As If It Matters

Finally got up a gallery of Rome photos from yesterday. You can check them out here. Nothing too exciting; I’d imagine they’re the same photos everyone takes when they visit Rome!

A while back I read this great Calvin Trillin book, “Travels with Alice”, about traveling around France and Italy with his wife. Most of the essays were about food, and almost all of them contained detailed Gelatto coverage. In that tradition, I thought it only appropriate to write about the gelatto I’m eating each day. Yesterday, Monday, November 29, brought a pinenut gelatto from a place near the Vatican. I asked the fellow behind the counter to pick his best gelatto for me, and he offered the pinenut flavor not necessarily as his best — “they are all the best” but as “the most italian”, which is really the best.

And it was good — very good. Pinenuts are not a standard issue flavor in the United States, and I confess I’m not sure why. They’re excellent. This gelatto was perhaps a little too sweet, and not as pinenutty as I’d like. There was even a general dearth of actual pinenuts, all the more disappointing given the stunning tastiness of the few actual pinenuts that were included. Overall, though, the gelatto far outperformed standard American ice cream.

So today I’ll have to go on another gelatto hunt and find a different flavor, a different purveyor of delicious frozen bliss. One other note: these italian keyboard are going to be the death of me. The letters are all in the same place, but the symbols — like quotation marks and especially the @ symbol — are strewn about the keyboard with a wanton disregard for standards. Even from internet cafe to internet cafe they have no consistency. What’s a blogger to do?

WiFi is trickier to find in Rome than I expected. If anyone knows of any open nodes, let me know. Right now most of them appear to be at the big chain hotels — and limited to guests. In any case, I’m not posting as much as I’d like, and photos will have to wait until I can find somewhere real to get online.

Last night I had a long leisurely dinner with my friends Matt and Lydia — and their ten-month old son (10 months today on the dot!) Henry. Lots of fun. My brother had me carry a can of Chef Boyardee’s Spagehettios across the Atlantic. He was concerned that Henry wasn’t going to get the most ubiquitous pasta of American childhoods in Italy.

Matt and Lydia live in Trastevere, a wonderful old neighborhood of Rome. They’ve got an incredible apartment, complete with roof-top terrace. And the food! The olive oil! The wine! Stunning. Of course, even though I brought my camera I neglected to take a single photo, I was enjoying myself so much.

Today I’m at the World Food Programme, looking into some work stuff. Maybe they’ll have WiFi… looks like not so much. oh well.

Arrived in Rome this morning. The immigration officer looked at my passport, “Nicholas Angelo Mele”, and asked me if I spoke Italian. When I said no, he shook his head and muttered. Then he looked at me and said “That’s terrible!” as if I had done something horrifically wrong.

First things first: per Aunt Linda’s directions, we stopped at the airport cafe and had a cappucino. Matt Keller was waiting, and he treated. From there, a miraculous ride to the hotel. Matt had no idea where he was going, so we just drove along and somehow stumbled onto the exact side street where the hotel was.

The hotel is just a couple blocks from the Vatican. 9 am on the last Monday in November and the place was empty. We walked right in, no waiting in line, and headed for the Basilica. Photos coming as soon as I find wifi. Right now it’s just an internet cafe.

A morning of Catholicity, including a miserable climb up the steps to the cuppola (Massey, I’m feeling the WOW in my calves…), incredible weather and an incredible view, and with just a couple hours sleep on the plane I’m ready for a nap.

On the plane I managed to crank out some blog posts on (surpise surprise) poetry, jazz, and LoBV, but they’ll have to wait until I find wifi. That might be the post-nap afternoon activity…

Over on the corporate blog, I post about technology and work. It’s generally in a decidedly different tone, and different subject matter, than the postings here at Nicco.org. You can read a summary of my work blog posts, but that’s not what this is about. As some folks may know, towards the end of the Dean campaign we started an online radio show. Every day Zephyr and I went into Tamara’s office and broadcast WDFA, and I loved it. It was a team effort, with lots of great work from Joe Rospars and Jascha Franklin-Hodge (now of Blue State Digital), and others like John Pettitt, Jim Brayton, Tim Jones, and Andy Rossmeissl. In any case, it was so much fun, and relatively successful, that I’ve been mildly obsessed with online radio ever since.

