Common Time VT: June 2017

The Superhero Sandbox Summer Special, a two-hour music program produced by Christopher Smith, will air on WFVR-LP 96.5FM Royalton Community Radio on Wednesday, June 28, from 7-9 PM EST. After multiple trips across the country over the last year, this program will feature many unique and rare recordings-- but will focus primarily on some of my favorite works of recorded music of all time.

Typical songs of summer-- "Hot Fun in the Summertime" by Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin's version of Gershwin's "Summertime," the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City," Don Henley's "Boys of Summer"-- are available just about everywhere else on any radio dial, Pandora feed, etc. Instead, this program will include music and songs that represent something about the lazy season that follows the 'merry month of May' and all its frivolity. For so many educators and students, summer represents a reprieve from academic diligence. However I find this early summer I am seeking a deeper diligence of the spirit nowhere near the conscious and academic mind. I am looking for the subliminal this summer, the clustering of moments that allows our time to slip right by. The cresting of the ocean waves that we pay attention to in summer; how the wind can whip those leaf-heavy branches of the tall trees that we only notice in a storm and near our homes; those moments when we find ourselves caught, relatively unprepared, by the blinding sun. In some places of the country, summer has been all but subliminal already, but rather a threat to health and safety. In this season or any other, none of us can understand fully how our environment may changes our plans and our lives.

So with this lackadaisical spiritual thesis and a stack of new recordings discovered during my recent coast-to-coast travels, the Superhero Sandbox Summer Special will represent some of my very favorite recordings-- not 'desert island' recordings, but a mix tape of unavoidable and immediately-gratifying musical favorites. A playlist will be added to this post following the program's conclusion.

What follows are some images taken from albums to be heard (in part) during the Superhero Sandbox Summer Special. I am very interested in providing listeners an immersive and transformative musical experience. Were I to interrupt the music for poetry or readings, I would likely use the four excerpts included in this post.

The fact of the matter is, all of the radical people in the country are emotionally disturbed people. If you were able to psychoanalyze them you would see that they are deeply disturbed. People who are religious fanatics, people who are fanatical in political ways, military ways, these are sick people. These are not normal minds, and our society tends to treat all these people with equanimity. So, we, as comedians, find it our duty to express the fact that you can’t, the people can be crazy, and dangerous. And that you must not be fool enough to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” To be a nonconformist in that degree, and to appreciate the fact that you aren’t necessarily insane, because you think somebody else is. And to be able to also accept the kind of madness that comes out of creative thinking. There are degrees of being mad. These are difficult issues, but these are issues we [the Firesign Theatre] like to deal with.

--Phil Proctor, in Backwards Into the Future: The Recorded History of the Firesign Theatre, by F. Weibel (Bear Manor Media, 2006).

Where once the waters of your face

Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,

The dead turns up its eye;

Where once the mermen through your ice

Pushed up their hair, the dry wind steers

Through salt and root and roe.

Where once your green knots sank their splice

Into the tided cord, there goes

The green unraveller,

His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose

To cut the channels at their source

And lay the wet fruits low.

Invisible, your clocking tides

Break on the lovebeds of the weeds;

The weed of love’s left dry;

There round about your stones the shades

Of children go who, from their voids,

Cry to the dolphined sea.

Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids

Shall not be latched while magic glides

Sage on the earth and sky;

There shall be corals in your beds,

There shall be serpents in your tides,

Till all our sea-faiths die.

– Dylan Thomas

Der Einsame [The Solitary]

As one who has sailed across an unknown sea,

Among this rooted folk I am alone;

The full days on the tables are their own,

To me the distant is reality.

A new world reaches to my very eyes,

A place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;

Their slightest feelings they must analyze,

And all their words have got the common tune.

The things I brought with me from far away,

Compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:

In their great country they were living things,

But here they hold their breath, as if for shame.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. C.F. MacIntyre (Rilke: Selected Poems, University of California Press, 1940)

The next few hours driving through new Mexico and Arizona were relatively quiet. Larry could see Elvis mulling over the conversation and trying to come to grips with it.

And then it happened. Just before twilight, as they were climbing the mountains south of Flagstaff, Arizona. Larry was in the front with Elvis, while Jerry Schilling, Billy Smith, and Red West were in the back, chatting. Drawn perhaps by the same impulse, Elvis and Larry looked up into a glowing sky that was a strange iridescent blue. As their gaze wandered off to the horizon, they saw a lone cloud. And then their eyes stopped and they sat almost transfixed. The cloud was in the shape of a man’s head. And inside the outline of this cloud they saw clearly the definite image of a face. It was a face they had seen many times before. There was no question whose face it was. The features were all there, set off by dark ridges in the fleecy white background. There were event he familiar mustache and bettled brows.

