The rower

One warm August night, unable to remain asleep, I rose, dressed, and went outside, hoping that a walk by the water's edge would help calm my thoughts. I set out along the gravel path that leads to the bay, my footfalls crunching on its pebbled surface, guided forward by moonlight and memory. Not until I had passed the last house did I begin to hear the faint lapping of wavelets on the rocks along the shore. Ahead of me, across the water, stretched the long, low peninsula on the other side of the bay; if anyone out there was, like me, stirring at that hour, their lights were too distant and too dim to be seen from where I stood. There were lobster boats moored here and there alongshore, bobbing in the waves as if rocking in their cradles, but the only sign of maritime activity in the offing was far out, beyond the limits of the bay, where one or two large vessels, with drafts too deep for our little harbor, were churning through the open sea, parallel to the coast, bound for Boston or Halifax.

I turned onto the narrow footpath that runs along the shore and headed away from town, keeping my chin down and my eyes on the path's uneven surface, which is broken in places by gullies, washouts, and exposed roots. The tide was high but had crested and begun to ebb away again out of the bay; only a few yards of boulders and patches of coarse sand lay between the path and the water. The wind off the bay was not particularly brisk, but even so it bore a pleasing and welcome chill, though I was not sorry to have picked up my windbreaker before I left the house. On the inland side, as I walked, I passed a succession of wealthy summer homes with long, carefully tended lawns, some of them terminating in low masonry walls adorned with electric lanterns. Though here and there a floodlight shone down on the path the houses were silent, the occupants either asleep or perhaps reading or drinking quietly in solitary inner rooms. After a mile or so the houses gave way, first to a thicket of beach rose and sumac, then beyond that to aspen and stunted white pine, the overgrowth of what had once been burned over in a great fire many years before. The path climbed away from the shore, which briefly disappeared from view, before descending again to skirt a narrow horseshoe of stony beach that was rarely discovered by visitors, even during the height of the season when it seemed that the whole area swarmed with hikers and weekenders.

It was when I had made my way around and was approaching the far limit of the cove that my eye caught something moving in the water, thirty yards or so offshore. It was low in profile and partly hidden by the waves, and at first I thought it might be either a log or a surfacing dolphin, an animal not uncommon in these waters in the summer months. I stood still and watched the shape as it glided through the reflected pallor of the moon, and only after a moment or two had gone by could I identify it as a kind of lifeboat or dinghy, in which a solitary pilot, seated at the middle bench, could be seen steadily rowing with the outgoing current. The craft bore no lantern nor any sign of cargo or tackle, and the silent figure working the oars, dressed in a gray cloak with the hood down, appeared, from its long hair and slightness of build, to be a woman. Her head was bent down from the exertion and her face was turned away from the shore; she rowed as if she had some familiarity with the task but not powerfully, pacing herself, being evidently in no hurry to get where she was going.

I continued along the shore path, matching my advance to the progress of the boat. Beyond the cove the bay widens, but the rower maintained her distance from the shore and did not venture out into the deeper channel. The wind was beginning to pick up and I zipped my windbreaker, but kept my hands out of my pockets to assist my balance on the stony path. Once or twice I stumbled and knocked loose a stone, but the sound that echoed as it struck onto the cobbles below either failed to reach the boat or did not concern its occupant. She rowed on at the same fixed pace, occasionally casting the briefest half glance over her shoulder to hold her course. I began to wonder where she could be heading at that hour. There were no docks or houses to the end of the point, and if she had been so reckless as to go boating alone, for recreation, at night, it seemed high time for her to reverse her heading and make for the shelter of the town. Up ahead, at the end of the point, barely discernible in the darkness, lay the long thin breakwater that sheltered the bay from the heavy surges and swells of the ocean. For an unaccompanied boatman -- or boatwoman -- to venture into those waters at night in such a craft, even in favorable weather, would be an act of almost suicidal folly.

The path shook off the last patches of woods and scrub and descended directly to the water's edge; at the same time it became rockier and more irregular. I clambered ahead as fast as I could manage, clearly visible now on the shore if the woman were to turn, but still she kept her head averted, tucked into her far shoulder. She began to gain ground on me; her way was smoother and she was gaining momentum as the tide drew her along. I stumbled, turned my ankle slightly, and scraped my hand on a rock, then I righted myself, rubbed off the sting in my palm, and hurried forward. She was nearing the breakwater now and beginning to veer away from the shore. I hoped that she was about to turn and circle back, but instead she rowed steadily onward, shooting towards the churning gap.

