Michelle Tea's 'Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms' (2018)

Michelle Tea, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2018. 

An eclectic collection of essays and memoir, or anti-memoir. The CONTENTS may give some idea of its scope.

"ART & MUSIC
On Valerie Solanas; Andy Warhol's Self-Portrait; Times Square; On Erin Markey; On Chelsea Girls; Gene Loves Jezebel; Purple Rain; Minor Threat; Sonic Youth's Magic.

LOVE & QUEERNESS
Transmissions from Camp Trans [and the Michigan Womyn's Music Fest]; How Not to Be a Queer Douchebag; Polishness; Hard Times; HAGS in Your Face; How to Refer to My Husband-Wife.

WRITING & LIFE
The City to a Young Girl; Pigeon Manifesto; Summer of Lost Jobs; Telling Your Friends You're Sober; Sister Spit Feminism; I Had a Miscarriage; Baba; Dire Straits; Against Memoir."

In the first section, Tea, though she's younger than I am, covers music, movies and books with which I'm mostly familiar. At some point in my early twenties I even picked up a copy of the soundtrack to Times Square, from a cutout bin for maybe a dollar or two, though to this day I haven't seen the movie yet. 

From "Times Square:" "We queers, artists, activists, intellectuals, misfits, know with the instinct of any migrating animal that we must go to the city to find ourselves, our lives, and our people. Times Square shows beautifully what is lost to us when we lose our cities, our scruffy, scuzzy, cheap, and accessible cities; our inspiring, cultured, miraculous, dangerous, spontaneous, surprising cities."  (pages 37-38).

In the second section, I found two pieces particularly interesting, "Transmissions" and "HAGS in Your Face." 

From "HAGS in Your Face:" "'We always wanted to be next to each other.'" (page 180). A nice turn of phrase.

In the final section, all are absorbing to varying degrees. "Pigeon Manifesto" is just plain sweet. 

From "The City to a Young Girl:" "I'm feeling it, the purpose and point of our political writings, our personal struggles. It's not to change the world that can't or won't be changed. It's to leave traces of ourselves for others to hold on to, a lifeline of solidarity that spans time, that passes on strength like a baton from person to person, generation to generation." (page 234). Amen to that. 

From "Sister Spit Feminism:" "The thing about being a poet, a writer, an artist, is, you can't be good. You shouldn't have to be good. You should, for the sake of your art, your soul, and your life, go through significant periods of time where you are defying many notions of goodness. As female artists, we required the same opportunities to fuck up and get fucked up as dudes have always had and been forgiven for; we needed access to the same hard road of trial and error our male peers and literary inspirations stumbled down . . ." (page 268). 

Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Café retrouvé: Patti Smith's 'M Train' (2015)

Patti Smith, M Train. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

A writer's life: Patti Smith's 

Peregrine

Pilgrimage 

Coffee

Dreams

Memory

Air 

Movement 

Stillness

Ink

Rain

Artifact

Time Regained/Le Temps retrouvé

El café veracruzano fue pionero para tener una denominación de origen en México

Inamorato, mother, son. "I made my coffee in her pot and sat and wrote at a card table in the kitchen by the screen door. A photograph of Albert Camus hung next to the light switch . . . My son, seeing him every day, got the idea that Camus was an uncle who lived far away . . . "(pages [71-72]). 

A quarter-mile from the canal house, coffee at the 7-11. The one at 25000 Jefferson Avenue, or the one at 23019 near the Kroger at Nine Mile, both in St. Clair Shores, Michigan? 

Confusingly, Patti Smith mentions the St. Clair River, but I think of it more as Lake St. Clair.  

I remember early morning runs, when it was cold outside, to pick up coffee at both of these 7-11 stores. And, when it was warmer out, an abandoned fish-and-tackle shop just off Jefferson.

"To me it looked like Tangier, though I had never been there. I sat on the ground in the corner surrounded by low white walls, shelving real time, free to rove the smooth bridge connecting past and present. My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted" (page [72]).

I remember all the people I met or knew around there. And social spaces. Steve's Back Room. Fishbones. Golden Chopsticks. Andiamo's. Pat O'Brien's. The public library and to the north, the Blue Goose. To the west, Shores Inn. Cedar Garden. The US Post Office. Hallmark's. El Charro. Grecian Table. The Bowling Alley and Linda's attached. Tim Horton. A connection with Van Morrison's father. Ice on the lake.