It was the face of Joseph Stalin.

Elvis cried out in excitement, “Do you see what I see? That’s Stalin’s face up there.”

Larry was equally excited. “It’s exactly like him,” he said. “What’s he doing up there?”

The features began fading, until Larry saw them become completely dissolved. He turned to Elvis, and saw him still staring. A radiant expression had come over his face. His eyes glowed with a soulful quality. And then, suddenly, he shook his head as if bringing himself out of a trance.

With one twist of the wheel, he brought the bus over to the side of the road.

“Follow me,” he said to Larry in a hoarse voice. He jumped out first, and rubbed his hand over his eyes. Larry had never seen him like this before. He looked like he was about to burst with excitement.

He grabbed Larry and hugged him, crying:

“My prayers have been answered. I have seen the Christ and the Antichrist, and I know what I have to do.”

There on the lonely road, as the entourage looked on uneasily, the tears streamed down his face. “I have felt the presence of God,” he announced.

“It’s happened,” he shouted. “It’s God, it’s love, it exploded inside me. I’ve finally seen what you were trying to tell me. And you were right, there’s no way to convey it. It’s beyond words, beyond mental concepts, it’s the very essence of life.” Emotionally, he flung his arms around Larry again.

“Thank you, I love you, what can I say. I feel like Paul on the road to Damascus. I am reborn.”

Elvis was now laughing and crying simultaneously. One of the entourage, thinking he might have snapped, approached cautiously. “What’s wrong, Elvis? Are you all right?”

Elvis was fighting to maintain his composure. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”

Only Elvis saw the vision of the Christ.

He was too agitated to drive. Red West took the wheel. Larry and Elvis sat together in the back, neither speaking for a while.

– from The Truth About Elvis by Jess Stearn and Larry Gellar, p. 47-48 (Jove Books, 1980)

Hey Jude-- Stan Kenton and his Orchestra Live at Redlands University
Summertime-- Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross
Old Man River-- Papa John Creach
Gentle On My Mind-- Mills Brothers with Count Basie
When I Fall In Love-- Jeri Southern

Loved In Loss-- Riding Shotgun
All Your Favorite Bands-- Dawes
End of the Line-- Traveling Wilburys
With a Little Help From My Friends-- Richie Havens
How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns-- Paul Simon
It's All Over Now Baby Blue-- Them

Hard Headed Woman-- Kelly's Heroes
It's Not My Birthday-- They Might Be Giants
You Can't Roller Skate In a Buffalo Herd-- Roger Miller
Heaven Is In Your Mind-- Traffic

A Place In the Sun-- Stevie Wonder
This Must Be the Place-- Talking Heads
Pure Imagination-- Lou Rawls
Every Man Needs a Companion-- Father John Misty
Take It With Me-- Tom Waits
Unchained Melody-- The Sweet Inspirations

Peace In the Valley-- Sam Cooke and the Soul Searchers
Bound for the Promised Land-- Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens
Strange Things-- Sister Rosetta Tharpe
There Are Angels Hovering Round-- Jean Redpath and Lisa Neustat
Have You Heard About the World-- The Alphabetical Four
Keep On the Sunny Side-- The Lewis Family
Just a Closer Walk With Thee- The Dixie Hummingbirds
Up Above My Head-- Sister Rosetta Tharpe

The legend that surrounds Las Vegas is, like most legends, much larger than its reality. What one might expect of that city in the desert is itself an alternative fact, a gross accumulation of a place’s social and cultural significance. I had never been to the place where What Happens There Stays There, but I created the opportunity in mid-April, as part of a further-westbound leg of an already-extensive journey.

My vehicle contained everything I had needed or wanted over the past three months, and its rear shocks were laughably inadequate when I headed west out of the Rockies and down into the wider tan landscapes of northern Arizona. My passenger seat was stacked with all immediate and necessary provisions: camping gear, a cooler with food and drink, a stash of clean clothes, shoes. The rest of the station wagon had all else: books, records, instruments, a desktop computer, binders containing the coming fall’s syllabi, academic and personal projects, art, and so much more. The front seat was as crowded as a rush hour ride on the T back in Boston, thousands upon thousands of miles away. The road west to Vegas was long, dark, and sleepless: I knew there was little to see, and, for better or for worse, I had been in no rush to leave the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Dawn was coming, and though the sun was hours from coming over the horizon, it was already making itself known, throwing light and inviting shadows out across all terrain features. The sky was turning colors I had never seen and will never see again.