I stepped onto the breakwater and leaped along its skeleton of immense stones, keeping an eye on the boat as our courses swiftly converged. In seconds I was almost at the jetty's end, and the woman, as she hurtled forward, was now no more than ten yards away. At last I saw that there was no doubting her course, nor hope of stopping her, and in desperation I shouted to her, and at that moment, for the first time, she heard me and turned her face -- or should I say, what remained of her face --in my direction.

Below the thin and tangled filaments of her hair the woman's eyes were so deeply sunken they might well have been hollow sockets. Her nose was eaten away entirely, and all that remained of her lower jaw was a jagged shard of bone and a few exposed and broken teeth. As the craft shot through the gap into the ocean she fixed her gaze on me, but her expressionless face did not once move or twitch and no sound issued from that grotesque maw. Her hands and arms kept to the rhythm of their rowing; I turned my body and met her gaze, watched her recede into the distance, until she suddenly snapped her head down and away from me once more, vanished into a swell, re-emerged, vanished again, and was almost instantly swallowed by darkness.

I did not want to consider what errand might have brought the silent rower into town, whether she had visited some inconceivable lover there or was perhaps searching vainly for a lost paramour or child who had been dead for generations. I stood on the end of the breakwater for some time, trembling and unable to move, petrified that I might lose consciousness and topple into the water and be drowned and battered against the rocks. When I had sufficiently gathered my composure I began gingerly to retrace my steps, buffeted by the wind and the salt spray, until once again I was standing alone on the shore at the end of the point. I fell to my knees for an instant, feeling tears of horror and anguish well up in my eyes, then I collected myself, shook off the chill, and began to make my way back to town.

City

The building was easy to miss. It was narrow, recessed a bit from the street, and identified only by the peeling number 62 of a faded gold decal above the door. At every window, from the ground floor to the sixth, the blinds had been drawn tight and the windowboxes were empty. There were traces of ornate dark lettering across the brick face, high up, from a law office long since gone, but it was impossible to guess whether the present purpose of the building was residential or commercial, or even if most of the rooms were tenanted at all. A pair of boxy yews flanked the door on either side; they appeared to have been trimmed within recent memory but the concrete planters that held them were dotted with cigarette butts and scraps of cellophane.

The woman stepped out of the doorway, pulling on her gloves, and stepped firmly but without evident hurry in the direction of the street; then she turned abruptly to the right and joined the flow of pedestrians moving uptown. She wore a long grey coat, well-made if not particularly stylish, a dark, trim Tyrolean hat with a single woodpecker feather in the band, and black low heels. Her hair was graying and she made no attempt to conceal it, but nevertheless she appeared to be still in her late thirties at most. She walked haughtily, her chin up, towering a good two inches above the other women walking in the crowd, as well as no small number of the men.

The morning was damp and chilly, though it was no longer raining. The sky above was a uniform slate gray, and its muted tone was repeated by both the pavement and the walls of the surrounding buildings. At the intersections the perpendicular columns of traffic halted or advanced, guided by silent bursts of signals. The crowd knotted and waited, spilled tentatively into the street, then surged ahead.

The woman overtook a man who was clutching a thick manilla envelope secured with a string wound around its clasp. Heavy-set and limping slightly, laboring with the exertion, he wore a suit and tie that were indistinguishable from those of any number of his fellow travelers, but unlike them he bore no hat, not even in his hand. His hair, which needed trimming, was matted with sweat, and as the street inclined slightly up a hill he began to fall behind the other. He steadied himself against a lamppost for a moment until he had caught his breath, and then resumed.

A block ahead of him a young couple stepped out of a cab. The man was tall and almost unnaturally slender. Though clean-shaven and neatly coiffed he wore a frayed, unbuttoned bomber jacket that did not fit him well and which had certainly been bought second-hand, as well as a pair of weathered jeans and brown loafers. His companion might have been completely unremarkable -- she was wearing a simple gray jacket over a white blouse and dark skirt -- had she been neither so unaffectedly pretty nor so obviously enthralled with her surroundings. She shook her head against the chill and shrieked with delight as she caught hold of the man's hand. They paused until they could work their way across the grain of pedestrians, then darted into a storefront near at hand.

As they departed two men in their thirties stepped into the space they had occupied and strode vigorously ahead. They wore dark suits and fedoras that were to all appearances identical, and they were talking intently and rapidly in a foreign tongue. They wove around clusters of lingerers without hesitating or breaking apart, and while they waited for the lights to change they kept their eyes down and never glanced around them.

