Category Archives: Poetry

Flip, Flip and Fly – the Crazy world of Vancouver Real estate

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The great Paul Simon once said “I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”. Yep, I had to go that far back to find a real estate reference in a poem or song. I’ll get back to poetry and real estate later in this post but in the meantime check out this excellent piece of investigative journalism which appeared in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/the-real-estate-technique-fuelling-vancouvers-housing-market/article28634868/.

It paints a depressing picture of opportunism and greed, it reminded me in a lot of ways of the movie “The Big Short”. In particular, this quote from one realtor, a Mr. Wang:

“I have multiple properties and an annual income 10 times higher than the average Canadian. I am making more money than multiple doctors” .

To quote “The Big Short”: “he’s not confessing, he’s bragging”.

I live in the area at the epicentre of the bidding wars described in the article and every weekend I see real estate agents in white BMW SUV’s cruising up and down the road with prospective clients. As a result, a siege mentality has developed among people like me who want to stay in the neighbourhood and have no intention of selling (my next door neighbour has put a sign on her door saying “I am not selling my house”). There is also a lot of anger (justified or not) in the community at the destruction of perfectly good houses, some of which have been around since the 1920’s, and their replacement with larger, lot filling “monster houses” which are then rented or left to stand empty waiting for the price to rise.

So I thought, is there a poem in all of this? I looked at parody – “I’ve got some real estate flyers here in my bag”, “pave paradise, put up a monster house”- but I couldn’t get beyond one or two lines. Then I looked at the pile of flyers from real estate agents that drop through by letter box on a daily basis and I thought “found poetry”! Maybe I could string the names of all the real estate agents together and form a poem. I immediately hit a problem. Way back in time, I read an interview with Eric Burdon of the Animals about a song called “Gonna send you back to Walker”. It was the B-side of “House of the Rising Sun” and was originally called, I believe, “Gonna send you back to Georgia”, but Eric thought it would be amusing to substitute an English place name. In the interview, he explained that it was difficult to write rock or R&B songs using English place names because most of the names were just not musical. I can see his point, “Sweet Home Derbyshire”, “Derbyshire on my Mind” wouldn’t work – those parsimonious slender vowels “e” and “i” compressing the middle of the word into that unmusical ”ysh”. “Alabama” on the other hand, now that’s a big loud word – all those “a’s” and that big “bam” in the middle.

Well, looking at my list of real estate agents, about half of the names were Anglo Saxon or Scottish and what can be done with “MacDonald”? He had a farm, end of story, or maybe he sold the farm, either way I was going nowhere. The names of the Chinese real estate agents offered more possibilities – one syllable, a lot ending in the same two consonants “ng”, easier to rhyme. There were two “Zhangs” on the list, so I thought – “more Zhang for your buck”- but that raised the spectre of racism that has been hanging over the whole issue like a giant red herring (mix that metaphor!). So it was all getting a bit fraught and mean-spirited and perhaps most of these real estate agents were just decent people following the first rule of capitalism – make hay while the sun shines.

So, no poem,

but maybe down the road

when the wrecking ball hits the house next door,

or the house across the back lane,

or the house across the road

and another load of old timber, gyproc and memories

is scooped into a giant tote

and trucked off to the land fill

maybe then there will be a poem

and a sad poem it will be.

Glenn Frey, the New York Daily News and the Lionel Messi Problem

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Following the death of Glenn Frey, an article by Gersh Kuntzman appeared in the “New York Daily News” titled “Glenn Frey’s death is sad but the Eagles were a horrific band”. The definition of “horrific “in the Oxford English Dictionary is “causing horror” and the definition of “horror” is “An intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust”. I wondered how could a country rock band that created some great songs and were accomplished instrumentalists and singers cause an intense feeling of fear, shock or disgust. He then goes on to say in the body of the article that Eagles were “quite simply, the worst rock and roll band”. Again, like them or not, how could that be? There are a million other far worthier candidates; the three guys who practiced in the garage of my neighbor’s house when I was growing up, for a start. The Eagles aren’t even a rock band, they are a country rock band that occasionally plays rock n’roll and when they do, they play it well – “Life in the Fast lane”, for example.

