The Killing Floor

Time Capsule: Notes for November

Time Capsule is a bi-weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Notes for November

I.
Long black day infused with beauty jutting down from lampshade lit at
midday. November’s like that. Month of saints & sages. Look at this: asphalt
path waves with glints of glass from low-level sunlight fifty yards ahead. If
that debris can, why not us? Earlier Bach, then Jarrett live in Paris. This is no
easel painting, rather notebook sketch. One mentor born 83 years ago today,
calls up the dirge I wrote after hearing of his death. Low notes on the left side
bass clef of the piano, the Blues, you could say. Refrains & memories. Stone
& skin. Spirit, flesh, & bone. None, I want to write, a silence, heard. Love’s
like that. November drums love into one.

II.
Green crows tramp the last of grass on shoddy Longfellow Arboretum far
from town in Portland. Who wants manicured lawns anyway, surely not
poets, dead or alive. Morning cast shadow bones across the neighbor’s house,
just as sumac spread black light over rock face on our walk along the Eastern
Trail, first Americans viewed with awe. Spiral of history, up or down, back or
forth, changing as the narrative progresses, or recedes. America is still a
mystery. When James Levine conducts Copland’s Fanfare for the Common
Man, one can wax optimistically for the nation on Thanksgiving Day. All
well, & good, we can use such inspiration. But Black Friday is on the way.
Green crows turn back to black, shadow bones turn into a chorus of muffled
ancestral echoes underground. Power structure, top to bottom, untouched.

FURTHER STUDY:
Keith Jarrett 
Aaron Copland

Time Capsule: Color Will Do ALL the Work

Time Capsule is a bi-weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

A PAIR OF SHOES
[Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890), 1886
Oil on Canvas, 37.5 X 45 cm.; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam]

Color Will Do ALL the Work

I remember borrowing New York Graphic Society’s three-volume version of
van Gogh’s Complete Letters through interlibrary loan, fascinated that they
pasted in most of the reproductions of drawings alluded to in his writing. A
kind of basic show-&-tell education for a young man with little knowledge of
the visual arts. Even then, in my early twenties I gravitated toward the final
volume containing the melancholy, if not mad wisdom coming from him in
Arles & St. Remy. Amazing how an artist unappreciated in his own time can
be hyped to the borders of cliché by mass culture. Our friend Ted Dalziel
stood first in line to get tickets for us for the retrospective of works from the
Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam lent to the National Gallery of Art, while
they renovated the former building. I honed in on the complexities of minor
eyeholes for bootlaces containing a myriad of colors.

For any artist or writer, the fear that one’s work won’t ever see the light of
day is exemplified by van Gogh. His cruel end with bad gun, mobbing
crows, stalks of wheat… (just now four crows danced & swirled outside this
bay window, as if a cunning spirit rose.) I remember, too, there was a chunk
of paint missing from a button on the shirt in his Self-Portrait at the Fogg in
Cambridge I always assumed ripped off by some sly Harvard underclassman
as keepsake. Early on, for me, the lone painting of his that did sell during his
lifetime, The Red Vineyard, became a favorite, a fetish. The person who
bought it at the 1890 Les XX exhibit in Brussels, Anna Bock, became a
heroine in my mind, & I tried to write poems in her honor more than once.
You can imagine the awe I felt when I met the woman whose grandfather
Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin was next in line of the painting’s historical
provenance. Whenever I visited Irina Borisova-Morozova Lynch at her home
in Gloucester, I’d ask her to retell, yet again, how the painting came into her
grandfather’s hands, eventually ending up on the walls of the Pushkin
Museum in Moscow.

I’ve returned to the letters this week, just as memory returns to the gift of the
catalogue of the show in DC given to us by my former colleague there in the
library, Mr. Dalziel. I see now, again, the show opened on my birthday in
1998, Kathleen & my anniversary the day before, many festivities centering
on our favorite tapas bar, El Jaleo, autobiography, Labors in Vineyards of
Desire, now written, & continuing to open floodgates of memory. The crazy
tendency to try & pick a favorite: The Yellow House, The Potato Eaters, Still
Life with Carafe & Lemons, those boots I mentioned, etc. Just yesterday I
opened randomly to my favorite volume three of the letters, where a drawing
of the bedroom accompanies his writing. Only now, right now, it dawns on
me that what I love about the letters is that they equal the paintings. The mind
of the man is exemplary, & what we’ve been taught to enjoy in the pleasure
of the imagery is here for the taking in words. Van Gogh says color will do
ALL the work. The painting of his bedroom in Arles was made, he claims, to
rest the imagination, to calm a madman.

FURTHER STUDY:
Anna Boch & The Red Vineyard
National Gallery of Art's Van Gogh Exhibition

Q&A with Scissormen's Ted Drozdowski

Mike Mellor


One of the great things about everybody's buddy Ted Drozdowski is that if you ask him one question he'll give you an answer to four. I guess that's what being a journalist will do to you.

Everybody around here knows Ted for his limitless enthusiasm, good will and generosity, and even though he's still present in the pages of the Phoenix we miss his material presence around here.

That's why you shouldn't miss him and his band Scissormen as they barnstorm New England for the next 10 days. I caught up with him via email as he was planning his trip back north.


