The Goastt, Etc.

By Archie Von Rilke

Dateline: Louisville, KY, 6/21/14

It wasn't the most awesome concert experience I've been to, although one of the opening bands blew me away with their precision and professionalism.   The first band, sad to say, was a throwaway, a power trio of dirty hippies dressed like Pigpen, (think dirty cowboy hats, greasy jeans, and flannels) playing raunchy psychedelia...not much to report there, but they did have nice guitars, as compared to me (a shitty ol’ Gretsch with electrical problems, a borrowed Telecaster and a borrowed Breedlove C350) but sounded only slightly better then when Matt Atkins and I play.

Except between acts I saw and briefly met the man, Sean Lennon.  I’d read and seen his interviews, and never really knowing his music, invested a lot of preconcert time listening to his new album, Midnight Sun, and two previous albums, La Carotte Bleue and Friendly Fire.   His latest albums are with his well-practiced band, The GOASTT.  He was a nice guy.  Obviously exhausted but kind, graceful, honest.  That’s what I got for the handshake and my mild intrustion into Mr. Lennnon’s life as a working musician.

 As usual for these types of venues, there was lots of strong beer and the legendary Zanzabar Pizza... Hot out on the patio, broiling inside with all the human traffic:  die hard Beatles fans, lots of indie rockers, barflies, frat boys, and jocks from UL.  Tattoos galore.  A typical midwestern local music venue:  you can find these types of bars all the way fron Lexington to Dayton:  a small stage, a long bar, in a sketchy neighborhood.  I guess what might bother Lennon bothered me.  All the Beatle fans expecting the second coming.  I wanted to be amused and actually learn from this dude, his music, his way of playing.

 

In the middle of things, The most amazing band by far was the Richie White Orchestra, fronted by Cesar Padilla, with some help from Lydia Lunch.  Hard, punky, prog, driving and loud and mesmerizing.   Great songs like "Marlboro County" and "I Be Michael"...the best "local band" I've seen in ages. I don't wanna talk the band up too much here, but check them out on Facebook if you wish.  I also met Cesar during the break and he was puro superpadre tambien.

*            *           *            *          *

When The GOASTT went on stage in a quiet and breathless moment, they started into their new album without as much as blink...Lennon's and Muhl's vocal work and the sheer drive of the band pushed the audience right up to the sonic wall, producing near replicas from the album, Midnight Sun.  The space was small and crowded and noisy with not the best sound, yet they rocked it.    There were small jokes in between, a contest to identify an old Patsy Cline song,  and weird asides to Paul Getty--the subject of of the band's most interesting and sardonic songs.  I was wishing he'd do more from La Carotte Bleue, such as "2012," or early stuff from Friendly Fire, at least to cut back on the heavy intellectual psychedelics he offered.   I left with admiration, and was stunned by the energy of the band and their tight sound,  but I had some hard questions:  Why was the Richie White Orchestra so f'n good?   Why is any local music scene so rich with veritable unknowns?  I remembered I’d be playing in late July in a “jam band” that did full live renditions of THE LAST WALTZ.  As a poet, I’ve read for five for 500.  Swirling in my brain, the importance of Lennon’s work in the light of the singer/songwriter movement that took from American poetry its punch and its relevance. Shit.  I’d die to have that kind of talent as a lyricist.   What I really wanted to do.   What is the strength and depth of Lennon's oeuvre?  Is it "all too much?"  After listening to his early sentimental work, on Friendly Fire, can I find a balance between that and his new heavy, driving, symbolic, allegoric and metaphoric psychedelic explorations of our culture?

I have to admit I like sentimentality and insist that my students risk it in the stories and poems they write.  Sure it can be overdone and become maudlin or cloying.  But the brief exposure of the human soul, the artist's soul, is worth it.  I briefly felt that when I shook Mr. Lennon's hand.  I hear it in his songs, and sensed that, when he was on stage, even in that small hot tight venue, for all the genius of his songs, the deep and clever lyrics, the chord progressions so affirmative and revelatory.  I know there are some things any son cannot deny his father.  As undeniable as when my father's 84 year old sister says I walk, talk, act, and look just like my long lost father.

