Thank You Stu

A music blog dedicated to my music guru Stuart.

[thankyoustu]

Micheal O’Gara - “Mystic Rider”

Summer and Smoke Tape

I’m always waiting to post this song after I get the chance to have hard make-out to this jam.  It’s a fantasy and fantasies rarely happen so...here I am... The 6th month--June--is the house of desire, and Michael O’Gara scores these steamy days with his most deliberately sexy and esoteric jam “Mystic Rider.”  While the lyrics touch on some deep hippie spiritual vibes, the music is all humid and earthy fornication.  You can’t deny the rocking and bobbing bass, those steady drums, the ethereal church organ, and the shimmery, noodling-yet-not-too-prog guitar.  O’Gara’s vocals are just as velvety-raw yet delivered with such ease.   Damn, it’s on. The track emerges from static like soft rain.  The organ paints a sonic watercolor twilight--dusk or dawn, you take your pick.  I get visuals from between the lushness of trees,  of gold sunlight dying under dark clouds.  I hear distant thunder.  The air is electric and tense.  An easy thunderstorm rolls in, not one to fear but to elicit excitement and possibility.   

[thankyoustu]

Stalk-Forrest Group -- “St. Cecilia”

Relatively Clean Rivers/ Stalk-Forrest Group tape

A while back, Stu made me a tape with Relatively Clean Rivers on Side A and Stalk-Forrest Group on B.  Recently I’ve been delving into my archive of Stu tapes (A.K.A. a hand-collaged shoe box stuffed to the hilt).  I remembered talking about Relatively Clean Rivers with a new record junkie friend so I pulled the mix out for a play or two last night while making gazpacho.  Although I revisited with RCR on my mind, this Stalk-Forrest track hit me pretty hard.  I won’t go into all the incarnations and history of this band: Thank You Stu is more about how I feel when I jam the tunes my music shaman prescribes and that’s the direction of this particular blog, too.  My heart’s been feeling heavy lately and “St. Cecilia” sent me into a deep trance out.  You know those moments when you feel your invisible second eyelid slide up and your vision glaze but you see something else, something beyond?  Maybe you don’t, but I get that vibe when I’m gardening, hiking, meditating, swimming...making love--in intense heat and sweat where I just go blank and quiet and barely put my finger on a realization.  I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m aware of it’s presence and the roundness of it’s form, like palming a mystery object in a black bag.  Even in the mundane space of my kitchen with the monotony of chopping tomatoes and onion, “St. Cecilia” took me there. As with the rest of this album, “St. Cecilia” is a burner.  But it’s movements are odd; it’s rhythm changes erratic; it’s tone, an elegant shift from cornering to coaxing.  The track is downright proggy, but the vocal harmonies take it to a holy transcendent plane.  Not to mention the stoned-out and sprawling guitar solo.  I caught myself a few times asking if I was listening to the Grateful Dead.  And that’s not a bad thing at all.  Glad the song is so long because it always obliges me by going on and on. So in the twilight of a typical July evening, I’m just a person in her meager apartment kitchen chopping vegetables. But thanks to my groove shaman, I’m getting down to some interior secret ignited by a Stalk-Forrest Group tape.  Whatever that vibration is, I don’t know yet.  But there’s something there.  What is it?  What is it?

[thankyoustu]

Vince Martin - “If the Jasmine Don’t Get You…the Bay Breeze Will”

Stuart introduced this track to me and some friends at one of his listening sessions, but he reintroduced us this past February when my friend Josh visited from Indiana.  We were all so into the long, sprawling, psyched-out, jazzy jam from Coconut Grove, Florida.  It seems appropriate to post it now because the confederate jasmine is in full bloom here in Tallahassee, and it sure has got us.

[thankyoustu]

Rest in peace, Vince.

