SMOKE GOT SMOKED

This man, Callion Hamblin AKA Smoke, was gunned down today by “the law;”
his blood stains our streets.

Tell Us Another One, Park Hills Daily Journal..! 

Who needs AT&T when we've already got Washington U. Professor Stanley Elkin to give us the 411? A dead man speaking up from the grave on behalf of another dead man. This excerpt is from The Bailbondsman, one of three novellas in Searches and Seizures.

“Mr. Main, it's Command Performanceville,” he says softly.

Oh, he's very sinister. “Why didn't you say Command Performanceville in the first place? Command Performanceville's another story. For Command Performanceville my commission is thirty percent.”

“Drinks all around,” he says agreeably. “I'll put you in the picture.”

“I read the book, I seen the picture. Your man downtown calls my man downtown who tells me your lad is under arrest. It's strictly offside vis-a-vis the other bondsmen, but I get to him first, arrange the bail, and he steps out into the sunshine a free man.”

“A hundred percent.”

“That will be sixty-five hundred dollars please.”

“C.O.D.”

“C.O.D.?”

“Phoenecian, Mr. Main, I'm a sporty young man. I drive fast cars fast. How would it look I was picked up for speeding and the cops found sixty-five hundred bucks on me? Use your kepeleh. Did we know you drive such a hard bargain.”

“I drive hard bargains hard.”

“Of course, of course. You'll be paid. The handle plus thirty percent. You'll get registered mail. Who's more honest than a syndicate man?”

“Then why do you speed?” I ask gloomily.

But there's reason on the young fellow's side. We shake and he leaves. The little bakery bell jingles behind him. Mr. Crainpool looks at me reproachfully, sorrow in his eyes like the toothache. “Something on your mind, Jiminy Cricket?”

“No, sir.”

“What would happen if I refused? Fetterman would do it, or Klein. Adams would. Does Macy tell Gimbel?”

“It's only fifteen hundred dollars after the forfeit.”

“Oh ho. I see where it is with you. It's alright to finger a man, just make sure you get a good price. Mr. Crainpool, kid, my finger comes cheap. If they ask how I do it, say it's my terrific turnover.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We would rather be a banker in a fine suit. We would rather conduct discreet business over drinks at the club. Heart to heart, man to man, gentlemen's agreements and a handshake between friends. We would prefer silver at our temples and a portrait in oils in the marble lobby. But...”

The human family lost a brother, father, son, and friend today; we are all diminished.

For all of you cannibals out there who prefer dark meat, those of you on Facebook and elsewhere who  have expressed your glee at a “nigger” being bagged, and the rest of you who kept your traps shut while they did; here's a knock-knock joke written by me especially for you:

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Justice.

Justice who?

Justice many people will laugh their asses off when it's your turn to be bagged as they did today when it happened to Smoke.

The Vault and Arch of Landscape Is All

In the dream, Susan Sontag is standing outside the empty shop window where Hunt and Gather on Jefferson Street used to be. I recognize her by her hair's skunk white streak, and well, I just recognize her from having read her critical essays and the novels, notably The Volcano Lover. She's gesturing at the abandoned enterprise, like there was something very particular she had been hoping to shop for there, some object that she was counting on getting that she cannot now purchase. On behalf of the entire town of Farmington, Missouri, I grab her by the hand and walk her over (it's not far, I tell her, you could hit a golf ball from here to there, I say) to a place, the only place this side of St. Louis, where I am certain she can fulfill her desire, whatever it may be—The Vault—our local lunch spot cum nightclub, and so much more, our Ground Zero for a diverse community who love live, original music and value its practitioners.

"Go with me to the vault." — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act V, Scene 3

Upon entering The Vault, Ms. Sontag immediately esteems the grayscale décor and relaxes as she surmises that she's in a place of indelible memories. She traces with her forefinger the white labyrinth swirl of the hypno wheel decal—or is it a vortex?—sealed on the surface of every table top. She sits in one of the  comfortable padded black chairs, looks up at the high ceilings, heat ducts and industrial piping traversing the long rectangular room in what once was a shirts and pants factory and says, the Lower East Side? I shake my head no. Williamsburg? No, not Brooklyn, either, I tell her, Missouri. Farmington, Missouri. Amazing, she exclaims. Amazing, I agree.

