Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Torture Gardens

Mark Scroggin's poems are whiplashing back and forth inside my skull.  He calls them, in his new book, Torture Garden, "Naked City Pastorelles."  (Buy Mark's book here, via Small Press Distribution.)  They are perfectly shaped, formally elegant little explosions of violence, despair, wit, and observation, each contained within a strict stanza of seven four-to-six beat lines.  The idiom within each poem ranges from overheard conversation to French philosophy, from feces and spit to classical music.  This strategy, in which dark, energetic expression is confined within strict bounds, alludes to Naked City, John Zorn's experimental jazz/thrashcore band from the early 1990s,

especially their album Torture Garden. 

The "hardcore miniatures" on this album are, like Scroggins' poems (with whom they share many titles), tiny explosions of chaos, some only 30 seconds long, combining genres as disparate as jazz, classical, country, grindcore and punk.  In this the Naked City album is itself paying homage to an earlier Torture Garden, an 1899 French Decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau.  A satirical attack on the Dreyfus Affair, the book combines found text from several different sources and features a sadist/hysteric named Clara who achieves orgasm by watching scenes of torture in a beautiful garden.  Allegory, bien sûr:

"Ah, yes! the Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering."

[Auguste Rodin's illustration for Le jarden des supplices (Torture Garden).]

This is a tradition that's all about pushing the limits, shocking us out of sentimental illusion into Enlightenment forms of disappointed knowledge.  Scroggins turns the screw one more time by calling his poems "pastorelles:"  "A pastourelle is a simple poem set in a rustic scene, graceful and trifling in tone, describing the meeting of a man of culture and an ingenue, generally a shepherdess."  See the shepherdess on the cover of the Naked City album?  Yes, that's her: "The motif of the young girl scolded or beaten by her parents...on account of her lover is most frequent in the pastourelle."  To Scroggins' credit he avoids reproducing the misogyny of this tradition in his own poems, but he takes energy from its violent flouting of conventions of innocence, symbolized for him by the garden:

Luminous the division and joining

bone remains sliding screens of

landscape blanched alphabets les lumières

history revealed by pathology blesséd

art thou annunciation arrowheads catching

eyes vertical shaping water love

perdures contingencies of perception endured.

                                                        ("Numbskull")

This erudite mash-up of Enlightenment ("lumière") wisdom, Christian pietism, and garden design (vertical shaping water) testifies to the failure of any of these to console us for the losses (perdures) that can only be endured.  Art such as this that pulls away the curtain of artifice to reveal the powerless spectre behind it rides a fine paradoxical line; of course the careful "shaping" of the poem itself gives us a kind of pleasure, perhaps a painful one as its purposeful obscurity assaults our ignorance and its rapidly shifting linguistic registers knock us on one side of the head and then the other like an anvil dropped on Wile E. Coyote.  (Naked City was inspired by the composer of many of the Warner Brothers cartoons, and the cartoon violence is apparent in Scroggins' volume as well.)  Despite their attention to ugliness these poems can't help being beautiful.  The final stanza in this astonishingly accomplished volume could serve as its ars poetica:

"Gob of Spit"

Repeat flip rinse fist smear

shout move twist shift grimace

wince scrub dilate disarrange dismember

ravel translate offload unravel tear

stroke penetrate gesture finger retrace

retract gesticulate lick scale gut

retrace ejaculate rage respond repeat.

 

 

EMP: A Museum of Hendrix, Nirvana, and Star Trek. Seriously.

I was in Seattle this weekend as part of the great annual migration of literature professors known as the Modern Language Association.  This year the convention organizers planned a couple of outings to local places of interest--a first, as far as I can remember.  I've always been a fan of convention tourism--I've skipped unmemorable panels for memorable visits to a swamp garden in Charleston, shopping in San Francisco, and the Art Institute in Chicago among many others--so I jumped on the shuttle bus to EMP, the Experience Music Project, a relatively new Seattle institution that is a museum like no other.

To start with there's the stunning Frank Gehry-designed 140,000-sq-ft building, a destination in itself.  Moving through the museum is like being inside a sci-fi seashell.  The MLA had arranged for us to hear presentations by Jacob McMurray, senior curator and director of the museum's Oral History Project, and Lincoln Ballard, director of its Education Department.  McMurray, sporting a jazzman fedora and indie-band workshirt, has been with the Experience Music Project since 1993, when it was just an organization collecting oral histories related to Jimi Hendrix. 

McMurray told us that EMP was started when Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a huge Hendrix fan, began looking for a place to donate his collection of memorabilia from the life and career of the Seattle-born musician. 