[thankyoustu]

Bobby Whitlock - “Dearest I Wonder”

Power Plant Too Tape

Power Plant Too is an old summer tape from Stu that made it back into my consciousness recently.  I remember driving back and forth down Miccosukee Road with the windows down, the canopies blowing in the wind to the transcendent high whine of the guitar on “Dearest I Wonder.”  On my long drives to work in Wakulla County, I’d imagine the pages of a calendar flipping to the next month as I drove on through the woods.  Time moved like trees swaying in the breeze, hazy and slow but at a constant pace.  Isn’t it amazing how you can look back on times in your life that were uncertain and maybe a bit difficult and still feel nostalgia?  Maybe that’s because even the rough times hold a little good. Bobby’s smooth earthy voice eased me through the heat--to cool pools in the forest and back through damp clothes drying in the golden rays of early summer.  Sleepy and a little drunk on alpha waves, that’s mostly how I remember hearing this track for the first of many plays. Throughout those years, people walked into and left my life, some with vapor ease and others with the catches of loose gravel.  And they’ll continue to come and go again.  I sometimes find myself resenting this natural flow, but tracks like Whitlock’s tend to make the going a bit better to bear.  If we could know the outcomes of our chance meetings and out-stretched arms would we cease to open our souls to one another?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Dearest, I wonder but what do I know? 

[thankyoustu]

Jefferson Airplane - “Good Shepherd”

Power Plant Too Tape

Stuart put this song on a tape for me long ago, but the day after the election, I kept hearing it play in my head.  That night I had to comb through my tapes to find the one that this song was on--Power Plant Too.  Then I had to pull out my Volunteers LP and revisit.  On this listen, tracks like “We Can Be Together” and “Volunteers” nearly blew my mind.  How can anyone not see the cyclical nature of history?  That we are constantly being haunted by our past because we can’t acknowledge it? (And by the way, why do people stop at “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” when it comes to jamming the Airplane?  WTF.)   I used to teach a class about how unresolved and erased history haunts--that’s why I’m so passionate on the subject.  I often wonder if my former students remember anything I taught them, if they are pausing right now and saying, “Hey...wait a minute...we’ve been here before.” “Good Shepherd” is merely one link in the evolution of song.  I won’t go into too much detail, but the track has it’s roots in a 19th century hymn and then reappears in an 1880s gospel blues song, only to be re-collected in 1953 by Ruth Crawford Seeger.  We owe the Airplane’s version of this incredible American gospel blues ballad to the great Jorma Kaukonen--who, in the early 1960s, learned the song’s inspiration (“Blood-Stained Banders”) from folk singer friends. Some critics say “Good Shepherd” is the least political song on the album, but I don’t necessarily agree.  For one, Kaukonen has even said that he thought of the “blood-stained banders” as the Ku Klux Klan.  In another regard, we can’t deny the influence  and presence of religious imagery (particularly Judaeo-Christian) on and within several facets of American culture.  From a “City on the Hill” to the “promise land,” what we think of as traditional American culture and further, the very language-style found within our founding documents is rife with Christian symbolism.  This does have something to do with the Puritans seeking out and establishing a new land to practice their religious freedom--but I’d like to go a step further and suggest that the idealism we associate with freedom linguistically lends itself to that of Christianity and vice versa.  Just run a synonym search. Now think about the power of the American myth.  Think about where we stand today because of the myth--how most Americans fail to recognize that the myth is operating.  “If you want to get to Heaven over on the other shore...”  While it’s certainly manipulative to employ the promise of an ephemeral world veiled in religious idealism, I find it amazing that “Good Shepherd” twists that idea.  The song becomes a kind of warning.  If you really want to go to Heaven, you shouldn’t so blindly follow false prophets.  “Stay out of the way of the blood-stained bandit...long-tongue liar...gun shot devil.”  Even the devil may quote scripture for his purposes. But the good trees are known by the fruits they bear.  So too are the true of heart known--by their actions.  “Can’t you hear my lambs a’callin.’  Oh good shepherd, feed my sheep.”   

[thankyoustu]

Judy Roderick - “Woman Blue (I Know You Rider)”

