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November 01, 2006
The Director's Cunt: Mrs. Garrett in Surrealism's Bad Rap
Garrett Caples
they just keep teasing me
and you know like they like they don’t know
—Bob Marley, “Hammer”
Come in! I’ve been asked to write some account of Surrealism’s Bad Rap, and though I fear it is giving away the game a little too early, I also immensely enjoyed trivia concerning albums I loved as a lad, haven’t the heart to refuse, indeed am dying to display my minute cleverness and, I realize, no one may care later. Thus may I gratify my vanity, and perhaps satisfy a curiosity in whose existence I’m uncertain I truly believe. Let me say here too that I have a constitutional disdain for poets who write extensive essays about their own poetry, or indulge in theories about it. But this again is an album, so fuck it.
1) “Four Tune” was recorded in my apartment, not, as the liner notes indicate, at the St. George Poetry Festival staged by Joshua Beckman back in 2002. I was the last reader at the all day event, which made me nervous because I figured everyone would be gone by then. So I went up and read 2 or 3 or 4 poems, a very short set because I figured people were exhausted, but there were still enough people in the theatre for a resounding burst of applause, a combined effect of its being the end of a truly successful event, the relief, nonetheless, at its end, as an entire day of poetry can be taxing, and, I imagine, some gratitude to this final reader for not droning on and on now that he had the mic. For me, it recreates the “feel” of the moment, inflated by time and my ego.
It is in fact the most recently written poem on the album, an attempt to write something sonically different from anything I’ve done before. The text is composed entirely of four letter words in couplets. Note the fuck-up on the verse “gums / gems,” where I say “gums gem.”
2) “Synth” is dedicated to Jeff Clark, originally appearing, I think, in a batch of 31 copies for a party marking his 31st birthday then subsequently published in the E edition of the journal 26. Vaguely related, in my mind, to his “Chocolate and Mantis,” which opens his magnificent second book, Music and Suicide (FSG 2004).
3) The text of “Robocop” was initially generated as liner notes for an album, Sooltime (2005) by the band Sool, which featured funny little news broadcasts about Robocop. I liked the text so much I kept it among my “real” poems and couldn’t resist the opportunity to throw it on the album even though, as a recording, it definitely “imitates” the Sool album, and is therefore in some sense derivative. [listen to "Robocop"]
4) “Turning on the Tongue” is dedicated to Barbara Guest; the title came from going to eat with Andrew Joron at a Salvadorian restaurant that served tongue in huge, tastebud-dimpled slabs. I confess I love tongue, am too afraid of mad cow to pursue this dish with vigor, but at the time, I riffed on the conceptual wrongness of eating a muscle using the very same muscle itself. It was, I said, “turning on the tongue.” The detached phrase, in its ambiguities, pleased Andrew so much I used it for a poem, though the poem has absolutely no connection to the incident which generated the phrase.
Graham Connah provided the most cosmic keyboard substance to the goofiest beat I could concoct using presets in Apple’s primitive Garage Band software. The beat and vocals are the earliest things I recorded for the album.
5) “Ordinary History America” is somehow dedicated to John Ashbery; either from meeting him around the time I wrote it or from thinking hard about his work, as I do from time to time.
6) & 7) “Assassin Raising Scalpel” and “‘I Have Seen Enough’” are both about Philip Lamantia, the first dedicated to him shortly after meeting him and published in The Garrett Caples Reader (Black Square Editions 1999), the second dedicated to his wife Nancy Peters, after visiting his apartment for the first time after his death. All the description of birds in the poem are literally true, except of course, one didn’t start telling me a story. Nancy told me the lawnmower story.
8) The actual last poem of the St. George Poetry festival was “Light Sleeper (Elegy for George Harrison),” a much shorter poem as befitted the occasion described above; turned into a song by my friend Jeff Mellin, a brilliant though underknown artist who runs the Stereorrific label (www.stereorrific.com) and the non-profit Waxfruit Arts Media Collaborative (waxfruit.org); only song on which I don’t actually appear.
9) “Untitled” is recorded as four separate simultaneous vocal tracks, seemingly related to the notion of a singular personality becoming a collective plural that is kinda “in” the poem. It used to have a title.
10) & 11) “Puna Baedekker” was published in The Garrett Caples Reader, inspired, of course, by Mina Loy. “The Mermaid’s Diaper” is simply “Puna” set to a track with greatly multiplied vocal parts rendering the words almost inaudible, hence the subsequently recorded but first-presented “plain” version, recorded while I had a cold. (I accentuated, rather than hid, my congestion, just to add a different vocal texture.) [listen to "The Mermaid's Diaper"]
The “Mr. Ashbery” movie dialogue samples at the beginning of “Mermaid” are too good to give up. Sole hint: woman saying “I dig” in the first bit is Charlotte Rae, later TV’s Mrs. Garrett, from The Facts of Life.
12) & 13) “Bianca” and “Liquid Diary” are two love poems.
14) The text of “T.Rex” is taken from “The Slider” in The Garrett Caples Reader.
15) GCR again; first poem in the book.
16) GCR, title stolen from a song on the first Mötley Crüe album, Too Fast for Love.
17) “Godzilla” is a true story about meeting the rapper Yukmouth that I published in a Norfolk, VA music magazine called Ninevolt and later in The Philistine’s Guide to Hip Hop (2004), a little cafepress thing we did based on the Ninevolt articles. The title is not based on the “Windows for Dummies” model but rather from my nom de plume for the Ninevolt pieces, which were signed “The Philistine.” One love to J-Stalin for his reminiscences and rap.
