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July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith--based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al--Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti--Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
25, 2002
Roamin' in the Gloamin'
Van Morrison: In September
by Gavin Keeney
"When the leaves coming falling
down
In September, when the leaves come falling down ...
When the leaves come falling down in September, in the rain When
the leaves come falling down"
--Van Morrison, "When
the Leaves Come Falling Down",
Back on Top (Exile Publishing Ltd., 1998)
Leon Wieseltier, contributing editor of The New
Republic, has promised for years to write an essay on the music
of Van Morrison, the Irish bard/troubadour. Thus far, he has
not delivered on the promise. It has been repeatedly delayed
-- perhaps because Morrison's work itself is infused with temporality.
Delaying, rounding, rummaging, idling, and all forms of prevarication
abound. "Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
... Get on the train, the train, the train, the train, the train
... This is the train, the train, the train, the train, the train
..." Transitions and glimpses of 'something' litter the
musical landscape, but 'paradise' -- the eternal now -- always
slips away. "Got you in my sight, got you in my mind ..."
For me, Van Morrison's music will always be infused with the
spirit of "the fall" -- of impermanence, always-already
deferred "transcendence", and somber "autumnal"
hues (and cries).
I first understood Morrison's legendary
status -- as legendary prevaricator/idler -- when I read Hunter
S. Thompson's paean to Astral Weeks in Rolling Stone sometime
around 1972-73. I had just started college and Rolling Stone
and The Village Voice were available in the library. Thompson's
article circled round Astral
Weeks and swooped incoherently down on "Slim Slow
Slider" -- the most amazing song on this extraordinary 1968
recording made in New York City in one continuous recording session
-- a journalistic feat utterly consistent with the music. "Saw
you early this morning, with your brand-new boy and your cadillac/
You're gone for something, and I know you won't be  back ..." This song shatters the
mirror of innocence, played out through the other songs of sexual
awakening, e.g., the delirium of "Just Like a Ballerina",
and represents the emergence of something purely archaic -- expressed
in the ravaged, wordless conclusion. This undercurrent is present
throughout but irrupts mercilessly at the close of the last song.
The infamous, wayfaring journalist was apparently struck dumb
by the savage incantation of the song -- the young girl "slipping
and sliding", riding away into oblivion. "Tell it everywhere
you go ..." It struck through the Gordian knot of Hunter's
cynicism to his post-romantic soul. Hunter S. Thompson was after
all a burnt-out romantic, albeit one obsessed with guns and drugs
and Richard Nixon. Many years later in the Woody Creek Tavern,
outside Aspen, Colorado, and sitting just below the Hunter S.
Thompson memorabilia mounted on the wall, I remembered that first
encounter ... Too bad he didn't saunter through the door. He
could have tried to explain himself. I've been trying to track
down this article for years, to no avail. Sometimes I think I
may have hallucinated the whole thing.
I heard covers of Van Morrison songs
from the Moondance
period in bars by local folk musicians in those first years of
college. I was 18 years old and the music -- combined with rivers
of draft beer -- was a near-death experience. It mattered little
that it was not Morrison singing the songs. The bands were superb
folk-blues bands -- the place was Northern Maine, where first-class
musicians were in a kind of self-imposed exile in the Great North
Woods. I eventually purchased Astral Weeks and it was the beginning
of following Morrison's ambling career over nearly thirty years.
Before Van Morrison captured my imagination, I had listened principally
to the folk minstrels Joni Mitchell, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Eric
Andersen, Phil Ochs, Leonard Cohen, and Jesse Winchester. To
this day I listen to Joni Mitchell's Blue
(1971) ... Tom Rush, exquisite in concert, was one of the first
to bring early Jackson Browne songs east, from California. Around
1972, he was covering "Colors of the Sun" and "These
Days", by Browne, and "Biloxi" (1971), Jesse Winchester's
gift to humankind. "The stars can see Biloxi/ The stars
can find their faces in the sea/ We are walking in the evening
by the ocean ..." In just three short verses, Winchester
encompassed the entire world. I wished, then, that "I had
a river to skate away on ..." I still do.
I've never followed any band or artist
through every up-and-down cycle. I collect the periodic releases
that seem relevant, then dump them later when they seem irrelevant.
With Van Morrison it was Astral Weeks (1968), Moondance (1970),
St
Dominic's Preview (1972), Veedon
Fleece (1974), Wavelength
(1978), Common
One (1980), Inarticulate
Speech of the Heart (1983), Poetic
Champions Compose (1987), Enlightenment
(1990), Days
Like This (1995), and, in 1999, Back
on Top that impressed me. Astral Weeks remains in my
collection, come Hell or high water. It resides, permanently,
"Way down upon the diamond studded highway where we wander
..." The middle period -- the 1980s -- was typified by Morrison
composing music that became almost purely instrumental -- the
surly and sharp Irish bard's voice vanished below layers of jazz
and new-age sonic (synthesized) improvisation. The Vangelis effect,
plus some forays into Scientology ... Throughout, however, the
saxophone became Van Morrison's second voice, and it has remained
so through the later years -- never quite going away. The 1999
music biz buzz about a "return to form", with Back
on Top, was, of course, nonsense -- in Morrison's work there
is no urform. Van Morrison is a musician's musician. Like Texan
Townes Van Zandt, before and after his recent death, Morrison
remains a musical conundrum.
The mysterious presence of the music
is the topographic sublimity itself of musical expression. The
mystical, rapturous takes on Nature -- Wordsworth's and Coleridges'
Nature deified and defiled -- are surrogate experiences of the
innermost landscape of language. This sexualized ambience has
been perfected since his first raw days with the Belfast band
Them. Morrison has since his youth lived in the echoing spaces/passages
of music and landscape. What else is 'Ireland'? He has soaked
up the influences of American gospel, blues, and jazz and brought
a literary, poetic consciousness to the creative tableaux of
his songs. But after all is said and done, there is that Pentecostal
fire burning below the stylistic operations. "Give me the
fire, ah give me the fire ..."