Back in July I wrote this post on the corporate blog about online radio and hinting at podcasting. Now, Tim and I are talking about starting an online radio studio in our office. Well, on Friday I was having lunch with Dave Winer in a great deli in Queens and we talked excitedly about podcasting, among other things. But then I broke my tooth while munching on a massive reuben. I left him a voicemail after I saw the dentist, and my first official podcast was born.

The funny part was that I didn’t know Dave had posted the voicemail, so Saturday morning when I started getting calls from friends (some of whom I hadn’t heard from in weeks) asking how my tooth was doing, I was mystifed. Dave had also posted about another idea from lunch, the League of Blogging Voters. I had promised to buy the domain, but due to the dental crisis I completely forgot. Luckily my friend & co-worker Mike Carvalho read Dave’s post and snapped up www.LoBV.org. Now you’ll just have to wait and see what we do to it.

I confess: I’ve completely stopped reading the New York Times. I’ve moved from the daily read (while I lived in New York) to the Sunday read to the occasionally glance to nothing. The trend started while working on the Dean Campaign - I realized that the NY Time’s coverage was pedantic at best and desiring to obscure the truth at worst. As I was coming to the conclusion that the New York Times cares very little about what’s actually happening the world, I was growing more and more engrossed in blogs. These days I assume that if the House Organ of the Establishment has anything valuable to say, I’ll read about it on the blogs.

This morning, Chris Massey sent me a link to a New York Times Book Review piece on poet’s personal favorites — “What book of poetry, published in the last 25 years, has meant the most to you personally — the book you have found yourself returning to again and again?

Personally, I tread a thin line between believing that there is a qualitative excellence that poetry must work towards and a post-modern acceptance that there are different aesthetics, that people have their own tastes and preferences. On the one hand, I deplore things like choosing the “best” poetry of the year - personal taste is so essential to poetry, how could you chose the best? On the other hand, so much poetry is absolutely lousy that I’m desperate for aspirations to excellence.

Regardless, the way they framed the question - what poetry have you returned to again and again? - seems to find the right middle balance between excellence and diversity, and so I settle in to enjoy what follows. Only I don’t. In fact, it makes me down right cranky. Ashbury chooses Tate after a bit of intro where he mentions Kooser, Wright, Simic - okay, I can handle that. I’ve got mixed feelings about Ashbury, who everyone says is so great and yet I’ve yet to discern a glimmer of any real passion in his work. (Maybe I’m reading the wrong poems - would someone correct me if that’s the case?). I downright enjoy Kooser, Wright and Simic’s work. James Tate I’ve only read isolated poems here and there, and generally I’ve liked them. But exactly the line Ashbury uses to raise Tate up is one that seriously irks me - an epigraph from Wallace Stevens, ”Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.”

Give me a break. I guess I’m more of a William Carlos Williams fellow — you know, no ideas but in things. I’m more than willing to suspend my rationality for some mysticism or wonder - but “the the” isn’t it. That said, the Tate poems that Ashbury quotes seem pretty good, and I resolve somewhat crankily to read The Reckoner by James Tate, as recommended by Ashbury.

Now we’re on to Jorie Graham. Another poet I don’t like. I don’t care for her poetry for the opposite reason I don’t care for Ashbury’s - her poetry doesn’t seem considered enough for me. Most of her poems have smelled to me of carelessness without the real work of distilling the world into poetic language. Again, maybe I’m wrong. I haven’t been a student of Jorie Graham’s work - but what I have read makes me despair for the state of poetry. She recommends Denis Johnson, someone I’ve never heard of - which I like. Obscurity can mean that it’s really excellent, outside the watered-down main stream. But her description immediately lets the wind out of my sails - both for its awkward construction and for the sense of what it’s trying to offer. She describes his voice as “a sound I have come to think of as one of the most distinctively American sounds — the easiest to fake or betray, the hardest to make endure — the sound of a sorrow that is inseparable from terminal anger…” and closes with this:

Great: American poetry as sorrowful anger. More pity, rage, and sadness - over Vietnam, no less! In the immortal words of Aerosmith, Get Over It. What’s happened to poetry? Where is the wonder, the deep and abiding sense of the spiritual, the mythical intensity of passion?

