Not Going Anywhere (for Barbara)

Let me tell you a story
Conclusive, based on fact
Long ago in the morning
She left did not come back
I don't really care anymore
I don't really care

Change the days into nights
And you will know when the feeling is right
This tale is too long
The plot is weak and the characters wrong
I don't really care anymore
I don't really care anymore
But she changed my life
I thought she loved me

And I will pray for you
You'll see the truth
Cause that's how it's got to be

Let me tell you a story
About the way she was

Those are the lyrics to the opening song on one of the music discs I made for my friend Barbara in an effort to comfort her during the last weeks of her life. This is an explanation of that first disc. It’s more for me than for you. In some ways, the songs were more for me than they were for her. Yesterday, when a handful of us met Barbara’s brother at her apartment to help go through her things, this disc was in her compact boombox.

We discussed life in depth, making her my confidante, an irreplaceable friend, my guru – a fellow traveler who struggles with the concept that the story we tell of our lives is a mildly entertaining "Liar’s Tale." The Guided by Voices song is a natural opener – let me tell you a story (true? embellished?) about the way she was – the playwright in her hopefully appreciating my limitations – the plot is weak and the characters wrong.

The next two songs are my attempts to bond.

We shared a love of Emmylou Harris. I offer two duets between gruff, rather ordinary men and angelic songbirds. “This Is Us” by Harris and Mark Knopfler. Let’s pretend we’re outlaws. “Bonnie and Clyde” by Dean and Britta from Luna. I picture our shared love of film to be the stuff of classic Godard Nouvelle Vague.

Before we get too serious here, I throw in a nonsense song that carries on the illogical French theme – “Mlle. Chatte” by Harlan T. Bobo, which I cribbed from a mix CD recently made by my friend Tom. I feel bad that the opening line is “Elle est grande,” but I know she’d appreciate the silly lyrics throughout (about a cat who eats butter, drinks wine and pees on the table) and the overall gastronomic absurdity.

***

There is tension next in the sad garage clatter of “Lovesick” from Lisa Germano and an opening lyric she again can appreciate: “You’re not my Yoko Ono / You said those words to me.” The underlying message I’m conveying, in my own sick way, is that she and I could have been but also could never have possibly been a John & Yoko. In reality, she may have never felt like anyone’s Yoko. I told her at times that our friendship in a way felt to me like a love affair, albeit a platonic one. That could be silly or cruel on my part (I can hear a few of my exes utter the word “cowardly,” actually) or maybe that’s profound in some weird way, but it’s what I experienced. Barbara could be as sassy and sexual as anyone -- I liked how she could be bawdy and classy and clever all in the same breath like a thoroughly modern Dorothy Parker – and we often discussed our romantic triumphs and tragedies. When, above, I mentioned cruelty, I’m reminded that no one could be more cruel about Barbara than she was to herself. A frequent theme of our final conversations was her vision of herself throughout her life as no great beauty – overweight, not a drop of makeup, too smart to even pretend to be a ditzy Barbie Doll, feeling at times like a disappointment to her mother. (As she prepared to die, she imagined a parallel universe in which she was thin and feline.) One of the best compliments I’ve ever received was years ago when she told me I had the handsome ranginess of Campbell Scott. No one has ever championed the cause of James A. Montalbano like Barbara Kerr Page did. Her friendship was one big chuck on the shoulder; a constant “good going, guy” that I rarely got from, say, my father or a partner. But I learned from her, too, that outer beauty is truly only skin deep. I think she enjoyed watching me struggle as a shallow, hypocritical American male; she constantly challenged me to keep looking deeper. In my fantasy world, she is the beauty and I am some rough beast.

“Not Going Anywhere” by Keren Ann (what IS up with the French theme?) gave the disc its title. This one is straightforward. Barbara was dying, but her legacy had been cemented, and she will live as long as I do.