Outside a hotel two porters stood waiting as a Greyhound slowly lumbered to the curb. The bus stopped, opened its doors, and dieseled as the passengers began to disembark. The driver, in uniform and cap, stepped to the curb and opened the luggage compartment; the porters advanced while a family -- husband, wife, and two small boys -- stood by. The crowd broke around them, stepping under the hotel's marquee.

As they approached the great square, in the center of the hive, the swarm dissolved and dispersed, merged into others heading east and west. The yellow cabs slowed and lined up behind the traffic signals; the rain began to fall, but only a few drops, black on the weathered sidewalks.

The Photographers (Grit Laskin)

Pete Seeger didn't write this ribald little ditty (it's by Canadian songwriter and guitar maker Grit Laskin), but he did record it, and it definitely shows a very different side of Pete Seeger than most of us are used to. Unfortunately there is no available CD version of Pete's Circles and Seasons LP, where his version was recorded. The tune is your basic generic English ballad tune.

"The Photographers"

Well early Saturday morning, I was strolling in the wood
I came upon a lady who by the wayside stood
And what, pray tell, would such a lass as you be doing here?
I've come to take some photographs, said she as I drew near

Said I to her, I do declare, this is a fateful day
For I have come to photograph, the same as you did say
Then I took out my Nikon-F and placed it in her hand
She said that's quite a camera, sir, you have at your command

My camera so delighted her, she could no more delay
She let me see her camera case, wherein her accessories lay
I'm sure, she said, you have most everything that can be bought
Just let me stretch my tripod out before I take some shots

We photographed from haylofts, and up against the wall
If you've not shot on Saturday night, you've not photographed at all
She had her shutter open wide, for daylight was all gone
Likewise my naked camera lens, it had its filter on

This lady had experience with cameras, yes, indeed
And I thought her exposures the best I'd ever seen
Although she seemed to tire not as on and on we went
I said I'll have to stop now, my film supply is spent

She said I've had Mirandas, Yashicas and Rolleis
Hasselblad and Pentax, likewise a Polaroid
Fujica, Canon, Nikkormat, a Kodak and the rest
But now I've seen your Nikon-F, and surely it's the best

(Thanks to Jim Capaldi of the Pete Seeger Appreciation Page for turning up the lyrics.)

In memory of Pete Seeger (1919-2014) and Jim Capaldi (1950-2013).

Update (2021): A Norwegian version performed by Lillebjørn Nilsen can be found on Live in Telemark, the recording of a 1994 joint concert by Nilsen and Andy Irvine.

Night piece (City)

One evening he was returning home from a weekend trip a few hours away. He had planned to avoid the city but had missed a sign, and not knowing the area he allowed himself to be drawn on by the traffic that was hurtling forward around him, figuring that one way or another he would connect with a highway he knew. All at once the concrete channel through which he was passing swerved and rose, and the skyline across the water came into view. He had approached the city countless times but never from that angle; illuminated as far along its length as he could see by an intricate array of tiny lightpoints it seemed more massive than he would have imagined, but also curiously unrooted, as if the entire metropolis might break from its moorings and slip away into the ocean beyond.

He crossed a high bridge and bore away to the right, still skirting the city, looking for signs with familiar names. The roadway swelled and dipped and twisted, rattling over metal plates and joins several stories above street level. He could see the crests of buildings on either side, but they were dark and he couldn't tell whether they were occupied or abandoned. As abruptly as it had appeared the skyline shifted into his rear-view mirror and then disappeared in his wake. In the lane to his left a cab shot by him and was quickly out of sight. The road divided; he made a quick decision and was almost immediately shunted downwards and off the expressway.

He braked and came to a stop in a line of traffic that had halted behind a red light. He was under the highway now, and could hear the rumbling of traffic overhead. A sedan drew up beside him. He couldn't see the driver but in the back seat there were two young girls wearing shawls and what looked like party dresses; they were restless and excited and kept popping up in their seats. When the light changed he veered to the right, guided by a lone rectangular sign that was bolted to the one of the columns that supported the roadway above him. He passed a block, then two blocks, of grated storefronts, waited briefly at another light, then headed up the ramp to another sinuous highway. The traffic was heavier here and he crept forward until he could merge; then he pulled out and accelerated into the flow.

Across three lanes to his left and the center divider cars and semis were whipping by in the opposite direction, in precisely synchronized clusters and pairs. As he headed away to the north the highway straightened. Flanked by symmetrical columns of apartments buildings it ascended a drawbridge and crossed over a dark canal, then passed through a brief stretch of salt marsh before once again edging back into the city's outskirts. He had come parallel to a rail line, where a score of brick red boxcars lay waiting or forgotten. Beyond the tracks a row of warehouses stood shut tight behind barbed wire, lit by single pale lamps below their eaves.

