The Chinese Model

In a recent speech to Young Americans for Freedom, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich asked rhetorically, "Do you want to create jobs as rapidly as China? The Chinese pay zero capital gains tax. If we had zero capital gains tax in the United States, we'd be building factories, founding companies, creating jobs, we'd be dramatically better off."

I believe we should emulate the Chinese model more extensively: let's have millions of Americans work in sweatshop conditions, pay them wages far below the poverty line, refuse to allow them to unionize, pack them into dormitories that make the Projects look like the Upper East Side, and cause anybody who objects, quietly to "disappear." After all, when you're earning 30 cents an hour, you won't have many capital gains to report anyway, so you might as well get rid of the tax.

There are two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And then there's Death Cab for Cutie...

Good art, it is said, elicits a powerful response from the observer. However, the converse need not necessarily be true: that something which elicits a powerful response qualifies as good art. After all, my response to rap music is quite powerful - powerfully negative. I can tolerate it in small doses, but tolerate is all the ground I'm willing to cede on the subject; I would never call it "good art". I'm not one of those who holds that rap isn't art at all - it is, in its way. I don't like it, but I am forced to admit that, at the most basic level, it is as valid as is the music to which I listen. I'm sure a hip-hop aficionado would find the Divine Comedy (to name a band of which I am especially fond at the moment) as objectionable as I find rap.

But at least I can pinpoint, with a tolerable degree of accuracy, what it is I don’t like about rap. And I can guess, again with a tolerable degree of accuracy, what fans find so attractive about it. I don’t agree, but at least I get it. And I get why they don't like the music I like.

What really irritates me is boring music. Watching them perform on a rerun of the Daily Show this evening, the example that leaps to mind is the Arcade Fire. Here is a band that is not in any particular way obnoxious. On the hand, they're not in any particular way memorable either. I wouldn't necessarily object to listening to THE SUBURBS; but at the other end of that hour, it makes no impression. I come out feeling, well, nothing really. It doesn't move me at all, even in the negative sense of having provided the necessary contrast to the music I enjoy. I can't find anything to actively dislike, but I cannot fathom why anybody would love this band. And then friends talk about the Arcade Fire as if they were the greatest thing to happen to rock music since the Beatles, and my only response is, "Huh?"

Another example is Death Cab for Cutie. I'll Follow You into the Dark excepted, I cannot call to mind a single Death Cab song, despite multiple listens. I want to get it, I really do. And after having given the band numerous chances to impress me, to figure out what people like about them so much, it all - just - sounds - the same! To hear my friends rave about a band and to fail completely to hear the attraction is, in its way, far more frustrating than to hear the attraction and to reject it. As Warren Zevon once put it, "I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all."

Rackham Limbs

When in Egypt new mountains rose above the sands of Memphis,

You lifted your head above the playa

At Abu Simbel god-men sat in silence,

Hands on knees like the Lushan Buddha

You crouched here, bent against the onslaught

Of a mountain thunderstorm

Did you learn the trick from Katschei,

To gain the world and lose your soul?

Is your heart locked in a babushka doll somewhere?

Or do Rackham limbs conceal still

The pulse of life?

August 2010

Western Polyptych

I. Weeping wall

Tearstain on a western hillside,

the carbonized imprint

of a Jurassic willow.

II. Outside Salt Lake City

Riddled with holes,

some towering red Swiss cheese

with little patches of scrubby mold here and there

Give me a knife to scrape the sky

and I’ll carve you off a slice.

III. Distant lakes

Rorschach lakes crawl

across stone sky-fields

like shadows on the surface of the moon.

IV. Lichen at High Altitude

Undifferentiated grey mass resolves itself

into rectangles, rhomboids,

a hundred million polygonal forms

all hard-edged and grainy-faced

Green patch in a sea of slate,

oasis opening onto infinity,

waving semaphore arms

Is there anybody out there?

V. The world is quiet here

The world is quiet here

Clouds so close you can snatch

handfuls of candy floss

and devour them greedily,

a famished Ming soldier on the Long Wall

The world is quiet here,

save the buzzing of a persistent fly

What brings him to this place?—

errands from worlds below

or an accidental updraft,

vaulted into the dome of heaven.

VI. Heathaze

A black river with green banks

bisects a sea of white salt

Heathaze holds up the promise of sanctuary,

vanishes like a dream half-remembered

and then forgotten

in the space between sleeping and waking.

VII. Iris

Blue pupil amidst a green iris

Granitic carunculae

A million points of light coalesce into

one twinkle in your eye,

shining at the prospect of a bath

or something less savory.

VIII. Condemned (Sutter Buttes)

Subterranean wrecking ball

razes to the foundations

Icelandic turf house in the blazing heat

The mind can fill in the missing lines,

bay windows and high gables

Now just two bony jaws,

open just wide enough

to swallow the sun.

August 2010

Buzzard's Roost

Castellated cliff-face,
limestone battlement
The rocks climb up to the ramparts,
piling on top of one another
as if to dare the next in line:
Jump! Jump!
Then finally they plunge away,
five hundred feet at a leap

From here everything
falls away in green gulches
and pine-tree precipices
and spires of stone
I wave to the nearest tower,
greetings to the eagle! He keeps watch there
His amber eye misses nothing—
quintessential watchman,
suited by nature to his sentinel-station

Smoke tendrils like lazy grey ribbons
from the lodge in the valley below
At this height the vapors dissipate,
cartwheeling on a thousand zephyrs
Zeus and Aeolus
keep company in this place

Where two kingdoms meet
I look down from the top of the world,
Or what seems like it at least—
for I can see in the distance
heights even higher than these.

August 2010

Elegy for Mr. Adams

North woods obelisk,

red weather-scars weeping blood

The name has washed away from your pedestal—

Julius? Frank? The characters aren’t clear,

half-discernable forms of laurel-leaves

etchings in stone

meant to last forever

Were you a man of distinction,

a personality to be put on by a high-school drama student

for the historical society’s Christmas play?

Or did you find your way to Potter’s Field

or even far Peking?

Did your children come this way

and lay roses on your grave?

The woods will honor you

bachelor’s buttons and cinquefoils

amidst the colonnades

August 2010

White Rocks

Three teeth in a grandmother’s mouth

yawning skywards

First molar, flat-topped,

amalgamated fillings—

a patina of pine-needles,

stained here and there with traces

of manganese oxide

Second bicuspid, massy, white,

undercut, the work

of a giant’s tablespoon

Scrawny firs cling tenaciously in the fissures,

root-arms wrapped tight

like a sea-snail adheres to the coast

when a diver comes questing

for its iridescent shell

Lateral incisor,

jagged to crack the sky

a natural turret

And here, smeared

orange with lichen,

foundations of a tower from long ago

August 2010