Working-Class Poet Laureate

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 77
Jim Daniels, Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems

Poet Jim Daniels worked at a Detroit auto plant to pay his way through graduate school. Now an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he has a dual-lens perspective on cultural issues and the conflict between classes. In an America where “white working class” has become a powerful, inflammatory demographic group, tapping that perspective has possibilities for freeing the discussion about where we, as a people, move forward.

This perspective also makes for great art. This book collects from eight of Daniels’ previous poetry collections, with eleven poems not available elsewhere. He writes in a plain-English style which many university poets espouse verbally, but which few actually practice. One gets the feeling he hopes to attract an audience of his fellow Detroit workers, without the patronizing academic practice of explaining blue-collar citizens back to themselves:

Bush idles over from his broken press
big pot sticking out tight
under a white t-shirt
gray hair slicked back, perfect.
He bends toward me and stares
at my greasy coveralls. I sweat
behind the washer, tossing
Axle housings onto pallets.

Hey, look at me. Am I dirty?
Am I sweating?
You gotta learn how to survive
around here, kid. If you don’t know
how to break your machine
then you shouldn’t be running it.
He spits on the floor, wanders away.

“Where I’m At: Factory Education”

The brief patter, reflecting the kind of language workers can slip in between outbursts from noisy machines, will sound familiar to anybody who has struggled under the weight of industrialized labor. Strictly noun-verb, with no words over two syllables, it has a structural hurry completely at odds with an obese man “idling over” from a stopped machine. It reflects the almost-liturgical language rites of working long shifts in an enclosed, windowless factory.

Jim Daniels

Speaking from experience, I attest, factory workers have their own group identity (as most employment demographics do). They don’t just do factory work, they are factory workers. They find ways to express this shared identity through the rituals they practice surrounding their equipment, their co-workers, their daily routines. Maybe that’s why they repeat familiar social and political patterns, because their identity requires community integrity:

Machine, I come to you over 800 times a day
like a crazy monkey lover:
in and out, in and out, in and out.

And you, you hardly ever break down,
such clean welds, such sturdy parts.
Oh how I love to oil your tips.

Machine, come home with me tonight.
I’ll scrub off all the stains on your name,
grease and graffiti.

I’m tired of being your part-time lover.
Let me carry you off
into the night on a hi-lo.

That guy on midnights,
I know he drinks,
and beats you.

“Factory Love”

Until you’ve worked an overnight shift operating a single machine, melding your body to its requirements, you must trust the authenticity of Jim Daniels’ depiction.

Daniels’ first several books excerpted here translate blue-collar experience into the language of university poets. Subsequently, as his life moves into education, his focus shifts. Many later poems translate arts and educated culture into the language of working-class citizens. The best examples come from his Blue Jesus poems, inspired by the painter Francis Bacon, whose electric, gestural canvases combine abstract and realistic themes in ways that take some getting used to. Here, Daniels responds to Bacon’s “Yellow Jesus”:

Can you keep a secret? I have seen halos around the heads
of beautiful women. Okay, shoot me
with a well-intentioned folk song—
I’m telling the truth
till it hurts: I love the body.
I love the sonic boom boom
of the heart after skin touches skin.

Rather than merely describe the painting, that lazy fallback of inexperienced MFA students, Daniels describes the experience of witnessing the painting. Anybody could Google a well-known artist’s paintings and say what they look like; Daniels shares how they feel, how a viewer unversed in the ways of “fine art” could learn to appreciate an artist whose most iconic works are often inscrutable. His focus has shifted from his early verse, but he’s still a cultural translator.

Having done factory work, and having taught university English, I can attest the two cultures are often deaf to one another, and need a translator. There are only so many people like Jim Daniels and me; we can’t be everywhere. But a book like this, shared by people across the cultural divide, could help bridge the two groups. If we had shared language, we could speak in poetry, without fearing one another.

