mark kozelek

there is a space in my heart for mark kozelek from which he will never be dethroned. he does not deserve it, but that is because no one ever really deserves our love. there can be too many reasons one does not deserve our love though. the counter intuitive mathematics of deserving and love should not perplex anyone, there's no sense to love at all.
to see someone perform who has always been a spectre, the present unpresent to use a theological turn of phrase, is difficult. people can not live up to our ideas about them- because ideas are bound to nothing, where as people are bound completely to their limitations, person and/or circumstantial.
no concert by mark kozelek could eve be good enough, for he can only be himself, and he can only be himself for the time allotted. he could never be the mark kozelek that I loved, for that mark kozelek is not real- and he could never be himself, or as I wanted him to be, long enough, for he is a part of the life I have lived and will live- I want him to play forever.
this is not even to speak of the issue of song choices. some of my favourite songs of his are more than 20 years old- he could not play his catalogue, time would never permit. and to demand that he play older stuff as opposed to his newer work is to reject him as a person all together, it makes me no different than the drunken heckler who screams at the besieged rundown bar piano man "play it again!" which would be a disservice to him as the adored and me as the adorer. how many hundred times has he played 'katy song' or 'japanese to english'? it seems only reasonable that he is sick of playing those songs - I can only listen to them still because my affection for them is entirely unreasonable.
the out come of a concert like the on I saw on Saturday seems to be predestined to be disappointment. frustrating since it never could have been avoided, not even by that figure around which the experience of the concert fixates. (I will admit that I am left in a complete state of doubt as to who that figure is: mark kozelek or myself)
mark kozelek has received some praise, and a great deal more criticism in these last days. his style has long since drifted away from the crushing, over-dramatic, yet inexplicably lovely, 'slowcore' style that brought him his early, relative, success. his lyrics no longer seem like pages of some manic journal shared with the listener because mark kozelek is compelled through/by guilt or love or madness to disclose. no his lyrics now read more like clippings from newspapers or writings from napkins composed on a porch. the guitar work is more artistic in his new work, and the lyrics are more mundane.
in one of his many rambling, entertaining talks between songs he explains to the crowd that the reason he does not have a fancy new smart phone is because he wanted to 'be able to do this'. it is his segue in his song 'alesund'- which is beautiful and haunting and so difficult to perform that one can see him have to focus the whole of his will and ability to perform it. it is more than enjoyable, and would leave me stunned except every song is performed in the space that the song he did not perform could have occupied. if I am not shaken and fulfilled, it is not fault of his. and while my inclinations are to self incriminate - I can not quite say that it is mine either.
going to see a concert is a strange thing in conception, especially if the musician or band one goes to see is not the type to put on a spectacle/ why go? the best the musician can hope to accomplish is to sound like they did on their album, perfect, and I am not trying to belittle the ability to replicate one's album caliber music - anyone who fancies concerts will confirm it is no small or common feat.
so why did I go? knowing I would be disappointed, knowing he would play few if any of my favourite songs, knowing I would not get a spectacle. was it enough to have some fragile temporary experience with mark kozelek for myself? is the concert experience so selfish in its roots as that?
though his music has changed over the years, mark kozelek music has always spoken to me. he words seemed, insanely or childishly, to be expression of things I felt. (I will admit there is a confusing element to that idea, seeing that I almost always discover mark kozeleks music after its heyday, and due to the fact that he is 14 years my senior) he seemed always to be saying what I could not, or perhaps closer to the truth dared not.
maybe in that is a little truth, that I went to see mark kozelek so that I could hear him sing about the things I did not know I already knew.
he was halfway into a strikingly different version of 'richard ramirez', carrying the emotion of the song entirely with his voice; which I sometimes wonder if he has forgotten has always been his best instrument- when I found myself crying. not loudly, or in the guiltless way I often cry at the end of good movies- but in the revelationary way. for reasons  I can not finger I realized something in the midst of that song.
mark kozelek has no idea what it is all about.
his lyrics and music have change not as some artistic response to changing cultural stimuli but because that part of him that used to write lines like 'we walked down the hill/I feel the coming on/ of fading sun/ and I know for sure/ that you'll never be the one/ its the forbidden moment that we live/ that fires our sad escape/ and holds passion more than words can say'. he doesn't see the world that way anymore - pushed by mystic and unimaginable forces. now he writes lines such as 'We didn't have very much to say/ she said that she'd come from some other place/ a town called Troyskirt, maybe Troysworth/ i was pretty distracted packing my stuff/ but I did make a point to ask her to stay/ but she said she had friends that she had to go see'. he is not struggling to make sense of the failed relationships and the fading loves, the seemingly unavoidable movement from love to pain, and back again. now he sees relationships as failed because that's the way the world is- there is no mystery to the 'why'- there only is. love fades because everything fades. and the lines or transitions between love and pain are so temporary on the larger scale and so subjective that differentiating between them at all is not some great human endeavor but a silly statement on one's current location.
mark kozelek has let it go. he's living and writing about the mundanity of experience - and if it sounds magical as it does at the end of 'I know its pathetic by that was the greatest night of my life' - its just coincidental.
I cried, because I missed my mark kozelek, and because I missed myself that could sing in off key affirmation of shared emotion and desperation about such things. I cant want him to be who he was anymore than I can hope to retain those things  no one seems to retain. and while I cant be indignant about it, I suppose I don't either have to be happy about it either.
So I cried because mark kozelek has no idea what life is about.
and neither do it.

