Teddy Roosevelt And "The New Nationalism"

Think Teddy Roosevelt and what comes to your mind?

Sagamore Hill? San Juan Hill? Yellowstone Park? The White House?

Try Osawatomie, Kansas.

If that name doesn’t ring a bell to you, here’s a little hint. Think John Brown, the fire-eating abolitionist.

Osawatomie Brown, they nicknamed him. Why? Because Osawatomie was the home base of John Brown, the radical abolitionist who engaged in violent rebellion against slavery.

It seems that the New England-born Brown witnessed his son shot and the town of Osawatomie burned to the ground in August 1856 by proslavery forces, during the period when the Kansas territory was at the vortex of national forces gripped in a desperate battle over whether it would be a free or a slave state.

I'll be headed to Osawatomie this summer too. Not just to feel the pulse of the place or to figuratively stand over John Brown's Body. But because of Teddy Roosevelt.

You see, it was to Osawatomie Kansas that Teddy Roosevelt came on Aug 31, 1910, a year after the conclusion of his presidency.

Osawatomie made the news last last year, of course, because President Obama chose it as a place with that historic resonance he was looking for to announce his own statements on American economic policy.

Roosevelt went there for a similar reason --  to deliver a speech, later called the "New Nationalism Address," to give a speech on historically symbolic turf. A speech which is now seen as one of the most important enunciations of progressive ideals in our nation’s history.

It was not TR’s first or last visit to Kansas. The hero of San Juan Hill and former Governor of New York showed up during a campaign visit in 1903, when he was running for Vice President. His “Ride Across Kansas’ was a whistlestop tour, it seems, but it attracted national attention for the adulation he received. “The applause was spontaneous and loud, and it appeared to come from people of all degrees of politics,’ noted the New York Times that year. “It was not so much for Roosevelt as a candidate for Vice President, but for ‘Teddy,’ the Rough Rider and the man.”

By 1910, Roosevelt had already served as President, fiught his political battles, taken on the Wall Street Trusts, and left office.

America's Rough Rider, recently retired, went on a safari to Africa, returned home to New York, and contemplated the political landscape before him.

Teddy Roosevelt was not done speaking out on the issues facing America.

"My proper task," wrote Roosevelt as he prepared the speech he was to give at the dedication of the John Brown Park, "is clearly to announce myself on the vital questions of the day, to set the standards so that it can be seen, and take a position that cannot be misunderstood.”

Among its tenets: Social responsibility of the wealthy. A progressive income tax. A graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes. Transparency in corporate enterprise.

Government supervision of capitalism. Judges that rule for human welfare over property interests. Reining in of ‘state’s rights’ demagogues, in favor of a Hamiltonian concept of federal power.

And a legislature that represents all the people -- not special interests, who ‘twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.’

Roosevelt used the park dedication to attack the ideals of "state's right" demagogues, as he called them. He was interested in a Hamiltonian concept of appropriate use of federal power to protect the rights of individuals against those who would subvert them for personal or corporate gain.

When it came to the relationship between workers and owners, Roosevelt envisioned a balance between labor and capital.

    "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed,. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a Communist agitator than I shall be anyhow. It is Lincoln's. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear. Now, let the working man hear his side. "Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.... Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; is a positive good in the world."

What Roosevelt decried was an imbalance. “Ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism,” intoned Roosevelt before 30,000 listeners on the hot August plains of Kansas.

Sound familiar? It should. Roosevelt was a kind of a front man for the 1910 equivalent of the OWS crowd, engaged “with many of the same issues that confront us now, notably the power of finance and the dangers of concentrated economic power,” wrote the Washington Post in 2011.

President Obama's speech at Osawatomie, delivered in Dec 2011, was of the same ilk -- and powerful enough for the New York Times to declare it "the most potent blow the president has struck against the economic theory at the core of every Republican presidential candidacy and dear to the party’s leaders in Congress. The notion that the market will take care of all problems if taxes are kept low and regulations are minimized may look great on a bumper sticker, but, he said: “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” Not before the Great Depression, not in the ’80s, and not in the last decade."

