Tag: muses

Posted on

Muses: Vaughan Oliver and Alistair Gray

The mysterious arty graphics of 23 Envelope actually influenced my aesthetic sense. The late Vaughan Oliver (September 12, 1957 –  December 29, 2019) instinctively knew how to combine text and image into visually arresting collages. I’ll even admit that I bought some albums just because of the cover art. His designs grace some of my favorite albums. The lace shrouded mannequin on Cocteau Twins’ Treasure. The erotic elegance of the Pixies first album, and the haloed monkey on their Doolittle album. The blurred out naked man dancing and/or swaying with a phallic object on The Breeders’ Pod. His album covers are works of art, and his unique style has influenced the graphic arts.

I read Alistair Gray’s epic novel Lanark around the time of my 4AD/Cocteau Twins fandom. The two of them are indelibly linked for me. That novel, which mixes a bildungsroman with a surrealistic dystopian novel is a classic of Weird Fiction.  It was one of the books where I had an epiphany: much of life does happen in our private alternate realities and using fantasy and allegory are valid ways to talk about the human experience. Plus, the book was illustrated with his amazingly complex drawings that hinted at a personal mythology.

Rest in peace, Vaughan Oliver and Alistair Gray  (December 28, 1934 – December 29, 2019).

Posted on

Octavia E. Butler’s 71st

The Google Doodle today features the late Octavia E. Butler. She is one of my muses. Her bleak, imaginative speculative fiction thematically explored the trauma of oppression. She’s known as a Science Fiction writer, but she also wrote horror (Fledgling, and Clay’s Ark qualify).

OEB

I heard OEB speak twice. She didn’t read from her fiction. But her speech was as powerful as her fiction. You read my blog post about her speech here (The Parable of Octavia E. Butler).

She was taken from us too soon.

Posted on

MUSES: The return of the mystical side of Natalie Merchant

The first show I went to at DC’s famed 9:30 Club, back when it was at 9th and F Street, was 10,000 Maniacs. They had just released their major label debut, The Wishing Chair. The front woman, Natalie Merchant, was a triple-threat, as they say in show business lingo. She had a lilting, beautiful voice; wrote intelligent lyrics about serious subjects; and was visually arresting. And by “visually arresting,” I don’t mean she was a babe. I mean her gloriously oddball stage person. The performance I saw back in 1985 featured her trademark spinning, on-stage costume changes involving numerous shawls and scarves, and using her long hair as a prop. In-between song, instead of banter, she would sing a cappella fragments of old folk songs. And in souped up jam session, she ‘sang’ impromptu lyrics from Yamyatin’s We.

Natalie

She became a star on the next album, In My Tribe, with a jaunty hit single about Seasonal Affective Disorder called “Like the Weather.” Her lyrics became less poetic and more preachy, something cemented in the follow-up album Blind Man’s Zoo. At her worst, she comes across as a sanctimonious scold. Sally Soapbox became her default setting. She rivals Morrissey in her ability to annoy me with her judgmental and often hypocritical pronouncements. (Case in point: “Candy Everybody Wants” portrays TV-viewers as morons and yet 10,000 Maniacs were often musical guests on numerous TV programs; in another article, she went on a mad bromide against the Lady Gaga/Beyonce campy video “Telephone,” failing to find humor in its homage to trashy women’s prison; yet her former band’s name at best, trivializes, people with mental disabilities).

But some of her songs can make me blub like a baby. “Cherry Tree,” about illiteracy, does it every time. And “These Are Days” practically defines nostalgic euphoria. That song kicks me out of any funk I’m in. She has a new album coming out, and it appears to draw from the Poetic side of her oeuvre. The haunting video and the lyrics to the song “Giving It Up” is very promising.

 

Posted on

MUSES: The Gnostic Gospels of Flannery O’Connor

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” was my first introduction to the work of Flannery O’Connor, and short fiction in general. It really packs a wallop. Black comedy, serial killers, social critique and, ultimately metaphysical transcendence are all in this brief story. Her fiction is dense and multi-layered. There is more going on in them than entire novels. Of all of the writers of the Southern Gothic school, her work is the one that endures the most with me.

In her cosmology, G-d dwells in the darkest corner of the soul, and that is where He does his work.
In her cosmology, G-d dwells in the darkest corner of the soul, and that is where He does his work.

It’s not just her acerbic wit or her finely drawn characters or her unmistakable sense-of-place. I think it’s because her fiction is tinged with a singular world-view that is just a wee bit over the edge. The subtext of her work is about Faith, particularly, the concept of the Lord’s Grace. But O’Connor’s Lord is not your grandmother’s Lord. In her cosmology, G-d dwells in the darkest corner of the soul, and that is where He does his work.

Many of O’Connor’s characters are terrible human beings. Openly racist, violence-prone, death obsessed, and narrow-minded. Though she was a devout Catholic, there is a streak of Gnostic theology in her work. Her characters worship the false God (the Demiurge), who created this flawed world (in her work, race relations simmer beneath the surface). The face (and Grace) of the true God is revealed to her grotesque characters in shocking ways.

I’m agnostic at best, but O’Connor’s fiction makes Christianity full of dark beauty and mystery.

Posted on

MUSES: Jean Cocteau and the shadow of Orpheus.