Snap! Ding the bell. You don't need to go home, but you can't stay here forever. 

My favorite coffee for some time, Peet's out of San Francisco, celebrates fifty years, or fifty-one this year, of making coffee. There's something about their blend and roasting process that makes me love the taste of their French, House and Major Dickason's Blend in particular.  

The best single coffee I ever tasted was in Italy -- espresso. The worst and weakest, in Pan Handle Texas and in Oklahoma. 

When I was growing up, my parents made coffee often, let's not forget.  On special occasions, a big percolator was set up to keep it flowing. 

Haven't missed a cup of coffee for more than a day since I was seventeen. Something to look forward to every morning, sort of like a little daily miracle of life, resumed. 

Today's Rune: Defense. Veracruz coffee: see El Universal Veracruz (9/9/2011), link here.

Into the Clouds, A Bird: Matsuo Bashō, 1644-1694

The adventures and hokku poems of Matsuo Bashō' (1644-1694) are like a magical interplay between St. Francis of Assisi -- Francesco, Giovanni de Pietro de Bernardone (circa 1181-1226) -- and Patti Smith (b. 1946). 

Bashō composed hundreds of pithy, brief poems, all the while moving around, traveling light, staying  here and there in a hut with some rice and wine, among drinking friends or on some pilgrimage. 

According to the dictates of his day, his hokku, or "opening shot" haiku, all contained a kigo, a seasonal sign, word, trace or link. 

For example:

Thoughts on a journey

this autumn:
         why do I feel so old? 
                  into the clouds, a bird

[Source: #720 (Autumn of A. D. 1694). In, Bashō's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō, translated by David Landis Barnhill. State University of New York Press, 2004, page 154.]

And now, a tiny sample of my favorites:

to the capital,
         half the sky left --
                 clouds of snow

Source: #223 (Winter of A. D. 1687-1688). In, Bashō's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō, translated by David Landis Barnhill. State University of New York Press, 2004, page 62.

resting on my journey,
         I watch the year-end housecleaning
                 of the floating world

Source: #239 (Winter of A. D. 1687-1688). In, Bashō's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō, translated by David Landis Barnhill. State University of New York Press, 2004, page 65.

villagers sing
        verses in the rice fields:
                the capital

Source: #287 (Summer of A. D. 1688). In, Bashō's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō, translated by David Landis Barnhill. State University of New York Press, 2004, page 74.

these fireflies,
         like the moon
                 in all the rice paddies

Source: #297 (Summer of A. D. 1688). In, Bashō's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō, translated by David Landis Barnhill. State University of New York Press, 2004, page 76.

At Takadachi in Ōshū Province

summer grass:
          all that remains 
                   of warriors' dreams

Source: #386 (Summer of A. D. 1689). In, Bashō's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō, translated by David Landis Barnhill. State University of New York Press, 2004, page 93.

Today's Rune: Defense. 

Wallace Fowlie's 'Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism'

Wallace Fowlie, Poem & Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University, 1990).

I love international interplay, and among those French poets broadly termed symbolists, we have Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) inspiring Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), who in turn have inspired T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Dum Dum Girls and onward.

But let's get back to Baudelaire via Fowlie: "The word associated with Baudelaire in the new aesthetic credo was bizarre. In announcing in his salon of 1855 that 'le beau est toujours bizarre' ('beauty is always strange'), he indicated that the artist's attraction to the strange is an element of . . . personality and separates [the artist] from [the majority of people], who submit easily to the conventional and the traditional, who prefer not to be startled by originality . . ." (p. 5). Exactly.

"[I]mpulses that often manifest themselves in the subconscious -- fantasies, hallucinations, and sentiments of fear -- and which in most . . . are not allowed to develop represent the sources of experiences in [humanity's] moral and physicial life. The artist, for Baudelaire, feels a desire to know and explore such fantasies that border on dreams and nightmares." (p. 5). Absolutely.

In a section on René Char (1907-1988), Fowlie continues: "The poetic act is a finding of a form for things that otherwise would never emerge from their abyss or their silence or their possibility . . . The risk of poetry is precisely this responsibility of the poet in the action of drawing poetry from the poet's sleep and from his [or her] subconscious." (p. 146).

