establishment; writing in USA Today on July 27, Michael Florek can’t decode what’s going on (“Well,” he shrugs, “at least [the words] sounded nice”) and turns to James Shapiro, Columbia University professor and Shakespeare expert, for an explanation, which he doesn’t really give. In the segment, Branagh is dressed as Victorian railroad builder Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and recites the speech from what appears to be a cloned pastoral hillside, visual evidence of some “green and pleasant land”; historical, dramatic and ideological frames seem to have collided and smeared:

"Why you would choose Caliban's lines as — in a sense — a kind of anthem for the Olympics, I'm not sure," Shapiro said. "If you gave those lines some thought, especially in the light of the British Empire, it's an odd choice. . . .The lines are quite beautiful, and I guess they wanted to rip them out of context and talk about how magical a place the British Isles are."

Shapiro is quoted, by way of clarification, inconclusively:

"Why give him the lines Shakespeare wrote for a half-man, half-beast about to try to kill off an imperial innovator who took away his island? I don't know," Shapiro said. "You would probably have to ask the people who designed the opening Games ceremony what their thinking was."

Duffy’s apparent précis of the speech at her own poem’s outset seems intended to meld a welter of noises and voices into a univocal nationality, a definitive “we” that wants to collect a listening world attentive to their noise into a latter-day empire, the Anglo-human globe. But if that’s really the case, then, like Boyle, she has quoted Shakespeare badly, confounding literary-historical and cultural frames: in the play, Caliban remarks how “a thousand twangling instruments” hum at his ears, “and sometimes voices,” which is the text we might think we hear repurposed in Duffy’s lines. But it isn’t. Her thinking, like Boyle’s, is actually a bit crooked. The reference to a “hundred tongues” gestures at Cecil Day-Lewis’s version of Virgil’s Aeneid, not Shakespeare. Another nation-founding cultural hero, rendered by Day-Lewis in idiomatic English (and, notably, his translation was broadcast nationally over BBC radio in the early 1950s), Aeneas in Book VI of the epic is confronting the Sybil, asking for information about the horrifying noises – not the sweet sounds – he can hear coming from Tartarus:

                        Scared by the din, Aeneas halted; he could not move: −

                        What kinds of criminals are these? Speak, lady! What punishments

                        Afflict them, that such agonized sounds rise up from there?

This is, in many respects, the antithesis of Caliban’s speech, although it bears remembering that Caliban is also pinched and tortured by the very spirits who serenade him. The Sybil – and Duffy, it seems to me, positions herself wryly in her poem as a vatic “lady” – catalogues as many of the tortured cries as she can, but finds her speech limited when faced with describing atrocity after atrocity, and so breaks off:

                        No, not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths

                        And a voice of iron, could I describe all the shapes of wickedness,

                        Catalogue all the retributions inflicted here.

The “hundred tongues,” that is, refers not to univocal plenitude but to the failure of the voice to be iron, its incapacities; these lines offer not a celebration of collective joy, but the refusal of pervasive and overwhelming agony. We should, in other words, be more afeard of what we see and hear, more than we are likely to be. But, like Boyle’s sensational kitsch, Duffy’s poem seems – seems – to want to smother our critical anxieties in swathes of triumphalism.

            Or does it? If Boyle’s staging of England was able to introduce a degree of historical-social critique, Duffy’s double edge is all the more forthrightly presented, as she deftly shifts registers between the descriptive and the metaphorical, around the intersections of political economy and participatory spectacle in sport. The London Olympics came on the heels of one more crisis for the English banking system, the so-called Libor scandal. For Duffy, the “we” into whose midst her readers are welcomed is a scandalized and angry body politic, a British version of the 99%:

                        We’ve had our pockets picked,

                                                                                    The soft, white hands of bankers,

                        bold as brass, filching our gold, our silver;

                        we want it back.

The subsequent medalling by the roll of British athletes she names in the poem becomes payback in a number of senses, both an affirmation of national muscle-fibre and metaphorical reimbursement, the filched sterling and Anglo-Saxon geld imagined returned to the people.