As Bob Seger said, the songs reach you at the end of evening, there in the hotel room, and you replay what you saw in your head until you sleep.  Dayton's a long way home and your travel has just begun.  The GOASTT cd?  It sits in a stack with all your faves on the back seat while the Replacements drive you home.

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Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: The Cast and Crew

The Things in Light Poetry Series continues to be a totally bitchin' phenomena; readers dig the hell out it. As we sift through submissions in order to bring you the best in new work from humanity's poetic representatives, we thought tonight's post should be a celebration of the amazing work we've already received. With that in mind, here are two new poems each by Ardith Brown and Albino Carrillo.

"Why this combination?" one might well ask. Well, as our managing editor explains it, the poets mentioned above and published below all had the same Shakespeare class together at UNM as undergrads. Our managing editor was there, too. The group of them performed a scene from Othello as an alternative to writing a midterm essay for the notoriously rigorous professor MacPherson. Those were halcyon days, a place to begin thinking about the power of words.

Tomorrow we begin the second chapter of the 2014 series with the poetry of Rebecca Aronson. Stay tuned.

Snake Farm

by Ardith Brown

Off an alley near the University

the dealer's younger brother says

my name sounds like a clipper

ship sailing away from the desert.   

He says Albuquerque needs more

boats, and I pretend to laugh when

he offers me a bump. His cocaine

eyes, wild and glassy-green, flitter

and pierce me like two snake fangs.

He grabs the twenty dollar bill

rolled up near the ashtray, licking

his tongue to rid his sticky

mouth of loose tobacco.

I am not the only girl surrounded

by snakes. Posters of boas adorn

airbrushed blonds, their huge breasts

weighing down the beige wallpaper.

Harley models writhe, their serpentine

guile strangled by itchy scales on waxy

lipstick smiles. Do you like snakes,

the dealer sneers as his brother

notices my brand new tan line.

He says I look sexy in turquoise.

I could run you up, if you want,

says the dealer on my next visit,

pointing toward a coiled up rubber

band next to his nudie magazines.

Instead I ask about the silver chopper

in the parched yard.  A large pit bull

is barking--its red eyes mad and bright--

at the new addition in his dusty,

weed-filled lot. The brother yells

shut up and asks if I want to ride.

Birds, San Antonio, 1992
by Ardith Brown

The wedding was not the apocalypse she imagined.  

Endtime, dystopia--call it what you will, but her dress

did not explode or combust. Late October was still hot in Texas.

Sweating through itchy lace, she could barely stand up for the vodka.

A marching band and jet fighters competed for the minister's voice,

but she wasn't interested in the Bible.  It was mostly exposition;  

anyway, she didn't quite believe. All the crystal and glitter

reminded her of discotheques on LSD, of tragic infernos,

sad Victorian women trapped in a muted Renoir.

She thought it unwise to get drunk at weddings,

but it was eighty degrees and the pressure was outrageous.

Booze wasn't sufficient to still the jackhammers fragmenting

her head; instead, she focused on the Virgin of Guadalupe

surrounded by roses and pink aura. Unusual to feel so totally clean.  

There would be friends and children, death and monsters,

days of confusion and depression, yet God would lower

her down soon, crush the hibiscus petals beneath her feet.

She wished for great flocks of grackles, their iridescent

bodies, black and shiny, whistling sharply to settle, settle.

But there were no birds. Silence wrecked her flight.  

Grass sparkled, but she wanted to forget the lawn,

how this night softened her own feathers, clipped her wings.

Married. Until today, time had worked against her--

distorted biological clocks. Grandmothers and aunts

hovered over the cake; small children danced.  

Odors of perfume and coffee smelled of hospitals

and unbearable civilization.  Now the bridesmaids

were poised, squirrels twitching, heart rates heightened,

each vying to catch the throwaway bouquet.

Momentarily she leaned toward the coast,

toward Corpus Christi and Galveston,

slouching a gray posture past the border all the way

down to the Gulf of Mexico where the water opened up,

a whale's mouth swallowing her delight.  Smells of salt

corrupted the reception, and out on the beaches the hotel lights

twinkled and blinked, calling her like diamonds on a neckline.

I lost hope.

I wanted do die right there.

I wanted to swim away and laugh,

an atheist at the coming of the Lord.