Tape X of the Bourbon Tapes

Judy Roderick’s voice comes the closest to personifying raw feminine despondency--at least that of mine.  When Stuart gave me the original Elevum, Roderick became a key aural companion to my temporally immobile state.  Her quiet phrasing with guitar gentle as morning rain eased me through tear-stiffened stares of blank vision.  “Woman Blue” describes the kind of devotion a woman can levy for the ones she loves.  It’s deliberate, unquestioning, and sometimes expansively self-destructive:  “I’d cut your wood and baby, I’d tend your fire.  I’d even haul your whiskey up from the Fresno bar.”  But for all it’s self-deprecation--“If I can’t be your woman, baby I’d be your dog”--the song still takes a dig with “I know know you rider, gonna miss me when I’m gone.”  This once became my mantra and still gives me some comfort in times of dejection.   I’ve heard we sing the blues to feel better--to sing our blues away.  Considering this now, I realize it’s all about remaining still and abiding your sorrow.  So many of us try to run from our sadness.  We quell it with alcohol and drugs and casual sex.  We try to forget with movies and TV and the internet.  We cover it and fight it.  This time around, I’ve decided not to push against my sadness but instead to lean into it.  I’ve learned that it’s a natural state and a part of who I am.  I’m serious.  I’m heavy.  I’m hard.  My friends kindly say I’m “an old soul,” but I know I’m really a sad girl, always a bit blue. Maybe I’m forever blue, but I have learned that the older I get, the more I’m able to handle.  Several times in my life, sorrow crippled me.  It made me live out of a suitcase and subsist on $25 a week.  It kept me at the bottom of a whiskey bottle and paling around with destructive post-teens.  I’ve fasted and ran until I tripped and spit blood.  But I also took thousands of photos, made nearly a hundred field recordings, and spent many nights awake assembling collages--all until I could make it right.  All until I could understand or until it hurt less.  “Sun is gonna shine on my back door some day.  Wind is gonna rise, it’s gonna blow my blues away.”   

[thankyoustu]

Gene Clark - "Some Misunderstanding"

Tape I of the Bourbon Tapes

A heart-wrenching jam from the first Bourbon Tape--Gene Clark’s “Some Misunderstanding”--reminds me of those early days of tears and whiskey, back when Stuart and I first met and he made the Bourbon Tapes.  These days, it’s just tears and more tears, some meditation, and no booze.   Most of my life I’ve felt plagued by being misunderstood.  The Buddhists tell me I should not concern myself with these fears because the self does not exist as something separate from everything else, but that’s not quite the way it works for me.  I’ve never felt anything but separate--against the wall at a crowded party, waiting in line at the convenient store, loitering at the mirror with all the other girls in the bathroom.  My people are scattered and gone.  No one recognizes my face...or he turns away from the raw nihilism found therein. The part of my identity that’s hidden and only tangible through blood memory confounds me, and I can’t wipe 34+ years of a Judaeo Christian complex away. I don’t want to either because each piece of me is important.  It’s made me who I am--but who I am is a construct, right? Have you ever loved someone who leaves you because of what’s out there beyond you?  Have you ever left someone you love because you have to see what’s out there?   We spend our formative years trying to figure out who we are--which is really just a construct that we are making up as we go along.  Or are we who we are from the start?  I feel like a hardened and “smarter” version of myself at five, but I hear so many people frantically say they have to “get their life started” or “find out who they are.”  You don’t know who you are?  It’s funny: it either takes time to believe who we are or none of us will ever really know.  To know who we are is to know what we want and where we want to be.  But dreams aren’t a birthright, and there is a price for searching out our dreams.  We make them happen, and we pay for them.  Gene Clark’s No Other really hits on this thought, and “Some Misunderstanding” has me soft and sorry for feeling selfish pain.  But damn, don’t we all use the beautiful rhetoric of fate to excuse ourselves from the table?    Once or twice or maybe many times, I had a young lover that left me to fly or be less attached or because I felt more for him than he felt for me.  On one of these occasions someone older said to me, “He’s too young to know the cost of things.”  Maybe this is what we mean by figuring out who we are.  Maybe we just figure out how much we are willing to pay for the precious gifts of the spirit, for the preciousness of life.  In our youth we overspend.  We are frivolous and loose with our time, our money, our emotions.  But when we reach that arbitrary sense of “completion,” the answer is nothing.  There is no price we can or would pay.  Instead, we desperately hold to anything precious that comes our way--at moments that grow more rare with the passing of each year.  We know quality when we see it because of all the times we have gambled and lost.  Maybe that is figuring out who we are--knowing what we’ve lost and what we won’t pay.    