Her eyes soon travel admiringly past the compact food and beverage kiosk where artist owner Kerry Smith  whips up her culinary wizardry—the beautifully composed panini, gourmet hotdogs, and enticingly named salads—the Harvest, the Lux. Kerry put the Mean Bean on the menu without even trying it herself first, just because she liked the way the ingredients sounded together, I tell her, and it's delicious!  

KDHX St. Louis DJ Bob Reuter's Band is coming back to The Vault on March 9th!

Susan's big eyes scrutinize The Vault's distinctive signature posters and banners announcing upcoming shows, all designed by owner, bass player, and musical curator Tim Smith, and she gasps with pleasure at the representations of burlesque troupes and bizarre circus emporia that have moved so many people here, myself included, right out of our comfort zones. I wonder if she's already noticed the same small hidden image Tim often includes in The Vault's posters, the thing you can look and look for and not see, but then when you see it, you see it always. She approvingly reads the canvases of the other artists whose work the Smiths so generously feature on the walls of their club, before giving her full attention to The Vault's focal point, its raison d'être—the custom-built stage.

Tim goes to the back and puts on a little Zoe Boekbinder for her, followed by a little Shenandoah Davis, Hymn for Her, End Times Spasm Band, then Sleepy Kitty, keeping it a mite cerebral just the way she likes it, and she taps her foot while taking in the black curtains and spotlights, reveling in the good acoustics and sight lines. Her face breaks out in a eureka smile and she intones in a lofty voice that Kerry will mimic perfectly later, not creationism, not intelligent design, but designed intelligently for Farmington's evolution and flourishing. She listens as I tell her of seeing a production of Waiting for Godot in Barcelona on my honeymoon, and that it was performed in Catalan! And she's about to say something about Beckett, about absurdity, about waiting, I don't know and never learn, because, in the dream, Kerry comes over with an Apri-Goat with slaw and a Schlafly bitter brew and Ms. Sontag hungrily devours it, muttering between bites and swallows of beer,  form, content, form, content, form, content...and I wake up.

 

After this dream, at the sold out Whistle Pigs show Friday night, I thought about how important nightlife is for adults if for no other reason that when driving to The Vault you can look up to the night sky, experience the expanding universe, see the stars and moon on your way to, on your way fro. There it is— the Milky Way! And also for the pleasure of the people watching, we are stardust, we are golden. Seated in the row just in front of me Friday there were two middle-aged couples, in their late 50's I would guess, and I couldn't help but notice that in one, the man flung his arm around his woman and pulled her close every chance he got (and she loved it!); in the other, the woman with outstretched fingers on two amorous hands scratched her man's back without inhibition, while he purred like a contented tiger.

At The Vault, grandmothers dance with their six-year old grandsons, men and women flirt outrageously with each other, same sex couples can feel at home. At The Vault we always laugh about something, we always cheer each other on. At The Vault, someone in the band will invariably say how attentive we in the audience are, how you can hear a pin drop, how they can't wait to come back and perform for us again. And it’s true, we are— attentive and grateful for the chance to feel and be part of the larger musical currents criss-crossing the country.

Also invariably, they will say thank you, Tim and Kerry, and we love it, because then we can clap and stamp our feet and whistle and woot-woot for The Vault and the Smiths, and express our appreciation for their considerable aesthetic risk-taking along with their daily sacrifices to keep the shows, excitement, and inspiration coming our way. It's a labor of love, really and truly it is, and they lead from the heart.

We've got some really great shows to look forward to here in Farmington, Missouri, now that Tim Smith has single-handedly put us on the musical map as a destination for national touring bands—the Black Belles, Eliza Rickman—those shows will sell out quickly. But it's the ones in-between, the oddities, the acts you've never heard of until now, the things that for whatever reason have caught Tim's interest that he wants to share with us, these are just as much fun to go to, if only to see who else shows up! What a year in music I've had since the Smiths opened The Vault's doors on March 22, 2011:

Long live The Vault. Viva! Viva! Viva!