It is fitting but also somewhat sobering that both Roosevelt and Obama chose to speak out on the issue of economic justice in a park dedicated to John Brown, who stood against the forces of slavery in America with such violence that he was tried, convicted and sentenced to execution for treason because of his actions.

John Brown put his body on the line. Unflinchingly.  But before they could hang him, he declared this.  

    Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment,” said Brown after the verdict. “I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done - as I have always freely admitted I have done - in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”

Roosevelt wasn't hung. But he was derided by many in his day for his progressivism -- in fact he was called a socialist, a charge he dismissed as being ’a slander to socialists.’ And most of the principles he enunciated eventually saw the light of day as the 20th century unfolded.

While there are many who would argue that, in the 21st century, Roosevelt’s ideas are facing their most severe challenge in 100 years, they remain one of the clearest enunciations of progressive principles to be found.

A footnote: it seems his 1910 visit to Osawatomie Kansas to celebrate the John Brown was not his last to the “Sunflower State.”  He did return one last time -- in 1916, to rally Kansans for the war effort.

According to the New York Times, 100,000 people thronged the streets of Kansas City to see Roosevelt. It was a triumphant return, marred only by someone hurling an open jack knife at the beloved American hero.

The assailant, according to the newspaper account, was “a tall, slender man dressed in brown, who had apparently been drinking.” 

 The butt end of the knife, we’re told, hit the arm of one of Roosevelt’s secretaries harmlessly, clattered to the ground, and was picked up by an American Legionnaire who, “closing it carefully, handed it to a nearby policeman.”

“Col Roosevelt first heard of the incident when he was having luncheon at the Muelenbach Hotel as the guest of the Commercial Club,” noted the Times reporter. “He put it aside with a laugh.”

“It’s Fun To Be Fooled/But It’s Better To Be Joe Gould”

Among the many individuals who have given life and color to the streets of Greenwich Village over the decades, one of the most singular was a Harvard graduate by the name of Joe Gould.

The story of Gould, whose life was detailed in a movie released in 2000 called "Joe Gould's Secret," is fairly well disseminated at this point. His confrontational demeanor and cryptic references to an 'Oral History Of Our Time' he was supposedly writing captured the imagination of everyone from e.e. cummings to New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, and eventually the filmmakers who created that movie.

Less well known, however, is that Joe Gould's last stand took place not on Bleecker Street. Five years after he disappeared from the Greenwich Village scene in 1952, amidst rumors that he had died or inherited money, the obituaries were written out for Joe Gould, who styled himself 'The Last Bohemian" prior to the Beat movement, stating that he had taken ill, gone from Columbus Hospital to Bellevue, and ultimately to Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood.

Like Carl Solomon, to whom Allen Ginsberg addressed his famous poem "Howl" in the mid-1950s, Joe Gould lived the last few years of his life in a hospital for the mentally ill.

Who was Joe Gould? And what was this supposed 9 million word oral history, scratched out in five and dime marbled notebooks? Was it a masterwork at all, or was Gould making it up as a story-telling point as he attempted to bum drinks in the local bars of Greenwich Village?

The answer to that question depends on whose version you hear.


Gould came from Norwood, near Boston, from an old New England family that settled the region as far back as 1635. In 1916 he came to New York and achieved a reputation around Greenwich Village, refusing to do any work except to solicit money for the "Joe Gould Fund." While ostensibly at work on his great opus -- one year he held a party mark the completion of 7.3 million words! -- he was busier hanging around and hustling crowds.


His life was colorful according to essayist Dan Balaban, who noted that Gould's day  "usually began in one of the cheap cafés that dotted the West Side in that era. Though he ate a lot of ketchup consommé, he was sometimes flush enough to indulge his taste for seafood ...Evenings found him cadging drinks at the Minetta. Sometimes he crashed the Raven's Poetry Club, reciting doggerel like "A Flatbush Grows in Brooklyn":

Said Johnny Cashmore
To little Noel Coward,
We want no trash more,
Brooklyn can't be defloward. 


Here's another famed comment by the irascible Mr Gould -- 


                My Religion

                In the winter I’m a Buddhist
                And in summer I’m a nudist

and this:

                I would give a month’s salary to sleep with you, my dear
                If I worked for the government at a dollar a year.