I had lost interest in monitoring the GPS, and was listening to CNN when the car rolled around a curve and down a hill, and unlike so many turns and hills before, suddenly on the other side of the windshield appeared the vast valley of development that is Las Vegas, with its maze of streetlights and houselights and casino lights twinkling against the lightening desert sky. “City of tiny lights/don’t you want to go/talk about them tiny cookies,” as Frank Zappa wrote, I thought to myself. I would leave Las Vegas having learned there are no tiny cookies, or tiny anything, in Las Vegas, and that the place is an expensive and ethically-questionable playground for adults. So much of Las Vegas exists to be aimless, without ideal or value, but to allow individuals to wander, without thrift or consequence, among pavilions and gaming halls and restaurants, the false and real storefronts, Atlantic City without an ocean or boardwalk, merged into the world’s largest shopping plaza.

I was there not only to scope out the scene for myself but to attend a conference on cybersecurity at a resort hotel blocks away from The Strip. My intention was to park the car and enjoy a few nights under a roof and away from the omnipresent steering wheel. Once the GPS led me to the parking lot of the hotel I found I overshot my goal, arriving hours earlier than necessary. I rolled down the window and sleepily watched the sun come up from behind the palms. With my eyes closed but still awake I felt the air inside of the car and outside of the car begin to grow warm. After a ten minute non-snooze from behind my sunglasses I decided to find food and walked to the chain diner down the block. There were a dozen of us there in the seven o’clock hour: off-shift wait staff, off-shift security guards, career gamblers, loners. Quiet conversations and coffee filled these morning minutes, and later there was bacon and eggs. Las Vegas seems to be a lonely place, as lonely and as transitory as a bus stop. Maybe it is loneliest in the early morning, at that hour when the sun’s daily beat down has again become obvious and unavoidable, in those hours among the stoic towers and neon, just people begin to emerge and wander, with a unique and ruthless intention, not unlike the ominous desert sun.

Besides attendees of this cybersecurity conference, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and aged hipsters Steely Dan were all appearing in Las Vegas over these few days. Tickets for Steely Dan, the only performance I had interest in, were selling for around $250 each at the box office. While the Dan’s song catalog contains unparalleled chestnuts of 20th century pop songwriting, I knew their stage show was very likely to be an incredibly-tight iteration of the Blues Brothers Rhythm and Blues Revue featuring resident aliens Walter Becker and Donald “Nightfly” Fagen, with ultra-great musicians doing the heavy lifting wonderfully. $250 was nothing in Las Vegas, but represented to me much of budget for this adventure. I finished my breakfast and walked back down to the hotel and conference center to check in. The air felt thick and warmer than before. The traffic was thickening, as morning commuters sped along downtown streets, racing themselves to the next light and to work.

The format for the conference was familiar: presenters covered topics that at times very-nearly fell under a main theme as big as the entirety of the western sky. Perhaps due to the technical nature of the participants and presenters, I found some of the PowerPoint slides to be incredibly complex and hard to comprehend. I may have been the only attendee who hadn't flown in for this. One lunchtime keynote was extraordinary: a witty and sharp British economist explained how Bitcoin started a blockchain economy that would soon change wealth forever. Some of us listened intently while others occupied themselves on laptops and other devices. Around all of us circulated tales of escalating cybercrime and continued digital threats to national security, filling the room like the pumped-in cold air in the windowless hall. Money would soon hold itself accountable, he said in so many words. Whether this meant the End of the Fed or had any immediate implications was unclear. But I know many of us were simultaneously reading the headlines on our phones as he talked. Prepared presentations continued on, focusing on the economics (but not ethics) of customer compensation practices following large-scale data breaches, the theoretical (but not necessarily practical) arrangements of data centers, and the forthcoming digital synergy between business and money. Some information provided at this conference will inform and enliven my classes this fall-- those whose syllabi had already been prepared and refreshed, and were waiting for use, deep inside of my hot and idle car.

Later that afternoon I was glad to leave that air conditioned space and the heady convo. I walked outside to let myself be struck in the face by the early-summer heat of Vegas. The small wind that moved between the tall buildings was hot and smelled like a city bus. The sun was blinding. Somewhere, cultural icons-- from Britney to Pawn Stars’ Chumlee-- were going about their business, as herds of tourists waited at crosswalks to wander down the next block. The sun made even the dull concrete sidewalks shimmer. This heat was nothing for this town, and I could feel it: everyone was ready for what could very well be the hottest summer on record, if not meteorologically at least financially. There is nothing like a blockchain economy in place on the casino floors of Las Vegas, but I am proud to say I did hear talk of such while I was there. I walked for miles, as I used to in Atlantic City; The Strip is ever-changing, with gamblers dripping from and into casino entrances at all hours. At one point I visited NBC’s “Television City,” where, in exchange for enduring a 47-minute unnamed pilot and providing my on-the-fly rating and written assessment afterwards, I received a ten dollar food credit and ten dollars’ credit at the NBC/Universal gift shop. I ate my kinda-free pretzel and drank my kinda-free lemonade, and wondered if I was drunk as I found myself considering buying a Star Trek t-shirt, just to use the coupon (I didn't). The most interesting retail shop I found featured a variety of products featuring highly polarizing political rhetoric. I asked a passerby to photograph me with the cardboard cutout of the President, and a well-known figure in Las Vegas, behind a mock Presidential podium.

