Shadowbahn(22)
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In other words, it’s not the buildings that are coming and going, it’s everyone watching them. In other words, the buildings have been standing at the edge of the Dakota Badlands since 7:59 and 8:28 Mountain Time on the morning of September 11, 2001. The music that everyone has heard and that now no one hears is time’s audiotape, the tunes of chronometry.
out of the future
Hurled from the South Tower rooftop across the threshold of his own image, Jesse has leapt from out of the future into his life. Or has leapt into the life he might have lived, another version of his life in which he’s the shadow of no other man or event but rather casts his own.
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Even as he has no actual sense of having lived it, he has a distinct memory of it, a life he occupied in his brother’s place, in a country and century that only has known Jesse. He stops to look around at Forty-Seventh Street before heading down Second Avenue, somehow knowing just where he’s going, somehow knowing every way and turn.
Candy says (New York City 1966)
At Sixteenth Street, Jesse cuts west toward Union Square, from where—when he gazes at the southwestern sky—no Towers can yet be seen, their construction still somewhere sub-horizon. On his thirty-block walk, now and then a passerby turns to look, as though Jesse might nearly be someone whom others would turn to look at, just notorious enough to have achieved a fitful conspicuity. Now and then, as though he were just one more crazy person wandering the New York City streets, he stops to shut his eyes tight, expecting the city noise around him to fade from sound . . .
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. . . expecting to open his eyes and find himself back on the Tower rooftop, beneath the black flesh of a galaxy so close he can run a fingertip along the curve of the night as if down a woman’s bare back. He knows, however, he really is here now, because he recalls it from before. There in the square, peering at the sky, he hears, “Jesse, darling,” whispered in his ear by someone whom he remembers more instantly than he remembered his own name. But after all, Candy calls everyone darling, including herself.
ROUND MIDNIGHT
May 1968
NEW ALBUM REVIEWS
Nothing in a journalistic endeavor (such as this magazine) conveys more faintheartedness than a preemptive rationalization (such as this editorial note) preceding a piece (such as the one that follows) unless it’s the decision to refrain from publishing at all, about which there’s been much roiling discussion in our offices. Originally running fifteen thousand words that we cut by nearly three-fourths, this “review” was submitted over the transom, unburdened by professional representation and certainly unsolicited by us. Reputedly a male model straight from the Tennessee backwoods, a gorgeous (or so our female staffers insist) Davy Crockett by way of Mr. Warhol’s Factory, of which he has been a visible denizen over recent years, the author has never published before, and nothing about him instills confidence as to his credentials, by which we mean simple command of the English language let alone grasp of the musical concerns that were the basis for launching this journal. Notwithstanding faint recollection of a brief European mini-phenomenon that surrounded the review’s ostensible subject years ago and is the source of the author’s enthusiasm or delirium or ire, or contempt or frenzy or wrath, or whatever the f*ck it is he’s saying so feverishly, fear not that any of us has forgotten Ornette or Miles or Trane or Dizzy or the lysergic-bop of the moment. So why are we publishing this, then? Because after arguing ourselves into exhaustion from one watering hole to another up and down Macdougal, we can’t bring ourselves not to. All right, look: Spare us the letters, okay? We promise never to do it again.
THE EDITORS
You Ain’t No Dancer (You May Be a Lover)
J. Paul Ramone & the Beatlebubs (Vee-Jay) Fuck Charlie Parker. Got yer attention now? ’Cause I have come, sir, to lay waste to your taste and wreak me some audio armageddon. I didn’t dislodge Candy Darlin’s maw from my pecker (my dead twin may have gotten the voice but I got me the words & all the manhood, I promise you that, ladies) and descend from my rightful throne as the most beautiful man this here Western civilization has yet produced, I didn’t take on this guise of fool & boondox vulgarian—right up till I start slippin’ in big words worth the $2.93 that’ll buy you a long-player these days, discussin’ cultural phylogenesis & all them poststructural hermeneutics that the academinx amongst you adore—no, I ain’t gone to all that trouble (you looking for trouble? You come to the right place) just so now you can pay me no mind. ’Cause what I’m telling here is your story, America, no use blaming it on me. You’re the one who lived it, and you f*cked it up, didn’t you? Sure you did.
Now no point going
over the whole last fifteen years, let’s just say back at some juncture down at the seven hundred block of Union Avenue where the yella rooster crowed to rays of a sun rising at forty-five revolutions per minute, music might have gone a whole different direction. You had yourself colored folk near fatigued at getting shat on for four centuries and you had some pretty little white girls thinking they might like dancing with some of them fine black boys, and at that moment all anyone needed was just the right song, an anthem if you will, the sound of a black soul trapped in the right white body. But course that didn’t happen so what you got was the short-lived rock & rhythm craze maybe some of you jazzbos recollect, a musical ghetto of queer ministers & wayward hairdressers & blind clerks & even a few crazy-ass white evangelicals in revolt, till that ghetto got itself put down by social inertia, moral consternation, a collapse of any strategy for resistance against the established order, and most of all a vacuum as might have been occupied by a single sorcerer who could alchemize a generation’s mass bewilderment into inexorable hysteria. See, I told ya I’d get to some of them $2.93 words, tho maybe those I just used go for more like $1.27.