[thankyoustu]

The Byrds - “He Was a Friend of Mine”

The Byrds may be my favorite band.  It’s often hard to make these kind of choices, but I keep going back to them.  What a powerhouse of songwriting, musicianship, and egos--American to core. Yesterday I was driving to meet a friend for lunch, and “He Was a Friend of Mine” came on the radio.  I’ve heard the song many times before and know that it’s about the assassination of JFK, but this recent listen hit me pretty hard for different reasons. A few weeks ago, I learned that an old friend of mine named Tom--someone I probably haven’t seen or talked to in 10+ years--was killed by a drunk driver last year.  Tom was a really kind person and an incredible poet.  His sensitivity and care for words instantly gained my respect and admiration.  I met Tom through my friend Angela, and both Tom and Angela were completing their senior year at FSU:  Angela for Studio Art and Creative Writing and Tom for Poetry.   I had graduated the previous year and was working my first full-time job at the Dept. of Education.  It was horrible.  I made $7 an hour and had a wicked supervisor.  Every time I got up to go to the restroom, she’d greet my return with a haughty, “Where have you been?”  After I suffered four UTIs in two months, she slightly let up on my bathroom breaks.  I was the only person in the office not allowed to participate in casual Friday because I was a receptionist, and my lazy co-workers would put all their work on me--spreadsheets, re-files, and data entry.  Even better, the department went through a massive “purge” that year, firing scores of people.  My superiors gave me the task of handing the newly terminated their belongings as security led them out.  I saw people eight months from retirement crying as they were ushered out of the building, and I heard outraged former employees curse and slam the office door--intent on showing themselves out.  One Monday I arrived to find that the security guards had discovered bullet holes on my side of building.  I was a 23 year-old kid, and the real world sucked.  Every day I cried as I walking to and from my car parked in the dirt scramble lot. Tom and Angela were still in school--meaning they still had dreams and plenty of creative time.  Being around them kept me from becoming a completely bleak drone.  I began volunteering for a non-profit art gallery and an experimental press.  Then I started up a free salon for writers and artists.  Angela and Tom participated and helped bring new people in.  As friends, we’d meet at Gill’s Tavern and sit in a back booth working on writing, and we’d read our work at Warehouse and other open mic nights and collaborate with local musicians on the Fertile Compilation--a free Tallahassee culture mix CD that we all read our poetry for.  Both Angela and Tom were willing to workshop with me in their spare time, and they encouraged me to keep writing.  One night they convinced me to meet them at a crappy little bar called Poor Paul’s for Ladies’ Night.  It was a Tuesday so I was apprehensive about being out on a work night, but I went anyhow.  Angela, Tom, and our other friend Joe were waiting for me with flowers.  They knew how awful my job was and how depressed I’d become.  I had one drink with them then we all decided to go home.  When we got to the parking lot, the passenger side window of my car was completely bashed in.  Glass was everywhere.  I’d had a nap snack in the front seat carrying my journal, a novel, and my cell phone (nobody carried them around like security blankets then), and it was gone.  Angela started calling my cell phone, and a strange lady answered.  After the lady hung up on her, she keep calling.  I had one of those Nokia candy bar phones that lit up all along the sides--bright white.  As Angela kept calling, we noticed something flashing in the woods that skirted the parking lot.  It was my phone!  The nap sack with my journal and novel were not far behind.  I was so relieved I didn’t lose my journal.  Tom, Angela, and Joe stayed with me while we waited for the police.   That was a weird and turbulent time in my life, and yet it was so short-lived--only 1 year.  Not long after, I quit my job and went to graduate school.  Tom and Angela and Joe moved away to different places.  Facebook didn’t exist then, and when it did exist, I lost interest in it fast.  I never stayed in touch with Angela and Tom and Joe.  I’d hear from other friends that Angela was back in Miami.  I sighted her once, years later, in Border’s Books then New Leaf Market and later at All Saints.  She was a stunning girl--half Chinese, half Puerto Rican.  She once cut her hair short and wore a little boy’s suit--she could look so fierce yet delicate. Over the years I learned that Tom moved to Boston to further his study of poetry, and that he’d gotten involved with a great lady who he’d be with until his death.  The last I knew, he was still in Boston, but he’d actually moved back to Tampa at one point and was now living in Dallas working at a museum.  When I’d known Tom that year in Tallahassee, he worked as a nanny, and I think he continued to work with kids as he was involved with the education component at the museum in Dallas.   He was truly a gentle and kind person.  I often think of his poetry--the pieces he read for Fertile or ones we work-shopped together.  Just a month ago I was washing dishes and thinking of his poems.  It wasn’t long after that I was told he was run over by a drunk driver in Dallas:  “His killing had no purpose, no reason or rhyme.  He was a friend of mine.”  