Gould cut a colorful figure in Greenwich Village. One of his archetypal performances revolved around his ability to speak seagull -- he claimed he could translate any poem into seagull, flapping his wings and skreeking. He claimed that the reason he was blackballed from the 50s lefty art world was a “proletarian poem” which he recited, called “The Barricades:”

This prissy hedge in front of the Brevoort
Is but a symbol of the coming revolution.
These are the barricades,
The barricades,
The barricades.
And behind these barricades,
Behind these barricades,
Behind these barricades,
The Comrades die!
The Comrades die!
The Comrades die!
And behind these barricades,
The Comrades die --
Of overeating.

Here's Gould's word on the most renowned literary zine of the era, The Dial, which actually published Gould’s essay, “Civilization," on its demise:

Who killed the Dial?
Who killed the Dial?
“I,” said Joe Gould,
“With my inimitable style,

“I killed the Dial.”

Aside from his wit and colorful behavior, however, the mystery of his Oral History Of Our Time remains the most talked about element in his legacy.

In Joe Gould's Secret, filmmaker Stanley Tucci tells the story of two men, one of whom would tell the other's story: famed The New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell and New York bohemian Joe Gould. According to the film one day, the softspoken writer encounters Gould, portrayed by Ian Holm. Yankee-born and Harvard-educated, the disheveled Gould is a scholar of the NYC streets. Gould's life's work, Mitchell learns, is "The Oral History of Our Time," a transcription of hundreds of conversations, remarks, and essays about what he has seen and heard. "Every day," writes Mitchell in The New Yorker, "even when he has a bad hangover or even when he is weak and listless from hunger, Joe Gould writes in school composition books."  After Mitchell's story appeared in The New Yorker, Gould became a minor celebrity.

According to Gould himself, the idea for the Oral History came to him while he was working as a junior police reporter in New York in 1917. He was recovering from a hangover at police headquarters one summer morning when the concept dawned. He immediately quit his job to work on the book.

He explained: ' . . . I would spend the rest of my life going about the city listening to people -- eavesdropping, if necessary -- and writing down whatever I heard them say that sounded revealing to me, no matter how boring or idiotic or vulgar or obscene it might sound to others. I could see the whole thing in my mind -- long-winded conversations and short and snappy conversations, brilliant conversations and foolish conversations, curses, catch phrases, coarse remarks, snatches of quarrels, the mutterings of drunks and crazy people, the entreaties of beggars and bums, the propositions of prostitutes, the spiels of pitchmen and peddlers, the sermons of street preachers, shouts in the night, wild rumours, cries from the heart. I decided right then and there that I couldn't possibly continue to hold my job, because it would take up time that I should devote to the Oral History, and I resolved that I would never again accept regular employment unless I absolutely had to or starve but would cut my wants down to the bare bones and depend on friends and well-wishers to see me through. The idea for the Oral History occurred to me around half past ten. Around a quarter to eleven, I stood up and went to a telephone and quit my job . . .'Since that fateful morning . . . the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.'

But there's a problem with all that. Not only is Gould an irascible man -- despite being befriended by the likes of William Saroyan, Eugene O'Neill and ee cummings -- but he refuses to show his oral history to anyone.


ee cummings, who wrote several poems about Gould, including a long poem with these lines in it: 'little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where to find them,' had his doubts. Significantly, another line in cummings' poem suggests he knew there was something amiss about the alleged oral history. 'a myth is as good as a mile,' wrote cummings. 'but little joe gould's quote oral/history unquote might (publishers note) be entitled a wraith's progress...'

The movie version of the story strongly suggests that no notebooks every existed. In his obituary, friends said they had no idea what happened to the histories.

However, in the past year or so some of the man's writing has turned up. Eleven of Gould's notebooks were recently rediscovered in an archive in NYU. According to the Village Voice, Gould's diary, which passed through several hands before being purchased by and long forgotten in NYU's Fales Collection, "offers a rare glimpse of the bombastic, ragged five-foot-four Harvard graduate in his own words."