Further down, Gersh lists other artists who were active in 1972 to 1976 – Lou Reed, David Bowie, The Sex Pistols – implying that the Eagles were creative dwarves in comparison. Whatever about Lou and David – The Sex Pistols? Never mind the bollocks, and there is an awful lot of bollocks written when it comes to The Sex Pistols, has anyone, even Gersh, listened to The Sex Pistols in the last 35 years. At the end of the article, he describes a scene in “The Big Lebowski” where “The Dude” asks his cab driver to turn off “Peaceful Easy Feeling”, because The Dude (“an icon of cool”) hates the “f**king Eagles”. Gersh exempts Joe Walsh from this un-coolness, in a sad attempt to pander, awarding him the distinction of being the only cool Eagle. Has North America become a giant high school where politicians resort to bullying, name-calling and macho posturing and rock journalists try to appear cool and hardcore by referencing The Big Lebowski and The Sex Pistols?

And then there’s Gersh’s Lionel Messi Problem. What is a Lionel Messi problem? Well, say you’re a sports fan and you are a dedicated follower of one team, you automatically can’t stand the team’s arch rival; if it’s the Vancouver Canucks, the Leafs suck; if you are an Everton fan, Liverpool suck; if you are a Real Madrid fan, Barcelona suck. But there’s a problem, Lionel Messi plays for Barcelona and is obviously the top player in the world. So if you are a Madrid fan the most you can do is to resort to lame criticism – he’s only good because of the system Barcelona play, he’s not the same when he plays for Argentina – then Messi, all by himself slaloms past four defenders and chips the ball over the keeper. Hotel California is Gersh’s Lionel Messi Problem. The lyrics are “mysterious”, only of interest to “nerds” (high school again), it’s a “novelty” song. Mysterious?  It’s poetry, Gersh, Don Henley is using imagery, metaphor, the whole song is a metaphor for chrissake! There isn’t a song writer out there who wouldn’t give his eyeteeth to have written that lyric. Apart from the lyric, the song has everything else – good chord structure, melody and great guitar. It is in fact a great rock song and how can the worst rock band produce a great rock song, that’s Gersh’s Lionel Messi Problem.

He has since written an article titled “I’m the Most Hated Man In America”.

Gersh, you are so bad!

 

Check it out here:

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/glenn-frey-death-sad-eagles-lousy-band-article-1.2501461

 

 

Rhymin’ (Neil) Diamond – the Good, the Bad and the Internal

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The great Paul Simon once said: “I’d rather be a llama than a whale”. Ok, maybe he didn’t but perhaps he should have. Anyway, this is not about rhymin’ Simon, this is about rhymin’ Diamond who once said”

I am, I said

To no one there

And no one heard at all

Not even the chair

Implying that, in a room containing inanimate objects, the object most likely to reply would be a chair. But all smart ass carping aside, that chair is important, not just because it rhymes with “there”. The chair suggests that Neil is in a room, and there is only one chair (“the chair”), so Neil is most likely lying on a bed and of course he is alone, so alone that he has resorted to talking to the furniture. Without the chair, he could be anywhere, it becomes the focus of his existential crisis. This is a “pop song”, one has to grab the attention of the audience or they are gone and it has to look easy and that’s hard and he does it through that one detail, the chair.

It has to be said that Neil is perhaps not at the same level as Paul Simon when it comes to poetic, sophisticated lyrics, but he has his moments. Take the first verse of “ Cracklin’ Rosie”:

“Aw, Cracklin’ Rosie, get on board

   We’re gonna ride

   Till there ain’t no more to go

   Taking it slow

   And Lord, don’t you know

   We’ll have me a time with a poor man’s lady”

There’s that internal rhyme happening – board, more, Lord, poor -and all those ‘O’s’, fifteen in total! And the assonance in the chorus of

“Cracklin’ Rose,

You’re a store-bought woman”

It goes a bit downhill after that – “you make me sing like a guitar hummin’” – hummin’ and woman – ouch!

But, for my money, Neil’s finest moment when it comes to writing lyrics is in “Sweet Caroline”. The song, admittedly, is not without some absolute groaners:

“Where it began,

I can’t begin to knowin’”

And that’s the first two lines.

Even the chorus, which contains that finest moment is a syntactical nightmare:

Sweet Caroline

Good times never seemed so good

I’ve been inclined,

To believe they never would

Oh, no, no
I have wrestled with this for some time and the best I can come up with is this: ”I’ve been inclined to believe that good times never would never seem so good”. Think about that too long and I guarantee that steam will come out of your ears. But it doesn’t matter, because all that matters is that rhyme between “Sweet Caroline” and “I’ve been inclined”. He could have gone for “fine”, “wine”, “mine” etc but there is something about “inclined” that is so unexpected, so colloquial, so conversational. It surprises every time you hear it. And of course, the acid test of any chorus is how well it does in a pub or bar late in the evening and everyone is a little hammered and some skinny guy on acoustic guitar hauls out “Sweet Caroline” and everyone is just waiting to belt out that chorus and I guarantee you that the volume will perceptibly increase when they reach that line and everyone takes just a little credit for recognizing just how clever it is.