A mile further he entered the first stand of woods, only on the railroad side. A brightly illumined sign for a multiplex cinema, itself several stories high, beckoned on the left, followed by a stretch of low-rises. Then, before he was aware of it, there was nothing but shadow and the obscure forms of trees on either side.

He drove for the better part of an hour, exited the highway, turned onto one local road and then another. When he had parked and sat for a moment and begun to walk away he heard the sounds of the car's engine cooling off, and from somewhere near at hand the first frogs of spring.

The use of memory (Carla Rippey)

The artist and printmaker Carla Rippey is a native of Kansas City who has lived and worked principally in Mexico since the 1970s, long enough that she has probably come to be more generally regarded as a Mexican artist rather than as an American one, though in fact she is both. Unlike many other American expatriate artists, she has put down permanent roots in Mexico and raised two sons there, and the bulk of her exhibitions have been in Mexican galleries and museums. She seems to be less well known in the US; the few monographs and exhibition catalogs devoted to her work — difficult but not impossible to find here — have been issued by Mexican publishers and museums. The one that I've been able to examine to date was published in 1994, and bears the title El uso de la memoria, which also happens to be the title of her comprehensive (and much more up to date) bilingual blog, an excellent starting point for those who might be interested in her work.

Rippey works in a range of media and with a variety of found materials, especially photographs. In some cases she creates drawings or paintings based on individual photos or assemblages of photos she has found at flea markets or in popular periodicals; at other times she subjects the photos themselves, or reproductions of them, to a variety of overlays and modifications, staining them or sewing thread through their surfaces, for instance. There is a political or feminist edge to many of her images, but the overriding theme is how people are remembered or forgotten or altered over the course of time. The sense of impermanence her work produces echoes her own history as a migrant, one who remembers, moreover, that her ancestors too were immigrants from elsewhere, and who knows that possession of place as of life is illusory and fleeting. Her use of photographs serves to underline the ways in which what we see before us, apparently solid, is subject to being transformed into an image, a two-dimensional ghost that has lost its original vital presence but which, as a memory trace, acquires its own afterlife.

 
Among her recent projects is a treatment of an old black and white photograph of an ornate building, either in ruins or in the process of construction. Rippey has printed the image onto the cover of what appears to be a handmade paper box. When the box is opened it reveals another copy of the image, printed on a much larger sheet of either cloth or paper and folded or bunched up inside the box. The effect is both striking and disconcerting; the building, once so monumental, has become a mere wisp, a thin tissue that could be folded into a pocket or blown away by the wind.

Rippey was a friend of the late Roberto Bolaño, a writer who was himself a multiple migrant, and who reportedly portrayed her in the guise of the minor character of Catalina O'Hara in his novel The Savage Detectives. Both were fascinated by the femicidios of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the string of largely unsolved killings that since 1993 have taken the lives of hundreds of Mexican women in the vicinity of that troubled border city. Marcela Valdes's excellent article in the Nation (December 8, 2008), which not coincidentally is illustrated by Rippey, is an indispensable source regarding both the Juárez killings and Bolaño's posthumously published masterpiece 2666, which is partly based on them. The section of 2666 that recounts the murders — often in harrowing detail — has much the same disconcerting effect as Rippey's art, as Bolaño's fictionalized retelling simultaneously flattens the actual victims into two dimensions and indelibly preserves an unsettling memory of them that would otherwise have been entirely lost.

Welcome

This blog is the successor to the web journal / electronic broadside of the same name which I began in 2004. I have reposted and backdated here some of the pieces that originally appeared at the older address; the rest I have taken down. Everything dated from today forward is new.

Night piece (Frenzy)

High on the bluffs, in a bare room looking out on the city, a man waits for the approach of night. He stands by one window, his back against the wall, peering out as the window-shade rises and snaps down again in the oncoming wind. Already shadows are filling the labyrinth of alleys beneath him, erasing the outlines of the buildings and trees. Streetlights flicker on, advancing block by block, but their faint illumination, diffracted by dust, only deepens the blur. As the wind from the ocean gathers strength the temperature drops a few degrees, but the heat radiating up from below remains intolerable. He leaves his lookout, paces the room, sits for a moment in the single wooden chair that is his only furniture. He reaches down for a ceramic pitcher whose monochrome glaze is stained and crackled, pours tepid water into a jar, and drinks, though it brings him no relief. 