            It’s worth remembering that this return is linked to the translation evoked in Duffy’s title, which isn’t just a question of the – albeit, gently ironic – global dissemination of Britishness but also of the poetic work of metaphor. (Both trans- latio in Latin and μεταφέρω in Greek mean approximately the same thing, to move or to carry across.) Duffy’s text quickly recognizes the obfuscation inherent in all metaphor-making, particularly around the media language of the banking crisis: “Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns, / austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts.” Even while her poem retains traces of Tennysonian bathos (in the smugly haughty, over-the-top “Enough . . .”), it also dismantles its own inclination to establishment-sanctioned poeticisms and substitutes for metaphor a strong claim on common reality, shared and propagated through in our investments in sports heroes: “we got on our real bikes, / for we are Bradley Wiggins, / side-burned, Mod, god.” The glancing nod to Quadrophenia (and The Who also performed in the Olympic closing ceremonies) suggests working-class disaffection and also images of natty mods on scooters, but this exaggerated haling of cyclist Bradley Wiggins is more than a sentimental investment in the distraction of sport. The reality of “our bikes” isn’t a hypostatizing of false consciousness, but a debunking of another of those bankers’ metaphors by actively literalizing, by a knowing public. The Telegraph on 11 July 2012 carried a story debunking the Bank of England’s absurd “idea for tackling the financial crisis: six bicycles”:

The Bank of England considered buying bicycles so that its officials could continue to move around in the event of a full-scale financial meltdown, the former City minister disclosed last night.

The national bank wants to appropriate another form of translation – the forward motion of the Olympic cyclists and of everyday people in bike lanes – to secure that its rarefied system of schemes and exchanges, its economy, keeps moving. Duffy’s poem, by re-appropriating the bicycle, converting it into nationalistic metaphor and then refusing its own tropes in favour of contingently returning to, of expressing something of the realities of daily life – “we want school playing-fields returned” – offers not an assimilative or appropriative nationalism, but an invitation to start again, better. Togetherness and community, even as they sometimes rely on a cliché-ridden and potentially reactionary language of public address, can also emerge from the revitalizing work of excavating that very language for the remaindered kernels of “our” historical realities at its core – for its cultural purchase. At her poem’s close, which is really an opening, a beginning again promised by the sensing of “new weather,” Duffy positions “us” (both the English and her English-speaking readers) “on our marks,” which is to say both in a position metaphorically identified with “our” athletes and in a critical relationship to the marks on her page, poised to write back to her text.

Singing in Public

Last night, I saw and heard John K.Samson (of The Weakerthans) perform for the second time this year, at the studio theatre of the Chan Centre at the University of British Columbia, where he has been appointed writer-in-residence in the Creative Writing program for this school year, 2012-2013. The first had been on May 12 at the Biltmore, on tour with a band (including Shotgun Jimmie) supporting the release of his solo record Provincial. Both performances were remarkable, not least for his ability to connect directly and feelingly with his listeners. The May show was high-energy and electric, and turned me into a fan, if I wasn’t one already. The previous fall, I had started supervising an undergraduate thesis by Bronwyn Malloy on Samson’s lyrics, and the enthusiastic conversations I had been having with her had really affected my growing belief that Samson was an undeniably powerful poet with a startlingly original sense of line and voice; Bronwyn’s essay turned out to be one of the best pieces of creative criticism I have read in my twenty-odd years as an academic, and I’m happy to admit that many of the better insights into Samson’s work that I want briefly to outline here must derive from my interactions with her writing and her thinking.