Matt Mitchell recorded the music to this tune some years before on a four-track, for his extremely limited-circulation cassette E.P. called Joe “Robbie” Blount. It was an instrumental called “Stomping Ground of Insects.” My one technical contribution is that the track was like 3 minutes and it takes at least 7 to read the story, so I had to loop the song’s two main movements twice each to achieve the necessary length. But this groove has always knocked me out, reminding me of Velvet Underground.
18) “Hugo Ballin’” is Andrew Joron reading a Dada sound poem by Hugo Ball, with a beat in which I was trying, completely unsuccessfully, to imitate the kind of beat I imagined E-40’s son Droop-E would have made for it. I may have missed the mark but I nonetheless appreciate where the shot landed. My personal favorite track.
19) “Prufrock Shakur” was first published by Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellemy in their magazine, MIRAGE/Period(ical), and was dedicated to Creely and Lamantia after their deaths. Andre Breton is sampled saying “Ma Femme” from his poem “Free Union” on the album Surrealism Revisited. Geoff Dyer and I recorded this version the night Tookie Williams was executed and if you listen closely, near the end I’m double-tracked in a sort of call and response mode saying, “Tonight they’re killing Tookie Williams / Don’t kill Tookie Williams.” They did.
20) GCR again.
21) “Little White Noise”: Someone requested I write a text but this wasn’t at all what he had in mind so I kept it and started using it at readings. This version was recorded at my friend Rob Norris’s studio on absinthe, so I sound a little drunk, which I was.
22) “Lucid Cloud” comes from the same session and bottle of absinthe.
23) “Wallace Stevens in the 4th Grade” is a title I stole from a Robert Bly poem, because I thought it deserved a better poem, or at least something remotely Stevensian. Stevens exerted the single greatest influence on my earliest attempts at poetry, but I tend to think of him as a shit these days, particularly after reading his essay “Insurance and Social Change” (1937), in which he recommends the Insurance company he helped run (Hartford) invest in cemeteries to turn a profit under Soviet Communism and German and Italian Fascism (Opus Posthumous 236-237). I admit I should have been warned by titles like “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” probably made some allowance for “the times,” but the coldness with which he proposes to profit from the impending European War destroyed my former love for Stevens. It’s hard to take pleasure in his work anymore, though my astonishment at “what he could do” in a poem admittedly remains.
24) “Uncle Bud” is made from Graham Connah’s keyboards and a sample I cooked up into a beat of Zora Neale Hurston singing some of the folksongs she collected in Florida. The original is available somewhere on the Library of Congress website.
25) “First National Anthem” I remember I began writing in a parked car, and it was a wistful piece, really about my happiness at the time of knowing Brian Lucas and Jeff Clark, who were the first poets approximately my age I’d ever met that I didn’t think were a drag, though please temper my arrogance here with knowledge that I didn’t go to an MFA program so my opportunities in this regard were at the time slight. But Brian and Jeff I loved and still do, and we had a few exhilarating years hanging out together in San Francisco/Oakland as young poets before each moved away in turn. Recorded one afternoon with Geoff Dyer, who perfectly improvised the parts one after the other, it was basically the first completed track on the album.
26) The title of “Clothesline Ballet” is taken from Fats Waller, while the poem is taken from the GCR. Last poem in the book as well as last poem written for it.
27) The unlisted bonus track is called “Sitting Inside a Box,” and was entirely recorded by Rob Norris, including the guitar solo I “pretend” is mine, in his home studio one evening by himself. I loved it—wouldn’t let him “improve” any of the takes because he sounded so in tune with himself that night—and merely added what seemed to me a Ray Davies-ish voiceover during an empty verse. This song he wrote one night about his ill-tempered parrot, Forrest, immediately laid it down, and forgot about it, until we rediscovered it accidentally while listening to the “absinthe” vocal takes and deciding which to turn into songs.
The “blind baby, cook” business that occurs on multiple tracks with Mr. Norris comes from what in retrospect is an off-color, if not racist skit about a blues-singer named “Blind Melon Chitlin” from a Cheech and Chong album that we listened to one night in high school on mushrooms. I apologize for perpetuating it, but it is the single longest running in-joke of my life (well over 20 years at this point) that Rob and I, whenever we greet or take leave of one another, or indeed need to tie off a mutually-understood conversational implication without a word, use Blind Melon’s “Yaow” and, if necessary, can communicate quite extensively using the “Yaow” in its different intonations and moods. And we’ve been unable to drop it, even when we once didn’t speak to each other for over two years. The minute we began to talk again, the “Yaow” was fully embedded in the conversation. Let me just say, too, no guitarist has ever quite astonished me the way Rob continues to do, and if I could solo like I pretend to here, I most certainly wouldn’t be a writer.
Overall, the idea for me was to make an album, as opposed to a recording of myself reading my poems, and the texts are treated with a certain amount of contempt or indifference—pretexts, if you will, for doing the tracks—and while I acknowledge that the album is a mess in terms of mixing and even certain basic vocal recordings, I recall that, too, sonic clarity was never in itself a premium to someone whose favorite records as a teen included the Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. Aside from the spur of the moment addition of West Oakland rapper J-Stalin when he was at my apartment one day, I couldn’t bring myself to ask any of the hip hop artists I’ve become friendly with to give me music because sonic clarity is necessarily vital to these artists; I was too embarrassed to put my work alongside theirs. All the same, with all its shortcomings, I regard Surrealism’s Bad Rap, not as a work of genius certainly, but as an interesting and, on its own terms, quite successful work of art.
Posted by Rock Heals at November 1, 2006 07:00 AM
