Selections from Country Music Frankenstein
When I moved to Boston, I was twenty-six. My first job was selling tickets for the Boston Ballet, a job that involved spending nights by a ground floor window in the ballet’s building near the corner of Clarendon Street and Columbus in the South End. I had no idea where anything in Boston was or what it was. The people who had this job were largely artistic marginal oddballs. A retired fashion model. Standup comedians. Painters. Acting students. A painter and cartoonist and designer of intricate puppets and puppet shows based on his cartoons, a man with ten parakeets and cockatiels, one named Antonio in honor of another poet friend, happily married to his artistic collaborator, the father of two artists, and completely indifferent to money, Donald Langosy drove me around and drove me home. He had cassette tapes of the soundtracks of Fellini movies. He would sometimes forget he was driving while we talked about Satyricon or Apollinaire, and he gave me my first experiences of Boston at night because I did not drive and was looking at everything with the eyes of somebody who travelled underground.
Even then, Donald was maybe managing the undiagnosed symptoms of multiple sclerosis that would limit much of his mobility since then (27 years ago), especially the athletic operation of his puppets and marionettes and their fabulist sets that spring from the mind of Donald’s protagonist in his Bertie Puddlepoop, a wild-haired and aquiline figure based on John Barrymore’s Twentieth Century screwball impresario and former husband of Carole Lombard who completely overmatches him, also the subject of his multi-panel Krazy-Kat-style comics, which are beautiful in their precision and detail. In Donald’s larger paintings, we find all of his favorite historical figures and especially poets, Leopardi, Dickinson, Whitman, Cocteau, Rilke, Artaud, Pound, and others, his wife, and himself. His work combines the influences of Velasquez’s color, baroque art, Renaissance masters, and the style of Mad Magazine cartoonists in their first iterations, in the 50’s of zits-a-popping on every Archie character against the Code of Comics, tailfins and Donald’s childhood and teenage years with “crazy Hungarians” and “sweet Norwegians” in Brooklyn. Every so often, he would slip on the brick sidewalk as he smoked his pipe, in the place where all art comes from, the gap between the slip into pratfall and a trip into tragic Dis. Donald’s recent work is against confinement.
Because he was a poet before he was a painter, and also because he has always continued to be a poet,Donald is a great reader of poems that decenter their central figures, and this is because he started out as a poet, so much of one that he travelled with his wife Elizabeth to live in Venice and meet Ezra Pound, which he did, several times. They lived down the street from him, if that is what people say in Venice, and greeted him frequently on his walks. In Venice, Donald saw the baroque churches and the baroque paintings, and he resolved to become a painter. Painting was what he was looking for in poems, and when he found painting he brought his poet’s eye, a poet’s eye trained by collage and also by the sets of baroque churches. His sensitivity to poetry is all over these collages, associative and also interpretive. This must have been 1970. Donald says Old Ezra wasn’t talking, but he was a great wiggler of eyebrows in his cape and broad black hat whenever he met this beautiful, elegant, poor and profoundly decent and open pair of lovebirds on the run from the America of “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and the gross blood of the movies without connections or pedigree. Actually, Pound wasn’t very nice to them at all. He did that bit with the eyebrows, and licking his lips, too, when he thought Donald wasn’t looking, but Olga was nice. Donald was disappointed in him, but he had already been elevated by Titian, actually weeping and falling to his knees at one point before one, causing the old ladies around him to suspect him of extreme and un-aesthetic religiosity.