"There is a price to pay for feeling deeply and for writing as a poet. That price is the daily assumption of peril." (p. 147). Indeed. 

Today's Rune: Growth. 

Ron Mann's 'Poetry in Motion II' (1982)

The Poetry in Motion dvd contains a whole alternate set of performances and interview clips under the rubric Poetry in Motion II: a mixture of dithyrambic proto-slam poetry and reflective poetic observation. 

Poets in this order:

Anne Waldman
Amiri Baraka including a chat with Anne Waldman
Jim Carroll chat with Ed Sanders and John Giorno re: following John O'Hara, support from Patti Smith
Michael Ondaatje
Allen Ginsberg with bells and electric guitarist: "the older you are, the better you relate"
Peter Orlovsky on acoustic guitar doing weird, awful mimicry
Diane DiPrima re: Revolutionary Letters
Helen Adam "Apartment on Twin Peaks" - energetic and strange 
Spalding Gray (d. 2004) -- mentions suicide
Jerome Rothenberg "For Hugo Ball" 
Ted Berrigan
Charles Bukowski (see below) 
Robert Creeley
Gary Snyder "the joys of Dharma scholarship," calmness, fixing a pickup truck with help, "tough-handed men of the past"
John Giorno "you spent most of your life just trying to stay afloat"
Michael McClure "Everything lives . . ."

A snippet of Bukowski's observations:

I've always felt embarrassed walking to a movie house because I kind of make my own movies: I meet bad women, I have fights, I go to jail, I go crazy, I drink. I make my own movies . . . 

I improve upon life a little bit. Life needs improving upon. It's not as interesting as what I write. Because it's condensed and it's visible . . . so fiction is an improvement upon life. It jazzes it up a little, it puts it together, it makes it sensible, even if it's horrible it makes it logical . . . it makes something you can see. You can light up something, you can drink something that's there . . . I'm as valuable as a good plummer. 

Amiri Baraka in Poetry in Motion (1982)

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

Jem Cohen: Museum Hours (Take II)

In plainer English than the previous post, the set-up for Jem Cohen's Museum Hours is this: Anne (Mary Margaret O-Hara) borrows money to travel from Montreal, Canada, to Vienna, Austria, to hold vigil over her cousin, who is in a coma; there are apparently no other available relatives or friends who can fulfill this responsibility.

On a tight budget, Anne finds a tiny room to stay in, and she wanders into the Kunsthistorisches [Art History] Museum, where she is helped by Johann (Bobby Sommer), a compassionate museum guard. During her extended stay, they come to learn more about each other, sharing a connection as they explore the museum and various spots in Vienna.

That's the basic set-up. Simple idea, quiet unfolding, thoughtful movie. A keeper.

Today's Rune:  Flow. 

Jem Cohen: Museum Hours

Jem Cohen's Museum Hours (2012/2013), set in Vienna and starring the city and its environs, the Kunsthistorisches [i.e. Art] Museum, Bobby Sommer, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Ela Piplits, delivers a beautiful and gentle meditation on art, cities, people and birds -- among other things.

I want to publicly thank Gina Mandas for the recommendation. Museum Hours is a very impressive work, with elements that remind me of Werner Herzog and Jean-Luc Godard combined with Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009) in its dazzling yet down-to-earth observational qualities. You gotta live, you gotta see things before departure time -- yes!

By some act of synchronicity, a few days before Museum Hours arrived in the mail, I watched a short documentary about Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1525-1569) and his art, so was extra taken by the attention devoted in Jem Cohen's film to the Kunsthistorisches Museum's "Bruegel Room" and the precision of the Ela Piplits' character's musings about Bruegel's art and life. In the parlance of our day: Wow. Will watch again.

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Jaimy Gordon: Lord of Misrule

Lord of Misrule (2010), a novel by Jaimy Gordon, won the National Book Award in 2010. That was the same year Patti Smith won the same award in non-fiction for Just Kids. If I understand the formula correctly, National Book Award finalists are awarded $1,000 and winners another $10,000 -- in case you were pondering.

I'm about halfway into Lord of Misrule and taking my time. Not a book to blithely rush through without missing a lot of fine craft and nuance. It's absorbing; you have to work at sorting out characters via their thoughts and dialogue without quotation marks or other traffic markers.