In the end, however, the notebooks bolster rather than contradict the suspicions of Cummings and Mitchell. Instead of a treasure trove of anecdotes into the life and times of Greenwich Village, the books, it has been asserted, was little more than a dry, mechanical day by day account of  Gould's life, including little more than his idiosyncratic foibles, his personal toiletry and his eating habits.

A rather inglorious conclusion to the story, it would seem, to a man whose funeral was attended by NBC, CBS and all the print media.

Yet all is not lost for old Joe Gould. I heard, for example, his portrait hangs in the Minetta Tavern. And so long as ee cummings' work is admired, Gould's name will continue to make the anthologies -- albeit as a footnote -- and hang around gathering dust on college shelves. 

                Amérique Je T'Aime and it may be fun to be fooled
                but it's more fun to be little joe gould

IN THE PRESENCE OF OUTDOOR INFLUENCES: Walt Whitman in Greenport LI

Much is made of Walt Whitman's misadventures as a school teacher in Southold, on Long Island's North Fork. Less well known, save among serious Whitman scholars, is the fact that America’s Good Gray poet regularly later frequented a nearby town -- the burgeoning whaling town of Greenport -- from his early 20s, in the 1840s, through the beginning of the Civil War.

There was a good reason for it -- a dutiful family member in the Whitman household, Walt seems to have felt a responsibility to support Mary Elizabeth, his younger sister, who was in something of a difficult marriage to one Ansel Van Nostrand, a local ship builder.

Ansel, accounts have it, was a heavy drinker, and despite fathering several children with Mary (constituting the principle line of descent for Walt Whitman Sr and Louisa Van Velsor), he did not make things easy on his wife.

The situation may have been problemmatic, but the ride out was a pleasant one for the gregarious Whitman, we're told -- though somewhat more of a commitment than hopping on the Hampton Jitney like people do these days. By horse-drawn coach, t took two and a half days from Brooklyn to the North Fork of Long Island.

Still, Whitman is said to have made the most of the trip, and in typical fashion enjoyed riding out in the open air with the driver, a fellow named Hull Conklin.

Though he had family reasons as a pretext for his stay, in his written recollections Whitman focuses more on the literary and bucolic aspects of his visits to Mary Elizabeth. “I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country…,“ he says in A Backward Glance Over Travel‘d Roads (1888). “in the presence of outdoor influences I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments and… absorbed Shakespeare, Ossian, the best translated versions of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante Among them. As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood.“

Also, the Iliad “…(which) I first read thoroughly…in a sheltered hollow of rocks and sand, with the sea on each side.”

Whitman tips his hat to these influences in shaping his own work. “If I had not stood before those poems with uncover'd head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written "Leaves of Grass,“ he writes in A Backward Glance.

But ever the 'Barbaric Yawp' guy, Whitman throws in more than a few caveats.

In fact, Walt ranks the importance of his literary scholarship decidely below the experience of nature, placing himself squarely in the camp of contemporaries John Burroughs and Henry David Thoreau. “I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelm'd by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.”

Anyhow the literature of the Old World may have splendid and exceptional myths, but it's also mired in “feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars,” continues Whitman. America, he argues, needs something new. “The New World needs the poems of … democratic average and basic equality... In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend.”

Whitman visited the North Fork of Long Island for decades, usually in the summer or fall. Sometimes staying with Mary and Ansel at their home near the corner of South and Third Street in Greenport, other times in one of the various inns in the growing town. By the 1850s he was riding out on the Long Island Railroad, clear to Orient.

When he wasn't tending to family matters or wandering the countryside, Whitman hung about town. He’d fish from the piers, engage the locals in conversation, and sometimes strike up somewhat flirtatious friendships. It was, said Walt, an opportunity to ‘scare up’ examples of humanity in all its display -- from the heroic and spiritually involved to the mundane.

How mundane? In one telling, if anecdotal, incident, a boatload of 19th century pleasure-seekers basically pick him up for a jaunt out to Montauk Point, where they all spend the night -- on board the sloop, moored under the stars.