[thankyoustu]

Roy Harper - "October 12th"

Tape VII of the Bourbon Tapes (UK 2)

The world is a mixed up, screwed up place.  Turbulent times like these call for a bard like Roy Harper.  I think of Harper as an kind of “Cassandra” who spoke truths that everyone ignored.  He’s my favorite angry poet, and I find it interesting that someone who got as stoned as he did was still seething with disgust for human depravity.   “October 12th” is particularly satisfying to me.  It has that quiet resolve of being so at the end of one’s frustration, asking why, why, why... “Why do I waste time trying to create? Why do I still try to communicate when you do nothing save coagulate making bad pretenses of pretending?” The track has a weird and eerie sobriety to it, too.  Harper’s gentle acoustic picking and his indignant strumming at the end of each line--he sounds like he’s barely containing himself from boiling over.  Maybe it’s Harper’s quiet, internal rage I understand the most.  It’s feminine, interior, and imploding with self-destruction and self-hate: 

Why do I sit here and sing you this song Why have I worried about people for so long I think you're all right and it's me that's all wrong And I hated myself when I was living

This October, I’ve felt so winded and blasted and beat-the-fuck-down.  We’re constantly bombarded with political battles and online popularity contests.  Even good, sensitive people are afraid of those who genuinely care for them--maybe because we are sometimes so deeply damaged and thus rendered mute and still by broken trust and lost faith.   For many reasons, I quit drinking and smoking over a month ago and started meditating.  It’s not easy.  You don’t realize how intense life is until you are on full brain power.  It’s marvelous when everything is going well, but when does everything go well?  Happiness is a rarity and fleeting at that.  The more serene you become, the more problems come out of the woodwork to antagonize you and throw you off course.   And the older you get, the more problems appear.  My friend Mona and I still tell each other, You do not need to look for trouble.  It comes for you.  Trouble will find you.  Not only that, you can no longer be so self-righteously incensed about all that befalls you--because you realize that bad things will happen to you that are nobody’s fault.  Wrongs are hard to accept when you have no one to blame.  This might be the hardest part.   

[thankyoustu]

Phil Ochs - "Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore"

Tape IX of the Bourbon Tapes

One of my earliest posts was a Phil Ochs track.  Recently, this song has been rattling in my mind.  I have a radio in my head I can’t turn off.  Sometimes it’s a bad thing.  I’m trying to meditate to shut it off a little.

But back to Phil...what a voice.  It’s like a bird of silk and chocolate and clouds.  I watched a documentary on him once.  He went to Africa to help with relief and protests and was robbed and had his throat trampled on--changing his vocal chords forever.  I cry when I hear Phil sing.

I weep for tomorrow, for the day hearts are as tender as mine are right now.  Doesn’t Lenny live here anymore?  Emma’s house is empty, so why do I call it Emma’s house?  Down low, too slow.

Are you sure?  Are you sure?

[thankyoustu]

Grand Funk Railroad - “Crossfire”