Lord of Misrule is centered around a racetrack and its attendant milieu in West Virginia in the early 1970s. Ever been to West Virginia?

Jaimy Gordon's writing is intense in the way Marcel Proust's and Patti Smith's writing is intense. Here's just a sample snippet regarding Little Spinoza, an easily spooked race horse, from the point of view of Medicine Ed, one of the people characters:

He always was a baby. He scoping around at the cats, the raindrops pimpling in the puddles, the sparrows hopping up and down and cussing each other in the eaves. He stopped and had him a long sniff of Grizzly's goat. Now that Deucey had the two horses, she bought Grizzly a ten-dollar goat to keep him company. When the goat wasn't in the stall he was tied up like now on a chain in the grass patch between the shedrows, but he always pulled it out tight as a fiddle string if folks was around, for he was nosy. . . (page 101).

Yeah, Lord of Misrule is quite risible in parts! Can you dig?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens (2006-2008) is an excellent, rewarding documentary written and directed by Barbara Leibovitz; it previously aired as part of the PBS American Masters series. This one bears repeat viewing, because behind the lustre of star power, there's a lot to absorb about the Leibovitz family milieu, Annie's intense relationship with Susan Sontag (1933-2004), and interesting tips about photography and music. Annie Leibovitz has not just found herself in the right place at the right time -- she deploys herself, positions and places herself, finds her way into the action with great initiative and skill. 

A lot to learn, indeed, but on the first run, I thoroughly enjoyed the footage involving Rolling Stone, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Hunter S. Thompson, The Rolling Stones, Patti Smith, Chris Rock, and even the cover of The Jim Carroll Band's Catholic Boy. Everything's connected -- I loved it, right down to the weaving in of "2000 Man," a lesser known gem penned by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards that was released by The Stones in 1967 -- and also used in Wes Anderson's sly film Bottle Rocket (1996).  

Today's Rune: Wholeness.  

Jim Carroll: Magic Stick, Detroit, February 21, 1998

Jim Carroll was great: sharp, funny, dark and usually late for his performances, at least the ones I saw. Man, that first one at The Pier in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1981 when he fronted The Jim Carroll Band seems like yesterday, exhilarating and permanent. He and the rest of the band had come down from New York City in a van and been pulled over by police in Virginia. "I thought they'd make me squeal like a pig," he quipped in that strange cracked voice of his, referencing the horrors of Deliverance. It's funny now, too, that tickets were only $5.00 apiece if memory serves. Woo-hoo, minimum wage had just gone up to $3.35 per hour that January!

1981 must have been the year my mind hit the open seas, as it were, because it keeps popping up as a top subject tag. That show at The Pier was The Jim Carroll Band's "First U.S. Summer Tour," so we all lucked out with that one.

And so it was again that when Jim Carroll came to Detroit as part of his 1998 Spoken Word Tour, I jumped at the opportunity to turn out one more time for the poet-singer. I'd only been living in Detroit since the summer of 1997, come to think of it. In any case, the tickets cost $12.50. 

On the night of February 21, 1998, it was cold and the street grates were spewing steam along the edges of Woodward Aveue. At some point, I found myself waiting, huddled in the Magic Stick, drink in hand, until he arrived, with three other folks in my party. 

The Magic Stick, part of the Majestic Theatre complex built in 1915, holds about 550 people max, so any good act is worth seeing there (as is the main Majestic space, with a capacity of 1,000).

Once Jim Carroll showed up, he launched into reading and recitation, clowning and gravelly voice impressions of William S. Burroughs and others. The dude was cool and, dare I say, transcendent of time and place. 

Eventually, Jim Carroll (1949-2009) inspired me to get around to contributing to "Essays on Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries," for Nonfiction Classics for Students (Cengage Gale), Vol. 5,  2003. Among other things. Thank you, Jim -- you rock! 

Man, 1981, 1998, 2012 -- it's all in here somewhere, really . . .

Today's Rune: Signals.

