august philippic

Seeing the leaves against the granite, orange and green and red, gave me vertigo.  I thought of the Japanese aesthetic of death, that a way of dying can be beautiful.  I think in the U.S. the idea has an unfortunate association with kamikaze pilots.  But what would it mean to honor death, to see it as potentially ugly and potentially beautiful?  How might an aesthetics of death shape, for example, health care policy? 

I’m trying to think of my favorite film death.  I think it is the end of Le Samourai (Japan again, but filtered through France!), which I am now going to spoil by saying that it involves a sacrifice, a clean modern line, a kind of love that can’t really be love.  It’s death as a Sade tune — “We move in space with minimum waste, maximum joy.” 

Tags: visions, grooves by august
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I saw a movie tonight so romantic I will not tell you the title. It featured a Brancusi statue, a concert pianist, a soap opera, and a café. A thunderstorm hitting as a girl steps onto the rooftop, and the angle gets a little wider and the Eiffel Tower looms behind. Here is a woman who has slept with father and son. Here is a woman who mouths the words of French pop music as she jams to her iPod. Here is a woman who gets a job in a place that only hires men. Here are people beloved by all Paris who wish only (well, not only, and certainly not always) to be left alone.

A striptease in a concert hall. By the soloist.

And the music – music as overtly sexual as late-night cable; music that will float you out to sea like an elderly Inuit, music like lavender, like cloves, like milk and honey.

I saw a movie tonight that was a postcard to art, a comedy in the fullest sense of the word (think Balzac). It reminded me of when I used to come to New York only for movies, for popcorn and for the feel of a city and for a breath of the hope of love. Those movies, like this one, made me want to drink coffee and write, repeating endlessly until I keeled over or ossified like a Brancusi sculpture. I’m still shaken.

Tags: visions, New York, august, grooves by august
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Praising, that’s it! Praise was his mission,
and he came the way ore comes, from silent
rock. His heart, a wine press that couldn’t last
made us an endless supply of wine.

Even in the dust his voice won’t fail him
once the godhead has him in its grip.
All things turn vineyard, all things turn grape,
in the ripening South of his feelings.

Nothing can contradict his praise,
not mold in the royal sepulchre
nor that a shadow will fall from the gods.

He’s the messenger who stays,
who carries his bowls of praiseworthy fruit
across the thresholds of the dead.

– Sonnets to Orpheus I:7, David Young, trans.

The mission of the night is praise (Praise!) and I will praise Paris, though it has been praised before, and better than I could ever praise it. My lyre makes cities reappear — hear the echoing of my feet when I landed flat footed in a square; see the twist of my face when I ate a cigar; I will walk the length of the quays and skateboard around them again; I will eat cake; I will make words from neon; I will speak in tongues; I will praise Paris.

Tags: august, grooves by august
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1. things on your chest (’nuff said).

2. feeling unknown by the telephone.
a. lee siegel.
b. mickey kaus.
c. at least time loves us.
d. brian boitano.

3. confess.
a. too much makeup.
b. chafing.
c. meth.

4. lift up the receiver, I’ll make you…
a. an underachiever.
b. a wide receiver.
c. a griever.
d. a labrador retriever.

5. i will deliver…
a. thai.
b. korean.
c. pie.
d. manichean.

6. be your own, personal…
a. publicist.
b. ad.
c. iphone.
d. boddhisatva.
e. junk bond trader.

7. someone to hear your prayers.
a. new computer.
b. mini.
c. more meth.

8. someone who’s there.

9. reach out and touch…
a. thequietman.
b. themaxfischerplayers.
c. the borg.
d. bono.
e. the edge.
f. the spanish inquisition.
g. the amazing creskin.

10. ka da - da bum boom…

dude.

Tags: grooves by august
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A gentleman enjoys his pie, and bakes it on occasion. For those seeking pointers, Dawn Coyote dishes out the goods over at Fond Adversaria.

Can anybody deny the symbiosis between pie and religion? Think of the church supper, or the diner where people turn to pie at times of existential crisis. Er, well, I know I do. Hence my perilous flirtation with Type 2 diabetes. There’s a Carson McCullers short story, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” about learning to love; the idea being that a person can start small and work one’s way up. I’ve always wanted to write a sequel: “A Ditch, A Grotto, A Pie.”

The best pies are like eighties music: they make one feel alive as they wallow in angst. Is there anything that electricutes my nerves with the same anxiety as a crust? It drives me into the worst excesses of Depeche Mode. I will have pie. I will be my own personal Jesus.

Reach out and touch me.

Favorites:

1. Chocolate Mousse
2. Apple
3. Peach
4. Key Lime
5. Pecan
6. Cherry
7. Berry (any variety, preferably wild blue)

I should dispense an honorable mention to a coconut creme pie that I met just this weekend. I do not know from whence it came, but man did it liven up a dull party.

mrs. august would like my readership to note the following:

Hummpff.

Addendum Jan. 22: “Not yet made dinner” meant not made dinner last night. I frequently make dinner. Although, dinner last night was not very good. Breakfast was awesome though — french toast with cinnamon apples.