June’s Tunes tape

Somehow Stuart always knows just what to put on a tape for me.  June’s Tunes is a real driver’s jam--a 70′s full-throttle version of one dharma bum’s summer road trip through rural America.  (Because nihilism and zen are strangely compatible.)  And maybe that’s just where my head is lately. At the end of last June, one of my oldest and closest friends (who also happens to be a distant cousin) died suddenly.  He went to sleep and never woke up--an enlarged heart, they say.  He was only 33 years old--a little over a month younger than me.  He’d just married his girlfriend of several years in October 2014, and she was 7 weeks pregnant with their baby when he passed. I can’t really explain the sadness I feel about losing him.  Although his death hasn’t been as difficult for me as losing my father, in the aftermath of both losses I’ve come across moments where the realization that I don’t have a dependable male presence in my life leaves me feeling bereft, angry, bitter, and overall untethered.   Daddy was always someone I could rely on, and when he passed away, I had no solid man in my life.  No broad shoulders and arms to crumple and cry into.  Several people who I’d looked to for support seemed to draw away from me slowly yet quite deliberately.  When friends leave you standing in the shadows of your loss, you hit a wall.  You find out who your real friends are, as they say, and usually the damage is irreparable.   Whether it’s death or emotions that some people just can’t deal with or the deep and intrinsic tragedy that lives in the soul of a rural southern girl like me, I do not know.  I have, however, found that being southern and from the country is often viewed as a novelty.  That is, until you peel back the funny stereotypes and finally discover that being “country” means a lot more than being “nature-wise” or “cutely ignorant.”  For me it means being full of tragedy.  Sometimes I feel like I carry more lives inside me than Spoon River Anthology.   Southern, country, rural:  Hollywood loves to capitalize on it, cutting-edge “artists” seek to exploit it, and most people enjoy doting on the popularized darlingness of it--but few want to marry it.  (And by marry it, I mean integrate it.  And by marry it, I mean marry it, too.)  As Stu says, “Too highbrow for the lowbrow and too lowbrow for the highbrow.”  But it’s actually more than that, too--something beyond being southern, rural, and country among the intelligentsia and in return, being sensitive and smart amidst the hoi polloi.  It’s like being alien.  It’s like having an interior state, a dark continent, that is disappearing as fast as the last rural outposts of America.  Loneliness is illness.  Sorrow is sickness.  Kill it.  Extinguish it.  Take a pill for it, and for god’s sake, don’t talk about it.  Get as far away from it as fast as you can, too.  Nobody wants to be contaminated.     Years ago I’d moved home to help take my Dad to chemotherapy.  I was also at the end of a nearly two-year stint as a vagabond and really had nowhere else to go.  I was completely broken inside.  My cousin (who I’d known my entire life, went to church with, went to kindergarten thru 12th grade with, went to the prom with...hell, I was the first person to get him drunk) lived down the road from my parents.  When things got too heavy at home, I’d walk over to his house.  We’d have some beers, pass the peace pipe, and shoot the shit.  He played the guitar, and I’d call out classic rock songs for him to jam.  We’d talk about old times and people from our past.  We shared a lot of the same memories.  He’d even buy my beer and cigarettes at the general store--just so it didn’t get back to my parents that I was purchasing such ungodly material.  (I was nearly 30 at the time, if that tells you anything about how small, rural, and Christian my hometown is.)  My cousin also took me out to the only bar around (Swampy Tonk) and paid for buckets of beer.  Although my parents weren’t exactly thrilled about me going to the juke, I guess they felt like I was safe with family so they didn’t make too much fuss.  I was going through a horrible break-up--one that took me years to recover from.  My ex was constantly calling me and harassing me, asking if I still loved him and then threatening suicide.  He was pushing me to the edge nearly every week--all while I was watching my Dad get pumped with radioactive drugs for his mystery disease.  (They weren’t yet using the “c” word.)  I had already fallen apart and even the tiniest pieces of myself seemed to crumble as I tried to bring them back together again.   Those evenings of classic rock strumming on my cousin’s trailer steps, starry nights riding to Swampy Tonk in his jeep, and afternoons of drinking High Life down by the creek saved me.  My cousin was my original friendboy, and he totally saved my life.  If I hadn’t had him those days, I don’t know who I’d be now.  I could always rely on him, and now he’s gone.  He’s why Grand Funk Railroad’s “Crossfire” really gets to me lately.  It’s all proto hair metal bearded melodies with mullet-ed Southern rock.  It’s all muscle tees and lifting weights.  It’s all cheese but with real heart.  I can’t help but think of my cousin.  He had a bar band called Stray Bullet.   He was a body builder, and I used to go to the high school gym and exercise while he and his brothers trained.  They’d listen to hair metal, chew creatine gum, and yell at each other.  He had a Corvette he had to get rid of or he was “going to kill himself” driving too fast.  When my lame high school boyfriend wouldn’t take me to my senior prom, he did.  When I wanted beer and cigarettes, he bought them.  When I needed to cry about some stupid boy, he let me.  And when my Dad was dying and I was back living at home again and feeling pathetic, he was there.          

[thankyoustu]

Blue Oyster Cult - "Then Came the Last Days of May"

August Ending tape

Summer comes on steady now, here in Florida.  Each day the temperature seems to go up a degree or three.  The humidity rises and late spring’s heady blooms cloy in the cool of the evening.  Now is a dreamy time to remember so many inaugurations of summers past and to get your head right with cheap beer, weed cookies, and sinkhole dips.   I can’t think of a heavier burner for these mercilessly hot days than Blue Oyster Cult’s “Then Came the Last Days of May.”  The sonic airiness of the drums and shimmery, easy blues guitar along with those haunting vocals always seem to satisfy my mood in multiple modes of heat hazed, smoked out, beer buzzed, and in the throes of summertime nostalgia.  The song describes the sultry beginnings of a hot summer, three life-long buddies, and a drug deal gone wrong--it’s a sad track but something about it has that bittersweet lamentation of remembering past summers and the expansiveness of youth--of mourning a time that is gone. “Three good buddies were laughing and smoking in the back of a rented Ford...they couldn’t know they weren’t going far...”  I think of old summers back and old friends--some dead and gone now and some so markedly changed that the days of knowing them are almost equally dead and gone.   And I have to admit that the version of myself from those days is also gone--I’m not as effervescent as I was when I was young.  Tragedy has made me somewhat (to use a friend’s description) serene.  So this late May, I find myself house sitting in the same spot I stayed exactly five years ago.  Although a lot has changed since then, I sometimes believe I can glimpse--in the waves of sweat and smoke, music and jasmine--the me of a parallel time.  Coupled with the fact that I am now--yet again--living in the same neighborhood I did before beginning my 7-year journey of self-dislocation from any sort of conformist and reasonable lifestyle reality, my mind is really blown with deja vu.  I look over my shoulder for the visage of my 27 year-old self.  Then I wonder where to look for a premonition of 46 year-old me.  I reason that if this mood enables a sense of peering into the past, then so too perhaps is the future’s veil thin and yielding. Yet I even venture back into my teen youth lately, too.  I think of my good friend--a cousin--who’s been gone for about a year now.  He’d buy my beer and cigarettes for me so my parents wouldn’t find out--to protect my reputation.  In his truck, he’d drive us through the woods at night--sober while we got totally lit--down to the clay pits and on the banks of the Chipola.  We all felt so limitless back then--limitless and restless and breathing deep the summer night air.  We had our little dreams and hopes and fears and yet we weren’t really ready to grow up.  We just wanted to have a good time and get started.  But like those buddies in the back of the rented Ford, my friends and I couldn’t have known how far we’d go.  You never believe it will all end when you’re there, when you’re in it.     

[stargazertrail]

Stuart’s pasture and oak trees.  Long exposure of landscape on a full moon.  Tallahassee, Florida.

Permanent Tourists.

My friends and I would often go frolic with our music guru Stuart during a full moon.  He plays cool records for us, we have some beers, and then we run around like wild children on his family property–part of which has a small forest of intentionally planted oak trees.  His father planted the trees in the hopes of selling them one day.  But they were left to grow, and now it has a miniature enchanted forest.  I took this picture on one summer full moon.   

[stargazertrail]

Colleen in Stuart’s enchanted forest, two long exposures.  Tallahassee, Florida.

Permanent Tourists.

Years ago when I first met Stuart, my friends and I would often frolic through (what-we-call) his enchanted forest.  It’s a cluster of intentionally planted oak trees neatly tucked into the corner of his family property–a dreamy place.  This afternoon I took some shots of my friend Colleen walking through the trees.  

[thankyoustu]

Mr. Fox -- “Mendle”

