“Dear Town,

We had our hopes for you.

Everywhere you were marked with stars and red ink. You were settling into late youth, like us, and we thought you might not mind our scuffed heels if we polished them first. You were our Special Occasion with your floating sterile fireplace and three story front door.

The boy’s soup was amazing; Vietnamese-style lobster bisque gussied up with western cream and ocean bits. I had vegetables pickled in rainwater which soaked my salad into wan watercolor.

Then the weird sea preparations: his stingray wing lopped off into pot pie crust and my bass draped over beans and fungi that slithered away under its muddled eyegreen sauce with every bite.

But dessert is where you lost us, despite your good wishes looped in chocolate letters on the rim of his plate. My little cake sat deflated on one side and deffered to the hard Chinese Checker sauce bumps to its left. His cherry crisp wasn’t and the fruit huddled outside its crepe.

Where was your joy, Town? I looked at your plump walls and thought about climbing them; I wondered if your spiky palm was real. But I didn’t think about you at all. And I wanted to.

Love,
M.”
   
   

Town Restaurant
at the Chambers Hotel
15 W 56th St
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 582-4445
Town’s Website

Give me more pocks. Give me the ones with maps on their skins. Give me the ones that wear freckles, nodes, weird sinkholes & dimples. Give me anything but plastic, smooth, resiny, Red Delicious lacquer. Give me fewer apples, give me more mottles and dapples.

They feel better in my palm. That satisfying gruffness of texture. Greeting the hand like a wool mitten. Supermarket Granny Smiths are inert in the palm like a cold steel handle.

The first few times I visited the Inwood farmer’s market, I made my new friends: the Golden Russet, The Stayman Winesap, the mysterious apples with only 3 digit numbers for names. I’d recently read Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, still wild over the part where he visits the apple orchard to end all apple orchards: some vast biteable catalogue of endless variety & shape, with apples little bigger than walnuts, apples that tasted like oranges and pears, apples with strange wild feral flavors and wrinkled skins like prunes (I’m paraphrasing loosely from memory). And now here they were in front of me, cousins of the ones he’d written of, heaped pell-mell in wooden crates, stems still on, cratered, pitted, unkempt and brazen. Their supermarket sisters elsewhere in tidy rows, tired and vacant like well-dressed children on SSRIs.

I walked the market stand, watched them. Every one was a personality. Some sassy ones, some cowed ones, some martyrs, some firebrands, some braggarts. One had what looked like a bad rash. Little peppery indentations tinged red around the stem. I was afraid to bite it. And when I did I saw that the red had suffused the white flesh beneath, as if a wound. My girlfriend told me later that hail could cause this, when the apple was first forming. The taste was unaffected, but watching the subterranean patterns formed by the hailrash transformed how I ate. I marveled at the designs while I chewed, seeing the pink wound-roots of this apple’s history.

Golden Russet became my favorite. Its flavor was crisp and subtle and always only flirted with sour and sweet, could never commit, just weaved around taste buds leaving trails of honey and almond and walnut behind. It clove in even wedges from the tooth, as if built for biting. I can imagine its taste and touch now, as vividly as when I had one months ago, which I almost can never do with food.

Mottles and dapples, so many of them. Those weird magic blends of flavors, complex and lingering, all bred away to the blunt blow on the tongue of Red Delicious and Granny Smiths. And all that rich wild topography of appleskin sieved and filtered and winnowed down to familiar cheap flashy supermarket wax-sheen.

I had always thought all this was silly. People crowing about varieties of apple, squash, oyster. Wine. Whatever. Seemed indulgent, idle, snobbish. Neo-hippyish and offensively granola. Ponytailed prissiness. But then you taste or experience something that wakes you up. Makes you revel in your senses, reminds you you have a tongue, a nose, sense organs built to know and hold so much more than you had realized was out there.

Like when you first try yoga and you feel some weird part of your back or thigh light up and crackle with pain-pleasure, some backwoods territory of your body you never even knew existed. And you stop, you take a breath, and you think: “shit, I live in this thing, and how much of it am I really aware of?” Even a lowly little apple can make you feel the same way, can cause you to marvel at how broad sensory experience can be and how much within it there is to sample — and how much of it that unpredictable variety people actively seek to curtail.

Nature is so vast, yet we choose to cull and promote such a small swath of it. As if resenting its enormity, its reckless variety. Whether it’s flowers, tomatoes, apples, anything that can grow and be consumed — we try to control and shape and create a demand, and anything wild and untameable & strange — anything that isn’t easily marketable — we shove away until we forget it ever existed. It’s part of what we do as humans, and must do — and at its best, it’s a beautiful act of harmonious tending and shaping (think Bonsai). At its worst, it’s petty and fearful; small-minded and profit-thralled.

We think we know Nature, its growths and types & creatures and patterns, but none of us ever will, even those of us who want to. Most of us only know the safe and manageable images of it we’ve created from it or forced upon it. Like growing up thinking all deers are Bambis, all elephants Dumbos, and only animals in cute hallmark cards are worth trying to save.
    

(broken)	(unbroken)	(broken)

Nature will save itself. Nature always innovates — in flower terms, “breaks” — whether tulip or apple or superflu. It wreaks wildness out of the shapes we impose, expect, plan for. And this is why we love it and are troubled by it. Its gorgeous chaos & defiance.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood. Tense, massed and corrosive, in constant nervy tremolo, at times loping in Bartoky pizzicato. It’s what few scores are today: a fully-developed character, without which the movie simply wouldn’t be what it is. An integral voice as important as setting, protagonists, pacing, plot.