***

You Don't

by Albino Carrillo

You don't
Listen to the
Darkness eating
Me alive.  When
My bones shake
In the night.  When
The terror of my own
Death echoes like
A police baton
On my skull.  Even
The sun knows
My pain, why don't
You.  The easiest
Task is falling
Away into the
Antigravity that'll
Spin me away
Like a lousy planet.
The most difficult
Being just the
Utterance of one
Word.  Whether
I can dance
I'm the morning.

On the Death of Childhood Friends

by Albino Carrillo

There was one time we were all
Gathered around a campfire
In the sandias, when it used to rain
And march was cold still in the lower
Passes between the high desert
And the ponderosa forests.

Chris was there, and Darrell-
We'd walked up with a keg
Of beer, made a fire in a
Dried out riverbed.  You
Never think you'll die
Then, when the class

Has gone away and
All you have to do is climb.
I think of Kenneth next,
Singing to Wagner
As he swung between
Love-boys, declaring

That even the pennies
On his eyes should be
Melted down when
The time came.  When
His brain stopped working
One day on stage

We He knew he'd be gone--
So afterwards we feasted
With money he left us--
Besides the food and
Booze, he left us each
A bottle of morphine

Tablets, dilaudid, and Xanax
To play with.
His parents told
Us they loved us for
Him, and only in death
Accepted that he was gay.

If you think
I have more to stay, listen--
Times I've been to
Funerals an carried caskets
Put money in baskets
And taken the Host.  Which

Is eating a part that
Reminds you most of death,
What's next.  Then there was
Countdown-- a prelude to what
Comes next besides
The lazy sun who knows its

Turn day after day without
Completion.  I give to you
The ultimate quantum
Of days:  hallway visits
Those transient times

When bells are really
Ringing outside, in the spring.

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Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: Albino Carrillo

Hunting for my Father

On the internet—nowhere

To be found except in the exact

Obit my brother wrote:  one

Error.  My dad served in the Atlantic

Theatre in a sea-going tug

And might have killed

Some German sailors.

I want to find his

Papers and his story but

Hey, they might

Be lost like he was.

Lately I know

There’s a deep

Newspaper record

Of his mishaps and misdeeds,

Half-steps in his dreamy

political State.  Even

At the end.  Now I’ve

Heard stories—

I’m lost in my dream

Of him, not what we

Know when we’re awake.

Wandering East has

Done no good.  I now

Know he had another

Kid way before he

Met my mother.  He

Worked bad deals,

Building pyramids

For old-folks in

Scottsdale and Santa Fe.

I’m amazed I’ve escaped

That world.  I don’t know

How he felt at 50.  I can

Stand at his grave,

Address the criminal

While the white moon hurtles

above me and in the next

grave my mother’s ghost

cries for the world they

left behind so long ago.

If there is any agony

It is for the life he lived.

The one I don’t know so

Well—I’ ve been told this

And that by him, never

Noticed, like us all

He had a secret life,

A secret he could not

Share or maintain.

In the morning

Sunlight I do not

Know what I know

As the truth.  Who

Was that man

In that picture

By the lake?   And

What was he doing

With all the fancy

Cars, the empty bottles,

The rifle he kept

In the master bedroom

Closet.  Closed like

I am forever to wander

Like a ghost for some

Sense of who

He was.  The

Trips to Vegas,

The long rides

To nowhere

He must have endured.

***

Albino Carrillo, a sixth generation native New Mexican, received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Arizona State University in 1993, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1986. He has published poetry in many literary journals, including The Antioch Review, Puerto Del Sol, Blue Mesa Review, CALIBAN, The South Dakota Review, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Sou'Wester, and World Order. Carrillo's poems are anthologized in both Library Bound: A Saratoga Anthology (Saratoga Springs Library Press, 1996), and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Carrillo's book of poems is In the City of Smoking Mirrors (University of Arizona Press, 2004). Before teaching at the University of Dayton, Carrillo taught in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, and at Union College of New York, where he held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Carrillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