The project started with interviews of those who had known Hendrix, either in Seattle or later in his career.  Ultimately the building was commissioned and EMP opened initially as a museum focusing on Hendrix (The Experience, get it?) as well as the music of the Pacific Northwest more generally.  This, of course, is when EMP started collecting materials about Nirvana.   As McMurray, who is quite the raconteur, tells it, around 2005 Paul Allen said to the museum's board of directors, "You know what else I really like?  Sci-fi.  And I just bought Captain Kirk's command chair from the Starship Enterprise.  Let's put that in the museum too."

(That's what McMurray said, but according to the interwebs, Christian Slater actually owns the chair.  Sorting this one out is above my pay grade so I will simply let the mystery be.)  Anyway, there is no doubt that Allen had a huge collection of sci-fi memorabilia as well, since it's now all in the EMP.  In order to smooth over the giant semantic chasm between these two collections, the museum recently re-launched as EMP:  Music + Sci Fi + Popular Culture.  Yeah, that makes it less weird.

Under this broader rubric, McMurray says (if we can believe him after that Christian Slater thing) that the museum now has almost a thousand oral histories on video.  He showed us fascinating clips of his conversations with horror director Roger Corman, Chris Squire of Yes (about opening for Hendrix), and Megan Jasper of Sub Pop Records, the label that first signed Nirvana.  Then he led us into the galleries for a guided tour, which I had been quite excited about.  We started in the Nirvana exhibition and I was immediately drawn so far into it that I never saw the tour again and had to be kicked out when the museum closed hours later.

I owned Nevermind in the 90s like everyone else, and have enjoyed belting out "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at karaoke bars, but I would not consider myself an especially knowledgeable Nirvana, punk or grunge fan.  Perhaps for that very reason, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about that history from this fabulous exhibition (organized, BTW, by Jacob McMurray).  The exhibition makes the case that the American music scene was transformed in the 1980s when idiosyncratic local scenes from Athens to Boise edged out the monopoly of the big record labels.  Punk's DIY aesthetic meant that the bands, often formed from inexperienced musicians who were still teenagers, not only developed their own sounds in isolation from the commercial mainstream, but also booked their own shows (often in unsanctioned venues, often closed down by the police), were their own roadies, did their own cover art, distributed their own tapes and albums, and had a direct relationship with their fans based on a mutual identification as outsiders.  As one commentator (from the band Minor Threat) said in an oral history that's part of the exhibition:  "We didn't cross over to the mainstream.  The mainstream came to us."

I probably spent an hour in front of one exhibit, a map of the United States that showed the locations of the punk and indie bands that shaped this transformation.  Each location had numbers associated with it, each number represented a band or album, and you could listen to a short intro and three songs from each one.  One song led to another in what turned out to be a dizzying variety.  Who knew the Pixies were from D.C.?  What did R.E.M. have to do with punk?  The Butthole Surfers--right, they were still performing when I moved to Austin in 1991. 

I was happily immersed in the 80s and early 90s for the afternoon.  I finally emerged, blinking, into the early darkness of the Northwest evening, turned my face up to the rain and saw this:

I heart Seattle.

Justin Vivian Bond, Dendrophile

A dendrophile is a tree-hugger by any other (Latinate, euphemistic) name.  Justin Vivian Bond, formerly of the iconic queer cabaret act Kiki and Herb, has just released a new album by that name that puts a queer spin on eco-friendliness.

Kiki and Herb came out of San Francisco's edgy mix of queer art and activism in the 1990s.  The duo moved to New York and by the time they broke up in 2008 had played everywhere from downtown spaces like The Knitting Factory to London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Broadway, where their show Kiki and Herb:  Alive on Broadway was nominated for a Tony Award.  Kiki was known for her nightclub covers/queer revisions of standards by iconic women rockers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVpIZ-Chta8

Although the character Kiki is a raucous, alcoholic chanteuse whom one cannot imagine outside a nightclub, Justin has always had a love of nature and is a well-known participant in the Radical Faeries, a movement dating from the 1970s that melds Marxism, indigenous spirituality, feminism, and drag in a potent and liberatory mix. 

From this rich soil comes Dendrophile, Justin's first solo album.  The dendrophile loves trees and the term can even mean someone who sexually copulates with trees.  In a recent interview Justin described enjoying maple syrup not only as a healthier alternative to processed sugar, but also as "tree cum.  Yum." 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X14a3G0SuLs

In this video from the new album, the singer is pictured among swaying grasses, or crowned with leaves, while lamenting "looting the land."  "Every time we kiss/ we confirm the new world coming," the song promises.  Justin's whiskey voice and the simple, haunting instrumental behind it are hard and sexy but full of emotion.  In the final image of this video, the singer's face dissolves into flowers.

Yum indeed.