From the start, with that slow pan from hill to quarry, it shivers the screen in trumpeting discord. The tone for the entire movie’s set — acid green and always on the cusp of exploding into violence, unresolved & shaking, sonically begging for resolution. Which Daniel Plainview brings with bowling pin in the final frames.

Can you imagine the film without the score? I can’t. And with modern film I almost always can — most scores are superfluous at best, at worst pandering to some misguided notion of a film audience dependent on treacly cues in the form of piano arpeggi or string crescendo to decide how to feel.

Here, Greenwood’s score is about the only thing — aside from Paul Dano in a few scenes, and Dillon Freasier, the child who plays H.W. — that consistently stands up to Daniel Day-Lewis’ obsessed, possessed presence for sheer force & focused savagery. For every shot of oil-masked Day-Lewis staring at a burning derrick, wild-eyed with halfgrinning greed, face pooling out of black like some mug out of a Caravaggio canvas, there’s an equal passage where Greenwood’s score howls out of silence with just as much awful glee.

Whether or not Greenwood composed the music specifically for the film is immaterial to me (He was denied an Oscar nomination because parts of the score come from his pre-existing piece “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”). What matters is that it colludes with and bears up the film as much as do its leads, and helps deliver it home as the mesmerizing, ugly, monomaniacal life study it is.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
   
   
Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood

Photograph of Katherine with Doves

Language arcs away to white

Curves with soft fluttering
White soft arc
And then is arcing
Gone

	Like her soft jawline
Gracing down from earlobe
  and arc-sweeping up to chin

		Like paralleling
Proud bowing arc
 Of dove-white
  Soft dove-breast 

Arcing gone
		      To two soft white dovings

   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
   
   
(The Photo)

Kohina

This, the little silver niche.

Draw around yourself curtains of
bleep, 8-bit hymns &
sine wave chorales.

You can shake yourself
til your gears wobble and clink;
wave your Lost-in-Space tube-arms
to the blocky beats.

These are the noises of our lives now;
our children will program robo-robins
to pitch their warbles
to metallic scratches.

These are the murmurs of the great silver expanse.

These are noises of death & of
bustling binary fertility.

Oven Bird

O happy
	en-moling
    fluff-pot, 

		Secreting yourself
		    away in
	chewy bole-bubble, 

Peep from
      branch-crater,
                   wriggle out & meet
           Cooling air like

biscuit newly risen,

      and like crab, like snail,
  like bee,

         Build your cell and

    Please 

seal well

   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Snail shells are homes — always in-progress, always excrescing, always spiralling & nautilising outwards homes — for the artists, musicians, songs, poems, writers, people, places, planets, plums that I regularly burden with gush.

At least this way all the shameless enshrining can be contained.

Think of them as cockle shells built for endless barnacling.
   

   
2-11-08

Banshee Birth
   

At Town Hall I wished
His cover of Cohen’s “The Guests”
Would never end.

And then he had us all hum –
To feel the ghost behind our heads.
& in our necks.

The massed chest-drones were
Soft yellow fibers
Being braided through everyone.

A year later,
At the Warsaw in Brooklyn
He talked about being rapt
Before old videos of Otis

And when Antony sang
He’d seize moments, notes,
And shake them into endlessness
Just like Otis:

With fearlessness
With tender madness
With grinning pain

So again come ghosts:
He wrings their necks
In exorcising vibrato

Just as he calls them forth:
The banshee birth
   
   
   
Antony & The Johnsons Cds

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

To me, watching Ivo Pogorelich play Chopin as he does here in the 1980 Chopin competition in Warsaw is not much different to me than watching Otis Redding sing “Shake” or Iggy Pop writhe on stage to something off Funhouse. It’s like seeing Coltrane blow holy hell out of his sax. It’s like hearing Patti Smith sing stairs up into the night on “Birdland.” Or Howlin Wolf throttle his guitar neck and sing the rafters into splinters. It’s pure channeled soul: the kind that’s wracked and hurt & fearful and writhing but swept up and organized in a solid mountain of feeling. The heart’s blood, black and wild, captured & focused in a sealed vial of white glass.

From what I understand, Martha Argerich, a judge at the Chopin competition from which this video’s taken (and a legendary Chopin interpreter in her own right), walked out when Ivo was eliminated. I can see why. If for no other reason that these are two Chopin interpreters who capture what’s hardest to capture in this composer’s works: delivering all the massive shifts in feeling without making it seem fragmented, schizophrenic, and doing so with tremendous technique.

Chopin’s works speak to me in part because they depict extremes of emotion side by side as they really (and uncomfortably, sometimes) exist in the human heart; Ivo speaks to me because he seems to understand this intuitively in how he plays. He switches from the most delicate and aching touches to the most hammering fortissimos without making you think he’s just playing up contrast/shock-value. His rubato, his pacing, it all shows a piano player who feels (rather than has read) that Chopin was a revolutionary of the heart’s mapping as much as he was of the keyboard’s.

This is how he plays the Scherzo no. 3: as the story of one human heart struggling and battling, in tragedy and absurdity, unifying it all by making the emotional vicissitudes (which are so characteristic of Chopin’s Scherzos) seem less like hodgepodge extremes yoked together and more like different portraits of the same human face — like Monet’s haystacks seen in varying shades of light. All of a piece, despite the changes, despite the furious switching.

Anyone else out there a huge Chopin fan? Any other interpreters you can recommend?