The story's opaque, bourgeois and worldly. We find Walt quietly fishing off the end of the Greenport town dock when he is whisked away by a sloop full of lively girls and a clergyman. "The girls were unaffected ... and the minister laughed and told stories and ate luncheons, just like a common man, which is quite remarkable for a country clergyman," notes biographer Jerome Loving in his book ‘Walt Whitman: Song of Himself.’

One suspects Thoreau might have disapproved -- there was much throwing of hats in the air and other displays of mid nineteenth century merriness. Whitman readily confesses they “hurled stones at the shrieking sea-gulls, mocked the wind, and imitated the cries of various animals in a style that beat nature all out!"

OK. On the face of it, it's not one for the 'Hindoo texts'... sounds a bit like a 19th century tailgate party. But as recollected by Whitman there's that 'something else' going, a perception given to us by one of the great American Transcendentalists, an experience in possession of a quality of magic and charm that communicates itself 150 years since the incident occured.

Yet on reflection, America's Good Gray Poet manages to find the transcendental center before concluding his reminiscence:“to bend over and look at the ripples as the prow divided the water -- to lie on my back and to breathe and live in that sweet air and clear sunlight -- to hear the musical chatter of the girls, as they pursued their own glee -- was happiness enough for one day." 


That's why to this day, I like to return to old Walt and his reminiscences. Reading his words, it's neither1862 or 2012 anymore. You can almost forget about the world and its troubles for a moment. You can almost hear Whitman hear it. Feel Whitman feel it.You can almost lie back and put your hand in the water and experience the plashing waters yourself.

Martin Espada Walks With Walt

Martin Espada and Walt Whitman. It should come as no surprise that Martin Espada's got an affinity for the guy.

Think about it. Better yet, read about it.

An inveterate advocate for the disenfranchised in America, Espada -- this year's poet in residence at the Whitman Birthplace in West Hills LI -- announced his feelings about Whitman loud and clear back in 2005 when he declared in an interview with the Walt Whitman Quarterly that while America as a society is still not ready for the Good Gray Poet's message, poets like him are.

"In a really tangible way, we’re not ready for Whitman as a society," said Espada in the interview (http://www.martinespada.net/Whitman_Quarterly.html). "We’re still not ready for his message of radical egalitarianism; we’re certainly not ready for his expressions of compassion for everyone and many of us, I should add, are not ready for his sexuality."

The whole interview can be read on Espada's website. But a few excerpts are sufficient to reveal how profoundly Espada has thought through his connection to Whitman, and the importance of his message today.

"I had to come to Whitman on my own and very slowly," says Espada, who will be reading at the Whitman birthplace on Saturday, Jun 2. "When I did, I realized something, which is that I had been reading Whitman all along without knowing it. His influence is that pervasive. You can read a poet like Allen Ginsberg or, for that matter, a poet like Pablo Neruda and not realize you’re reading Whitman."

Whitman, as an iconic and multivariegated American poet, is a touchstone for a host of ideas and points of view. But it's no surprise what particular part of Whitman most appeals to Martin Espada -- Whitman the advocate. "If you look at the 1855 introduction to Leaves of Grass – the first edition – you’ll find a passage that’s very telling when it comes to Whitman the advocate. It’s Whitman there who says that the duty of the poet is to “cheer up slaves and horrify despots.” I can identify with that."

Espada keeps company with Jack Kerouac in targeting that line.

Kerouac, in Dharma Bums, says this: i've been reading whitman, you know what he says, cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the bard, the zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and there have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume... 

Kerouac gets an anti consumer bop lunacy kick out of Whitman. By contrast, Espada's point is decidely more political -- and pointed.

"In Leaves of Grass you are immediately struck by Whitman’s faith both in poetry and in democracy. It’s a faith that we need to reassert in these days. Certainly, I think the universal compassion expressed in Leaves of Grass has to be reasserted. This is another timely lesson for us now. It’s not a coincidence that certain kinds of people recur throughout his work, especially in “Song of Myself.” We can see the pattern by which prisoners, prostitutes and slaves keep cropping up in Whitman’s verse. He makes continual statements of solidarity with these most marginalized of people. We need more of that today.”