He stands again, goes to the window. He can still make out the waves cresting in the distance, but the sea is now the color of ink and is rapidly merging with the sky. Somewhere offshore a signal beacon pulses, and the red light seems to sear his pupils as he stares. He turns away and shuts his eyes, feeling sweat beading on his brow and neck. He moves to the corner of the room, to another window where the beacon can not reach him, but he still feels its pulsing as if it were the circulation of his blood. He hears music, intermittent and indistinct, something reedy and strident, until at last it is drowned by the roar of the wind. There is a hint of ashes in the air; the taste gets on his tongue and he can't get rid of it. He straightens his back and throws his arms apart as if crucified. He would scream but he knows no sound will issue from his mouth. He would throw himself out the window, onto the rooftops at the bottom of the bluffs, but he is unable to lift his feet from the floor. He can do nothing but wait, burned by the wind, until the bleakest, most silent part of the night.

Because that is the hour, he knows, when they will come for him. 

Without a ghost (conclusion)

She motioned to the waitress for the handwritten bill, then folded a ten and a couple of singles neatly under her empty coffee cup. As she passed the register the cashier looked up from counting the change in her till long enough to say thanks hon, good night and she smiled back and barely above a whisper said good night in return. She hunched up the collar of her coat a little and descended the stairs. The metal door handle was cold to the touch; as she stepped outside she saw that it had begun to rain, a chill, fine drizzle blown by an insistent breeze that was coming from the direction of the river. A Checker cab, yellow and black, rumbled towards her like a monstrous hornet. The driver slowed to cast a look at her, angling for a fare, but she ignored him. As her umbrella opened with a satisfying snap she began to walk.

Her apartment was one block east, two and a half blocks down. The few storefronts in the neighborhood — the liquor store, card shop, and beauty salon — were barred tight, and the empty sidewalks beneath the brownstones, glazed by the rain, gave back a pale reflection of the streetlamps. As she came to a corner the traffic lights flicked from red to green, but nothing moved. She turned onto her block, past cast-iron railings adorned with spheres and spikes, and located her keys in her coat pocket as she climbed the steps. The glass door shuddered as she swung it open, and shuddered again when she shut it behind her. There was a checkerboard pattern on the tiled floor, now smeared with wet footprints, and a bank of weathered bronze mailboxes. Seeing some letters tucked in her box, she popped open the lock with her key and withdrew one phone bill, one handbill from a local laundry, and two handwritten letters, one of them much thicker than the other. She noted the return addresses quickly and tucked them into her pocket, then began to climb the stairs.

At the third-floor landing she wiped her feet on the mat and unlocked the door, which was stiff and had needed planing since the last time it was painted. The light from the hall barely penetrated the darkness of her apartment, until she struck the switch at her right hand and the single overhead lamp came on. She stepped past the closet and her bedroom on her left and the entrance to her living room on her right, and went directly to her bathroom, where she stepped out of her shoes, rested the umbrella inside the tub, and hung her coat on a hook behind the door, retrieving her letters from the pocket before she left the room. She heard the cat, a languid orange tabby of indeterminate age, drop to the floor from his habitual sleeping-place on her bed. A moment later he emerged, groggily, and sat watching her, passing a moistened paw over one ear and shaking his head against an itch. When she spoke to him he stood and rubbed against her ankle, arching his back, but the effort seemed to exhaust him and he sat again and did not follow her as she moved towards the darkness of the kitchen.

She left the kitchen lights off for a moment and went to the window to pull up the heavy venetian blinds. Her apartment faced the rear and there was little to see in daytime, even less at that hour. Somewhere, along the harbor, a construction derrick towered, surmounted by a row of red lights that winked through the night and the haze to ward off planes. They were tearing down a cargo terminal, she knew; she had walked as far as the water one day to see the fragile skeleton that was all that remained. When it was gone, she imagined, nothing would take its place, and the harborside would slowly take on the appearance of an old man with failing teeth. The river would flow on, unconcerned, and carry away all memory.

She poured out what remained of the cat's water, which she had left for him in a china bowl decorated with a circle of blue flowers, rinsed it, filled it again, and set it down on the floor. When she poured out his food, into an identical container, he joined her, now suddenly come to life, and began to eat, crunching and purring at once, until he had consumed enough for the moment and left the rest for later. He found her in the living room, sitting on the couch, her feet propped on a stool, wine glass beneath the table lamp beside her, as she began to read her mail.

Without a ghost (II)

At the corner of 57th street she waited until a downtown bus pulled along the curb, stepped inside, fished a token out of her purse and dropped it in the till. The driver was a slightly built young man — Puerto Rican, she thought — who acknowledged her with a nod as one of his evening regulars. The bus was mostly deserted. She chose a seat under a cigarette ad, across from a man in a rumpled gray suit who seemed to be asleep. There was a tabloid in his lap, open to the racing pages. Three rows in front of him were two young black women with neatly beribboned felt hats; they were whispering together and giggling, and once or twice they glanced back and caught her eye.