Jean Cocteau is perhaps best known for his films, in particular, his elegant, candlelit classic take on Beauty and the Beast. He was a kind of renaissance man, with achievements in literature as well as film and art. He was not a Surrealist, though that movement did influence some of his work. His work is deeply informed by myth and fairy tale; the figure of Orpheus shadows much of his cinematic work.  Like the musician Orpheus explored the shadowy underworld, the artist Cocteau explored the subconscious and its language of myth and symbol.

Cocteau Collage

As much as I like his films, it’s his highly idiosyncratic artwork that entices me. The drawings have a child-like simplicity but are deeply mischievous, and, in some cases, openly homoerotic.

Posted on

Nina Simone/Zoe Coalrose

Fellow college alum Michael Dorfman pointed me to this fascinating 2010 article written by Joe Hagan about the mercurial Nina Simone. The article, entitled I Wish I Knew How To Be Free, uses Simone’s secret diary entries to cast light upon this talented but troubled woman.

simone

Struggles with her identity, her marriage, her career and her sexuality are all revealed. It’s heart-breaking and illuminating.

Coalrose, one of my stories in my forthcoming collection is about a character loosely based on Simone. Zoe Coalrose is a kind of dark muse to the marginalized in magical realist/historical piece.

Posted on

Muses: The Rorschachs of Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones is, in her own, as bizarre an artist as Bjork. She is uncategorizable. Is she a jazz chanteuse, adding her own spin to the American Songbook? Is she a confessional singer-songwriter like Laura Nyro? She has been a neo-beat ingenue, the female answer to Tom Waits. Her music spans from jazzy, bluesy folk-rock to big band to R&B. Her albums have been all covers and at one point, trip-hop. She is an intrepid musical experimenter who willfully ignores genre classifications.

The Weird Beast
The Weird Beast

My favorite songs of her, though, are esoteric and hermetic. Her masterpiece, Pirates,  closes with two weird songs, “Traces of the Western Slope” and “The Returns.” “Traces…” is a long, dark trip through an urban hell peopled with jailbait girls, gangs, junkies and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe that seems to be a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice. The music is spooky jazz-tinged funk and has no real formal song structure. “The Returns” is an icy ballad as terrifying as anything on Nico’s The Marble Index. On the next album,The Magazine, “Deep Space: An Equestrienne in the Circus of the Falling Star” is a Satie-esque piano ballad full of metaphysical imagery (“the Lord’s face is an all-night cafe”). That album ends with a triptych of songs collectively called Rorschachs. The songs include an instrumental (an Italian classical guitar piece called “Theme for the Pope”); a spoken word piece about childhood memories (“The Unsigned Painting”) and disturbing song about being haunted by an living Id/Demon—(“The Weird Beast”).

Posted on

Muses: The mystical genius of William Blake

I discovered William Blake’s work when I was a child. At the time, Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet was very popular and my family had a copy of it. The words were poetic and philosophical; but it was Gibran’s black and white drawings that held my interest. The mystical opaque paintings that accompanied the inspirational, allegorical prose poetry held my imagination. I could stare at those pictures forever. At 10, I wrote and illustrated my own work of Inspirational Fiction, entitled Bird of Stars. It had a one print run, and it no longer survives.

william_blake_-_nebuchadnezzar_-_wga022161

Gibran was described as a “modern day William Blake.” I found that was only superficially true. Gibran is a talented visionary, but Blake is a genius. His symbolic paintings are portals to other worlds, and reflect a very personal version of Christian mythology. His work is febrile and opiated, full of colors that have no precise name. The luminous beings in his paintings seem more summoned than painted. Blake created a private mythology that overlapped and incorporated Christian myth. It’s said that he had visions, a kind of Gnostic awakening. Even his demonic images are imbued with this grace.

Posted on

Muses: Henry Darger’s Portal to the Realms of the Unreal

By day, Henry Darger was janitor. He’d had a hard life; he had been orphaned and raised in a Boy’s Home in Chicago. He spent his days doing menial work at a Catholic Hospital, and went home to a dank basement where he lived as a hermit. But in that basement, there existed another world, one that he created. Nights he created an imaginary world full of winged beings, child slaves and heroic princesses. He was writing a novel, an epic set on a magical world where good and evil clashed. This world was meticulously illustrated, with eerie murals created from paint and collage.  He is considered to be the ultimate example of an Outsider Artist.

darger1

The intensity of his vision is admirable. It was a burning passion, almost a madness. Darger was compelled to write and illustrate thousands of pages of this story, with no intention to publish. His work was only discovered after his death. There are times when, as writer, you feel that you’re just writing for yourself. For Darger, that was enough.

Posted on

Muses: The Wildean Aesthete of the Harlem Renaissance

NUGENT 1

My story “Conjuring Shadows” was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent. As a writer, Nugent’s work was strongly influenced by modernism. It was highly elliptical and poetic. His most famous piece, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” is a stream of consciousness mediation on art, racial and sexual identity. “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” is also a pioneering work of black gay writing. Nugent was also a painter and illustrator. His illustration work has the sinister eroticism of Cocteau’s scribbles, and the wicked decadence of Aubrey Beardsley, while his paintings are influenced by the Romantics.  Like Oscar Wilde, Nugent also penned retold Biblical tales and myths. Nugent was also born in Washington, DC, like yours truly.

Richard Bruce Nugent Website

%d bloggers like this: