To Stacy Blair on P.F.S. Post

 

The love poem To Stacy Blair begins, of course, in Chicago, Illinois. Whatever else you might say about a piece supposed to be that intimate, I can only say that Stacy, who was a critical genius, remains the number one reader of my books, even now. There are top tier reviews I've received as substantial by other people; but nobody means it like Stacy does. And the many letters she wrote me did break my heart. After that, it's all best left to the imagination. Except to say that, in a way experiences can have of marking or not marking an individual, I was, indeed, marked by the time I spent in Chicago and the Midwest in the Aughts. The world I felt open up then was about boundlessness, and about dreams coming true. A poet who was truly on the road, was always who I wanted to be. When I walked around the Loop, or hung out in bars in Bucktown, it was not worth questioning anymore whether I was on the road. I was. Chicago and the Midwest will always mean the road to me. Maybe an uncommon association (nowhere near New York, where I also did plenty of road-time, or San Francisco, where I did not), but so what. And To Stacy Blair brings home to roost that most effectual time I spent on the road, with the most sense of hinges to the roads that are, or could be, the eternal ones. So, the poem linked here is one I began in the late Aughts and never finished. In 2026, it's now finished, ready to be aired. 

So its been: Chicago, a road-place for me, by which I was marked, among others, also of mine: New York, New England, Central Pennsylvania, Montreal. A quirky map, to be sure. And other places that might need to be rejuvenated at any moment: Pittsburgh, Florida, New Jersey. Back to Chicago, and the sense that through the latest two rewrites here presented in The Stacy Saga, I've done justice to everything Chicago meant to me in the Aughts. Also an acknowledgement, especially regarding Pittsburgh, that there must be more work to be done, because roads can develop out of old situations, and time creates strange loops whereby time past that wasn't, or didn't seem, relevant, imposes on time present to revivify, reinstate, even electrify it into awareness. So we can all live and die as Emperors of Eternity. Also noting that the summer of 2026 for me was about time loops. The Time Warp. And if the process of creating time loops does have Rocky Horror-ish dimensions (come up to the Lab, and see what's on the slab), it is amazing to me that time, which is really only matter eternally changing form (there is no time) really can be looped, and moments exist inside each other in uncanny ways. 

Different kinds of Frequencies

John Tranter takes a crack at mid-Aughts Henniker, gets tangled up in blue. 

And back to Frequencies.

Stewart Home (UK): Mini-Manifesto

 

I’ve had some really good times in the U.S., but I don’t want to go there anymore (or at least not until there is at the very least some regime change). I have loads of American friends and I’d love to go visit them, but right now I can’t. I know there is a huge difference between Americans and the U.S. government. Most Americans I know (whether from north, south, or central America) oppose the world wide terror operations of the Bush administration. We’re not just talking about invasions and occupations, but kidnappings, torture, detentions, and executions. The American government is the largest and easily the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world, and one of only a few (the British government is another) with access to weapons of mass destruction. There aren’t many places in the world I wouldn’t visit, but the idea of going to the U.S.A. right now really frightens me. So seeing people organize against war and terror in the U.S. (that is, against the Bush government and its policies) is important to me: and I am seeing that on the web and elsewhere. So all I really wanted to say to those doing this is “keep on keeping on,” because the world needs a real movement against terror. Terrorism is always elitist and “Vanguardist.” Bush and Bin Laden need each other but we don’t need either of them or what they stand for. Only non-hierarchical mass movements can make this world a better place. We need to rediscover our humanity together. And in opposing terrorism we need to focus on the biggest and most dangerous terrorists: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and their cronies.

© Stewart Home 2006

Adventures in Weightlifting

 

Brian Freedman read Adventures in Weightlifting as part of the This Charming Lab reading at Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus on March 27, 2004.

Logic plays a role that is best described as supporting in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy; and when hormones are thrown into the mix, there’s just no telling what sort of strange things might happen. This most unfortune fact of teenage life now manifested itself in an ugly, and ultimately uncomfortable way. I awoke the day of the concert with a jolt. My eyes snapped open to glimpse a world grown suddenly urgent in light of the dream I had just suffered through. In it, Ali and I were sitting at the concert with Sylvester Stallone, who had somehow gotten hold of her third ticket. And despite the truly studly outfit I was wearing, she spent the entire showing hanging onto his left biceps, staring into his hangdog eyes, and asking if they could take a shower together. In the background, the New Kids played only one song, and not even one they wrote— Berlin’s "Take My Breath Away," a tune made famous in one of the biggest hits of the Eighties (Top Gun).