Las Vegas’ relaxed prostitution laws-- and the promotion of that economic activity-- defines everyone’s experience on the sidewalks that are The Strip. At every corner, promoters offer business cards featuring naked women, with phone numbers to call, and rates for companionship, per minute. These business cards litter the sidewalks, some of the only garbage I saw on the busiest walkways. I was sad to see how many people have abandoned their dignity in this regard. I encountered a promoter for a medical cannabis delivery service, as well as a promoter for a medical cannabis license processing establishment ($100 gets you an official Nevada medical cannabis prescription, plus a free 1/8^th ounce; doctor on-site, 24/7). But while cannabis is present in a limited sense on The Strip, alcohol rules the day: one may carry a drink anywhere on The Strip. Many twentysomethings carried three-foot-tall plastic beakers containing frozen drinks, as if having just emerged from 7-11 with adult-beverage Slurpees. Where in the rest of the world behaves like Las Vegas? I know no other place—Memphis’s Beale Street, Burlington’s Church Street, Harvard Square—these are all pockets within larger, more sensible cities. Las Vegas holds in its heart these adult Slurpees, accessibility to video poker screens and ATMs, and cheap thrills beneath the waistline. People watching is fun in Las Vegas, but only if you enjoy seeing people behaving in an uncommon way—perhaps more disembodied and disconnected from themselves than when spending a night out in their nearby metropolitan area or hometown bar.

Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville was the only bar I could find on The Strip with seating that put you right on, and four feet above, the sidewalk. From this vantage, the passersby became the show-- prostitutes, with or without men on their arms; couples, happy and talking in to each other’s ears; people consumed by their devices; gamblers and hustlers walking fast; a group of women, talking and laughing; people passing and speaking quickly in foreign languages; a bachelorette party sparkled by. I ended up sitting at this bar a while, alongside a scrawny, verbose early-twentysomething local who didn’t mind making a scene: as people passed, he called out a celebrity he thought they resembled, shouting “Al Pacino! MY MAN!” and “Gwenyth Paltrow! My wo-MAN!,” echoing back to Las Vegas his drunken recognition of our celebritocracy (he is pictured here with a parrot, lent to him by a passing Johnny Depp lookalike). This went on for at least an hour, and got this guy into almost two fights. When I came back from the bathroom Jimmy Buffet’s security guard was standing around on the deck, putting an end to the silliness. Later I ran into a street performer with an acoustic guitar and without a care in the world. He played for me his own rewrite of the anthemia “Margaritaville,” with lyrics focusing on his love for recreational cannabis consumption. There were other street performers, too: a guy in his late teens playing a homemade, PVC-constructed saxophone; a jazz saxophonist who carried with him an elaborate homemade PA system; guitarists and singer-songwriters, some of whom were being paid by the casinos; sleight-of-hand magic tricks, one of which involved my ring; a short man with an amplified electric guitar who played horrifically while standing next to a Marylyn Monroe lookalike; and others, who had no instruments to play.

There is much more to Las Vegas than The Strip but I didn’t see it. To support the infrastructure of the main attraction, a full separate community of workers exists, with homes and families and driveways and living rooms, and I did not try to understand or see that part of Las Vegas, but rather stayed grounded at the conference, distracted by as many all-hours walks around The Strip as I could handle (which, suddenly no longer living at elevation, was a lot). I left Las Vegas on the morning of April 20^th, a day when many back in the Rockies and back east were rallying for the recreational consumption of a substance other than what is condoned outright on The Strip in Las Vegas. I did stop into a Goodwill on my way out of town (and a closing Radio Shack), and waited twenty minutes in line as a team of cashiers dealt with inoperable registers. A mother and son complained loudly before leaving. I paid one dollar for a CD copy of electric fiddle genius Papa John Creach’s album Rock Father, its own carnival of studio musicians and guests, no less frivolous than all of Las Vegas (I do not remember, however, where I got the vintage cell phone pictured in this post: a yard sale, Goodwill, or?). While my notes would allow for a more complete chronological account for my few days in Las Vegas, not all of What Happens There is worth indulging, or even understanding; some of these photographs may be worth at least a thousand words apiece-- "but let me call a buddy of mine who's an expert and he can tell us for sure." My time on The Strip showed me a city able, willing, and ready to aid and abet a corporate carnival of entertainment, a Mecca for the culture that is big business and for the big business that is the promotion of a specific American culture-- a place where everything, especially fun, has its price.