Autumn and Death (2 poems and a Conversation)

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Autumn

The leaves have abandoned

that chlorophyll thing

and are leaking yellows and reds

like a paint store catalogue.

Death (a slimverse)

A God’s voice

roaring: You!

You are not

in control.

Conversation with Slim

Me: Slim, in a previous post “Slim’s Advice Part 2” you said and I quote:

“Avoid Autumn and Death

they’ve been done before

there’s little more to say

on either score.”

Are you being ironic here in a self referential way?

Slim: No.

Me: “Slim, the first poem here is an outtake or revision of a previous poem (Slim’s Advice Part 3), are poems ever really finished?”

Slim:

“Words can be ‘

rearranged

if you just

talk to them.”

Lately, Slim has taken to talking in these 12 syllable bites he calls “slimverse” and I find it irritating and more than a little disturbing. So, as gently as I can, I say to him:

“Slim, that makes absolutely no sense to me, do you not think you are being a tad cryptic, a tad gnomic, if you keep on like this, you are danger of turning into a fucking garden ornament”

We haven’t talked since.

The Most Over-rated Album of All Time

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This is a continuation of a previous blog, titled: “Bob Dylan’s Worst Line Ever”.

After Slim’s brief outburst, he lapsed into silence again and did his impression of a lizard sitting on a rock. The not unpleasant smell from the Indian take-out mercifully masked the usual faint odour of sour sweat emanating from Slim’s bedroom. His bedroom door was closed, a yellow light leaked through the gap between bottom of the door and the threadbare carpet. The room  pulsed  in a vaguely sinister way.

I began to panic; he could pull out his blueprints of the Star Ship Enterprise at any minute. I was about to ask him why so much depends on a red wheelbarrow, but thought better of it. I reached for my phone.

“Slim”, I said, “I was looking at Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 albums of all time, the other day, do you want to see it?”

“Not really”, he replied.

“Ok”, I tried, “what do you think is the most over-rated album of all time?”

“All right”, he sighed, ”show me the top 10 albums.”

I passed him my phone and he studied the list for a few minutes, then pounced.

“Number 7, ‘Exile on Main Street’, by the Stones”

“Really, why?”

“Because, it’s awful. It’s recycled 12 bar, refried boogie, Jagger sounds like a cat being neutered. It’s not even the seventh best Stones’ album. Creedence and The Band did this kind of thing a few years before and a lot better. This is the sound of the Stones throwing in their creative hand and saying, ‘enough, we’re tired’. It’s the artistic equivalent of taking a package holiday to Majorca. Look, it’s listed higher than ‘The White Album’ and ‘Kinda Blue’. Absolute bollocks!”

“Kind of…”

“What?”

“It’s ‘Kind of Blue’ not ‘Kinda Blue’

Slim looked at me like he was wondering why he bothered to speak to the rest of the human race at all.

“Well”, I said,”why do you think Rolling Stone rates it so high?”

“Because, it’s a Keef album and, to rock critics, Keef embodies the rock and roll spirit, the dead romantic hero, except he’s not dead. He’s the guy who would never have hung out with them at school. Plus, there’s this legend of the Stones hunkered down in a house in France recording the album, escaping from the tax man where in fact, Mick, Charlie and Bill never stayed at the house probably because they didn’t want to be around Keef’s junkie friends. Anyway, Mick didn’t think much of the album at all”.

“Really?”

“Look it up”.

So I did.

This is Mick Jagger talking about ‘Exile’ in “According to The Rolling Stones” (Chronicle Books, San Francisco):

“Exile on Main Street is not one of my favourite albums”.

“…when I listen to Exile it has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.”

“Exile is really a mixture of bits and pieces left over from the previous album recorded at Olympic Studios…..These were mixed up with a few slightly more grungy things done in the South of France. It’s seen as one album all recorded there and it really wasn’t.”

“So there’s a good four songs off it, but when you play the other nineteen, you can’t, or they don’t work, or nobody likes them, and you think, ’Ok, we’ll play another one instead’. We have rehearsed a lot of the tunes off Exile, but there’s not much that’s playable.”

Template

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Template” is a sculpture by the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. It is made from old wooden doors from demolished Chinese houses. At an exhibition, in Kassel, Germany in 2007, the sculpture collapsed after exposure to wind and rain. Ai Weiwei decided to leave it in its collapsed state. In an interview, he explained that nature had taken his work  and re-shaped it, perhaps made it better, had done something he could never have done. Slim has this to say:

Template

Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei

Give your head a shake

Cease these po-faced utterances.