Isles II Tape

Piercing, witchy, intense as dark eyes, and heavy as settled cold, this track has a ferocity that any child of winter would understand.  Mr. Fox’s “Mendle” is British ballad meets acid test--otherwise the ultimate psyche folk jam.  When the track begins, the singer’s angelic voice and the mystical fifes allude to a gentle and demure, girlish beauty--a pastoral romance.     But there’s something more here--the funerary organ, the sibylline shift in the vocalist’s tone, those hollow ritual drums, that distorted and blown, heavy-ass psyche guitar--and then you realize that it’s charged with feminine rage. “Lucy she smiled as she heard the stars sing. And her hand it was warmed by her zodiac ring. Lucy she smiled, thought no more of the day. Wondered why her body felt colder than clay.” I’ve been researching the idea of feminine rage lately, how it’s almost always portrayed as self-destructive behavior, and that women tend to turn their rage inward and implode.  But I think it’s actually manifested in more ways than that.  Feminine rage is psychic rage, eye daggers, and the enduring will.  More than passive aggressive behavior and nice/ nasty etiquette, a woman’s scorn is of conjuring and cursing.  When she feels deep anger, a woman can cling to it like belief.  She’s devoted to it. She preservers, and she is patient.  She waits. Feminine rage may be the most common incarnation of psychic energy. Throughout our lives, we women are affected by unseen biological factors. That is why I feel that ladies are predisposed to be more open to the supernatural.  Intuition, premonitions, dreams:  I think we’re in touch with that which resides just below the surface of reality.  But intuition is a muscle--you have to use it or it will shrivel up and stop working.  And of course, emotions can get in the way... To get back to the jam, the lyrics of “Mendle” seem to suggest a story of the sexual assault and murder of a lady named Lucy.  And yet the music of “Mendle”--that fuzzed out bad ass guitar--hearkens to innocence transposed, those vengeful remnants brought about by the exchange of one ghost for another.  A determined harbinger, she (like Bloody Mary) will claw her nails to bloody stumps to come back, or (like Beloved) will transverse the thickest woods on foot to return.  Feminine rage is innocence transposed, and nothing is stopping her.   And maybe feminine rage isn’t necessarily self-destructive.  Maybe it’s more nihilistic than anything else.  After all, a tendency toward self-destruction is certainly a component of not-giving-a-fuck.  Yesterday, I had thought of a girl I knew who killed herself at the beginning of 2013.  I didn’t know her very well, but she was a strange creature--demure and tiny, ethereally feminine.  I never thought she’d kill herself or do it the way she did.  A few days after the New Year, at 11 am she drove to the top of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, set her car on fire, and then jumped to her death.   Sometimes the pain and rage consume you.  You fall into it as easily as meeting the crashing wave at your back.  Rage can be as cacophonous and lulling as the static in your head before you turn in your soft bed and submit to sleep.  The world might see self-destruction, but women feel submission, being consumed, devoured, and veiled.   “Mendle” exercises some of these dark feelings in me.  I tend to turn that guitar line up as high as possible in the car, on my stereo, and in my headphones.  I don’t really care how it kind of hurts my ears and is probably fucking up my speakers.  I need that noise to envelope me, to swallow me up and take my thoughts away from the rage and all the anxiety and guilt I feel about that rage.  No sex, no drugs (well, maybe a few), and no dare-deviling kicks.  Just noise.     

[thankyoustu]

Crazy Horse - “All the Little Things”

September Salad tape

So, I’ve stayed away from Thank You Stu for a while now.  I won’t go into all the reasons why, but each time I’d begin to blog a song, I’d be pissed or sad or just generally negative.  I’m still working through all of that, but I keep thinking that I really do need get back to our conversation.  Don’t you?   The music’s been flowing--thanks be to Stuart--and I’ve had a lot of epiphanies in the ebbs and wakes.  Thoughts and feelings grow and fill-out like ripe fruit, like babies in the womb.  Giving birth to these new awakenings is damn painful, but I do realize that I’m gaining strength. Crazy Horse’s “All the Little Things” is a sexy, brooding, straight burner--gliding me through all the new chagrin.  The piano drives.  The guitar totally wails.  For a minute, I might believe it’s Neil Young playing.  The drums never let up (and thank fuck for that).  It’s so moody and cool and melodic and tense with desire and pain--it’s like a hot guy that you know is so bad for you.  The sex is amazing, but he’s probably on his way to life in prison. “All the Little Things” finds me sleepy-eyed and heavy-hearted, cool and disaffected speeding down back roads and squinting under the nighttime neon and fluorescent of gas stations and drug stores.  I’m a little stoned and half-dreaming.  I feel the song move right through me like the hard rushing air off an eighteen wheeler.  The trains that pass through this town go right through my chest, right through the sore rims of an empty hole in me.  It’s been here for a while.  I know the hole quite well.   Lately, in the aftermath of intermittent tears, I grope for the memory of a sensation of having breathed in water--a feeling that reminds me of childhood days spent swimming all day.  Maybe I seem a little dramatic, but in my daily life, I often come off as quite stoic.  Moments when people think I should be emoting, somehow I’m not.  When my Dad died, I ended up crying in the grocery store and while ordering a hamburger.  “Yes,” sniff, “I’d like french fries, please.”  And in the midst of all these changes, people I’ve known for years, lifetimes even, seem to evaporate.  Some have died, others have burned the bridge between us, and most have just fallen off into silence.  In turn, old and a few new friends have rallied around me.  I feel really lucky, because now is the time I seem to need them most.  “Do you need a friend to stand by ‘til the end?  When you get there, you know you get to start all over again.”

[stargazertrail]

Come to my first ever photo show for First Friday (and the day after) in Railroad Square.  I’m so pleased to be showing with two amazing local photographers:  Cindy Miller and Al Hall.  Libations, treats, and screen printed t-shirts!  Soundtrack by Tallahassee record collector and guru Stuart Fletcher.  Hope to see you there!