Those who attend Espada's reading on Saturday June 2nd are likely to get a healthy dose of Whitman's faith and message, filtered through the eyes, ears and voice of a poet and a man whose viewpoint so aligns with that of Walt that he once stood before a commencement hall at Hampshire College and declared this:

"Make sure that compassion is the guiding principle of your republic, the pulse of your poetry. Walt Whitman, the bard of prisoners, prostitutes and slaves, insists that 'whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks/to his own funeral dressed in his shroud."

I can roll with that.

-----

Martin Espada Walks with Whitman as this year's poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace in West Hills, LI. Espada will be teaching a Master Class Sat Jun 2 2012 at midday, and reading that evening at 5 p.m. Visit their website for details: http://waltwhitman.org/component/eventlist/details/121

A Gathering Together: Mike Watt's Common Ground

They're calling it 'hellride east,' but when Mike Watt comes to NYC Wednesday May 2 to the Poisson Rouge, there'll be more than your regulation  'hoot, jam, thud and stooge' work going down.

The way I reckon it, it'll be a chance to gather with those who dare to dream as individuals, but travel together as a clan. With tolerance. To celebrate, as Mike Watt terms it, The Big Love.

If that sounds like making much of a thing, listen to Mike Watt's take on Walt Whitman

That's right, Whitman. 

Art Rock/Post-Punk/Jazz/Improv credentials aside, I was sold on this guy Mike Watt the minute I saw the Youtube of him at Whitman's grave in Camden NJ. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ7K1A1ymos&feature=relate.).

Watt articulates a vision of Whitman and Leaves of Grass that, even filtered as it is through the crackling imperfections of a homemade Youtube vid, is as startlingly visionary as the Good Gray Poet himself. 

Leaves of Grass, says Watt, has got this tolerant open mind. When I'm reading it, it's like goddamn, my life's in this stuff. I thought about this stuff, the very pragmatic things to be done to make it work. Put a record together a tour together play with my bands. 

 Watt's keenly attuned to the historic context.  (Whitman's) first goal was to stop the war that was coming. He wrote it in 1855 -- the war was in 1861 -- but it was a slow slide the country was going in. Everybody knew it was coming and they felt helpless but he said, 'I'll write a poem to try to heal us, somehow, from warring.

This cat is like, you know what, you gotta be tolerant if you really want to make the real dream he saw. The one that resonates in me, the only one that makes sense if you're gonna call it a country, the idea of a place where we all live. 

You gotta dare like this man to dream big.

Rather than herd, the more generous idea is common ground. Then you have respect. That's a lot different from conformity and goosestepping. What Whitman's saying is if you want real togetherness then you have to have tolerance because we are separate cats, we don't dream by committee." 

If that's not some cool shit, then you're not paying attention.

Mike Watt's music is a thing to behold, too, if you haven't heard it. Here's a great example, 'Chinese Firedrill." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWyyeN0yKhM

living this life
is like trying to learn latin
in a chinese firedrill


The thing at Poisson Rouge itself on May 2 is a celebration of a most excellent book by Watt, put out by Three Rooms Press and having its NYC debut prior to being launched May 5 at Beyond Baroque in LA.  The book's called "Mike Watt: On and Off Bass," it's got poetry and a lot of pictures Watt took while kayaking off the coast of San Pedro where he lives. Jack Black likes it.


I'm not into kayaks, but I like this guy. I think what he said about Whitman is the shit. And I'm going down to Poisson Rouge and hear from the man himself. 

Why not? Like Mike Watt says, it's common ground.

(Three Rooms Press & CEP Presents: NYC launch for “Mike Watt: On and Off Bass” at Le Poisson Rouge. Featuring HELLRIDE EAST with Mike Watt + J Mascis + Murph, plus Appomattox and Dead Trend, and a reading and signing by Mike Watt along with additional very special guests. Book available for purchase at event. Advance Tickets ($20): lepoissonrouge.com)

The Night I Opened For Levon Helm

I still remember the cold February night in 2003 I opened for Levon Helm at a honkytonk down by the railroad tracks in Huntington, LI, called Leavy's Last Stop.