Yes, the forces of nature

Can create great wonders:

The Grand Canyon, for example.

But what we have here

Is a tornado in a trailer park.

Havoc has been wreaked.

You left your sculpture out in the wind and rain

And the wind and rain have done their thing.

Let us not pretend

That this is anything more

Than a failure to read the weather report.

The Level Of Discourse (Donald Trump,The Republican Party and Hitler Analogies)

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The Level of Discourse

I want to say a few words

About the level of discourse

How low can it go?

How low can it go

When a candidate for the presidency

Of the United States

Gets up on television

And mocks, mimics, ridicules

A disabled man

And the media endlessly debate

Whether he intended to or not

When he plainly did

And the members of his party

Refuse to criticize him

Refuse to say that

This is beneath our dignity,

Perhaps dignity

Has left the room

Has left the United States of America,

And these same party members

Pride themselves

On their rugged individualism

Their boots on the ground machisimo

And oh how they love their Hitler analogies

But when a trumped up

Pumped up tin pot bully

Emerges from their own ranks

They are too chickenshit to say anything

How low can it go?

The level of discourse

How low can it go?

 

Taking the Piss

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Taking the Piss*

 A man on crutches

carrying a catheter bag

full of urine

leaves St. Paul’s Hospital

wearing a tee-shirt

that says:

Dreams start here.

*According to Wikipedia “Take the piss” may refer to the expression piss-proud, which, and this is a stretch, in turn refers to the morning erections caused by a full bladder pressing upon nerves that help affect erection. This is considered a “false’ erection, and hence someone who is “piss-proud” would be taking credit where none is due, and taking the piss out of them would be an attempt to discredit them using mockery.

Another theory is that back when urine was used in the process of fixing dye to wool, urine was brought by canal to the wool mills in the North of England. Naturally transporting urine was less rewarding financially than transporting, for example, wine, so when asked what they had on board the boatmen would reply “I’m taking wine”. The inevitable reply to this would be “No, you’re taking the piss”.

This could all be true or perhaps Wikipedia is taking the piss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss

Slim at the Vancouver Folk Festival

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Slim at the Vancouver Folk Festival

One hour into the folkfest

and a mellow, minor key, melancholy

is seeping into Slim’s bones,

he feels it like an arthritic ache

and he wishes that someone

would duck walk across the stage

shooting staccato bursts of distorted guitar

at the chilled out, Tilley clad audience

who, unlike Slim, have a default mode

other than anger.

The Twenty Second Read

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The Twenty Second Read

A couple of days ago, I was looking at my WordPress reader and I came across a poem by Robert Okaji called “The Nightingale”. Robert is a fine poet, check out his blog at robertokaji.com. Anyway, the reader as per usual just showed the first few verses, and a word count, then as I looked down I noticed a message at the bottom saying”20 sec read”.

I got up and went into the next room where I have a ceiling high Ikea bookshelf packed with poetry books and novels that I can’t throw out because I intend to read most of them again at some point. I pulled out the first poetry book that I bought (sometime in the seventies), The Collected Poems of TS Eliot, Faber and Faber. I opened the book at “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.”

“Let us go then, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table….”

That’s one of those images that snagged on my brain, the first time I read it, like windblown paper snagging on a bush. The poem was published in 1917, but to me it is a quintessentially modern poem with its antihero narrator, the outsider, the wry observer – “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”. My point is that I have read that poem many times since the seventies and will continue to read it because every time I do, I get something new out of it. So if today TS Eliot had a blog, although somehow I think he would prefer the relative permanence of paper, I hope WordPress reader would label his poem a “lifetime read”.

By the way, I tried reading Robert Okaji’s poem in twenty seconds, but all I could glean was that it was about a nightingale. So, I went back, a second, third, fourth time and each time I extracted more meaning from the poem. So, I would currently probably label this poem “20 seconds and counting”.

The Stack

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Slim gets all industrial.

The Stack

And what a beautiful plume this is, Nigel,
a plume with time on its hands.
Look at it loping across the sky
like the tail of a giant Chinese Dragon.

Let’s hail a cab to find the plume’s end
where the last wisps of water vapour drift upwards
and a blue mist hangs,
and there it is
above the emptying parking lot
of the big box mall
in the western sky
before a bawling sun.

Lucinda Williams

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Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
your voice is like a bruise
there’s no one out there
there’s no one out there
fit to tie your shoes.

Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
your voice is gargled dust
you wrote the book
you wrote the book
on loneliness, love and lust.