Patti Smith: Woolgathering

Thoroughly enjoying Patti Smith's Woolgathering (New Directions, 2011; original edition published in 1992). Even read slowly and aloud it can be completed in an hour or less. All the sweeter for repeated delvings. The new edition includes a 2011 note to the reader completed in Barcelona, photographs with end credits and eleven poetry sections bookended by "A Bidding" and "A Farewell." It compliments all of Smith's work, and in some ways gives an inkling of the whole. I really like it. She summons up childhood visions better than anyone else I can think of and that's not all. I remember moments of the kind she conjures and relives: the field with the bats, a fire, praying, the ability to fly. For her it was Germantown, or Woodbury Gardens, New Jersey; for me it was East Stroudsburg, the alleyway, the Catholic Church; an apartment complex in Justice, Illinois; Monarch Hill of Mendota Heights, Minnesota; Ellerbe Creek of Durham, North Carolina. Maybe it's the coming rain, but these memories are reappearing, evoked by Woolgathering. 

In the new intoduction, Smith notes that when she began writing this in 1991, she was living with her husband (Fred Sonic Smith, who died three years later at age forty-five) and two kids "in an old stone house set by a canal that emptied into Lake Saint Clair" (page ix). It's more generally known that they lived in St. Clair Shores, a near suburb of Detroit. In Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography (Victor Bockris with Roberta Bayley, Simon and Schuster, 1999, page 234), their abode is described as a century old house situated on an acre lot "somewhat like a small castle . . . dark-brown brick and wood . . . topped by a turret." This intrigues me for a number of reasons, but for one in particular. When seeking a place to live in and around Detroit in 1997, I looked at a small bungalow on one of the canal streets near there. Even then it seemed astonishing for these little homes to be situated on the land edge of the USA, facing Canada across the lake, the same lake that had also been the terminus point for at least one tornado on July 2 of that year, the very day I started to explore the area. Like a daydream, I remember. Via Patti Smith's reveries, renewed images shimmer: the astral weeks, the mystic chords of memory.

Upcoming: Patti Smith at the Detroit Institute of Arts on June 1, 2012.

Today's Rune: Partnership.         

Jean-Luc Godard: Film Socialisme (Take II)

Godard's Film Socialisme (2010): funhouse, kaleidoscope, house of horrors. Beauty, ugliness. The better angels of our nature, the lesser demons of our nature. Literature and petroleum products. Art and war. A voyage on the Costa Concordia before it sinks.

"Money is a public good."
"Like water?"
"Exactly."

Egyptian hieroglyphs, jarring noises. Patti Smith with guitar. William S. Burroughs. “Casablanca, Algeria, Cairo.” Digital shambolic. David Lynch: INLAND EMPIRE (2006). Patterns. Questions. Suggestions. Palestine.

“I turned away so as not to see.”

Culture bank, watches, gold. Today, past, future. Crisp. Documentary quality. A slice of Robert Altman. “You will have friends.”

"Quo Vadis, Europa – Where are you going, Europe?"
“We look at ourselves in wars like in a mirror.”
“It takes guts to think . . . You have to love yourself enough not to harm your neighbor. . .”

"When you hear your own voice, where does it come from?"

Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel. A llama, a burro, a petrol pump, a woman reading Balzac: Illusions perdues /Lost Illusions (1837-1843).
“I’m going back down south.”
“If you make fun of Balzac, I’ll kill you.”
To be or to have?  Erich Fromm (1976).

A long line, a suggestion box.

"Today’s August 4, right?"
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of Night / Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932). 
1789, August 4.
Saint Just ‘89.

Tactile, sinks, kitchens, washing up.
Florine and Lucien.
TEXT.

"Liberate and federate our humanity."

"On neither the sun, nor death, can we look fixedly." François de La Rochefoucauld.

Steps of Odessa – Battleship Potempkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Eye of the camera, ears.
Man with a Movie Camera / Человек с киноаппаратом (Dziga Vertov aka David Kaufman, Elizaveta Svilova, Mikhail Abramovich Kaufman, 1929).

Hellas, Greece: Cassandra.

Brion Gysin, cut-up.
Space-time-puzzle.

"When the law isn’t just, justice precedes law."