The Genius Industry

Danielle Krysa (with paintings by Martha Rich), Your Inner Critic Is a Big Jerk, and Other Truths About Being Creative

I don’t know if Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way was really first in the current creativity books boom. I certainly noticed it first. Books, and to a lesser degree video and audio recordings, encouraging aspiring artists to quit being their own worst enemies have become a major hustle for the publishing industry. Most, like this one, are pretty good. Yet I can’t help noticing: books for aspiring artists seem to be growing faster than the general art market.

Danielle Krysa, collage artist, painter, and prolific blogger, has written two previous books on working artists and their creative process. Both focused heavily on interviewing working artists and getting their views on how the creation process works internally. This one includes some interviews and dialog, but has a more personal, you-centered focus. Krysa apparently wants to reprogram your internal monolog away from self-sabotage, a habit common in creative aspirants everywhere.

Between the interviews she’s conducted with professional artists, and the responses her first two books received from readers, Krysa noticed certain prevailing patterns in how people think about creativity. She distills these patterns into ten aphorisms we would-be creative types can apply to our own process. These include, but are not limited to, “Excuses Are the Enemy” (how true), “Failure Leads to Genius” (certainly my experience), and “Your Inner Critic Is a Big Jerk.”

This sort of internal reprogramming matters for anybody who’d like to create. Not just full-time professionals, either; hobby painters, early morning novelists, and weekend woodworkers, of which I’m all three, need reminders that our fear of failure, our self-destructive criticism, and our facile self-justifications are our biggest weakness. We need to expunge these influences from our thinking if we aspire to create, even for our own mental well-being.

Consider why people don’t create. In my teaching days, students’ most-cited reason for not writing more was that they believed they couldn’t, that they feared trying something and getting proven wrong. This negative self-talk, which Krysa notes children writing doggerel or gluing macaroni to construction paper don’t practice, generally come from well-meaning but misguided teachers, peers, or sadly parents, who mistake fault-finding for constructive criticism. No wonder many artists can’t create something meaningful until their parents are dead.

Danielle Krysa

So far, so good. I wish Krysa’s personal exhortations included more action-oriented exercises; she has some, but not many, and not in every chapter. As scholarly writer Patricia Goodson noted recently, the leading block stopping academic writers (or other creative professionals) from actually creating, is that they don’t think of themselves as writers. And the surest way to overcome that block is to write (paint, sing, build) until you change your own mind.

Fine, that’s a personal opinion. Perhaps some people do better with self-talk before plunging in headlong. I don’t pretend to understand the varieties of psychology enough to dispute Krysa in this regard. And if creative people coordinate their actual creating with the kind of emotionally uplifting self-talk Krysa, and others, espouse, I have no problem believing they’ll increase their output quantity, and with it their output quality. Creating more is key to creating better, but we must first create.

Put another way, notwithstanding my nitpicking, I appreciate Krysa’s sentiments, and will likely incorporate reading several pages of this book into my daily creative regimen. But books similar to this one flood the market relentlessly. My favorite bookstore has more shelf space dedicated to such moral exhortations for creative professionals than to philosophy or world history, and almost as much as science or current events. Books for creators, especially writers, are a boom market.

It’s tempting to say something about the boom market in creativity books while pipelines for creative marketing are drying up. Admittedly, as I write this, both the New York Times and the Washington Post are experiencing subscription booms and expanding their newsrooms for the first time in years. And the explosion of basic cable TV networks have created unprecedented new markets for actors and directors. Perhaps the creative market is undergoing a transition, not a contraction.

But that still feels unsatisfying.

Much as I appreciate Krysa’s book, and feel grateful for having read it, it’ll probably vanish into a crowded pool of similar creativity manifestoes. I’ve received several similar review books that went through one printing and disappeared; only Martha Rich’s interesting, borderless paintings encouraged me to accept this book. Krysa does nothing wrong, but also nothing to stand above the crowd. Krysa’s principles deserve better. But frustrated creative aspirants are already at saturation marketing levels.

Smash the “Smash the Patriarchy!”

Meg Myers before

Meg Myers, a singer-songwriter whose work I admire, recently got a pixie cut. I prefer to call it “a pixie cut,” because it sounds better than “shaved her head, and letting it grow back,” which is what her Twitter and Facebook photos resemble. I don’t like it; her clavicle-length black locks have loomed large in her public image, and the pixie cut doesn’t frame her face the same way. The formerly savage artist looks tamed.

