Two Of Us: You and I Have Memories

Some kind of light by your side.

Well, Kent, this would be about the time we'd stop doing whatever we weren't supposed to be doing and settle down to sleep. That meant music. We listened to everything together, even after we wound up on two sides of a room divider, the green from the stereo the only light. We listened to a little of it all in there--Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding, Ozzy/Sabbath, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, The Commodores, Boston, Blondie, Rush, the Clash, Van Halen, Rickie Lee Jones and the Pretenders--everything we knew back then. 

You didn't like some of the old music punk turned me toward, and I didn't follow you far down the jam band road, but we shared embryonic bonds. Though we could never really talk about it (it wouldn't occur to us to talk about that), I think we thought through a lot of our identities in that room. We grew into the odd ducks we were out of that quiet time together. 

That time that would start just about now. I was generally in charge of the stereo (the first one was on my side, lol), and I remember picking things you'd want to hear as we worked on getting sleepy. I knew every time I could go to Ian Hunter's "You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic" and the Grateful Dead's "Terrapin Station." 

And we would both always go for some Beatles. That started back when we first met, me 11/you 9, and the Beatles were the great inheritance from my older brother we bonded fullest over together. Most nights, I believe that meant "Abbey Road." 

 Last time I saw you I told you to watch the Scorsese Grateful Dead documentary. I don't know if you did. You wouldn't have learned as much from it as I would have anyway. You lived half that story. 

 But this Beatles "Get Back" thing? That would have been something to blow both our minds. (We simply would not have believed such a thing could exist back then in that room at 5809 Meadowcrest.) And though it's a movie about the "Let It Be" sessions, they play at least ten songs that would appear on "Abbey Road." And though many of those songs would be only fragments on "Abbey Road," they're equal to every other fledgling song idea during these sessions. 

So, you remember how we loved "Polythene Pam"? Well, instead of one minute woven into a suite, it becomes the whole song we always wanted it to be as kids. 

No, it's no longer. John doesn't play any more of it....

But he doesn't know he won't write it into a full song yet, and, because that's true, we hear it now always wanting to be that unwritten song.

Plotting something together

So I'm writing you in this week of my world remembering the Beatles because I want to sit on the side of the bed with you again and listen together again. I mean, I'm doing it with you in my mind now, just the way you were back then. I'm realizing you've always been there because we shared so much time in that stereo's green light. 

 One of the things I think is truly great about this new Peter Jackson "Get Back" thing is that it gets at that passion of playing music as brothers. And I don't mean because we banged around on some guitars at times. It was really the joy that made us want to do that. It was sitting in the darkness sharing that journey into sound. It was sometimes catching each other's eyes when we heard something really great. Just before we drifted off, in the dark staring at the ceiling, it was that quiet remark, a "that right there" and a "yeah" from the other side of the room. 

 And one reason that focus on the shared experience matters so much is that this movie emphasizes the community in music. Elsewhere, that last part of the Beatles career is torn up by individualistic interpretations, simply because the family was growing up and apart, a natural process. That's one way to look at all our stories, and that's what you and I were doing, playing music together from the ages of 9 to 17.

It was also the time of our greatest bonding. 

Living in this world, we lost touch some over the years, for all kinds of reasons, but we always felt the deepest love when we were together. The kind of bond you see in this band in this movie, it stands out to me as John Lennon bouncing on his toes; George Harrison asking Paul what he thinks of a line; Paul banging drums and climbing rafters, letting himself be the silliest of all; Ringo defending the band's togetherness, saying, "You don't know that; you're surmising because we got grumpy with each other. We've been grumpy for 18 months." 

That part's about grief over Brian Epstein's death. That part, like so many, reminds me of that night after Dad died--you, me and James partying in the kitchen, taking turns deejaying YouTube. Your idea, and it worked--grief made raucous and joyful.

"Get Back" is about grief, certainly, but it's about grief in such a full, round way. It's about the music and the love where I live with you now, my dear brother. I linger more and more over the meaning of those memories that will always be "longer than the road that stretches out ahead." Physically, I'm walking that road without you now, but you've never been more constant in my heart. 