Somewhere in the thirties the bus took on more passengers. First to appear was an elderly woman, who settled herself behind the driver in the first available seat. Behind her came a youngish man in a white shirt and tie, his suit jacket folded over one arm, and finally a middle-aged couple and two adolescent girls, all of them toting bags from department stores in the vicinity. There was a momentary fuss: the girls wanted to sit in the back, the father objected, the mother said something that was lost in the noise of the bus engine accelerating, then the whole group trudged to the back, the father sourly trailing behind. The girls tumbled together into the last row, chattering happily, peering out the window as if it were their first time in town.

By the time they reached the Village the man with the newspaper had awakened, though he still seemed half-dazed. He craned his neck and looked blearily out through the scratched windowpane until he caught sight of a street sign, then folded his paper, tucked it under his arm, and shifted himself closer to the aisle. She pretended not to notice that he was staring at her, frankly but without evidently finding anything of interest. After a block or two he rose, heavily, and stepped ahead to the next row, his back to her, swaying with the motion of the bus. The driver braked gently and the man wobbled forward, then stepped off without looking back as the bus came to a halt and opened its doors.

She stayed on until Bleecker Street. The two young women ahead of her rose at the same time, clutching their purses, huddled so closely together they might have been joined at the hip. They were hushed now and serious-looking, until one of them whispered something and the other began to giggle again, just for a moment as they descended. She watched them disappear into the evening crowd, and headed for Sheridan Square.

Most of the storefronts were dark by now, except for the clubs where music could be heard playing through the doors and the few restaurants and shops that had evening hours. On one corner there was a butcher shop with a grim tableau of small game — a rabbit, some birds she didn't know the names of — swinging in the window, lit from above by a single thin fluorescent bulb. As she headed west the crowd thinned out. There was one last cluster around the steps leading up to a bookstore where some kind of public reading was in progress; she heard a muffled voice from the interior, the silence of attentiveness, then a burst of laughter. Two slender young men and a pretty, petite woman in a yellow scarf stood at the base of the stairs. The men were smoking and doing their best to look smooth while the girl shivered against the increasing chill. As she left them behind she passed a row of darkened windows that spanned a grim, anonymous concrete building, a warehouse or a sweatshop she couldn't tell. She passed a narrow alley on the right, where a faint smell of urine wafted up from worn-down cobblestones, then continued on in shadow until after another moment or two she emerged into the faint illumination of an isolated little diner that was open all hours.

She was only a block from her apartment but she wanted a meal. She seized the handle of the heavy glass door and went in, up three steps to the cashier, who stood behind a display of Life Savers and chewing gum and invited her to sit anywhere she liked. Most of the booths were filled with bohemians in threes and fours, some of whom stared at her as she passed, though without breaking off their conversations. She found an empty booth in the far corner and sat down facing the door, setting her valise on the vinyl seat and resting her hands on the faded formica tabletop. There was a little Seeburg jukebox at each table, set underneath the window; someone had put the Everly Brothers on already but she flipped through the selections once anyway out of curiosity.

When the waitress came over she declined a menu and ordered a small salad and a bowl of tomato soup, a cup of tea with lemon, and then a rice pudding to finish off with. She pulled a magazine from her valise but after a half-hearted look stowed it away again. As she ate, alone and unnoticed, she kept tabs on the other diners, listening in on what scraps of their mingled conversations she could make out. Some were in high spirits, laughing and gesticulating, while others maintained an affected aloofness, leaning back, smoking slowly, uttering some indistinct pronouncement from time to time. Just outside her window a neon sign, tangled into a beer-brand script, oozed blue light.

Without a ghost (I)

She stayed on in the office after the others had left, doing a bit of cleanup on an article that had been passed on to her for a quick polish. The author of the piece was capable enough, she thought, but he had seemed to lose interest in the assignment halfway and left the ending in a bit of a muddle. She couldn't blame him, really; it was hackwork for both of them, just something to fill in some back pages and provide a plausible teaser for the cover. She had met him once or twice, but he hadn't made much of an impression: just another awkward young man with a disposable container of coffee in one hand and a disordered valise in the other, coming in to drop off a typescript or pick up research materials, waiting for an editor who was either stretching out a lunch hour or engaged in a long telephone conversation behind closed doors. She was sure he either had other jobs elsewhere or more likely was occupied, like the rest of the freelancers, in searching for one. Between running from one prospect to another and going to movies with his friends he had managed to find sufficient time to sit down at a typewriter and slap the piece together, knowing as well as she did that it would be taken apart and reassembled before it ever saw print. She was grateful not to have had to write it herself from scratch, as she often enough did without earning — or wanting — a byline for her trouble.