So, okay, it’s not for me. But I’d no sooner thought that than I began second-guessing myself. Am I imposing some male heteronormative colonial blah-blah on a woman I’ve never met, never gotten closer to than performing on a stage sixty feet away? Am I trying to turn a woman, whom I admire partly for her independence and chutzpah, into a vessel for my expectations of feminine modeling and docility? How dare I standardize her?

These thoughts plagued me, off and on, for two days. (Okay, more off than on:I have a job.) Y’know, the standard “male feminist” self-doubt from a heterosexual man who loves women, while also respecting them as humans. Us honky dude progressives regularly engage in self-censorship that makes citizens of communist regimes look easygoing by comparison, constantly policing our every thought. I chased myself around the house several times before I realized: it doesn’t matter.

Literally, my opinions on a celebrity’s haircut don’t matter. My taste in women’s hair only matter to those who seek my input. Meg Myers has a boyfriend, a tour manager, and a press agent through her record label, who all have valid input regarding her image. If they believe shaving her head won’t harm ticket sales, will move albums, and looks good in bed, their opinions matter. Me, I only follow her for her voice.

Some people certainly should do better shutting their yaps. When she posted her first full-face photo with her cropped hair on Facebook, some meathead commmented: “Your hair is fucking horrible”. This blunt, vulgar imposition crosses a line by demanding that she take his opinion as seriously as her professional contacts and family. Plus, cussing out a celebrity in public is bush-league Mark David Chapman behavior. It’s a dick move, venturing perilously into abusive boyfriend territory.

Meg Myers after

Myers handled it beautifully, posting back: “Thank you I really appreciate that. You're a really kind person [heart emoji]”. Her response made me laugh, defanging the harshness of that numbskull’s comment. This solidified in my brain that fans can have taste-based opinions. My view of her hair, like my view of her music, is my own. Not everybody likes her music (she’s never cracked the Hot 100), and not everybody will like her hair. So?

Men should certainly desire to help, advance, and respect women. We’ve enjoyed standing in society for so long, we have the unique ability to raise others up, and should take the opportunity whenever it arises. That should be the ideal of male feminism, that we use the privileges society accords men to boost women. Yet in today’s atmosphere of social media outrage, Jezebel.com screeds, and full-time professional offense-takers, male feminism has become about impotent self-flagellation.

If I second-guess something as fundamental as my taste standards, how can I function as a creative individual? My tastes led me to Myers, long before I recognized her face, and I never questioned that. Yet my desire to be supportive leads me to negate my own opinions. It would be unsupportive to tell a celebrity “Your hair is fucking horrible.” It is not unsupportive to think, quietly to myself, “I don’t care for it.”

Who benefits from such attitudes? Certainly not me, since it started a cascade of self-doubt and second-guessing myself. Men who support women internalize the attitudes of social media outrage, get reduced to quivering jellies of indecision, paralyzed by their self-criticism. Men who don’t support women dismiss that outrage as typical feminist bitchiness, and continue behaving as before. Those men who most need the message, are least likely to hear it. And the cycle continues unabated.

So that’s the lesson Meg Myers taught me: dogmatic “-ism” thinking hamstrings those who really should act. It stops people from talking to those with whom they disagree. And, paradoxically, believing something strongly and giving voice to that opinion, probably entrenches anyone who believes the opposite. As our media has become more “social,” we’ve stopped communicating with diverse groups. Maybe it’s better if, rather than embracing an established  “-ism,” we simply sit down to conversation.

Chicago FUBAR Patrol

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 14
John McNaughton (director), Mad Dog and Glory

Crime scene tech Wayne “Mad Dog” Dobie (Robert De Niro) is a loser and knows it. Pathologically averse to conflict, he ghosts through life in an almost-empty apartment, scorned by his Chicago PD peers, listlessly photographing crime scenes. But circumstances thrust him into a convenience store robbery, where he accidentally saves mob boss Frank Milo’s (Bill Murray) life. Now Chicago’s biggest criminal owes a debt Mad Dog would rather goes unpaid.