To start with, “powerful” is probably the wrong word to apply – at least, without some qualification – to Samson’s art, despite how unreservedly laudatory I’m trying to be here. The actual power of his songs and lyrics derives, I think, from their ability to tap into a pathos of powerlessness, of the social and linguistic disenfranchisement that the characters both represented in and speaking through his texts all seem to share. He voices the weaker than. At the Biltmore, he closed out the set by unplugging himself from the PA – my ears, I have to tell you, were ringing that night; some of those songs, casting back to Samson’s early days as a Winnipeg punk, still asked to be thrashed – closed out the set by unplugging himself and his guitar, climbing up onto one of the monitors, and doing a stripped-down acoustic version of “Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure.” That song is the sequel to the “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute,” a song about his cat composed in response to a request, as Samson explains it, from Veda Hille. The subject-matter might at first glance seem incidental and patently lame. (A cat song? Really? Two cat songs?) But this veneer of weakness is belied not only by the cat’s Latinate moniker – derived from the motto on Winnipeg’s civic coat-of-arms – meaning “strength,” but also by both songs’ reach into a common human experience, the tenuous uncertainties around returns on our investments of affection: both lyrics ventriloquize an anthropocentric projection of meaning onto a mute and vanished animal – the cat pleads and explains. But those explanations are hardly conclusive or satisfying, and the latter song ends with the cat’s detachment from language, from meaning, and from human connection, as it struggles to recall what its unusual name might even have been: “But now I can’t remember the sound that you found for me” (Lyrics and Poems 80). The attachment to a name, to a verbal guarantor of a distinctive personhood, reduces to semiotic dehiscence, to sound and sense coming apart. But, what was amazing at the Biltmore show was that, as Samson reached the song’s close, his audience – many of whom had his words by heart and were singing along anyway – turned this line into a choral refrain; unplugged, he became for a time a kind of latter-day balladeer, singing with not just to the sum total of his listeners. Undifferentiated by the electric trappings and apparatuses of performance or broadcast, Samson became a part of his public. (Became his admirers? At last night’s event, he talked about the influence of W. H. Auden early in his life. Maybe so.) And there was nothing saccharine or maudlin, and more importantly nothing cynical, about singing for a lost cat; instead, what he managed was genuinely affective: feeling, shared. He closed out last night’s performance with the same tactic, a version of this same song delivered standing on a chair, unplugged from any amplifiers. Reaching quietly out.

Still, Samson’s songs often doubt, or at least call into question, their capacity to cross through this daunting alterity, this public divide we all seem to share. In “Pampheleteer,” he repurposes a line from Ralph Chaplin’s famous 1915 union anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” turning political call into a lament for lost love:

Sing, “Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one” like me remembering the way it could have been. (37)

As tempting as it might be smart to re-appropriate Herbert Marcuse’s collision of revolution and Eros to explain the doubled trope here, I think it’s better to see the feeling represented in these lines as an unsteady amalgam of alienation and community. The inherent weakness of failed or failing desire becomes what binds us, erotically and socially becomes a name for the absence we all appear, in a kind of contingent solidarity, to feel. In this song and in “Virtute,” that strength in weakness depends on the shortfall not only of memory – of knowing for certain what might have been – but also of re-membering, of picking up the disparate pieces of a civic body in disarray: cats, friends, acquaintances, lovers . . . all the inhabitants of a particular home or place or city, whether hated or great.

          Last night’s concert included two on-stage interviews with John K. Samson by novelist Keith Maillard, the current chair of UBC’s Creative Writing program. When Maillard asked about how he composes his songs, Samson remarked on his slowness, on the agon-like struggle he goes through writing and finishing songs. He said something close to: “The process of trying to remember how to write a song is how the song gets written.” Again, it’s the sometimes effortful reconstituting of failing memory that’s key in his conception. Samson’s songs both thematize and enact the approach of expression, of saying something, to the constantly retreating and collapsing edges of language, the unsayable. Part of his humility, I think, is a recognition of a pathos of the failure of meaning at the core of the lyrical. As one of his characters, a broken-hearted dot-com entrepreneur, puts it in a one-sided overheard plea to an former lover, “So what I’m trying to say, I mean what I’m asking is, I know we haven’t talked in a while, but could you come and get me?” (77). A lyricism of the colloquial emerges in these lines through missed connections, through tentatively expressing the desire to be heard and to make contact with someone else. Community, that is, starts to consist in desire rather than realization, in the mutual recognition of our absences, as both speaker – or singer – and listener. We start to empathize across, and because of, our mutual distances. When in another lyric Samson obliquely defines his poetics, his practice of making, in terms of utility and labour (“Make this something somebody can use” [86]), the insurmountable ambiguities of everyday language convert into common weakness, into lyric public address.
           (I have left out specifically discussing the deftly crafted, mercurial imagery and evocatively kiltered phrasings that are hallmarks of his style. Most of what I’ve cited above are examples of moments of colloquial diffusion rather than of poeticism. But he’s great, trust me. Take a close look at any of his lyrics. You’ll see what I mean.)

Book

Samson, John K. Lyrics and Poems 1997-2012. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2012.