Bound volumes of back issues lined the cheap wooden bookcase across from her desk, along with a shelf of style manuals she rarely needed to refer to. She kept a jade plant and a few African violets on a white enameled stand by the window; she was known to have a way with plants and would often be delegated to rescue specimens that had been neglected by the occupants of the other offices. Her overcoat hung on a coat stand behind the door, next to the empty waste receptacle in which she stored her umbrella, her one essential and cherished accessory. She couldn't be bothered with a handbag and used her briefcase instead, or a small purse for special occasions. Her glass-topped desk was kept bare at all times, with the exception of her phone, a rolodex, a wooden box for incoming mail, a stapler, and a caddy containing her writing implements as well as a collection of paper clips and binder clips in various sizes. Everything else, except for whatever manuscript she happened to be working on, was tucked away in a pair of three-drawer metal cabinets. She favored a straight-backed, padded wooden mission chair on casters, purchased in an antique shop in the Village, which allowed her to access her files without having to get up. There was another, simpler, wooden chair in the corner, which was for the convenience of visitors. On no occasion did she require a third chair.

As evening advanced the lights came on in a few of the offices across the street, though most would be dark until morning. Directly opposite her window, through partly opened vertical blinds, she could see the heavy-set, white-haired man in shirtsleeves and tie who never seemed to take an early evening off. His office was cluttered with boxes and file cabinets and stacks of what looked like blueprint tubes. Over the years she had watched this accumulation grow until, eventually, it had begun to build up from the floor just inside the glass; within a few months she expected he would disappear from view entirely. There was a scraggly locust tree outside her window, though she could only see its topmost branches. The wind had blown a strand of what looked like crepe paper up from the sidewalk, and it fluttered now among the leaves, impaled on a thorn.

At around 7:30 the phone rang. It was her sister, calling from New Jersey to say that her youngest boy had come down with the measles and that the dinner planned for the coming Saturday would have to be postponed. They didn't talk for long — she could hear crying in the background — and when she had set down the receiver she felt thirsty and decided to stretch her legs. The fluorescent lights in the hall were always left on for her; she never really felt afraid working in the evening alone but the illumination made the empty corridors a bit cheerier and the faint hum of the bulbs afforded her an illusion of company. The water cooler was at the end of the hall, outside the copy room in the building's corner; from there the corridor turned sharply, leading out to the reception desk, the deserted lobby, and the locked glass doors. She took a paper cup from the dispenser and pressed down on the valve, then waited as the water trickled out, cooling the cup against her hand as it filled. From where she stood she could see Sixth Avenue and the fleets of yellow taxis bustling through the night. There was a clock, an advertisement for a watch company, on the building on the other side; it had been broken for months and read 11:41. She threw the empty cup in the basket, cast an indifferent glance at the collection of burned-down butts in the ashtray on top of the file cabinet beside her, and returned to her office.

It took her only a few minutes more to finish her evening's work, but she didn't hurry to leave. She dropped the finished copy in the bin outside her chief's office, knowing that he would barely glance at it in the morning before sending it on to the production department. She sharpened a few pencils and brushed the shavings into the wastebasket, looked briefly at the mail before tossing most of it in the same place, and straightened the desktop glass, which as always had worked its way a fraction of an inch askew during the day's labors. Across the street the white-haired man was still working at his desk, though she saw that a fifth of liquor now stood beside his hand. Beyond him the hall appeared dark and labyrinthine.

She took her coat down from the stand, put it on, and gathered up her umbrella and valise. Flipping the wall switch, she left the door to her office open behind her and headed down the hall, turning off most of the fluorescent lights as she reached the corner. The reception area lay ahead of her, dimly lit and silent. She didn't know the new receptionist very well, in fact she wasn't sure what this one's name was — Terry? Tammy? — something like that, and guessed that she too would move on as soon as she had the chance.

She turned the stiff metal knob that secured the door, stepped through the opening, locked the door with her key, and pressed the button next to the elevator. As she waited she looked down the dark hallway, past the water cooler, at the faint glaze of light on the window that looked out over the street.

Winter pieces (V)

He walked down the quiet street, feeling the evening damp on his face and neck, keeping his hands warm in the pockets of his coat. Along the row of white houses lamplight filtered weakly through curtains onto porches and deserted lawns, on silent cars in shadowy driveways. A gauze of mist enveloped the steetlights. There was no sound other than his footfalls.