This project was probably doomed to commercial oblivion the moment some wisenheimer said: “Hey! Let’s give Bill Murray the Robert De  Niro Role!” That’s not an exaggeration. Murray plays almost the same repressed, terminally lonely Godfather figure DeNiro played six years later in Analyze This. Yet somehow, it works. Watching Murray’s criminal spiral into seriocomic uselessness, while De Niro’s schlubby cop grows a pair, is a blossoming of the human spirit.

Frank Milo aspires to stand-up comedy, but is about as funny as an ER visit. But he owns—or anyway controls—the club, so nobody can fire him. Mad Dog watches Milo’s set, then does something Milo’s made-men audience never would: offers constructive criticism. This impresses Milo, who, in appreciation of Mad Dog’s naïve ballsiness, loans Mad Dog his favorite bartender, Glory (Uma Thurman), as his “girlfriend” for one week.

This horrifies Mad Dog on multiple levels. As a policeman and decent human being, Milo’s casual disregard for human freedoms shocks him. But a stranger barging into his quiet, carefully ordered life upsets his ability to restrain his feelings. With Milo intruding at work, and Glory intruding at home, Mad Dog becomes unable to control the roiling mess of emotions beneath his timid surface. Worse, Mad Dog realizes: he likes it.

Not just the anger, either, though getting pissed off with Milo quickly becomes addictive. Glory, despite being traded like a baseball card, proves an ambitious, strong-willed woman, only beholden to Milo because she owes him money. Mad Dog falls in love, and begins trying to become the man worthy of Glory’s time. Too bad Glory only wants out. Mad Dog resolves to pay the debts holding her back, despite her objections.

The movie’s two leads come from very different cinematic worlds. De Niro’s biggest prior stab at humor was as the psychopathic, massively unfunny comedian Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (oh, wait, that’s another De Niro lick Murray stole for this film). Murray’s other stab at crime comedy-drama, was the massive bomb The Man Who Knew Too Little. These cinematic worlds seldom overlap, usually in films that go unrecognized for years.

Uma Thurman (left) and Robert De Niro in Mad Dog and Glory

Yet the noble attempt to reach across the divide works here, possibly because the actors play each other. Watching De Niro teach Murray how to be funny, mirrors Murray inadvertently teaching De Niro how to get angry. This entire movie basically constitutes an extended reversal joke, watching each character turn into the other. How, we wonder throughout, will Mad Dog crowningly humiliate Milo, becoming the man he’s always been inside?

Uma Thurman had already gained visibility appearing in artistic successes like Dangerous Liaisons and Henry and June, but was still one year from her star-making role in Pulp Fiction. David Caruso, as Mad Dog’s partner Mike, had over a decade’s experience by this point, without a breakout hit. His performance here later served to model his notorious NYPD Blue role. It’s interesting seeing future stars developing their iconic, though typecasting, performance personas.

Billed celebrity stars and breakout supporting actors alike bring this movie mixed reactions. They plainly give everything to their roles, and love what they’re doing; De Niro in particular hasn’t vanished this completely into any part since Raging Bull. Yet they had to know even the studio expected this movie to crater. The production lacks a score, suggesting terminally tight budgets, and some takes run unbelievably long, evidence the director lacked money for reshoots.

And audiences responded appropriately. This film made back barely half its budget at the box office. Sometimes this means a movie failed artistically; other times, like this, it means the studio withheld marketing funds, distributors flinched from unsupported product, and audiences never realized this film had been released. It found a cult audience on VHS, and later DVD, but remains largely unseen by more diverse audiences.

Mad Dog and Glory lacks jokes as such. Like a Chekhov play, it depicts the collision between characters who talk without listening, who act without thinking. We laugh to realize these characters doom themselves. As a comedy, it demands a thinking audience; but it provides rewards missing from typical big-studio farces. And we’ll remember it long after high-gloss confections vanish from memory.