“Bloodbuzz Ohio” by The National is just a great recent song that I thought she’d like. This is, after all, a mix CD from an Eighties boy. And she would be playing the disc on her little boombox. She forever speculated about what comes next after this life, what the trip is like. A spaceship? Another dimension? A parallel universe? A long odyssey being carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees?

“Cape Canaveral” is another recent favorite of mine, from Conor Oberst. Barbara for me is a classic Boomer, a ‘60s teen, a postwar love child, a women’s libber, a 20-something in the gritty sloppy ‘70s. She’s a California Dreamer, a mod gal in Swingin’ London, an adventurous hedonist before Reagan and AIDS. I lived vicariously through her in that sense. This song, with its perfect reference to Sister Socrates, evokes that time for me, a maudlin tribute to the Age of Apollo, reminding us that chasing after hope is a fool’s errand. Plus, Oberst is the first New Dylan to actually live up to the title. She’d revel in his wordplay.

***

“What Am I Worth?” by Dave Alvin and the belter Syd Straw is just another Beauty & The Beast duet for her consideration. A gruff doofus getting circles run ‘round him by a brilliant, vivacious woman with talent to burn. That’s how I felt for 4-1/2 years sitting next to her, thinking I was a decent copy editor. Barbara was always at least one dimension beyond me. (I also wanted a sassy country song in the mix.)

That last song was also a bridge to a straightforward gospel song, “River of Jordan” by the Louvin Brothers, my nod to the Big Guy, in case he’d been listening to us this whole time. It was also my wish expressed to her that she could find peace in her final days and have the cool waters wash clean her soul.

“Tomorrow Is a Long Time” – here, the Christian group Nickel Creek’s version of the Dylan song – has always haunted me. No one has expressed yearning quite like that. It’s always made me think of a lifetime as being just one long day (instead of a day lasting a lifetime), with tomorrow being whatever comes after death. It was one of the songs Dylan wrote when his girlfriend went off to Italy at the time (another was “Boots of Spanish Leather”). I learned that trivia from the NY Times obituary of that girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, his early muse, who died earlier this year. (Now there was some baggage for a woman to carry throughout her adult life, which I’m sure Barbara could perhaps appreciate.) Barbara was also a muse to me in many ways, both in journalism and in my private writing. We spent a good deal of my summer before law school swapping screenplays and workshopping other scraps of writing. I think the only time I ever truly shocked her was when I hit her with the ending of my epic film treatment that is still in progress. She seemed genuinely disturbed by what my mind had conjured up. I still hope to pull it all off someday. Meantime, I cherish the two 10-minute plays she entrusted in my care.

“World Inside the World,” by Rhett Miller of the Old 97’s, is just another pretty song. It felt like it fit in neatly with her philosophy. And the reference to DeLillo is special. She loved being read to, and I got the chance to do that during many of our visits that followed her various hip surgeries. I’ve always wanted to read “Underworld” to a woman I love; we got through most of the long first chapter once. Maybe that’s all I’ll get; it would be enough for me.

“I Saw Her Standing There” by Daniel Johnston – the epitome of his tortured mind’s blend of the infantile and the profound. Accompanying himself on piano (you can hear him pause awkwardly to turn the pages of his sheet music), he plays only the chord changes, transforming what was once early Beatles pop joy into a dirge. His thin voice, as always, is haunting. The positioning of this amateurish cover version between the song before it and the one that comes next is for effect.

“I and Love and You” by the Avett Brothers, gets our piano back in tune, as lovely as they come. It has a mournful gospel feel to it. The Young Grasshopper will catch the lyric “What you were once / I am today.” I figured she’d appreciate the awkward lyric “Oh, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in.” And, of course, the song is a cowardly ‘80s mix-tape way of simply telling another person that you love them. Do I have to hold that boombox over my head here? Last fall she mailed me a novel: “The Importance of Music to Girls.” Across four postcards, she scrawled this message: “Thought you’d enjoy this – the title is ironic (I think) because girls don’t feel about music the ways boys do – plus, she’s about yr age and so some tunes will be familiar. Good to see yr mom (she’s fabbo) and hope you two had a great time. Hope, too, you’ll have a good time in Portland. Cheers! B.” That last part was a sendoff to Oregon, where I was headed to stalk my favorite band, the first one mentioned above, Guided by Voices, which was on a mini-reunion tour. Ugh, the importance of music to boys.