About half a block beyond where urban renewal in the '60s stopped, leaving some empty old buildings for the down-and-out and honky-tonkers to continue to exist in an otherwise gentrified town.

"Leavy's Last Stop," not the end of one road or the beginning of another, just some place which was no place at all -- but at the same time square in the heart of some unexplainable thing or moment in time and therefore a vital, necessary place.

A bar for ex-cheerleaders and washed up boxers, firemen and their wives, landscapers and truckers and lean looking country and western types, plumbers and paving contractors and a psychiatrist with a porsche or two also mixing in, because he remembers what it was he loved about being alive and in the world before he stopped loving the world and started "working" in it -- something he loved in the blue smoke of a honkytonk in a college town he went to and before he had to settle down to a lifetime cutting away at the rot in people's minds or paving it over.

And a number of beat musicians with no gig to go to even though it was Saturday night, and besides they heard that Levon Helm was in town and playing with a pickup band and maybe they might just get asked to sit in for a song or do a set, or either they already had been asked and were waiting their turn.

A legend! Levon Helm in a honkytonk in Huntington Station and no spotlight on the man and not even a miked drumset. You could probably hire him for your kid's birthday party, yet he played with Dylan, his wheel was on fire he was driving ol' dixie down -- big pink last waltz Levon Helm, made songs that Joan Baez covered but which grew out of something funky and true blue Arkansas cotton roots.

It was Scotto's idea really. He got Levon to come and additionally had this notion that I belonged in front of a bar crowd, a poet in a rock setting can work okay he said, if you handle it right. That was his area and anyway I didn't mind. Scotto handles things, ska bands blues singers up and comers down and outers, he saw me back in the sixties when I was almost famous in an r&b band and figured I could still be worked into the bar scene and furthermore add some class to it.

Scotto said it'll go like this, he'll introduce George the poet, turn the spotlight on the stool and go! It'll add a little surreal moment to the evening, he said, cool the place down bring it into focus in the middle of the mayhem and beer and anger and sweat, anyway we're giving it a go.

I do know a crowd when I see one, and the place was jamming -- cars everywhere, hundreds of people inside the place. Scant attention paid to the warm-up group from NYC, a guy with his shirt hanging out and rubbing his hair while he sang, acting as if he just woke up and found himself in front of three hundred people and was surprised by it though not all that displeased, backed by his friend or roommate with an electrified acoustic guitar, whanging away with big stroking twelvestring chords. 

"That's a John Lennon guitar" said some guy in a checked shirt, near where I'm standing, quiet-like, practicing the phrase two or three times, when the two of them are done performing and get off the stage he says it again hoping they'll hear him, "that's a John Lennon guitar."

I am wearing a checked shirt too, everybody's wearing checked shirts, and I'm standing next to an amp and waiting for my cue, and Scotto is looking serious and anxious over the heads of all those people until he sees me and then he comes over leans forward grips my hand and says "a consummate professional! right where I need you to be, man!"

So I stood there in front of the band and Levon Helm in his lair of drums and snares and cymbals, and I looked out over the people, some crowd standing in front of the stage, and said the word cotton pickin' three times, and read a poem over everybody's head. 

Pointed it at the heart of some invisible imaginary person in the back of the room, some person who was attentive and really listening and maybe even hearing, though he or she didn't expect that to happen at all and furthermore couldn't see me, some person I could reach with my words, something that would go over easy.

And it did go over easy, though I felt like a preacher giving the benediction before a brawl. A number of the gals in the audience ooohed and ahhhed and some of the guys did too, but some others didn't, they coughed and looked at each other and pulled at their bottles and pretended I wasn't happening or really there. They weren't obnoxious about it just grimly polite and inwardly inattentive because it was an official sanctioned moment on stage, I was authorized to read them poetry, how long could it take anyhow, and besides they were patriotic god fearing people and not just because of 9-11, these were not brawlers, they had jobs to go to Monday morning, they just drank their beer and watched me and waited for Levon.

I didn't detain them long - they got their Levon and the rest of his band and I got to open for Levon Helm.