Jim Harrison offers something much more on my wavelength. He’s my sort of man, grounded, close to the earth, obsessed with food, women, and his hunting dogs (and hunting gods…): as H.G. Wells said, the “primary and elemental necessities” of life. Harrison’s opening paragraph gets to what I feel is the real question that’s being asked - what poetry sustains you?

This is how I feel about poetry - that it is soul food, that I cannot live without it. When I’m traveling (which is a lot lately), I always bring some poems with me. I make it a point to stop in any bookstore I pass and seek out a poem. It’s sustenance, survival, manna. And that’s what most rubbed me wrong about what Ashbury and Graham wrote - they approached it too much as an academic exercise, not a monastic one. Surely they have poems or poets that they return to for strength, for encouragement, for a daily sense of what life is really about - but no, instead we get Ashbury talking about how he returns to Tate for a sense of the “possibilities of poetry”, making poetry sound like a grim professional undertaking that requires regular audits and we get Graham lecturing on the healing possibilities of anger and self-pity.

Robert Pinsky follows Harrison with something that feels tame by comparison. His claim that James McMichael is “treasured by poets, but not much noticed by academic or journalistic fashion” certainly raised my eyebrows - this is exactly the sort of poetry I was hoping to be revealed by this exercise. I’ll have to explore the claim and let you know. Generally, I find Pinsky’s poems to range the gamut from deeply sustaining to decent. One of his poems, Samurai Song, I memorized because of it’s intensity and ability to provide strength in a dark hour. Perhaps a bit machismo, but I prefer to think of it as contemplative.

Mary Karr I cannot comment on, for I know neither her work and I’m only slightly acquainted with Zbigniew Herbet’s work. But lines like “Herbert poems are slapstick for intellectuals and philosophy for the ill educated” raise my hackles and provoke some of my worst instincts. On the other hand, she says Herbet “advances local experience to mythic scale” and ends with “In a time of great terror and prevarication, this voice can heal us.” Okay, I’ll give it a try - but I’m suspicious that a voice that is “slapstick for intellectuals and philosophy for the ill educated” can also “heal us”.

James Fenton (whose work I do not know) hits the mark with his mention of Thom Gunn. I think Fenton’s on to something: Gunn’s poems can indeed be food for survival, soulful even - perhaps because of their proximity to death and Gunn’s peeling away to the bone in an intense desire to be real, to be true, to be authentic. Sapphire follows Fenton and chooses Lucille Clifton. I once heard Clifton read at the Library of Congress (with Eamon Grennan) and found her poetry to be sustaining - but I’m not sure Sapphire has chosen the poetry to make her case. I’m headed back to no ideas but in things but I know we don’t have to go down that road again, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Harold Bloom brings the whole thing full circle and seems to directly single me out and chastise me for earlier comments about Ashbury. But at the end of the day, I still don’t buy it. I generally like Bloom’s criticism, but with lines about Ashbury like “Which is to say that Ashbery, unlike Wordsworth, cannot labor to keep his eye steadily upon the object, because every object now belongs to anteriority, and not to us,” I just can’t handle it any more. You’re telling me that Ashbury, who you’re calling “our major poet since the death of Wallace Stevens”, can’t focus on objects in his immediate vision because they aren’t apart of his world anymore? It’s completely circular, and ultimately belies what drives my dislike of Ashbury: his extreme self-centered, self-obsessed style. Moreover, Bloom’s critique exposes what seems like the worst sort of poetic cope-out - that ultimately we don’t really understand Ashbury, so we should stay out of his way and revere him as great. Bloom himself notes he has never “mastered” Ashbury and finds him “maddening”. I agree - but that’s not because there is enormous greatness here (as Bloom says with his obligatory comparison of Ashbury to Whitman). It’s because there isn’t anything very good or very real here (and the two — good and real — are ultimately related).

I’m on the same page with Bloom that we’re looking for poems that are ”inexhaustible to meditation.” I just think it’s absurd to think that Ashbury belongs in these ranks, unless you’re self-obsessed and absurdly interested in abstract academic discussions of poetry.

The whole thing ends with Sharon Olds citing Stanley Kunitz, Yosef Kumunyaka and Debroah Digges. All is well and good here - these are all fine poets whom I admire, but I’m so worked up about the Bloom-Ashbury love fest at the cost of poetry that I can’t enjoy the closing entry.

Overall, I left the article unsatisfied, cranky, and even a little angry. There is the larger shape of my aesthetic - which is undoubtedly more in the vein of William Carlos Williams and a less abstract poetry. I heavily (but not exclusively) value a more traditional rhyme, rhythm, and meter in poetry - something that feels absent from many of these assessments. Of course, I’m miffed at the absence of some of my favorite poets like Philip Levine, Eamon Grennan, C.K. Williams, and Tom Andrews. For the last six years, I’ve turned almost every day to poems by Levine or Grennan. I even find myself returning to Billy Collins, for his contemplative consideration of the every day.

But there are two other things at work here - one is what kind of poetry feeds you. The other is the overall state of modern poetry. The editors specifically asked for poems written in the last 25 years - recent poetry. I just can’t help but feel that most of these people missed the point - what poetry sustains you was the question, not what poetry do you enjoy or do you want to show off. What volume of poetry induces panic at the thought of losing it forever? What poetry is that urgent to your life? I’m unconvinced by the answers most of these poets and critics offered. Is it possible they don’t know what that means? That they don’t know what the primary and elemental necessities of life are about? That might explain the shape of modern poetry, and how a lot of it seems completely useless to me, removed from the things that matter. And it would explalin why so many people seem to have such limited use for poetry these days — it is not necessary or sustaining. What do I mean? Time for H.G. Wells:

The above photo was taken last night by my friend Sona, as Tim, Garrett and I watched the election results coming in. The different looks on each of our faces reminds me of this video installation I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a while back. It was a stunning work of art by Bill Viola – the first video installation ever purchased by the Met. He took five actors, gave them each an emotion to express, and then taped them for 60 seconds. He then slowed down the 60 seconds, making it a sixteen minute video. It sounds strange, but it was visually stunning – on a massive, crystal-clear screen, it looked like a perfect painting – except that if you watched it for a minute you realized that the people in the painting were moving, ever so slowly, movements mostly invisible to the naked eye. The cumulative effect was captivating.

And so was last night – captivating, slow motion, full of emotion, intense in a slow-spooling sort of way. The look on my face in the photo is perhaps as tense as I’ve ever seen myself.

What is there to say? I’m not ready to pontificate on what this means and what happened and what the future holds. In a mundane, petty way – I think that MSNBC had the best TV coverage of the election (having four TVs running at once I feel I can be an accurate judge of this). The web was kind of funny – I think that most of the blogs didn’t have great coverage, but did have great discussion. I generally found CNN.com to have the best online election coverage. C-SPAN had the coolest map. And Comedy Central’s Indecision 2004 blog had good comic relief—specifically the “liberal agenda”. Our Resultron performed admirably, due mostly to the overtime efforts of an amazing team. I also enjoyed two interesting sites – one for GOTV that used text messaging, and one for moBlogging of ballots.

Now what? Good question. This op-ed from earlier in the week from the Boston Globe seems especially apropos. Beyond Voting was called to my attention early on Tuesday – and the sentiment suits me. I know virtually nothing about the site, but it’s ethos is right – this election is just the beginning.

But at the end of the day, I’m not sure what any of this means. Dark images of The Handmaid’s Tale come to mind – I recall Margaret Atwood being asked about the content of the novel, and she said something to the effect that everything in the novel is happening already. I have no idea what tomorrow and the next day look like — but I took heart in a poem I read late last night — true, it’s a bit blood and gore, but I need a fortitude, a resolve to continue fighting the good fight — so here it is.

My friends, the future belongs to us.

Some might say I should start the day by blogging about the election. That blog post is coming, but right now my exhaustion is showing in the wear and tear on my spirit, and I prefer to turn my attention to non-election considerations. My father just sent me this little tid bit from the New York Times ::

It’s that last anecdote that catches my attention. I am a proud graduate of the International School of Kuala Lumpur — the international school mentioned at the end of that segment. And while I was not a member of the Debate team, I was a member of the Forensics team — in Impromptu Speaking, Extemporaneous Speaking, and Oral Interpretation. I traveled with the Debate team to tournaments and memories of the amazing duo Donny & Duncan still make me laugh. And I do recall the conflagration mentioned above — it’s kind of crazy to run across (in the New York Times Op-Ed pages, no less!) an episode from your high school on the other side of the globe.

I woke up this morning to the booming sounds of Lee Greenwood, courtesy of my roommate Garrett Graff. In my pre-coffee, heavily-headached, angry sleep-deprived state I growled at him — “what the hell is going on?” and he cheerily informed me this was his election day “pump up mix”.

I sat down at my beloved Powerbook for the most up-to-date news. Today, after all, is the culmination of a long journey that began in March of 2003 when I first stumbled onto a fellow named Howard Dean. I’ll be following the election day happenings through the blogs — my favorite right now being Jerome’s MyDD, for “my due diligence”. But I’ll also be following the election results through an amazing machine built by my beloved EchoDitto: the DCCC Resultron.

My first email of the morning was from Mike Carvalho who pointed out this Yahoo News story about BLOOD SUCKING MONKEYS ATTACKING HUMAN BEINGS. I kid you not. Just another reason why I hate monkeys.

Oh geez. The obnoxious strains of the greatest hits of John Philip Souza are now wafting in from Garrett’s room. It’s too early for this pre-coffee, even on election day. I think I’m going to shoot myself.

Back to my personal jazz history. Truth is my last post in this series depressed me so much I didn’t feel like writing about jazz anymore. It’s just that Miles Davis was so much worse on Doo-Bop than I remembered him being — it was an album that did not age well, and I was a bit ashamed that I had ever found it so enthralling. But I did, and that’s that.

What prompted me to start writing about jazz again was actually the cover of the October issue of Poetry, which has this stunning crocodile photo. That’s what first drew me into this album: crocs.

Where this album came from is shrouded in mystery. I know one thing: it is a movie soundtrack, and to this day I have never seen the movie. Somehow or another I started listening to this album — perhaps prompted by my earlier Wynton Marsalis experience. This was back in the ancient days of cassette tapes, when I would listen to tapes on my walkman going back and forth to high school.

Hold on — memory returning. I think that I bought this tape during a visit to Jakarta for model united nations during my freshman year of high school. I’m recollecting it was a cassette tape from an indonesian company — I remember the style of casing and insert. In Asia, there was all kinds of crazy releases of cassette tapes. In Seoul, Korea, Itaewon had a store called Yes Records where they sold bootlegged metal, punk, rock. The inserts were photocopies of a hand-written list of the songs on the album.

The problem is that the Yes Records bootlegs wore out pretty quickly. They were cheap tapes. Indonesia, inexplicably, had inexpensive — and legal! — high quality cassette tapes through a deal with A&M Records. Or at least that’s my vague recollection. On school trips there, I stocked up on music.

So that’s how I acquired the album. I certainly bought it because of Wynton Marsalis’ name & photo on the cover, not because of the movie. Listening to it on the bus back and forth to school, one day I realized that the fourth track sounded alive — alive like a crocodile or alligator or something. It very viscerally brought to mind the animal. Hard to describe, except that it just sounded like a croc. I scrambled around in my bag and produced the case and insert, complete with glossy cover. Sure enough — title of the track was “Alligator Tail Drag”.

Well, that was a powerful thing. Inducing, just by your music, the personality and character of an animal — an animal that was very far from my mind in Seoul, Korea. The album as a whole was impressive — it was big-band, New Orleans style. But where The Dirty Dozen Brass Band was wonderful, joyful chaos in big band madness, Tune In Tomorrow was carefully coordinated, restrained, scripted — but just as beautiful and inspiring.

My other favorite tracks include a fun, bluesy number, “May Be Fact Or Fiction”, with vocals sung by Johnny Adams. But it’s the romantic, bluesy Shirley Horn pieces — “The Ways of Love” and “I Can’t Get Started” — that really make it stand out. I fell in love with Shirley Horn through this album. She sings with Marsalis’ trumpet and it all comes together with a quiet, simmering intensity. I didn’t know it at the time, but listening to it now it reminds me of Johnny Hartman and his smoke-soaked voice. The track “I Can’t Get Started” (which I vaguely recall is a Gershwin tune) opens with a perfect Marsalis solo, and then Shirley starts her magic:

That is a fine song, Horn’s voice just dripping through it ever so slowly, making me think of smoke rising from a slow-burning cigarette in a dark bar. Or more precisely, “It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette / someone left burning on a baby grand piano / around three o’clock in the morning.”

This is the fourth in a series detailing my personal jazz history. You can read the series here.