“For Today” from the young Jessica Lea Mayfield continues the loveliness. It also provides a break between all the boys here in the homestretch, as well as a link to a kindred song three tracks down the line. The lyrics, to me, echo the sentiment from Dylan’s “I Don’t Believe You” – putting up a false front and acting like you’re not going to miss that person walking out the door. Barbara the copy editor would appreciate the clever misuse of the phrase “I could care less.” I feel like her little grasshopper student when I quote:

I could care less about you
Care less about you
And how I love the sound of you walking away
And I can
See clearer
And I am getting closer
To finding out just who I am
Without you in the way

So hold me
But only

For today

Here comes Guided by Voices again, with “A Drinker’s Peace,” a self-eulogy full of smart rhymes. Again, I think of her frolicking in the pre-‘80s era when I hear the line, “I get a contact buzz / Can’t remember what the problem was.”

Next is “Modern Girl” by Sleater Kinney. Tough chicks singing a masculine, ironic song about being a strong woman (because, of course, her baby loves her). The song is an instant timeline for me, headed in reverse. A young male former student of mine reminded me of this song with a blog post of his in the fall. The song hadn’t made an impact on me when I bought the disc (“The Woods”) a few years ago. But, oh, what a video. (Maybe it’s again cruel of me to have the words “My whole life / Looks like a picture of a sunny day” echo through a dying friend’s brain.) Carrie Brownstein snarls like Chrissie Hynde did when I saw her and the Pretenders in concert in suburban Chicago in 1984. Hynde at the time, in her painted-on I’m-33-I-got-a-kid-baby leather pants, was channeling Dylan that night. Here, the close-up of Brownstein’s mouth as she grits her teeth and spits out “sunny dayyyy” – she’s the lovechild of Hynde and Dylan, a lesbian dressed up like a boyish British mod. The mind reels, like a movie reel, tumbling backward, two decades at a time – 2005 … 1984 … 1965.

And back to the ‘70s. Back to the duets. The lunk and the angel. “For a Day Like Today,” by Lee Hazelwood and Suzy Jane Hokom (a name from a BK play if I ever heard one). A bookend to the modern imitators Dean & Britta above. Makes me think of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. Or Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. Don’t go there. Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra. Richard and Mimi Farina. Bobby and Suze arm in arm on the album cover. Back to the ‘60s, back to my womb. (A running joke between us was that Barbara, 14 years my senior, could have been my mother in South America.) Lisa Germano (track 5 above) also does a killer version of “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” I chose one of her miserable originals instead. “You’re not my Yoko Ono.” Barbara was endlessly enamored of Wild West images. “For a Day Like Today” is a rambling cowboy tune that always had a carry-me-to-my-grave feel to it. By this point, the reference to “hope” is no longer sarcastic. Just a song or a dream – or some hope – we’d been saving for a day like today.

“Ballad of a Broken String,” by the Icelandic experimentalists Mum, is a mesmerizing instrumental. It has the snaps and pops of vinyl throughout. It borrows from Piazzola and Morricone – more cinematic beauty. It’s the accompaniment to a funeral in the rain. It’s a song I’ve often used to send myself off to sleep. It’s carried along by the beat of a heart. It dares to care about a poor little broken string; like a rubber band on your wrist or hanging lonely on the doorknob. It’s a soundtrack to a New Mexican sunset. Eventually the heartbeat stops. The clicks and crackles linger until you lift the needle off the vinyl. Listen to it again, and you can hear that the song, 4 minutes and 44 seconds, has the cadence of an entire life being lived.