termini

i went down, as i often did on tuesdays, to stare at the straight lines of the loading and unloading trains. i liked the structure of it- those metal almost cylinders, static and silent and the cables of human movement that morphed from constrained pulsing order to chaotic absurd throngs in a moment, then back again. i had been in rome for months, languished in the august heat in sync with the whole city that seemed to capitulate to the weight of the weather and the oppressive invasion of tourists. but the cobblestones, and the baroque facades had become common place, just the week before i had been walking down via napoleone III turned left unto via gioberti cut through a heard of hissing and wailing stagnated cars and passed as disinterested as a spring stream right past the santa maria maggiore. termini was my wistful port, a cliff from which i could stare out at leaving made manifest.

the suddenly peeling away from a view of disembarking I saw a woman who looked like, exactly, a girl i had once known. i remembered that moment we shared, as she unwound her ḥijāb, how her the pristine cream neck revealed itself like one of solomon’s towers. it was a frozen moment for me, that never seemed to fray with the passing of time, the act of her unwinding the surprising lengths of her dark curly hair. and all the skin and the shed sanctity less revealing than her eyes, and the tremble in her voice as she asked me a question.  it was her, i was sure of it, though i knew it was not. the heart shape of her face, and the fierce aura that exuded from her seemed exact. and so my mind and heart could not reconcile, and as i called out her name, in a choked voice, she didn’t bother to turn to it. it wasn’t her name, it was august in rome and I was imagining things.

mem or ee

the fall is for brooding, open highways, and the ghosts of the ever lingering lovers so far gone the memory cant recall, cant conjure them on command, like the known sign no longer visible in his for reflecting rearview mirror. beyond the hills infront, just like those heinous empty nebraska plains, recently passed through, what exists i can not know or remember only imagine. i sat on my front bumper at an all too familiar gas station - as he had so many times been - between my past and the unpossessed future. only the past is mine.
'how can you do that - walk backwards through life?'
he, or i, the subjects - life or story? the direction you view, i look, everything is twisted fact or fiction, twisted and ravelled and ravelling around each other, around themselves. 'theres nothing back there for you,'  he thinks she is disgusted, she hides it well, but i could see it, coiling behind the veil of her eyes.
in his head or out loud i say, 'theres nothing back there at all.'
'what?'
'things imply substance, and theres not, theres no past beyond the stories and the corner crouching ghosts,' she has been sick of this, is and was, and will be even later when they, we, have stopped talking. i know she isnt here, thats just a memastory, this is just the haunt, the milemarker. 357 where the light swung left to right no matter which direction one faces, for the light was always just remembered even when he was living in it. i thought it looked like silent blonde streamers, fragile and resolved.
white washed blue eyes and her fingers at his wrist, checking for his resting pulse. 'i cant feel it' from beneaht the shest she says, '.....
he remembered it as a confused sleepy wandering question, childish but then i remembered it differently something about the sound of the highway- maybe more a mocking tone. and it all seems to blur, the bedroom or a gas station in limon, colorado. was it her voice or the old mans that mocked me like pearl mocked dimsdale, 'thou wast not bold, thou wast not....'
it was a carved grey beard and the frayed cowboy hat then he recalled asking him
'where you headed?'
and before i could answer he rambled on about some place in texas, about a job or a girl or whatever it is spectres on the great american highway always find themselves crawling towards. the old man was headed some where, for there was nothing the old man told him, for him or i or he or them in this place. there was and is nothing ever here, something is always elsewhere, over there beyond the ridge, beyond the hills, the horizon until there are no more horizons - for that is what death is, the end of horizons. and living the movement through the nothings of this place, ever real, and not, he or i thought, to be confused with the nothings of the past which were not even real, to the place where one no longer look into, and through what was not towards what might be.
i think i grunted, i am sure i didn't speak.
'what about you? you headed home?' the old man couldnt have seen my licence plate.
i said no, or i dont know, or 'i dont know where home is'
most places are like most other places, from the over hang of a gas station florida isnt much different from east colorado, or alabama from virgina. go to enough places, see enough of the spectrum and the gaps between the majesty of st marks and the mundanity of your average road side diner falls away, or into itself, a place is everyplace, is no place. and like all the memories of summer days become one day of bright summer, or one bar of golden light so do all places become a, or any, gas station.
and too the voices and the people and the old man and the girl are there, saying in both voices, unique and uniform, choral and monotone the words, the question
'... where is your heart?'