There is always a gap between any artists, even when they collaborate. In these collages, Donald is trying on some of my concerns, but not necessarily buying them or buying into them. As friends always live in different worlds, when he hears my description, he gives his own. As we went along in our collaboration, I started writing poems after his collages and wrote new ones in the spirit of the work that began to emerge. He and I both like a crowded field of images, but he might go in a direction that is less crowded than I would. He might have more extensive powers of negative capability. All artists are essentially self-taught or become self-taught as they go along, but we are coming from different generations. While I have spent a lot of times on the fringes within sometimes very sketchy institutional settings and as contingent academic labor, and as a poet, I stick to the parallel margins of institutional discourse and vocabulary though its aims and politics and sympathies suit my own. Meanwhile, Donald is out in the hills. A complete original, at times he is still flouting the “comics code” of the fifties and the old censorship and repression; on the other hand, he is pointedly showing us a culture that keeps Boris more fully clothed than Natasha, Rocky or Bullwinkle. Donald is one of the last American artists who still thinks Freud was basically right about civilization, the unconscious, and its discontents. The effect is doubling: like reading Berger’s critique of the nude and art as property on display in Ways of Seeing while also watching a pre-Code Hollywood musical. Their lack of realism is part of the point. They are show business about show business. They are about looking, and you realize after a moment that Donald’s figures are always staring back at you from their perches in imaginary space. You can tell when he thinks people are being good because they look like they just swallowed some chocolate that melted in their mouths, and when they are not, they are just awful. Some figures look right at you. “What are you looking at?” and also that other question, “What are you projecting upon what you see?” Here, I am also thinking of Donald’s paintings. Other figures, like his grouped sitcom stars, observe the action like heavenly figures in a mystical state, something like the “mystical marriage” paintings in which a painter imagines a bunch of saints all hanging out together.
For Donald, the DIY Cocteau of Boston, art is everything, transcending the general culture, laughing at its restrictions and prohibitions and ways of keeping score and maintaining status, as those are things that are always ultimately reversed at the real big picture show, the one in his head, and the one with an afterlife. His true subject is paradise, as William Carlos Williams said of Ford Maddox Ford. He is still unstoppable, still painting, and also working with laptop and iPad he is making collages in the spirit of Matisse’s cutouts and the late paintings of Renoir, who done against the agony of severe arthritis. All along, he has remained an example of life-art and friendship in art. I sent him these poems made with something of his spirit, out of our shared influences, and also, just because I love him and his work. I am honored that he made these collages after and about them.
—David Blair
For Feast of St. Deodorants Processionals Led by the Rightwing Bishops of North America
One Florida wrapped in one other thing, experience,
heritage, sociopaths contending, gotten together, uniting
one group worse than the next: you. Political calls go out
to send more jerks. We need the biggest jerks you’ve got.
He sweat so much all day, he ran like rain to the CVS
as soon as night fell, got new deodorant, popped the lid
off it as soon as he was back out the automatic doors
which opened and closed behind him, motion sensors,
no breeze in the palmetto palms in that surrounded
the parking lot with frogs, pawed furiously at his pits
down the front of his shirt. Some poor schnauzer looks
like a print of Saint Joan traumatized in dungeon. You did
what to that poor anima, rescued it from slow tortures
or tortured it yourself? He keeps sweating into the night
as he walks past all the porches with their porch lights
and finally melts. A wick stands up in what’s left of him,
his black spinal chord burnt down to a final string or wick
like the threads of the stitches the emergency room doc
leaves for last and knots, which you can cut to pull out.
Lean over and light him as you would a citronella candle
and then hold him aloft in the long nighttime procession,
for tonight is the Eve of the Feast of the Saint Deodorants.
Move with the crowd past the movie theater marquee
and the nightclub, the Irish pub, the creperie open late,
towards the cathedral, joined by other processions,
one bearing aloft a large silver dish with a flower-garlanded
hunk of something the size of half a cow’s ass from the tail
to leg, a dried ham of plenty, salted and husked yet beaded
with the nighttime humidity, arriving a few awkward moments
just when the brass band begins a new song before the second
dish arrives, followed by its acolytes, the white-rind ooze of cheese.
/ / / / /
Towns Without Pity
It was a town of office workers
in mind
adjacent to furniture factories
and slums teetering inside every blast
or squeeze of hair syrup
of the Clinton years, in every February
camellia bush with a tough red flower,
and then there was witch-hazel frizz.
Nobody slept with each other from work
but they dated the same promiscuous
and shiftless people. She was listening
to Rhonda talk about her shiftless
ex-boyfriend who sounded
like a good time now that Rhonda
dumped him, Rhonda with those
saddle bags and Mary Hartman braids.
Meanwhile, just get those folders
back in the right filing cabinets.
No, I won’t join you at Hooters.
The pool hall owner
was bankrolled by his wife
until she divorced him
and the big gold ring she bought him, too,
but he kept his good military posture.