Finally, a playful yet dark, bittersweet coda. “Spicks and Specks” by the young Bee Gees. Barbara, their contemporary, is back one more time in Swingin’ London. She’s one of the girls I’ll never forget. I came to New Mexico for the sun. But where is that sun? Now she has made me wonder: What is it like to plan the swift sunset of your life? The older you get, the more your memory is just a series of spicks and specks of a life gone away. I warned you; this exercise was just as much about me as it was about Barbara Kerr Page, who died at age 62 on April 27, 2011, my last day of law school.

***

And a final coda: A week before she died, Barbara mailed me a postcard. Because she forgot to include the city quadrant, it didn’t arrive until the day before she died. It reads, simply: “April 2011. Enjoying the music – thnx! Happy Easter! Love, B.”

"Tokyo!"

"Tokyo!" is a triptych from Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-Ho.

Gondry's opener is filled with irresistible characters. A lovely tale, with an absurdist ending of charming magical realism.

Carax's is a challenge, and most folks would skip it. It is a flippant, modern take on Godzilla movies with a brutal philosophy that I would say rescues it from its fundamental silliness. ("What would you like for your final meal?" "Flowers. And cash.")

I adored Bong's closer more seeing it the second time. It builds to a profound ending. When that door handle jiggles, something truly magical happens. The overall thread running through all three films is the way in which humans in that city, living on top of each other, struggle to make that tactile connection.

[Seen at: The 2008 Santa Fe Film Festival and this past weekend at the Southwest Film Center at the University of New Mexico. Available on DVD.]

Open-mike night at Brickyard Pizza welcomes novices and old pros

The story goes that in 1948, Billy Boy Arnold, just a teenager at the time in his hometown of Chicago, went looking for Sonny Boy Williamson, because he wanted to learn some harmonica tricks from the master.

It's a familiar phenomenon in the world of blues, where songs don't necessarily get handed down from generation to generation so much as the younger, curious up-and-comers seek out the masters or dig up the old tunes.

You can hear a classic Billy Boy Arnold song - "I Wish You Would" - just about every Tuesday night at Brickyard Pizza. That would be New Mexico native and guitar slinger Chris Dracup warming up the crowd on open-mike night for the semipros and the amateurs who sign the sheet on the corner of the bar at the home of the Blue Ribbon Special.

On a given night you can also hear jazz and folk and rock or maybe even flamenco or slam poetry. You can hear Bob Dylan's "Shelter From the Storm" or "Plush" from Stone Temple Pilots.

While the open-mike draws the typical hopefuls, like singer-songwriters, it truly is an anything-goes atmosphere. Dracup, the host, described one act last month as "bluegrass punk." Performers from "Stomp" stopped in for some spoken-word action when they were in town, he said, and a flamenco crowd was the highlight of another week.

On a recent Tuesday, the night started with "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Members of Dracup's family, including his wife and 1-year-old daughter, were at the center table that night and so a nursery rhyme wasn't out of place. Of course, Dracup played it in the style of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

"It's bizarre that I'm back here playing on Tuesdays," he said before his set.

What is now Brickyard Pizza wasn't always the relaxed smoke-free place it is now. The building used to house the popular University Area clubs Sprockets and Fat Chance. Dracup used to play those grungier joints when he was a member of bands like the Muttz and the Rattle Cats.

He started out around age 15 in Taos. Back then his influences were more modern virtuosos like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, and later Vaughan. (These days, the 42-year-old Dracup spends his days doing graphic design under the name Six & Nine Design. Yes, that's a Hendrix reference.)

Dracup eventually went off to Austin and Nashville to do session work and play gigs. "It was good to get experience, and I would have like to have stayed there," he said of Nashville in the early Õ90s. But he eventually headed back to the high desert. "I kind of got tired of starving," he said.

When he returned to New Mexico about 10 years ago, he dug deeper into the origins of the Delta blues and studied his influences' influences: Albert King, Freddie King, T-Bone Walker. And further back, Robert Johnson and Billy Boy Arnold.