But the highlight for me was meeting old Levon beforehand, a very cool experience, with that Burgess Meredith glint in his eye like he's hip to the true energy going down everywhere around him, not just what ordinary people think is going down, which is false and petty and superficial. 

It happened like this: Scotto brought me downstairs into the basement for pictures. We sat in front of a white sheet that had been draped over an ice cooler as a backdrop, it was the basement where roaches and moldy couches and broken chairs go, low ceilings, stacked cases of Budweiser, leaky pipes, the lair of most bands really, from here to Cleveland and halfway back.

And Scotto tells Levon I'm a local poet and used to play soul music and Levon smiles and likes that. And we drink some of those beers in the bottles in the Budweiser cases. Levon and me and the band, subterranean and connected and silent.

The beer was warm. The cellar was cold. After awhile I figured I should ask him something, so I said hey Levon did you ever pick cotton on that Arkansas farm he grew up on but he said he hadn't.

Then it was time to go upstairs and go on stage and we did. It was all very peaceful and easy.  

Langston Hughes: The Spanish Civil War Poems

'Fascists is Jim Crow people,honey...and here, we shoot 'em down' (Langston Hughes, Dear Folks At Home)
 
   
 A recent presentation at the Cervantes Center in New York City of the first books to come out of BAAM (Biblioteca Afro-Americana de Madrid, African-American Library of Madrid) -- Texts about Spain by Langston Hughes and From Mississippi to Madrid by James Yates -- offered ready access to the perspective of a cadre of activist mid-20th century African-Americans on the issues of fascism, colonialism, racism and freedom.

Of the two books, Hughes’s is the more interesting for devotees of poetry, consisting of an impressive collection of chronicles, poems and excerpts from his memoirs.

Hughes was a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, and after six months there, came back with the material experience for a series of six poems inspired by what he saw.

While not considered the poet’s most well known work, some critics call these poems some of Hughes’ most bitter social commentary, uniquely immediate and intense.

The politics is palpable. In them, he pointedly links racism with fascism -- but also, links both to colonialism, offering a singular perspective on where the culpability lay in what was arguably a mid-century struggle between established and incipient imperialist European nations for colonial power.

'I looked across to Africa/and seed foundations shaking' he writes in "We Captured A Wounded Moor Today." ‘…Cause if a Free Spain wins this war/the colonies too are free…'


I guess that’s why old England
And I reckon Italy, too
Is afraid to let a worker’s Spain
Be too good to me and you
Because they got slaves in Africa
And they don’t want em to be free.

There’s plenty of compassion and pathos in the poems, as well. ‘…the dead birds wheel East/to their lairs again/leaving iron eggs/in the streets of Spain…‘ he writes in "Air Raid: Barcelona," ‘…the stench of their passage/remains when they’re gone.'

In "Song of Spain," Hughes reaches to the raw, dark power of the Spanish notion of ‘duende' and calls on the common people to ‘drive the bombers out of Spain/drive the bombers out of the world…I must take the world for my own again.’

This theme -- driving out the violence of war -- reaches a crescendo in "Madrid, 1937"

Put out the lights and stop the clocks.
Let time stand still.
Again, man mocks himself
And all his human will to build and grow!
Madrid!
The fact and symbol of man’s woe,
Madrid!
…the ever minus of the brute,
The nothingness of barren land
And stone and metal,
The emptiness of gold.

The horror and emptiness of war fought for gold is a tale told by many over the centuries. But in hammering home the notion that fascism, racism and colonialism, in the middle of the twentieth century, were different faces of the same animal, Langston Hughes was offering a challenging synthesis of view.

'We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word fascism,’ he told an international gathering of writers in Paris in 1937, at the height of the Jim Crow era of racial discrimination in America. 'In many states Negroes are not permitted to vote or hold office…freedom of movement is greatly hindered, especially if we happen to be sharecroppers…we know what it is to be refused admission to schools and colleges, to theaters and concert halls, to hotels and restaurants…In America, Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know.'

Langston Hughes' Spanish Civil War poems may not be his best known -- but they offer critical dimension to our understanding the complexity of the politics, perception and social witness of one of America's most important 20th century poets.