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Jean-Luc Godard: Film Socialisme (Take One)

Film Socialisme / Socialisme (2010), Jean-Luc Godard's latest movie, is out on DVD. Like most Godard films, love it or hate it. I'm in the former camp and quite happy to see Godard in strong form. I think he played a little prank on some early English language reviewers with "Navajo English" subtitles (which you can choose to see on the DVD version, too, if you wish). The Navajo version cuts out nuance, leaving lines that read as if transcribed from Kraftwerk's "Computer World" (1981): "Business, Numbers, Money, People / Computer World . . ."

The film is jarring but thoughtful, expansive and -- believe it or not -- sweet. 

P.S. No worries for Godard fans. Intercuts, intertitles and Interzone -- they're all there.

Today's Rune: Joy.

Bringing It All Back Home Again

Coming at you from Tar Heel Land, Bob Dylan in the background, luxuriating. Lots of conversation, most lately about Dylan through the years as a sort of cultural yardstick, and Patti Smith, and Van Morrison and a bunch of other stuff. The Rolling Stones Some Girls (1978) brings about a boatload of memories as well. Get the oars out . . .

I've written a little about Saxapahaw before; it seems to get cooler even again, with new music and art venues, the all-important post office, excellent food, and only about twelve miles by back road to Carrborro, my old stomping grounds morphing into Chapel Hill. Greensboro, Durham and Raleigh are all within easy reach. The land here is lush and rolling, much greener and more wooded than in North Texas. The roads are in better shape, too, but gas costs about the same -- about $3.20 per gallon for regular unleaded.

Today's Rune: Journey.     

Laurie Weeks: Zipper Mouth

The wild rains began early, an ideal excuse to stay in and read Laurie Weeks' Zipper Mouth (The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2011) from cover to cover.

Zipper Mouth: a tour de force of trenchant observations and incandescent sentences! I intend to read it again soon for the sheer excitement of its language.

Zipper Mouth: evokes fond memories of Alice K's Guide to Life: One Woman's Quest for Survival, Sanity, and the Perfect New Shoes (1994) and Drinking: A Love Story (1996) by Caroline Knapp, with a touch of Susan Gordon Lydon's Take the Long Road Home: Memoirs of a Survivor (1993).

Zipper Mouth: like dropping a new dose of Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873) and his Illuminations (1886), mixing it in a cocktail of William S. Burroughs (and perhaps Augusten X. Burroughs), maybe some Patti Smith, plus some "French cinema" of the avant-garde variety, and let's not forget David Lynch, specifically Eraserhead (1977). Something wild and mind-expanding.  

Zipper Mouth: highly recommended for the adventuresome.

Today's Rune: Growth.   

Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder: Once More Into the Mix

Ah, what a treat! Joan Jett, then of the Runaways, sparkles among the talking heads (though Kim Fowley is sharp, as well) during a fraught 1977 discussion about how to receive "Punk and New Wave." In shows from 1981, these three guests come off as erudite and charming: Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop and Wendy O. Williams (Plasmatics). Tom, despite his hangups and preconceptions, gives them their due, and all perform live. Elvis' appearance comes just a couple of weeks after he played in Chapel Hill. Iggy has a tooth missing and a cut lip, drinks a little wine and schools Tom about Apollonian and Dionysian energies. That is, in between frenetic performances of "Dog Food" and "Five Foot One." The show ends with "TV Eye."

Today's Rune: Strength.  

Yesterday's Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder

Especially since a teen and starting with Johnny Carson, I've occasionally watched late night talk shows most of my life. In the late 1970s and early 80s, I'd come across Tom Snyder's Tomorrow. Now as a little treat, I've been catching some of his interviews with musicians from those years compiled on a two-disc set released in 2006. Snyder sits back with his seventies' vibe, smoking cigarettes and coaxing his guests. The set is intimate, cameras drawn close and tight -- nothing like the glitz of the bigger programs then or now; Shatner's Raw Nerve is the only really comparable venue like it that I can think of, though Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley take a similar approach. 

So far, Patti Smith (in 1978) has described Johnny Carson as a "human parachute," landing safely on his feet after gaffes and missteps. She is strange and adorable with Tom, who likes her. Then on another night, in an interview I remember having seen at the time in Chapel Hill: Snyder in 1980 sparring with John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) and Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd., which they describe as "a company," not a band. Finally, guest host Kelly Lange (now a novelist) interviews the Ramones -- and they also play a few songs. Great stuff -- raw and entertaining. Iggy Pop and more still to watch. 

Today's Rune: Joy.