Dracup's signature tune these days is that Arnold song from the 1950s ("Come back baby, I wish you would"), also covered in the '60s by the Yardbirds. Arnold, a Chicago harmonica player, was a disciple of Sonny Boy Williamson and a session player on Bo Diddley's early hits.

Arnold made his own recordings for Vee-Jay Records (the label that let the Beatles go), including "I Ain't Got You," which was popularized in the late '70s by the Blues Brothers, the fictional Joliet Jake and Elwood.

Arnold went on to live the blues most of his life. According to a bio at the All Music Guide, Arnold drove a bus and was a parole officer for years in Chicago before making a comeback in the 1990s on Alligator Records.

Adam Zientarski toils as a cook at Brickyard. He's 24 and also a regular at open-mike night. He's usually off Tuesday nights, but he's been known to work a shift, go home and come back with his guitar to play a set.

"It's got to be comfortable in the place you play," he said, "and I feel really comfortable here."

Being so young and pierced, Zientarski doesn't initially give off the vibe that he's a fan of the Beatles, James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel. Some of his covers include "Dock of the Bay" and the Beatles song "Blackbird." And he's the one who will throw out "Plush" from the 1990s post-grunge rockers Stone Temple Pilots.

He also has built a portfolio of 20 original songs, focused on a "positive, inspirational message," he says. "Basically chasing your dreams."

Zientarski played with a band in Michigan and moved to Albuquerque two years ago. He is finishing up an associate's degree in liberal arts at Central New Mexico Community College, and he hopes someday to earn a master's in guitar performance at UNM.

In other words, he's eager to learn. And the laid-back open-mike vibe at Brickyard on Tuesday nights gives him the room to do that.

"Every night, with my vocals I start out a little weak, but by the third song I'm a lot more comfortable," he said. "The confidence just hits me and I get stronger."

"We get a lot of kids who come in who are shy on the mike and insecure. And after a while they become more comfortable," Dracup said. "People at first are not used to the P.A. Some have gotten really good at it."

Zientarski credits Dracup with playing the mentor role.

"Chris is amazing. Just to hear him is good for me," Zientarski said. "He's been really really awesome about saying, `Good job.' He keeps me proud of myself for getting out there. So it keeps me coming back."

Dracup used to host open-mike night at O'Niell's Uptown, but in 2005 it turned into a sports bar and no longer seemed to be the right fit for blues jam sessions. The change of venue took some getting used to.

"It was slow at first," Dracup said, "but then it took off."

Dracup keeps mostly close to home now that he's raising a family. He still plays Santa Fe and Taos. He might zip over to Austin this spring. But mostly he can be found with his band at Zinc on Saturday nights in Nob Hill. He's assembling live recordings that would make up his first solo album. And his Tuesday gig is a short drive from his home.

"It's better than sitting on the couch on a Tuesday night, which is what I'd be doing," Dracup said. "Plus it's a good feeling to help people do their music. It's fun."

On a recent Tuesday, the one with the post-holiday family gathering, Dracup followed up "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with more standard fare.

After a few songs, harmonica aficionado Marvin Jaramillo joined Dracup and drummer Mike Chavez. They tore into a Robert Johnson song, "Come On in My Kitchen." They worked through a particularly mournful version of Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry."

After a break, Jaramillo returned for a solo harp set and launched into another crowd favorite: his scat-jazz version of "Misty."

Jaramillo is a bit of a ringer in the crowd. He has taken first place in recent years at the annual Yellow Pine Harmonica Contest in Yellow Pine, Idaho. (The town brags of a population of 40. Go to the contest's Web site at www.harmonicacontest.com and see the harp-playing, toe-tapping squirrel. Turn your computer's speakers on first.)

Jaramillo and Chavez and Dracup and pals are the senior members of the Brickyard scene. But as the night goes on, would-be blues legends trickle in through the front door. For some, this is their first time playing in front of others.

"Anyone who's brave enough to get up there," Dracup says, "I figure, give 'em a chance."