Thank you for everything, Kent, and thank you for sharing all those musical journeys with me. This is the heart of what that movie shows that makes me think of you--music is about "we" and how "we" come together. In a world where "I," "Me" and "Mine" are the most popular brands, it's such a gift to have learned together the importance of that collaborative beat, that dialogue and that harmony.

Oh, and the laughter. There's so much of that here, heartfelt, filling in all the gaps...just as there was, always, with us.... Just as there is in the smiles when I think of you now.

Letting Go, Arms Open: Horror Stories and the Reason for the Season

 "This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects --no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story...."

"The Portent of the Shadow," by E. Nesbit (published 1905)

 Since I turned, say, ten and was too old to trick or treat anymore, and since my best friend Scot and I gave up throwing our own spook houses at….lemme guess….thirteen, I think my favorite Halloween activity has been handing out candy. Nothing else quite gets to the heart of the matter. I have some friends who watch trick or treaters from the window of a local haunt; that’s probably very similar.

Me, a lover of horror movies and fiction of all kinds can’t even pick out a movie. Sure, I roll the classics on the TV, but that’s just background music. Almost every horror movie director since George Romero has “Night of the Living Dead” playing on TVs in their films as a shortcut that captures fragments of a sensibility, a feel.  

At this precise moment each year, no particular story can get at the whole of what brings so many of us together. This contemplation of the thin line between life and death connects the cultures of ancient Celtics, Romans, Persians, Aztecs and Pacific Islanders. It's a sensibility many stories reach for but few maintain for long. It’s about a feeling not far removed from the feeling of Christmas Eve, rooted in ancient winter solstice celebrations. It makes sense that many of our ghost story traditions began on that colder night at the end of the year.

Some aspect of that quiet connection between worlds is what I’ve often chased when I write stories, and it started with the family ghost stories. After all, the first storyteller who had me on the edge of my seat was my grandmother. She was my Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson long before she read them to me.

This is all on my mind because, recently, I’ve been seriously trying to sell one of my novels to a publisher. Agents ask interesting questions. I’m learning how the business works. But what I want to sell doesn’t have a whole lot to do with business, and when I’m asked what genre I write none of the answers seem adequate.

Here’s the honest truth: when I’m asked to pick a genre for my fiction, and the pull-down tab says “literary” or “commercial” or “horror” or “magic realism” or “offbeat/quirky” or “contemporary” or “multicultural” or “fantasy” or “mystery” or “thriller” or “speculative,” I want to say “all of the above.” None of it seems adequate. I spend most of my time writing about multicultural and contemporary social and political issues, and those dialogues are filled with fantasy, mystery, speculation, suspense, and horror. All of that’s in my fiction and most fiction that interests me. I would love to reach a large audience (i.e. commercial), but my aims are no lesser than whatever anyone regards as “literary.” 

I’ve never stuck to one genre in my reading or my writing, but I do know my default reading for pleasure comes under the banner “horror.” Now, if only anyone agreed what that meant.... Here’s my crack at a definition for what I mean, strongly suggested by the Edith Nesbit quote above. 

My childhood play

Ghost story is my favorite term for horror, but to the extent that it’s about real-life horror, it’s also fantasy. It is a magic realism, a surrealism. I remember H.G. Wells (who gave us "The Invisible Man" and "War of the Worlds") once writing that fantasy was 98% reality. That makes sense to me. We must believe in the "real" world of the story to be awe-struck by the fantastic in that world, to feel the thin line between the worlds in the fiction and the thin line between those worlds and ours. 

That said, the unreality is crucial. Horror strives for the unreal to strike us deeper. It's unreal in a way I think allows it to engage us precisely at the subconscious levels where we might otherwise defend ourselves. If the monster tried to be real, we'd fight, explain it away or say it's unconvincing. This unreality is part of why I think horror prose is more unsettling than any movie—the realistic pretense relies entirely on the reader working with the writer to create worlds. The writer and the reader are playing make believe together. 

