I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PETER GABRIEL-“The Book of Love” (2010).

This is a cover of the Magnetic Fields’ song (not the fifties song).  I have this strange relationship with the Magnetic Fields.  I love the songs that Stephin Merritt writes.  His melodies are simple but timeless.  And his lyrics are usually wonderful.  Like from this song:

The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

And then there’s Merritt’s voice.  It is deep.  Almost comically deep, especially when he sings slowly, it brings on a strange profundity to these words.  And it works pretty well.  Although sometimes I want the songs to be…more.  And that’s where the covers seem to come in.

Gabriel’s cover doesn’t change the song really at all.  But it has Gabriel’s voice, which soars and it has Gabriel’s sense of instrumentation, which also soars.  Perhaps it’s that Merritt’s songs deserve bigger and lusher treatments–they practically scream for Broadway.    And while Gabriel’s version is nowhere near Broadway over-the-topness, it fleshes things out nicely.

Of course, it may very well be that Merritt’s understatement (and oftentimes, just one instrument) provide a successful counterpoint to the spectacle that the song could be.  And maybe that’s why they are so successful.

But Gabriel’s version is really great, too.

[READ: April 20, 2013] X

One more book of poetry for April, this one by Dan Chelotti.  It is Chelotti’s debut, and Chelotti’s poetry is wild and weird and often quite funny.  It is also unapologetically modern.  As you can see from the first poem “Ball Lightning”

I am looking out over
one of the first real gray
days of autumn listening
to a podcast in which
these two men are talking about
the phenomenon of ball lightning.

Or, more sadly in “ Grieving in the Modern World” in which he compares the way people’s grief in the old days was so public, but now it seems so small and insignificant, oh and besides:

…the microwave is
almost finished heating
my dinner , and the newshour
is about to begin.

What seems common in Chelotti’s poems is that the mundane world creeps in.  I love the beginning of “Magic”

The mechanic says
I have a great ear
for cars, but no ear
for music.  I don’t ask
how he knows

And then it ends with the mundane:

I would love a bath—
a bath a hamburger.

Although sometimes I feel like the mundanity takes over.  Like in “I Love to Hit Home Runs and Run Around the Bases” which opens with

I wish I could eat a hot dog when I run around the bases and never really leaves the ball field.

Or “November” which has an interesting opening

The cheap plastic pumpkins
turn into cheap plastic
turkeys and all is renewed…

But when the story shifts to dreams of rockstardom the ending is more of a joke than anything else:

I was put here’to put my fist in the air
and thank you
for coming out on a cold Tuesday night,
Thank you, Cleveland.

There also appears to be some duplication of ideas as with “That’s Mathematics.”  Recognize some repeated images?

You microwave
a tortoise shell
to see if it sparks.
you take a nice warm bath,
and that’s mathematics

Mostly I feel that I like some of the images he presents but not the overall poems.  I like the beginning of “The Unbearable Again”

It takes twenty years
to sufficiently translate
horror into nostalgia.
Even those who are
horrified by the kitsch
commemorating the death of x
begin to long.

During all of these posts about poems I have complained most about the really short ones, so here’s my obligatory quoting of a short poem that seems like random words throw together:

Grace

I received communion once in my life.
I pull a rusted revolver from a lake.
Above us, a passenger jet points
out just how transparent the sky is.
This mark on your forehead.
This row of potatoes.

What?

But it’s salvaged by the longer ones like “Annual Percentage Rate” which has some great lines like

Debt frees me
to be an incorrigible
asshole.  I want to be
an incorrigible asshole
more than I would like
to admit.

I love that.  And I love how it melds right into

                      Because
I don’t like to admit
this. I think of Frank
O’Hara and the way
he almost made
it through his whole
life without using
cherry blossoms
in a poem
but finally couldn’t
stop himself.

So, all in all, another mixed bag of poetry for me.  I do enjoy so much of the imagery, but I hate when things just seem to get weird for weirdness’ sake.