Today you may call me DeLilah, I’m feeling like the midnight dj. What are your favorite love songs? I think I’m always being swept up by various ones whether en flagrante delicto or not, but there are two that always make me die in their simplicity, the way they feel open and mysterious and to the gills with all that maudlin, wistful awe that will elevate any corny love song into the sublime. “Oh Yoko” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” if you were wondering. I’m not so adventurous after all, eh?
And then there’s poetry. I do this thing. I don’t especially like this thing I do, but I do it. I save poems. I keep the ones I love the most to myself and I give them away in secret. They’re reserved for deliberate moments and deliberate people. I’m sure it’s some sort of vanity. I guess it’s a particularly flattering light you catch when you’ve aided in the discovery of something great.
So, knowing that, this is my favorite(favoritefavorite) love poem. It’s not an obscure one, maybe you’ve read it before. It’ll kill you all over again. Keep it only half a secret.
Mon Semblable, Stephen Dunn
I like things my way
every chance I get.
A limit doesn’t exist
when it comes to that.
But please, don’t confuse
what I say with honesty.
Isn’t honesty the open yawn
the unimaginable love
more than truth?
Anonymous among strangers
I look for those
with hidden wings,
and for scars
that those who once had wings
can’t hide.
Though I know it’s unfair,
I reveal myself
one mask at a time.
Does this appeal to you,
such slow disclosures,
a lifetime perhaps
of almost knowing one another?
I would hope you, too,
would hold something back,
and that you’d always want
whatever unequal share
you had style enough to get.
Altruism is for those
who can’t endure their desires.
There’s a world
as ambiguous as a moan,
a pleasure moan
our earnest neighbors
might think a crime.
It’s where we could live.
I’ll say I love you,
which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid
poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone ever has.
I called one of these tracks “Opiated Disco” when I sent it to a friend, I might stick that to the whole jam. Very little of it’s actually disco, but it all sorta sounds like it’s wearing a flannel button down in July and swaying to the rhythm just a half-beat too slow. 17 tracks, none of them too recent because I’m pretty uncool, some ancient anthems because that’s occasionally necessary. Here’s a zipped doggie bag you can take to go.
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It’s late into the night and I’m listening to this AM frequency pulsing real slow in and out with a stack of soul records from long ago and way up north, which when you’re nerdy about radio like I am is a deeply pleasurable midnight delicacy. So I’m swaying back and forth in my bedroom folding laundry on my bed and I’m admiring how the cat is so sleepy and heat-drunk she can’t even give a fuck about the dog’s big biscuit paw draping over her belly like she’s some little girlfriend of his and this track comes on and suddenly it’s like I’m being haunted by a friendly but sorta bummed out ghost.
When I was little I’d make movies in my head about the life I assumed I’d be leading after gritting my teeth long enough through the hassle of childhood. This was the song I imagined playing at my wedding. I probably haven’t fancied myself a bride since I started bleeding, but this song still sounds to me exactly like being in love feels.
Maybe nothing in the world can ever sound as good to you as that first soul record will.
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122 ostensibly young people offering 122 expressions of gratitude in celebration of a single letter written with a certain unearned familiarity and which reads like a sun-warmed song of gratitude for a loved one held long and fast to the busom!, butis in fact a song in praise of no one, in awe of no thing, addressed to no specific object of affection. It’s some sort of tease; these words extending outwards and reaching at you like some asshole ghost of intimacy.
Thank you for these words of encouragement, they’re writing. It was exactly what I needed to hear.
It’s been like 30 years since the record Tusk came out. Here’s a morbid ‘celebratory’ interview with Buckingham and Nicks (recorded, it seems, apart from one another because the sight of him seems to makes Stevie ill). Can you even fathom if after thirty years, you still kept venom in your heart for an ex-lover? Whatever, I still play Beautiful Child like seventeen times a day.
The contrast between a seasoned Lindsay and a somewhat eerily paralyzed Nicks will remind us all that people who make beautiful art give no promise of being even intrinsically TOLERABLE human beings. It’s about as comfortable as I imagine sitting through a ten minute cut of Woody Allen getting self-righteous on behalf of Roman Polanski or something. All I’m saying is, might take you a while to fully recover your affections.
Here’s a ghoulish exercise: imagine if Stevie Nicks was your MOM. She’d be like driving you to school when you missed the bus one morning and the two of you would sit in the parking lot fogging up the windows a bunch while she made you slog through her ninety six minute demo “edit” of some unicorn epic about being a magical and unknowable force much akin to the moon, which might have made you inwardly laugh if you had known at the time that they’d be blowing it up pretty soon cuz scientists are pretty sure its just an old bloated bag that we keep around for posterity. But still you’d be like sitting there in the parking lot watching Stevie Nicks’ entitled mouth push out all these self-congratulatory puffs of meaningless shit and you’d have to nod like you’re listening because she’s your mom and nobody really likes making their mom cry, but at the same time privately you’d be like, Fuck, I bet somebody’s asking some super fucked up question about their pussy in health class right this very moment and I’m gonna catch such shit at lunch for not being there. I’m never living this one down.
