One lucky thing: I found my silver and blue paperback copy of Howard Moss’s Selected Poems, which I’d been looking for for years. It had somehow found its way into a U-Haul box with some very old, very fat New Yorkers. The box burst, and there was the Howard Moss paperback. On the back of the book was a blurb from James Merrilclass="underline" “Over the years Howard Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery.” Inside was an ancient, faded dot-matrix-printed receipt on stiff paper from a cash machine operated by the Bank of New England: on June 7, 1980, I withdrew sixty dollars. Where are those dollars now? Gone to graveyards every one.
Jeff said he would write up an estimate for the floor repair, but he said that five thousand from Allstate would certainly cover it. The three of them drove off, their pickup trucks filled with broken planking. I took Smack for a walk and gave him a liver snack, which made his morning, and then I went out for breakfast at the Friendly Toast. The box lifting had made me hungry and I ordered the Irish eggs Benedict, made with corned beef hash instead of a circular disk of ham. Then, for the first time in more than thirty years, I read Howard Moss’s poem “Piano Practice.” I’d forgotten how observant it was. “The left hand’s library is dull,” Moss says, “the books / All read, though sometimes, going under velvet, / An old upholsterer will spit out tacks.” That’s very true about the low register of the piano. Partway through, Moss has an underwater stanza about Debussy, which unfortunately ends on a less good note about how the deep-sea mirrors “eat their hearts out.” Scratch that — I even like Moss’s mirror image now. It’s all done in a loose-seeming pentameter, with a great deal more enjambment than is healthy, but never mind the meter: you can practically hear the ice cubes in Moss’s scotch glass tinkle as he’s writing — writing and listening through layers of lath and plaster to his neighbor the industrious student musician.
I remember how glum I was after reading “Piano Practice” for the first time all those years ago. I’d been working on and off for a year on a poem about piano playing, trying to describe the mingled sounds I heard coming from the practice rooms while I waited for my reed to soak, and Howard Moss’s poem made mine superfluous. Now, though, his poem only made me happy.
Twenty-two
RAYMOND’S GOT GENUINE MUSICAL TALENT — I’ve got his “beans in my jeans” song running through my head.
I’m sitting on a wet beach towel in the car with raindrops popping away on the roof. The driver’s seat was soaked because last night I forgot to roll up the window all the way. That’s what a Fausto cigar will do to you. You crack the window to let some smoke out, then it rains all night long, and boom, your ass is wet. I think I should stop inhaling. I’ve got another beach towel draped down from the roof of the car so that more rain won’t come in the window. It’s the only thing I don’t like about this car — no gutters. Thank goodness the barn boxes are all up and safe.
The textbook I’m currently reading is by Rick Snoman, a DJ and remixer, and it’s called Dance Music Manual. It’s got 522 pages and it’s arranged like a scholastic treatise on angels and is about as helpful to an amateur musician like me as Aquinas’s Summa Theologica would be. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. There are eight genres of dance music: House, Trance, UK Garage, Techno, Hip-hop, Trip-hop, Ambient, and Drum ’n Bass. Trip-hop? House music arose in the eighties as disco was dying, Snoman writes: “DJ Nicky Siano set up a New York club known as The Gallery, and hired Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan to prepare the club for the night by spiking the drinks with lysergic acid diethylamide.” Trance, on the other hand, started in the nineties with a song by DJ Dag and Jam El Mar called “We Came in Peace,” which repeats a single phrase from the Apollo 11 moon message several dozen times. It was intended to create a state of trance but it doesn’t seem to work — there’s such a thing as too much Neil Armstrong. The genre quickly evolved, according to Snoman: “The increased popularity of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA or ‘E’) amongst clubbers inevitably resulted in new forms of trance being developed.” Ambient music could be traced back, he says, to a moment in the mid-seventies “when Brian Eno was run over by a taxi.” In the hospital Eno listened to some harp music while rain beat gently on the windowpane, and he liked the intermixture, and there you go. In the index to Snoman’s book, Daft Punk appears as “Punk, Daft.” Prince doesn’t appear in the index at all.
Here’s my one-week dance-music self-study boot-camp syllabus. From the seventies, we begin with a formal analysis of Donna Summer singing “I Feel Love.” Moving her bad-girl hips and looking up at the lord in that wicked, innocent way she has. Boom, done. We move on to the total sonar-echo funkosity of the Talking Heads doing “Take Me to the River.” Boom. We decide to turn up the volume slightly, because everything sounds better louder. From the eighties, we rediscover Chaka Khan doing “Ain’t Nobody,” with carbon-neutral keyboard sequences by Hawk Wolinski, and “Talking in Your Sleep” by the Romantics, boom, living in a spotlight, boom. Then the Fixx, very tight, doing “Saved by Zero.” Then Midnight Star, “No Parking on the Dance Floor” and “Operator,” boom, boom, “Operator, this is an emergency.” We begin to feel a powerful sense of obligation: we must dance. Then we study the inscrutable a cappella chord that begins “She’s Strange” by Cameo, and we try unsuccessfully to make harmonic sense of the meanderingly slow arousing siren wail that follows. Next we turn our attention to the Crystal Method doing “Vapor Trail,” which seems to be about smoking crack although there are no words and it’s just as good sober, boom diddly boom. We turn up the volume further and spend an hour worshipping the chorus of Underworld’s “Always Loved a Film,” and then we bring the noise with Benny Benassi’s remix of Public Enemy, boom. We sit cross-legged, devoting an afternoon to the greatness of Hol Baumann doing “Bénarès” and Mercan Dede doing “Ab-i Hayat”—boom, boom, dakka doom, doom sa, comme ça — and then we pound our delighted hippocampuses with Eric Prydz’s ode to the piano, “Pjanoo.” At the final reception cast party we all dance to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” until we must chase the cat. Then we collapse in orgiastic confusion, knowing that we have a good solid foundation for getting down on it. Tuition: the cost of fifteen songs on iTunes.
• • •
ROZ JUST LEFT. I’m in shock. I said, “Before we look at the barn and get all sad, I want to try out a song on you.” I played her my Guantanamo song, which I’d fiddled with a bit. She dipped her knees to it here and there, which pleased me. After it was over, she said, “It’s got a great dance beat, but I’m honestly just not sure about the Guantanamo part, because it’s so upbeat and cheerful that it seems as if you’re almost making fun of Guantanamo, which is surely not what you mean. Guantanamo is a terrible prison where people are forced to waste their lives. Shouldn’t the song be something more like — I don’t know, ‘I saw you on the dance floor, / I never wanted anything more, / I bought a rubber at the corner store’?”
“That’s it!” I said, writing her lyrics on a folded-up piece of paper. I also played her a fresh version of the doctor song. She liked that one.