Calypso (to 'nýja lagiδ')

they had been laying on the floor of her living room for hours.
suspended, inclosed by the screaming white walls and carpet.
everything was still, unadorned- except for the massively oversized mirror
that hung above her couch, framed by roughly cut cardboard.
the world had stopped for them, nothing moved.
there was only music
they spoke at times, and then went unimaginable expanses without words
he traced lines, shapes, words, sentences, secrets
with his fingers into her arms and legs
when he asked how long they had laid there
her heavily lidded eyes pulled open
draconic  and lovely and green
she answered 'always'

later like a shock.
the sun breaks. pouring in through the gossmer drapes that hang
over the rarelly openned double french doors.
the illusion of their forever trembles
in the adamant light of celestial physics.
'it's almost tomorrow' he says
'no, no' her soft pleas, 'make it stop.'
he pulls his hand through her thick hair,
newly illuminated it is a cascade of garnet and copper.
'i dont know how'
'if you just put this song on repeat.
and we dont ever go to sleep
it will stop.'
he could not help his smile, at the sleepy laze of her voice
'will it?'
'yes, just stay here with me,
in this room,
in this song,'
she says softly,
'if we dont go to sleep, it will be today forever.'

Jessica

you werent recalled
the feeling of remembering you was evoked
it was the sky, its moody sullen grey
hanging as it so often does in the fall, so close
to the awaiting earth, and the turning grass
more like escaping air from an exhumed tomb
than an actual memory
your large ovular eyes, so dark
the line was not decernable
between
pupils and your irises
peering over your freckles
and your cocktail glass brace

i couldn't shake you, and stood
there in the nearly empty parking lot
at least as long as our last red light
embrace
and i thought then i was too damn old
to be haunted by the ghost
of some other man's wife.

The Ardah

The highway gives way.
and out of the tangled tentacles of asphalt and cement the city rises.
shuddering to a standstill the panting six cylinder
and we pour out the doors and on to the sidewalk
pressed collars and matte hair paste and loan shark smiles
in doors at the bar we bang fists and cheer to the tv screen
choral waves of temporary fanaticism fueled by booze, from the low rack.
predatory glance from the blonde on the corner.
keys in the nose in the bathroom.
they take my cousin's id at the front gate and we mull around the crowd on wall street for a while moving in and out of the unnecessarily strange themed bars the circus freak joint opens to the urban mexican cantina past a few groups of people of color to wink and flash disingenuous smiles at the pack of girl who don’t know where they are they're drinking twelve dollar martinis in silly cocktail glasses admist a sea of waist high held clear plastic cups into the steam punk bar and out into the pavement to assault the street vender with fists of ones and home remedy whitened teeth.
manifest destiny.
hot dogs for everybody.

'fille dans la ville' or scrying strange skyscrapers

from the garden on the patio of the 17th floor, she's almost sure she can feel it - the city is alive.
its breath sings up, off the street, blows back her hair, fills her lungs.
cars pump through its veins, vibrating the railing, and her hands long and slender.
somewhere behind her the sun is going down, crawling up the cooling glass of the tower is the click and hum of some street musician. she peers down at him, watching the disinterested  moving past, on.
later she's on the pavement, in movement, apart and a part of the great urban beast.
stopping and starting, beating the pathways and moving in sync with the strange physics of the street. she stands adrift of the crown fountain, in the descending dark, catching the kiss of its mist, like a vespers upon her face.
she stands there, like a rod, eyes closed amongst the maelstrom trying to feel, know the secrets she thinks are carried there in the fragile consistency of the monumental.
a stroll down michigan, others are pulling on light jackets and around her the cool off the lake clings to her like a companion. at the light at randolph a boy tells her she has beautiful eyes, she smiles because she knows it is true and leaves him there confused by the look, in the wake of her hair.
just a block north she sees something different, peering along the line of the river she sees lower wacker and realizes the city is not what she thought. growing out, off of its own bones- the city seeming lovely, is too a monster perverse. the heart is on the outside, its spine is a dead husk, and the colour and wonder is grown on its detritus, its decay. oh, there's a serenity to city lights, their looming consistency. but looking at their reflection in the chicago river, she found it all very jarring. all the towers, arias of steel and glass and cement, were undeniably absolute, resounding. but she thought then that they were not the representatives of the real city, not the secret that had propelled her eager exploration.
the wind was kicking up, and off to her right the dingy yellow noise of the bar, where her friends were waiting, wept. she knew then that the light broken and trapped in the black wake of the river was the real reflection of the city. cutting quietly through the city, bringing in and pulling out. she found it disconcerting, was alarmed and felt herself recoil from the waterline. she wondered how people managed to live in, with the presence of such a truth.
she bundled herself again the wind for the first time, and drug herself into the bar and the choral warmth of hellos and hugs. a few drinks, a few stories. a song, a dance, a hand at the waist. a distraction, a flutter. words at the balcony. as he left to get drinks she immediately forgot him, as she did all boys and in the night turned again to look on the city.
amidst the unsystematic movement, lights from the cars, the churn on the lakeshore- she could see the disk of the navy pier, the ferris wheel drawing her in. she found it instantly soothing. it illuminates. a pulse. turning at measured pace. looking on it she was able to sigh, and again believe that all was as it should be, and as it will be, forever and ever.