The music of Common One accompanied me
through a period of rediscovery of the pure, symbolic realm of
First Nature. Living in Southern Maine, and on the coast, I became
obsessed with studying the landscape closely for its metaphoric
power, but also for the signature of the Real. The songs followed
me through snow-covered fields in winter, spruce and pine woods
and coastal beaches in summer. Inarticulate Speech of the Heart
seemed to me to descend from the starry vault of winter nights
-- the music carried transcendental and cosmic wave formations
(symphonic, emotive, aural dreamscapes). Like David Crosby's
If I Could Only Remember My Name, the songs had virtually no
lyrics other than pure non-semantic fragments of speech -- cries
and moans -- or the phonemes that haunt the foundations of all
languages. Later, when I met Crosby quite by chance, I told him
that this was my favorite work of his. He said others told him
the same thing.
Poetic Champions Compose was a gift from
a friend. It was before CDs and I had a tape for years till I
replaced it with a CD recently. The haunting "Sometimes
I Feel Like a Motherless Child" remains the formidable experience
of that work, just like "Slim Slow Slider" from Astral
Weeks.
And then along came Back on Top, in 1999,
with the lyric gems "When the Leaves Come Falling Down",
"Philosophers Stone", "In the Midnight",
and "Golden Autumn Day". I purchased it at the Virgin
Megastore at Times Square, where music resembles an avalanche.
Where you have to pick your way through a wasteland of musical
rubble to "find your way out". At the same time I purchased
the 1999 Townes Van Zandt release, A
Far Cry from Dead, a sardonic title since it was released
(and mastered) after his death. As a poet, Van Zandt inhabited
the same musical parallel universe as Van Morrison, plucking
songs from the archaic aether as inspiration came and went. "Livin's
mostly wastin' time/ I waste my share of mine ..." Coming
from Texas, Van Zandt worked in a far more rustic idiom -- country
blues and folk. With both Morrison (the bawdy bard) and Van Zandt
(the hard-drinking minstrel), music is essentially the landscape
of that parallel universe that poetic, primal consciousness inhabits.
In Long John Baldry's a capella version of "Wild Mountain
Thyme" I found confirmation of this truth -- in a song where
landscape and subjectivity collide head-on like a car crash.
I listened to that song repeatedly until I learned it by heart.
I can still sing a fair version ...
The war cries of the poet/minstrel are
the pangs of struggle -- including lamentations and "rack
screams" -- or protestations against Being-on-the-Road-
to-Perdition (to update Heidegger), or, perhaps, Being-Sunk-in-the-Mire.
What else was John Lennon's extraordinary primal scream phase
all about? The existential anxiety of Townes Van Zandt led him
to a so-called "shamanistic", haunted country blues
oeuvre, and to slow alcohol-induced self-immolation. (There is
an apocryphal and questionable all-purpose excuse for why the
Irish drink too much as well: i.e., to quell their "native
clairvoyance". Given the history of Ireland, one might just
as well substitute "drown their sorrows" for "quell
their native clairvoyance".) No one has appeared to replace
Van Zandt, in terms of poetic intelligence, with perhaps the
exception of Sam Phillips. (If only she can stay away from the
pop producers ...) She is in many ways maintaining a post-Virgin
Records vigil for her own soul. Fan
Dance (Nonesuch, 2001) is a sign that this vigil is, for
now, brilliantly, a matter of "marking time". For the
moment, Sam Phillips has escaped the "heart collector".
Morrison, equally a stranger in a strange
land, has appropriated Blake, Yeats, Wordsworth, Coleridge and
the English-Irish literati (and illuminati) in his lyrical, sometimes
mystical perambulations but never Kierkegaard, Heidegger or Jean-Paul
Sartre. Perhaps Leon Wieseltier would be so kind as to explain
why.
"Only a dark cocoon before [we]
get our gorgeous wings and fly away ..."
ANCIENT HIGHWAY
"There's a small cafe on the outskirts
of town
I'll be there when the sun goes down ...
When the grass is high and the rabbit
runs
Though it's talkin' to you and I
And every new generation comes to pay
The dues of the organ grinder jam ...
And I'll be standin' there, where the
boats go by
When the sun is sinking way over the hill
On a Friday evening when the sun goes down
On the outskirts of town. I wanna slip away
I wanna slip away, got to get away ...
Travelling like a stranger in the night,
all along the ancient highway
Got you in my sights, got you on my mind
I'll be praying in the evening when the sun goes down
Over the mountain, got to get you in my sight ...
And you'll be standing there, while the
boats go by
While the boats go by on a Friday evening
Got to slip away, got to slip away down that ancient highway
In a town called Paradise, in a town, in a town ...
And we're driving down that ancient road
Shining like diamonds in the night, oh diamonds in the night
All along the ancient highway
Got you in my sight, got you in my mind
Got you in my arms and I'm praying, and I'm gonna pray
I'm gonna pray, to my higher self, ah don't let me down
Don't let me down, give me the fire, ah give me the fire"
--Van Morrison,
"Ancient Highway",
Days Like This (Exile Publishing Ltd., 1995)
"What Astral Weeks deals in are
not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned
down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed,
stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the
enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.
It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth,
because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally
horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy,
according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision
of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception
of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled
down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with
its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity
to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt." --Lester
Bangs
Gavin Keeney
is a landscape architect in New York, New York. and the author
of On
the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails
of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.
He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
An Islam
Primer
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
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