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3. Guadalupe Santos Trujillo and the Night Sky

by Albino Carrillo

Guadalupe Santos Trujillo had been riding a silver-green15-Speed Ross Mountain Bike since he saw it for sale during a dope run over to the college campus.  After he dropped off some G-13 for a couple dumb hippies from Vermont who were waiting for him in the all night Laundromat (these were in his “bicycle days”) he found himself in the tree-lined part of town banging on the heavy oak door of an old Professor who was waiting for a Ms. Julia Walpole to take a look at the thing:  a sky blue 1967 Volkswagon Squareback.  He had seen it in the distance and likened it to candy.  Sweet metal candy.  The coolest thing was that it was in almost cherry condition.    After selling a pillow, Guadalupe had the cash then and there, and even though this greatly confused the old man at first, twenty minutes later they were at the kitchen table, filling out the title transfer.  

Guadalupe had plans.  Snatching up the title so quickly that the professor’s yellow Lab barked from where it was on floor beside the stove,  he strode out, just as Julia Walpole knocked on the door.  He slipped past her and past the professor, who still held tightly in his weak hand the wad of fifteen 100 dollar bills that he’d just made.  The only thing Guadalupe left behind was a certain acidic smokiness that wouldn’t linger in the air much longer that Walpole’s patchouli.  Her eyes were wide with astonishment.

Now the car had never acted up before, and with the car Guadalupe thought he could extend his business and his social life.  He had been riding up to Santa Fe on the Sun-Runner every weekend to sell weed to the hippie crowd frequenting the Japanese-Style hot-spring baths, the same who went dancing to World-Beat music all night at El Club Suroeste.   Guadalupe Santos Trujillo’s main problem was that he was always running away:  this started when he was a boy.  He’d sit at his desk all day at school making up other realities—he thought for a while he was the son of a king, lost and adopted, certainly not the son of his real father, an old alcoholic encyclopedia salesman who’d disappear into the deep expanses of Central Texas for days in search of profit.  Because he could too clearly imagine his father hobbling up to a small one-story stucco house framed by 3-foot high galvanized fencing in search of a sale, he could also imagine that he’d be rescued someday, recognized and taken to a castle or palace that would be all his, somewhere in La Extremadura de España.  Of these places he’d read, and had spent hours copying heraldic shields from the set of Britannicas his real dad had won in a sales contest.

So when he found The Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky under the passenger seat one evening while he was trying stash a pillow of Diesel under it, the first thing he thought was how far he could already see:  back then, the night sky in New Mexico was still clear and black and icy.  He drove to Santa Fe on the back road, through Madrid.  The crowd at El Club Suroeste was typical for a Saturday night in mid-June:  güeras from the U, local gals from Taos dressed up like their mothers, like fresh young hippie things:  toe rings, hip-huggers and flip-flops.  The boys and men mostly a mix: the Santa Fe locals who, as lawyers in the daytime, wore pressed chinos and starched shirts; the locals with black, straight hair, leather jackets and big belt buckles; the star-struck boys who liked the wild hippie southwestern look—turquoise rings, maybe even a heishi, faded 501’s, Birkenstocks, the distant pot-soaked bedroom eyes of John Lennon.

It occurred to Guadalupe, at that moment of intimate self-reflection when he dug his hand around and underneath the passenger’s side seat in the blue VW and could hear the noise of the band playing on the patio, that he had come upon very lucky moment:  kneeling, with the door open, Guadalupe, while fishing for the big bag, grabbed the book instead—with it, the first thing he did was turn to the point in the book that is full with color pictures of stars, nebulae, and galaxies, in particular a crystal clear shot of M 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy.

The streets in Santa Fe are small, narrow paths that remind you that the Spaniards built this city in the 1600’s.  They reminded Guadalupe of the time he’s gone to Spain for the summer, actually traveling to the small city Alburquerque. It was the cobblestone, the neat two- and three-story stucco buildings that did it for him.  In the bar, he immediately and without plan ran into Julia Walpole who of course, when the blue VW pulled-up on the curb, next to the bar, was sucking on her second clove smoke, her schooner sized margarita almost drained.  Walpole had become what a TV producer or urban sociologist might call a semi-regular—she knew two of the waitrons by name and the host often talked to her about his trouble getting good bus help.  This because Walpole had once accused an ugly, slightly chubby Peruvian bus-boy of stealing her watch from the bar where she’d left it while talking to a friend she’d met in the hallway by the restroom. It was behind the door labeled Mujeres all the time.   The watch, a sliver-banded Bulova, actually had been her father’s; she simply picked it from the bedpost the night after her father died in his sleep—all it needed was a new mainspring.