The Dramady of the Sixties, in Two Acts

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Four
The Firesign Theatre, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers

George Leroy Tirebiter hasn’t left his Los Angeles apartment in years. Desperately lonely, and unable to order takeout, he turns on the television, to find some of his classic films from his child star days running the all-night block. As Tirebiter watches his own face, he regresses through the years, and his life at different ages melds together into an unending dream sequence of hopes, joys, and sudden disillusionment.

Calling the Firesign Theatre’s classic third album “comedy” is somewhat misleading. This hour-long impressionistic play doesn’t much resemble the Firesigns’ vinyl-record comedy contemporaries, like George Carlin or Bill Cosby. There’s no storytelling, only the ghost of a narrative through-line, and most importantly, no cues from the laugh track to what’s funny. It’s an immersive experience, like a fever dream following too much chili and Sonoran sticky icky.

Yet it’s nevertheless constantly hilarious. Like their rough contemporaries, Monty Python, the Firesigns draw influence from the British Goon Show, newly syndicated for American radio during the hippie era. The overlap is unmistakable in their dry humor, very long set-ups that often discard conventional punchlines, and cast of thousands played by a very small ensemble. The humor is fast, kinetic, and arrestingly complex. It demands a thinking audience.

Tirebiter watches two movies, apparently at once—the implication is, he’s flipping between channels, a more laborious process in those pre-remote control days. In High School Madness, he plays an Archie Andrews-type giddy teenager, bouncing off walls with school spirit, who finds his entire school building missing on graduation day. In Parallel Hell, he plays a soldier trapped in a war (implicitly Korea, though never stated) that apparently never ends.

Interspersed among these movies, we get glimpses of the commercialized, sterile world Tirebiter now inhabits. The TV plugs The Howl of the Wolf Movie, a satire of all-night B-movie blocks, promising “honest stories of working people, as told by rich Hollywood stars.” Tirebiter sees himself, apparently from the future, on a This Is Your Life-type game show. And he watches a post-WWII commercial appeal for nationalized blandness, “Shoes For Industry.”

A promotional photo of the Firesign Theatre, from their record label.

Together, this jittery, hot-blooded mélànge of images drops us, boiling frog-style, into a world where everybody works but nobody cares about their product; where staying busy matters, but nothing is worth finishing; where wars continue so long that continuing becomes its own goal. Sound familiar? Isolated from his own accomplishments, valued only instrumentally, Tirebiter uses humor to retain his essential humanity in the City of Angels.

George Leroy Tirebiter was the name of a dog, adopted by students at USC as an unofficial campus mascot in 1946. His fondness for chasing cars got him killed in a hit-and-run in 1950, but his legend survives today. The characterization of Tirebiter on this album implies Bobby Driscoll, a child actor best remembered for voicing Disney’s Peter Pan. Driscoll tried, unsuccessfully, to transition into grown-up war films in the 1950s; he dies of a drug overdose in 1968, age 31.

This description, unfortunately, makes the album sound unremittingly bleak. Not so. For fans of Monty Python or Saturday Night Live, this excellent piece of long-form narrative comedy mixes ensemble slapstick with deep feeling and a surprisingly touching conclusion, for a form of audio-only comedy that one seldom hears anymore. Many people have claimed the Firesigns as an influence; far fewer, sadly, have tried to reproduce what they did.

The Firesigns love long titles. This album opens with a callback to their second album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?, and this album’s conclusion opens their fourth album, I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus. The albums meld into  a rambling, hippie-era gestalt, salted with Beatles references, jibes at then-current politics (a robotic Richard Nixon—hardly a stretch), and more.

Unsurprisingly, the Firesigns are an inextricable part of their generation. Founded in the wake of the Sunset Strip riots, their basic ethic always involved poking powerful people in the eyes. This album, like their others from the late Sixties and early Seventies, reflect a terrible fear of encroaching institutional blandness. Those fears seemed comedic, almost science fictional, when this album debuted in 1970. They seem downright prophetic now.

As stated, this album requires a thinking audience. Because it touches on Tirebiter’s life at different stages, it’ll also reflect the life progress of its hearers; re-listening as you age is a rewarding experience. Its mix of glum themes with silver-tongued comedy zingers could help you see the world as never before.