Loft and Turf

For me, Elkin, while an odd bird, is incantatory. Like me, he's a New York/Missouri hybrid, and also like me, or me like him, he's absolutely hunky-dory with over-the-top. This, in pregnant parentheses, no less, from Stanley Elkin's 1991 novel (his late period)―The MacGuffin:

(“What's this all about?” Loft, the director of the airport, had asked. “A little slogan I thought up,” Druff said. “What? A slogan?” 'Change planes in our town and we'll show you a time'?” “Sure,” Druff told him, “if they had even a two-or three-hour layover we could pick them up in buses and show them around. No city in America has thought of this yet.” “There's such a thing as turf, Druff. You're the street man here. You of all people ought to know that.” So [Druff] took his case over Loft's head. “Look,” he'd argued to a chilly City Council, “what's the worst that can happen? That the bus has an accident and everyone in it is killed or maimed. Don't worry, it won't happen, we'll use only the most seasoned drivers. It won't happen, but even if, God forbid, it does, most of these people are covered by the credit cards they use to purchase their airplane tickets, by their travel agencies, by the bus company itself. I asked counsel to look into this and he assures me we're in the clear.” Going at his job in those mercantile rooms of yore as if City Hall were still a department store. He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets and only wanted to be a better one. Why not? Streets were roads, roads were what the Romans built, and he, Druff, was road man here, Imperial Commissioner of the Way to the Empire! So give me a little credit please, he'd thought. I understand about empire, why wouldn't I know about turf?)  

Photos by Steve Hull

This past First Friday I traveled a recently resurfaced country road―Highway OO―to one of the more interesting, candid and boundary-extending conversations I've experienced this year in Missouri. One almost hesitates to tell the truth about what happened for fear that some premise will be found to blow the candle out. Fredericktown is one of many small towns around here already undermined and gutted by empire and left to rot or cannibalize themselves. It’s a place where a tacit bargain's been struck: as long as the social security, welfare, unemployment, and other government assistance checks still trickle down, many people will remain fiercely and willfully ignorant, blaming “muslims” or “illegal aliens” for their own sure and steady downward spiral into the void where the center, the one that's most assuredly not holding, used to be.

But wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, The Loft is a pocket of tolerance, or a pothole of tolerance on the otherwise smoothed over road to extinction, in a place where a strict and punishing conformism is fiercely policed by volunteer bullies patrolling the local coffee shop, and law enforcement personnel cruising the desolate roads. One man I know tells of being routinely beaten as a boy for the crime of riding a skateboard, and decades later he’s still in the trenches. So one has to risk that which one has to risk.

Having listened to the definitions and etymology of loft we read aloud (some surprises there), after reading and discussing Richard Jones' poem The Loft, noting its theme of lies of omission, after reading selections from chapters 2 and 3 of Cooperative Village in which the protagonist is out touring the streets of her neighborhood accompanied by the corpse of her dead neighbor on a luggage cart, “showing her a time” as Mr. Elkin says, we talked to each other about the possibilities for the future. I heard someone say that we in America live in a culture of disrespect, and that that can change. I heard someone say that she urges parents to pick up their crying babies in the aisles of Walmart and that American children don't spend enough time embraced in loving arms. I heard someone express a fear that many people don't know basic survival skills―how to plant a seed, or fix a home-cooked meal. And in the course of the forthright conversation, a 14 year-old girl, a brilliant and serious girl who aspires to be a neuroscientist, declared herself as an atheist.

What happened next was truly marvelous. No one demanded to know who's been deceiving her. No one thumped a bible or screeched scripture about Satan into her angelic face. There was a moment of profound silence, some of it pained to be sure because believers were among us (one man told me the next day that he had gone blank when she said it, that he had to leave the room he was so hurt for her), but the rush to condemnation was stayed. And soon after someone said that maybe The Loft could save Fredericktown.

We talked about confronting the absentee-landlords and cycling the art currently exhibited in The Loft into the many empty storefronts on street level. One painter volunteered to have her piece, an oversized color-saturated landscape of pinnacles, moved to a vacant shop window. It was a hallelujah moment, like the fine artists were just waiting for the literary artist to replenish their vocabulary of hope and daring. One is giddy at the prospect of the bullies stopping and staring at the unlofted art, unleashing their ridicule at objects they can plainly see to be beautiful, well-formed, shaped with intelligence and care, until finally, they get it out of their systems.And then...?