It was the way he was sitting in the car that drew her attention.  Guadalupe had bought the car before anyone even had a chance to drive it around the block or make an offer.  It had been sitting for a while.  The truth was that they had known each other in college, 20 years ago now, the desert still the same night after night the same stars, the same lonely people, now in their 40’s driving drunk between ‘Burque and Santa Fe, still looking for kicks and UFO’s out there on the Turquoise Trail, stoned on ecstasy or G-13.  Being lost in the Southwest was a gift and a sentence.  The blinding blue sky literally drains your will to move on, drains you of ambition and color.   And even though you may be skin-darkened by the insufferable sun, that is in itself is a reminder from the desert, of human frailty.

At the wrought-iron entrance to el patio del Club Suroeste, then, Walpole walked right up to poor stoned Guadalupe and with one hand grabbed the book of stars and kept smoking with the other: 

“Hey, motherfucker, that should’ve been my car.”

She pushed him hard, like Elaine Benes would, as she grabbed it, twisting with all her weight like she’d learned in a self-defense class.  Too stunned to react (he had smiled broadly at her as he entered the courtyard) he stumbled away.

            “Hey man, what the fuck…nice to see you, too!  He pushed back against the wall and she slipped in a puddle of beer.  He kept his hands up like he’d learned in jail.  “No way.  I fell in love with it the minute I saw it, and I had the money and I, you know, it was the right time.  Like it was all set up, cosmically.  I wanted something like that car since High-School.  Have you seen the dashboard?  Not a bit of sun rot.  And, anyway…why do you want an old hippie car?  Some goddamn book came with it too.”  Guadalupe knew he was lost.  The book might explain, what?  He was way past that here, and the alarm was ringing in his head.  They opened it together.

On his right, the open portico to the street yawned and was tired.  Walpole hung back on the patio wall and Guadalupe was vaguely sick.   “Have you ever seen the stars from behind the Sandias?” he asked, as he hot-boxed Marlboro Menthols and nursed a beer he didn’t want.

“No.  Well, driving, yes, she said.  You know I’m from Missouri.  We have stars out there too.”

“Naw, what I’m talkin’ about is the thick white Milky Way you can see if you drive to Madrid and then over the mountains.  There’re some clear meadows out there and you can see forever!”   He said this as his heart pounded and he wondered if he were really alive.  Julia drank another Lone Star as she flipped through the Field Guide, dog-earring some pages as she went.   

            The drive down to ‘Burque is always furious.  Even more furious that Walpole was following him down I-25 at 75 miles an hour in her 1985 Ford Ranchero GT.  After sitting in the bar for almost an hour, they’d decided to go out to the llano to see the stars in the naked black sky that was there, hanging over the desert.

            It’s almost all downhill to ‘Burque.  Guadalupe could see Julia closing at times as he neared the Sandia Reservation cutoff that would take him into the dark hills.  They drove like racers, taunting each other, flying by at 85, shouting, flipping the bird at one another, laughing, thowing empty bottles of beer out their windows.    But it was on a straight two-laner just north of Burque that his mind began to drift into the dark night swallowing the foothills into fog.  He had formed a map in his head:  soon, he and Julia would be sitting on the hood somewhere, staring at the nothingness that is space, naming stars from a book, looking for a page not in that book.

            A bottle tumbled carelessly under his feet as he made the wide, dancing curve that took him onto Sandia Pueblo land.  He could see the lights of ‘Burque far to the south and they looked like lost stars from a map he imagined.  He gunned the engine, with Julia riding him parallel along the two-lane highway that lead to the other side of the Sandias.  They threw kisses and cursed one another.  Going east briefly, his eyes caught the dull, surprised eyes of a coyote crossing the road.  As they both roared past, it vaguely turned to watch a rabbit farther down the road.  In a few minutes, the rabbit would be dead in the coyote’s jaws.   Far in front of him, in the darkest corner of the northeast sky he could see the Pleiades rising, its cup of hot blue stars casting a 440 year old light on the scene.   

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