Many of my favorite artists are sensitive to their audience (arguably, to a fault) because they care so much about the art being more than a spectacle, instead being a dance with the audience. In the case of horror, that dance attacks your reason, your certainty, your security.

It's asking you to let go of a framework of thinking, hoping you'll find another, but meanwhile it leaves you teetering at the precipice, open, unsure. 

Personally, I think that open, unsure pause is a good way to approach whatever you do—whether it’s writing about music or listening to your loved ones. That’s a piece of what my grandma taught me when she told those old stories, and it’s a torch I carry. Halloween night, when I see kids running and jumping and screaming from house to house in anonymity compounded by darkness, they remind me of what made the night so thrilling when I was their age. I get a sort of contact high. 

Of course, there’s a thrill just opening that door. You never really know who or what’s waiting on the other side.

The beautiful grands

Erica, Steve and The Saints of Lost Causes

11 years. The days fell the same this weekend.

You reached out that Friday afternoon to tell me you were sorry about abandoning our friendship, and you wished my new family well.

I saw Steve Earle this Friday, what a strange, oddly perfect connection. He played songs from "Ghosts of West Virginia," about the 29 miners killed the spring before you died, the worst mine disaster in 40 years. He made the audience sing along to "Union, God and Country," warning us if we didn't sing people were liable to think we were scabs.

This would have made you laugh. I remember how you cheered him on when he shared his politics before "Devil's Right Hand," "Billy Austin," or even "The Revolution Starts Now."

Then he sang "Far Away In Another Town," "The Saint of Lost Causes" and "Harlem River Blues" from his "J.T." album. That brought everything home. "The Saint of Lost Causes" seemed to me the highlight of one of the best shows I've seen from him ever, a show that never let up to its closing cover of "Rag Mama Rag."

But the band sounded bigger than ever on "The Saint of Lost Causes," full and haunting and ominous. Steve never sounded better either. Nothing felt tossed off. He sang every note like he meant it.

And that thing about wolves and shepherds and who's killed more sheep. You and I would have talked about that, better now than in the past.

I guess we are now, the only way we can.

Sunday, Monday and today were all more tough anniversaries from that same terrible weekend. It felt like it was all falling this way for a reason, or at least I'm going to make reason of it. That's my job. In many ways, you taught me just how important that job is. Whether or not our conversation could have shifted to one with a little more hope now only matters in the way I deal better with others going forward.

Meanwhile, I continue to grieve, but I'm determined to do it differently. My dad and I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico to hear a man named Stephen Jenkinson talk about death when my father knew he was in his last year. I went looking for a quote from Jenkinson that I carry with me often, one about grief being the love for that which has passed from view.

I found another one by accident, and it speaks to how I'm looking at this anniversary. “Grief is not a feeling; it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you. We are not on the receiving end of grief; we are on the practising end of grief.”

When I was facing disability twenty years ago, you helped me fight my way forward. Maybe I did something like this a time or two for you. I hope so. Either way, your memory shows me what you always showed me--possibility, a way to rise, a way to be more fully me, and a way to fight.

That was a fine band the other night. You should have heard fiddler Eleanor Whitmore sing "If I Could See Your Face Again." I can see yours--watching her, listening, loving music in a way very particular to you.

It was a concert made for you. And it was a concert made for me, BC and Ben, all the more grateful we still have one another after all these years . . . me all the more grateful for you.

Twelve Years Ago and Today, Knox Family's "In These Streets"

Knox Family's 2009 EP

Twelve years ago, I wrote this about a single as vital today as it was then.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74D_TC1tthk

Single-Minded, “In These Streets”  

                Maybe it’s because the percolating bass and percussive claps at the beginning of this record call to mind the funk that would prefigure hip hop, but it’s not a hip hop record I first think of when the Knox Family’s “In These Streets” comes on. It’s not a funk record either, although the band I’m thinking of was certainly influenced by both funk and early hip hop. The Clash’s “Somebody Got Murdered” wells up out of my subconscious the moment MC Jerm raps “Yo man, I don’t think they heard you” and a voice cries out in the dark, “a murder!”