It all made sense, of course. The scene in that movie that all the women in the entire world— or, actually, solar system— were talking about, was the one in which Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis made slow-motion love, on her perfectly disheveled sheets, as that song drones on in the background. And in that scene, there is a lingering shot of Tom’s arms, as he lowers himself on top of Ms. M, with a grace and slowness that would’ve been worthy of an East German Olympic gymnast. I now realize that this was a manifestation of issues I had with myself, with my own 105 pound frame; but at the time, at that first event-date time, I knew only one thing— I had to get bigger, bulked up, by the time that evening rolled around.

After I got out of bed, I ate, and worked out, and ate some more, and worked out some more, and repeated the process far too many times to count— against everything I knew, against everything my father had taught me about weightlifting. The post-dream desperation had clouded my vision so much, as had actually caused me to believe that I could bulk up to Stallone-like, or at least Cruise-like, proportions, in a matter of seven hours. The reality, though, was much more embarrassing. “Bri,” my Mom called up at about three in the afternoon, “are you in the bathroom again?” “Yeah,” I shouted weakly, breathlessly, “I’ll be down in a minute.” I was dying, I thought. Had I known the word cholera, I’m sure it would’ve crossed my mind. My stomach was tied into enough knots to make an Eagle-scout proud. My muscles were fatigued to the point of near-paralysis. And in two hours, I had a date!

Great planning— I had spent the entire morning and early afternoon cramming as much protein-rich food down my gullet as possible, hoping that at least some of it would find it’s way to my unacceptably small biceps and pecs. But there was no such luck in the offing that day, and those cans of tuna had found there way through my system and right into the toilet. Combine that with three full-blown work-outs, and my body was staging what felt like a coup d’etat against itself. Three flushes later, I somehow made my way to my room, got hold of the date outfit I had used on the previous year’s excursion to the movies with a girl named Alannah (stone-washed jeans, button-down Bugle Boys shirt, black penny-loafers), and limped my way down the stairs, bow-legged.

“Don’t say a word,” I said to my father as I walked past him in the living room. He was shaking his head and snorting silently. He didn’t have to say anything— I knew what was implied. He was right. “Have fun,” he said in a mocking sing-song. As I walked towards the kitchen, the sound of a horn echoed from the driveway.

© Brian Freedman 2004

Stone the Devil

The Twenties for me started exactly when they were supposed to: January 2020. It so happens that that month, Speck released the acid-jazz track Stone the Devil. The piece features a fragment from Stoning the Devil, which came out on Synch Chaos yesterday. All the musical issues behind acid-jazz are built into Stone the Devil, as is the sense that this is a creepy version of acid-jazz, and also one with resonance towards cities, the urban, Center City and West Philadelphia for example, or Los Angeles, where Speck is partly from. Not that I can forget the night in January 2020 when I had the song in my head as I crossed the bridge from West Conshohocken back into Conshohocken, onto Fayette Street. And Stone the Devil, with other tracks from the CC Mixter crew, have seen some reasonable chart action around the Net, and enfranchisement onto the Acid Dropping EP. The early Twenties for me were partly about this issue: here's what to do if they use you in music. To the extent that I've flexed what muscle I have in the direction of the CC Mixter tracks, I've also, as someone mostly self-taught who plays and writes rock music, learned how much I don't know. And the eerie glow of Stone the Devil rings down the ages, from This Charming Lab into the Twenties, about sophistication and sophisticated marriages of literature and music, and about the possibility of new, attendant worlds opening up all the time. 

Dominique and Stoning the Devil

Dominique and Stoning the Devil, which debuted at This Charming Lab at KWH in 2004, on Synchronized Chaos. Many thanks to Cristina Deptula.

Ode On Jazz

 

Ode On Jazz sashays onto WXPN on Live at the Writers House 46

Ode On Jazz gets frisky next to Dominique at This Charming Lab

Ode On Jazz takes to the Midwest and the graininess of Myopic

And grooves back into its typographically clean home-place on P.F.S. Post