Others of us puzzle through, knowing sometimes rest is needed. The work is to rest — heat up some pasta, assemble a salad, read Matthew Ingram’s Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness, feel the heaviness of it weighing in the palm of one’s hand like a sentence, retreat from it into episodes of Adventure Time. Orange Juice sing “Rip it up and start again.” By that, they mean the past. I’m reminded of a line from Pharmako-AI where the book’s AI writes, “The past is mutable, and it can be remade in our image as we desire” (26). At which point I hear poet Joy Harjo adding, “At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge” (Poet Warrior, p. 20). John Cale’s “Paris 1919” serenades me to where I think the implications of this are leading me. “You’re a ghost, la-la-la-la-la-la-la,” sings Cale. And reader, I feel it. This ghosting. It takes the royal promise of Adventure Time’s “Island Song (Come Along With Me)” to cheer me. Loneliness is hard.
Tag: John Cale
After Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground
Yea, and I rise—
no grapes,
no gripes—
each breath an act of love.
Blacula (1972). Rocky Horror (1975). El Planeta (2021).
To our list, add Lou, too — his story eerily lesson-like, and relates —
though different, certainly, in its affect.
Gay nightclub noise bands formed
to silence Lou’s committee in head.
Enter John Cale, ex-Welshman
Radio tuned to foreign broadcast.
Out pops
“European Son.”
Artists escape to
New York at midcentury’s end.
42nd Street
Andy’s Film School
60s culture.
15-20 movie houses:
Here comes
new channels.
Here comes
LaMonte Young.
Very high spiritual states.
Long sustained tones.
Study of drone.
And along comes
Lou’s Syracuse buddy
Delmore Schwartz.
Add, too,
Jack Smith, Tony Conrad.
The drone of Western capitalism:
By Dream Syndicate Dazzled
By Dream We Dream
PS I LOVE YOU
To catch an evening screening of you, I hike downtown.
Seeming Lovers
ahead of me.
The Lovers
sit side by side
whispering in the dark.
“‘Tis my new favorite movie!” I tell myself:
made with masks all the more thrilling.
Plants kick in and
I relax,
Chasing happiness by my side.
Trance-Scripts 