Tags: grooves, Virginia by august
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We were driving south on Broadway and Blondie was on the radio. Once I had love/and it was a gas with that famous, hollow ku-ka-choom, ku-ka-choom, ku-ka-choom backbeat come to find out/ had a heart of glass. We listened for a while, mrs. august meditative, and me nervous about all the trucks turning onto the GW bridge that seemed intent on squashing my sedan.

“It’s amazing,” she said, come to mistrust “how well this holds up.” In between “Yeah,” I added in my most helpful tone love is so amusing. I had a mental image of workmen reassembling CBGB’s in Vegas please don’t push me aside.

We’ve both felt nostalgic for the seventies lately if I fear I’m losing you Bob Newhart, her parents’ art, the Swedish modern look, it’s just, no good, you teasing…. Steve Martin like you do

I think we’ve both listened to the song mostly at times when we got its sadness. But now we are married, and not (for the moment, and for a long time to come, I hope) given to sadness about relationships, and so mostly we feel its beat, its energy, its persistent newness.

Tearing down CBGB’s is okay with me. seemed like the real thing Building it in plastic in Vegas is not. only to find It’s all nostalgia mucho mistrust and no energy love’s gone behind.

I think I’ll go buy a really big suit. Love needs no museum.

whoo — oo – oo, waa-oh

Tags: grooves by august
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It’s about embracing time out of whack.

It’s easier to explain what I mean with reference to movies. Virgin Suicides is about girls who are not in step, but also about boys looking at them, knowing that they are far away. It’s a nostalgia for longing. It’s a moment in time when everything goes completely off (a family of sisters commit suicide), which gives the time before the suicide a particular hue. It’s temporary. It doesn’t quite count. But it changes things, but in the retelling it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly changed.

So with Lost in Translation. The world of the hotel, the attractions that one feels deeply but can’t articulate, the freedom and isolation of walking in a crowd and not understanding a word that anybody is saying. And one suspects the same of Marie Antoinette, a queen caught in the last moments of monarchy, one who will lose her head and in the aftermath of the regicide, no one will quite know what to make of her or of her time beyond a vague pause before a revolution.

Bizarre Love Triangle is an anthem to longing, to change, and to not being quite able to articulate either emotion: “I feel fine and I feel good/I’m feeling like I never should/ Whenever I get this way, I just don’t know what to say/ Why can’t we be ourselves like we were yesterday?” Say the word and all will be well. But because I know you won’t say the word, I will pause, here, in the Bizarre Love Triangle, and pretend that you might. I will stop time.

The beauty of the emotion is that it can be danced. The last time I completely gave myself over to music, the last time I danced without knowing or caring who was around or what anyone thought or what happened afterwards, I was in Taiwan. I had gone there ostensibly to learn Chinese, in fact to get over a girl. The sequence of songs was “Respect,” “Everyday People,” “Bizarre Love Triangle.” I was not me. I was not Chinese or foreign, not male or female, not old or young. I could speak in tongues. My every move seemed prelude to revolution, my own new order.

Tags: grooves by august
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The year is 1987. Five southbound teenagers are traveling north on I64 to William and Mary Hall, where R.E.M. are playing on their Document tour. The evening will be recorded in Rolling Stone as one of the worst concerts R.E.M. ever gave. They had recently become a fraternity favorite, and the drunken moshing of Sigma Nus screaming “Leonard Bernstein” at just the wrong moment would prompt Michael Stipe to flashlight a couple for security to escort from the building. The southbound teenagers would enjoy the concert, would avoid the hard, human crush, would speed back through Norfolk (where they had started their trip) and on to North Carolina, where they sleepily take the S.A.T.’s the next morning.

Each of the boys has told his parents a different story. August says he is going to North Carolina, spending the night with friends so he can be well-rested and prepared for “Clint Eastwood is to codfish as [blank] is to mackerel.” Ben’s parents believe he is spending the night with Phil. Phil informed his parents he is going to the beach with August. All but Allan edited out the part about R.E.M. Allan did tell his parents about R.E.M., but left out the S.A.T’s. Fortunately for all concerned, the respective parents never wind their way through this spool of half-truths.

The point was that North Carolina gave the S.A.T’s a month before Virginia. By slipping across the border, we could then get in two rounds before college applications were do, thus doubling our chances of a decent score. And if we then rewarded ourselves with a trip to the beach, did we not deserve a little time in the ocean? And when we discovered R.E.M. was playing in Williamsburg, well, why not?

Put it this way; I would never have risked my college education on U2. On the subject of incomprehensible lyric: what the hell is pride in the name of love?

Back to the five teenagers, one of whom was a me barely recognizable to me now. R.E.M. made sense to them. Not at the concert, where they felt beamed into a world we weren’t ready for, but in the truck on the way from the S.A.T.’s (disaster!) to the beach the next day. They had a tapes of Murmur and Chronic Town, and the twangy harmonies seemed to spread through the grasses along the Alligator River (oh shit, Jefferson I think we’re lost). They were so happy to be in motion: lower wolves. It was dark when they reached the beach, and they talked of all the people they thought they might be, but it didn’t work out that way (gardening at night). They had passions they did not understand and could not articulate, loyalties to spaces they didn’t realize were demarcated. They found twisted harmonies and dissonances; they drank heavily, slept it off, went home. They understood what was to come, but of course they had no idea.

Tags: grooves, Virginia by august
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