                And that makes sense. A big part of the Clash’s appeal was a bracing honesty that confronted the walls that keep us apart. Seattle’s The Knox Family takes us from behind any four walls we might like to think protect us and out into the darkness to confront reality. Toni Hill’s beautiful vocal is key to the intimacy of that journey as she reminds us, “Somebody’s praying in these streets/somebody’s dying in these streets/somebody’s hustling in these streets” and then takes it all in her immediate embrace with, “Somebody’s singing for you and me.”  

Toni Hill's 2008 "Only Love"

                The rest of the record goes further into the muck and mire that’s the current human condition.  Most important?  The light it shines.

                In verse one, Julie C’s sassy and knowing rhymestyle catalogues a mind-numbing list of offensives in the “all out war against poor populations,” including intimidation tactics carried out by everyone from the FCC to the beat cop,  gang legislation, privatized prisons and deaths caused by “non-lethal” weapons.  This verse and the second are rapped against sirens that spiral between the left and right channels of the speakers and another voice in the night, making an unclear sound but plainly in distress….  Somebody hustling or somebody dying.

                And then Hill sings again, backed by a 5 note key progression that mines the same territory Timbaland’s been working lately but suggests a bigger, explicit dream— hope for every voice that currently goes unheard and faith in those voices to change the world.

  

Julie C's 2011 "Sliding Scale"

              Julie C’s second verse starts at the heights of Wall Street  and follows the “global economic collapse.”  She somehow hits on all of it, from the political stakes that lead to bank bailouts to the foreclosure of the homes of those small enough to fail. Before she’s finished, Julie C describes a globalized war between the rich and the poor.

                With the stakes this high, Hill begins to tic off more of what “singing for you and me” means—“we gotta get together/’cause we need/ to heal the sick and hopeless/yes, indeed/to strive for peace and justice/equality/love for you and me.” With keys washing in behind her, Hill’s voice grows more reassuring and inspiring as she touches on each key to the future. 

    The third and final verse starts after the record’s turned the corner toward a fade out. Julie C raps a sign off and then, like James Brown throwing off his cape, she launches into, “Yo, violence is a symptom not the disease.” The dissonant sirens are gone now, replaced by flute-like keys and more percussion including high hat and snappy wood block beats. Something’s different about this last highly charged verse, though the signs stay grim, “Why is the city of Seattle dropping another 110 million to open a new jail we don’t need, while the district can’t even find a measly 3.6 to keep our schools from closing?”

                And this cape-dropping allows for a new intimacy. This last verse feels like an urgent whisper being passed on a streetcorner.  “Want to know what’s really going on?” Julie C asks.  “Just follow the paper trail to downtown Olympia, Wall Street, D.C./As long as poverty pimps keep profiting from our problems/We can’t wait for change/We gotta create our own solutions/Straight from the peoples’ movement.”

                And with that, the Knox Family’s debut Ep is out. It’s the end of a rich record, though only 7 full tracks long. From the opening “Make Love,” DJ B-Girl has produced a great party record with a laid back, minimalist style that always manages to use its playful, frenetic beats in fresh, surprising ways— part West Coast gangsta, part crunk and part old school hip hop.  But it’s also, consistently, a series of statements of strength, unity and solidarity. “In These Streets” is the perfect ending, justifying all the bold claims that come before.

                But it’s more than that.  It’s a singular piece of revolutionary art unlike anything else.  It’s the blues of “The Message” wedded to a concrete basis for political unity.  And it’s a spiritual, with Toni Hill’s refrains insisting that the human spirit was made to fulfill our dreams.  It’s a song to suggest a new genre—not protest music so much as revolution rock—good for dancing, crying, shouting and even (especially?) blueprinting our dreams into reality.

For more information:   http://bgirlmedia.com/   

The Poor People's Army, present in this video as the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, is currently suing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), HUD secretary Marcia Fudge, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, HSBC Bank, Serrano Acquisitions LLC, the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia. The suit declares Housing as a Human Right and actively protects 30 families occupying abandoned HUD properties, publicly owned housing, with an aim to not only occupy but improve those properties.

Learn more about the effort here: https://poorpeoplesarmy.com/