Some pool halls have serious ugly
lighting and industrial
carpet meant to muffle sound.
It was a limited number
of options that set people
apart from food lions
out at night on highways
looking for places to eat
with some class.
I expected mummies
and pyramids to be the next big thing
after the Alfredo sauce dries,
and then emu stew with boiled peanuts and salt.
No wonder Ian walked his big lizard on a leash.
/ / / / /
In the Party-Time Berkshires
Miriam says, boon philosophy is no concepts at all,
Though people are not rightwing, they are not liberal,
and they are not libertarian.
They merely lack a lexicon.
Marc listens. This makes
sense to him. Raising up his left hand,
he gestures to the rock pile
on the edge of the rehabilitating orchard
that is the backyard looking down
the bowling alley to Mount Graylock
and says, those groundhogs, or Murmeltiere,
a family, one always stands guard,
and see her in profile?
And Miriam says, gesturing with her right hand,
that man, that guy, on the tractor. He’s what I mean.
He is the best person
ever. He has no concepts
whatsoever. His chairs climbs
steadily the steeper and steeper embankment
as the grasshoppers
leap from the prow of his tractor,
forwards, upwards, and to each side.
If one lands by his lips, he eats, ingests it quickly.
Whatever are these two
talking about? I pretend to know. I don’t.
This tractor’s up-going effort
reminds me of the smooth road
most of the way here from Boston,
reminds me of this roll of dimes
in my sock drawer, next to my can of peanuts
that really has a terrifying slinky snake in it,
and a few yarmulkes from friends’ weddings,
which I don’t like to throw out. Seems bad.
There was a young man in a chair, once,
paralyzed, like my friend Rob, died of different virus,
only with polio, with none of his bones broken,
robbed clearly, at once, with sweats and shivers.
There were no concepts
and there were no cures. For years,
he was drunk as we were that day in the Berkshires
and on vacations, but his vacations never stopped.
The people on the boat with him
were vapid and rich. The party never
ended. And then he discovered Georgia,
the springs, the very poor, the young,
the very ill, the strong shoulders and arms
of the courageous, the canny, the dim,
the sweetness, the toughness
at the core. And you know what.
That was a party, too. Just people.
And he knew he would have to whip Hitler
even if the stay-at-homes here regressed
whenever not mown, and maybe liked being
angry dark clouds. They liked
being spruce clouds of grey and blue.
If they were pastries, they would be prune.
What was unsettling still is. Who stands there
on the rock pile? Who is driving
the crickets and grasshoppers
up to Heaven and to the sides?
See some junky by the children’s section
waiting to score by the library
where they keep Melville’s pipe
and the bric-a-brac of honeymoon.
You can say they all live out there out here,
but nobody knows those who do not use concepts,
but just like people. Except everybody. So there.
/ / / / /
The Wake of the Sexy Cousin
Raise it for the pleasures of life, the bodies of men and women without excessive textual mediation, packed, even pickled, in the mystery of feeling.
The wood fires. These people at my cousin’s wake were overfed and suntanned and rubbing each other on the couch. They were some hedonists.
I loved them. The fire pits. The removal of smells. It is a funeral scene from Propertius and the pages of Cosmo.
The windows open on the trees in daylight. At night, the loud toads and tree frogs, spring summer and loud bugs, August, late August.
Out the windows of the empty yacht club dining room, the crowd brandishes its long white implements into the drizzle and hard grey of the rainy harbor.
I feel my age. Already five years. There is a green room.
I was interviewing the starlit starlet from my high school. She disappeared into Denmark. The mole on above her lip was not a Restoration comedy mole. Her mouth was a bow, practically a small pretzel of laughs.
I remember her swayback and overly small shoulders. Public school bathing suits were all blue, got darker wet. She says you can only hitch rides
across North Africa so long. Professor Pants, I have been dead four years already, with my lisp.
But how can that I be, I ask. You wore jeans. A white triangle stood on its finger with its hypotenuse in the air. People don’t know. Was it my heart? Was it my head? Did I overdose? Did we just over-doze?
The island fills with the calls of gulls in August. It gets quieter in September. Then it’s October, and migratory crows cover one roof. Then another roof. And the telephone lines near the roof. That happens every year.