Mike Mellor: So Scissormen has got a lot happening all at once these days. There's a documentary film, Big Shoes, a new official live bootleg CD, an upcoming tour of New England, a European tour in the works...and do I hear rumors of a new studio album? Can you fill us in on some of what's going on with the band?

Ted Drozdowski: Funny, in retrospect I feel like I hardly got anything done this year as an artist, and I think that's because I'm such a road dog. The truth is I've written dozens of songs, plan to sign a publishing deal here in Nashville, played a great new European festival and had the amazing luck of Robert Mugge, my favorite music film maker, turning his eye toward the band and making a film where we're almost in every frame. That's kind of mind blowing.

And yet, because I've played fewer live dates than I would have liked I feel like I hardly got anything done. I realize that's wrong, but unless I'm playing gigs and spreading the gospel for this music I feel like I'm laying down on the job. I do all the other stuff, like making albums, so I can play live. For me that's where the magic is—where the songs really come to life and when I get to be something better than myself, a guy who can really offer something to people, whether that's entertainment, uplift, knowledge or chaos.

Mike: Does that mean that after all this other stuff next year is going to be a big year on the road?

Ted: Next year the plan is for Scissormen to tour our asses off. That'll be easier with the permanent addition of my favorite Boston drummer Matt Snow as the other full-time Scissorman. He'll be moving to Nashville to join the band and become an honorary southerner. He's as big a road dog as I am. And we play badass together. We've got to get to places Scissormen haven't been able to return to in a while, take the music to new towns and maybe even make the trip to New England twice a year instead of annually.

We're also looking at three weeks in Switzerland, Italy and France for May and June, around the time of the Blues Rules Festival in Switzerland. We accidentally recorded our new album Bootleg: Live at Blues Rules 2010, there in May. The festival was so cool, the promoters so open-hearted, the fans so warm that I wanted to share the experience. When I found out there was a board tape I figured, "Hell, let's put it out." I was also looking for a way to stay in touch with fans and friends, since I feel like I haven't been touring enough to see them all in person. We did a limited CD pressing with permanent availability on iTunes and other digital outlets. We recouped our very modest costs before the street date, so now I plan to put out a new limited pressing Scissormen CD every six months, just to stay in touch with everybody, with a full-blown studio production every 18 months or so.

Mike: I've noticed the practice of making limited edition boutique albums is suddenly rising in popularity. Let's make a point to talk about that when your next one is released. But until then we still have a documentary to watch, right?

Ted: Yeah. The movie, Big Shoes: Walking and Talking the Blues just previewed on the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise and premiered at the Starz Denver Film Festival on November 5. I hope we'll eventually be able to get a DVD/CD package available after the festival run is over. All that's in Bob Mugge's hands right now, since he's the movie guy, but folks can get a sneak preview online.

Mike: An what about that new studio album rumor I heard?

Ted: I am chewing away at songs for a new Scissormen studio album that I think will close one chapter of the band and move into another by expanding our sonic approach and storytelling, but will still stand by our Mississippi hill country and Delta roots. It'll be interesting, and I think we'll get working on those songs and start looking toward the studio after Matt gets down to Nashville. I'm really excited about it.

And I suspect that when we get to New England in November some of those new songs and sounds are going to leak out during our shows, I'm really psyched for this run. We'll be getting the band to Portland for the first time in years, and making our first stop in Worcester and in Hartford. We'll be playing some of our usual haunts, too, but the grand finale is always the Lizard. I think of that as my homecoming show, since that's the place that really nurtured Scissormen. And we always have crazy-ass shows there.

This one is sponsored by the Boston Blues Society, and the great Boston guitar player Peter Parcek, whose new album I produced, will be part of the bill with his band and Barrett Anderson, too, who I met years ago through Ronnie Earl. We always close the night with a two-hour set and special guests and it just gets crazy and wild and goes in all kinds of directions, which I love.

 

SCISSORMEN 2010 NE TOUR
11/11 Chili Head Barbecue, West Bridgewater, MA
11/12 Venue Music Bar & Grille, Portland, ME
11/13 Black Eyed Sally's, Hartford, CT
11/18 Next Page Cafe, Weymouth, MA
11/19 Gilrein's, Worcester, MA
11/20 Lizard Lounge, Cambridge, MA

 

 

 

Where Ya Been So Long?

Mike Mellor


I been in New Orleans, baby, stuntin' like a dead prez and workin' them hoes from Bywater to West Carrolton, from the 1st to the 17th. Ya heard?

But seriously, yeah...Halloween weekend with Quintron & Miss Pussycat at the Spellcaster Lodge (an underground club in the raised basement of their house in Bywater) is something special. Basically we just walked into their back yard, handed some dude ten bucks, slugged down $3 mixed drinks from the makeshift bar and gushed gallons of sweat into a steaming, writhing dance mob of hardcore kids, weirdo hipsters and art school fags until 3 in the morning. Who could ask for anything more?

Here they are the following night at One Eyed Jack's in the Quarter:

 

 

What is that magical spinning light and sound box, you ask? Why, it's the Drum Buddy!

 

 

New Orleans is still in a battle for both its economic and cultural survival, and the threat of corporate consumerism still looms ominously over the city like the abandoned skyscapers. Thank you, Quintron & Miss Pussycat, for keeping up the fight and keeping New Orleans weird.