"What I Love Is Near at Hand"

Bill and I started a ritual a couple weeks back.  We go for a Friday after-work walk at Spring Grove Cemetery.  It's a truly beautiful place in the middle of neighborhoods and nothingness, and as you walk through its hilly, calm, planetary atmosphere you start to feel connected to a way of understanding things that's transformative without movement or strife or even thought.  All those gravestones, all that sunlight splashing off of leaves.  And the smell as you go from bright sunlit oxygen into a small ravine shadowed with old trees, musty, cool and secret, the sunshine falling through in short silvery intervals onto gravel and dirt.  It's a smell you remember but can't name (lost rivers, empty buckets, old water-hoses), like a drug you took as a teenager that was so pleasant you can never have that same experience ever again.  Lost time or maybe a dream of lost time is what it is, nostalgia stirred and then left still.

We don't talk that much as we walk. 

The place is expansive, falling off into hills, statues, little mock-cathedrals and marble vaults.  You don't want to talk.  Just walk.  Engraved names and dates, weather-beaten angel faces turning into morphined skulls.  It's not spooky though, just pleasantly exactly what it is.  It's the recent gorgeous weather too:  too clear to get into your head, the sky so fluorescent blue and cellophane yellow you can't really appreciate it without wincing.  Just walking, past all those graves, all those people's lives.  It doesn't feel creepy because it meanders close to what poetry is supposed to make you feel when it's done right.  The whole atmosphere slows down to elements you can worship, or at least ponder without having to understand.  You're there in the moment and everything is sparkling and kind of monumental but nothing is scary or complicated or rushed.  Just walking, like that, through the end of the afternoon.   The prehistoric boniness of the trees, the thickets surrounding the cut grass, the swampy waters stirred by fountains, rock-bridges and patches of dead weeds... 

I kept thinking about Theodore Roethke.  He truly is the one poet I think about the most.  His poems have a beveled but somehow amateurish sense of architecture that makes you feel like you're experiencing Shakespeare and Henry Darger simultaneously, that mix of "high" and "low," or whatever, pouring forth, sculpted and shorn into a constant death and rebirth.  His poems have their own equinox, their own cemeteries.  These are lines from The Far Field:

The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.



Life after Death

 

Jeff Howlett and Mark Covino's A Band Called Death is about so many things, but it focuses its primary resources on telling the story of Death, an early-70s, African American punk trio out of Detroit headed by the late David Hackney, a visionary musician who along with his two brothers recorded an album in 1974 that wasn't released during his lifetime.  Hackney's stubborn dedication to his own vision, music, and the band name Death became his eventual downfall in many ways. (The record company who signed them would not release the record without the name-change, and Hackney never allowed that to happen).  That over-the-top name, however, also seems to be the main reason for the band's eventual resurrection in 2008.  Hipster record collectors began stumbling upon a couple singles the band made back in the 70s at alternative record stores, and finally Death began to stir interest yet again, this time with enough zeitgeist to create a sort of mini-movement.

 

What is so incredible about A Band Called Death isn't really the story about the band's comeback, as much as the story of David Hackney's sad decline into obscurity, despite trying so hard to avoid it.  He passed away in 2000 from complications due to alcoholism, and the movie is a tribute to his youthful vigor and dedication to what he saw he needed to do.  His two brothers eventually gave up, and went on to front a revivalist reggae touring band, working janitorial and other kinds of jobs to get by.  Hackney never really gave up on what the idea that Death was his life, and that the band's inevitable emergence as a great punk institution was just around the corner, even (especially) when everything seemed stacked against it.  That commitment only caused him misery the last days of his life, but it also helped to create the music that will be his legacy:  intense, flagrant, crazy, beautiful rock n roll that makes the Ramones and Sex Pistols sound puny in retrospect. 

 

The amalgamation of all those disparate elements -- three African American brothers in 1974 creating some of the best  high-energy, fuck-you punk music while living in Motown -- makes Death a sort of anomaly that had to either self-destruct or find vengeance. 

 

Death did both.

 

This movie made me cry unlike any other I've seen this year.  It is a hyper-emotional experience.  An exhausted sadness permeates many of the scenes in which Hackney's brothers try to conjure his spirit in order to remember him exactly as he was:  a high-spirited, freaky, sweet nobody who had talent and gumption and a sense of ego that both doomed him and allowed him to see behind that doom.  While that deeply felt melancholia does infuse the movie, A Band Called Death is also incredibly life-affirming, especially in its focus on Hackney's nephews, who now front their own punk band named Rough Francis (a name they culled from Hackney's music).  And Hackney's brothers, Dannis and Bobby, take center stage at the end in a reconfiguration of Death, with his full-sized picture floating behind the stage, a makeshift rock god holding court.  While watching that neo-Death, you remember the real thing as Howlett and Covino have framed it:  three young dudes in a bedroom in their house in early 70s Detroit, rocking so loud the neighbors end up pounding on the front door.  They only get louder.  It's a joyous celebration of rebellion, as well as a way to understand that punk really isn't a movement or a style as much as a force of nature. 

 

By the end, Howlett and Covino have given us an epic, tragicomic bildungsroman with Bobby as the protagonist, a vital American story that somehow uplifts even while it maintains the super-punk spirit embedded in Death's creed and name.