And in case there was any doubt to with whom the magic truly did lie, from his most recent solo album that gives me great hope of getting older without getting boring:
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Right now you’re like a sulking cherry tree that hasn’t bloomed for years but then inexplicably erupts with pink flowers in mid-autumn. You’re like a child prodigy who lost her mojo for a while and then suddenly recovers it when her old mentor comes back into her life after a long absence. You’re like a dormant volcano that without any warning spurts out a round of seemingly prophetic smoke signals on the eve of a great victory for the whole world.
I usually keep my sartorial pleasures a private affair, but if you can’t appreciate the art, engineering, and imagination behind the draping here alone–to put it one way, I hate you.
I wonder what I will do with myself now. I’d like to avoid mediocrity if I can.
Misty felt that life was a battle. You had to fight and think. You had to hack your way through life with your intelligence as a machete cutting down what obstacles you could. You were born knowing nothing: you had to fight for what you knew.
I’m amused that nobody seems at all to hear the voiceover commenting on manufactured vs. organic intrigue. I think that says it all about what passes for style these days, doesn’t it.
And while we’re dealing out great songs, this is always a sweet one. And the film in its namesake is also an eerily timeless iteration of adolescent female sexuality.
When I was a kid, my mother used to use an epilady to de-fur herself. I would sit next to her on the bed in solidarity and run a small matchbox train up and down the length of my shins. Pain is beauty, I guess. Beauty is pain? Whichever.
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This is by far my favorite poem by him. I will read it again every month or so and feel myself come to understand something closer to the heart each time.
My Father’s Wedding, Robert Bly
1924
Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle’s old milk wagon.
Some men live with a limp they don’t hide,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons often are angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want …
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.
Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog’s, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog’s teeth say that.
But I grew up without dog’s teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!
Then what? If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it. Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
On my father’s wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone he could carry it.
He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.
He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
his bark-like skin then,
made rough especially to repel the sympathy
he longed for, didn’t need, and wouldn’t accept.
So the Bible’s
words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.
After that he was alone
and I was alone.
Few friends came; he invited few.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.
People always give me tons of shit for being a snob. Not snob like they love me at the country club, but snob like I’ll call you an animal when you’ve got more than 2 tbs. of ketchup on the sidelines of your dinner plate. Meanwhile, I’ve got like “The Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East” on my book shelf and a sincere affection for Garfield. Some snob. An authentic snob is the type who will tell you that they’ve simply never “cared for” a Tarantino picture.
The point is, I saw two popcorn movies this past weekend. Big end-of-summer jams, District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. The ham fist of that excruciatingly inept alien allegory knocked me into some hard existential mourning. I walked out around 20 minutes in, waited for my family in the lobby. It failed not only because it was obviously written by a mediocre mind, but it had an agenda. It had the pretense of an “indie” production when it was no such thing at all. It wanted to make some point, except the only point I could see was that the capacity for human cruelty is so heartbreaking and endemic, bring on the exterminators. That’s cute, the whole apartheid/xenophobia angle, but the fact remains that no aliens have yet come, and it is just us, mostly without grace, blindly righteous and blithely ruthless. What a bummer.
I prefer the universes Tarantino creates. His characters are not without brutality, but they have grace. And I do mean that in the theological sense. I think maybe the opening and final soliloquies delivered by Miss Alabama Whirley do a fine job of showing you what I mean. I could not count how many times I’ve watched this film. When I think of being in love, of beauty in the world in spite of…, I think of this right here:
I’ve got two karaoke standards: Peggy Lee and Bobbie Gentry. I’m working on my Dusty, but she’s got some hiiiiigh notes, I’ll tell you what. Bobbie was one of the first country ladies to write and produce her own songs in the big leagues.
(And Dusty was an infamous perfectionist hellhound in the production booth, which is exactly why her records are fucking perfect and this is the sort of instance which affirms for us all that there are indeed a few truths in the universe which only a woman may fully understand.)
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If my father had been an aesthetically-obsessed writer enlisted in the military and not an audiophile student enrolled in veterinary school, this is the same letter he would have written me:
9 March 1944
Dearest Tess
Here is a little note to wish you every happiness on your birthday. Your mother will give you the present I have for you. It is some painting material and I want you to take great care of it & paint very carefully, because these colours and brushes are not made as toys but are the kind which real artists use, and when a thing is the best of its kind, even if it is only a little thing like a paint brush, it should be treated like a Sacred Animal. Always remember it is not the size or price of things that is valuable but the quality.
You have been a great happiness to your mother and me for five years. It is very sad that I see so little of you. I pray that before you are six ¹ we shall be together at home once more
Ever your loving
Papa
¹ It was her sixth birthday.
(From The Letters of Evelyn Waugh)
Later he would write, “My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.” A charming brilliance, he had.
mattababy.com is a blog living in Providence, RI with a bad attitude and a secretly sentimental side. It covers all cultural detritus, large and small, relevant or not entirely.