As he reached the corner he caught sight of a sudden illumination to his left, just above the sycamores, a pale light shining where he knew there was no moon. A moment later the plane broke from the haze. It wasn't large, a commuter jet he guessed, with wings that were fixed across the top of the fuselage, giving it a bit of the ungainly appearance of a seaplane. It was flying low but smoothly, lights flashing below and steady on the wing. Only then did he make out the faint drone of its engines.

In seconds it had burrowed into the clouds and once again was out of sight.

Winter pieces (IV)

It had snowed the morning before, six inches of soft powder, then after an afternoon of brilliant sun the temperature had dropped overnight enough to freeze the surface once again, leaving an inch-thick plate of harder snow to lie upon the rest. He had parked his car on the shoulder of the two-lane road, and as he stepped away from the pavement and climbed over the weathered stone wall the top layer broke into shards beneath his feet with a noise like shattering china.

Even so he surprised the fox. It stood in a little clearing where the orchard met the woods, no more than twenty feet away, one paw raised, its eyes fixed upon him as he himself came to rest. They eyed each other neutrally, then, after a moment, the fox sat, its gaze still on him. Their bearings were set to intersect when they resumed, if neither turned, but each seemed unwilling either to step forward or to change their course. The stillness of the morning surrounded them, without a hint of wind.

Finally the fox stood and slipped off, veering just a bit to skirt the outer row of the barren pear trees, moving quickly, not in fear but as if it needed to make up for lost time.

Hitchhiker

“There is amongst us a set of critics who seem to hold that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such thing as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing from a perforation in some other man's tank.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Preface to “Christabel”

"I have not included 'Christabel,' for the reason that 'Christabel' has failed completely to include itself. Wherever the mysterious tracts from which it rose may lie, they are off the road which leads to 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan.' And we are following only where known facts lead. I wish I did know in what distant deeps or skies the secret lurks; but the elusive clue is yet to capture." — John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination

According to biographer Richard Holmes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge began writing his unfinished narrative poem “Christabel” in the spring of 1798. He continued to tinker with it — or at least claimed to be doing so — into the latter part of 1800, but in the end it remained, like “Kubla Khan,” a tantalizing fragment. Years later he outlined the poem's supposed conclusion to a contemporary, James Gillman, but Gillman's description throws little additional light on what was probably a doomed project from the beginning.

In all honesty, the ruins of “Christabel” don't bear up to comparison, in terms of memorable language, with “The Rime or the Ancient Mariner” or what we have of “Kubla Khan,” but the tale they sketch out is not without interest. Briefly, the story is something like this: Christabel, the young daughter of the Baron Sir Leoline, goes wandering in the woods one evening outside her father's castle, ostensibly to pray for “the weal of her lover that's far away.” While kneeling beneath an oak tree she hears a strange sound, and on rising she discovers another damsel, barefoot and dressed in a white silk robe. Interrogated by Christabel, she says that her name is Geraldine, that she is the daughter of a nobleman, and that the previous morning she had been taken from her home by five warriors, tied on a white horse, and forced to ride at breakneck speed before being abandoned by her kidnappers.

Taking pity on Geraldine's plight, Christabel brings her home, at one point heaving her swooning guest over the threshold of the castle. They retire to Christabel's chamber where, in an unmistakably erotically charged scene, Geraldine bids her rescuer undress, then herself disrobes, lays down by the girl's side, and pronounces, “in the touch of this bosom,” a spell of possession over her. The next morning Geraldine rises, now fully restored, and awakens a somewhat ill at ease Christabel, who prays “that He, who on the cross did groan / might wash away her sins unknown.” The two young women seek out the Baron, who gives an enthusiastic welcome to his guest, and is surprised to learn that she is the daughter of an old friend, one Lord Roland de Vaux, from whom he has become estranged.

The Baron vows to repair the wrong done to Geraldine, and orders his bard, Bracy, to seek out the castle of Roland de Vaux in order to report Geraldine's safety and, at the same time, declare his own desire to be reconciled with him. Bracy, in reply, temporizes, reciting a dream he has had, in which a dove (obviously meant to represent Christabel) has been seized in the embrace of a bright green serpent. In the meantime, Christabel catches a glimpse of Geraldine, as “the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head / each shrunk to a serpent's eye,” but then instantly falls into a trance, and herself begins to hiss like a snake. She throws herself at the Baron's feet and desperately begs him to send Geraldine away, calling on her dead mother as witness for her pure intent. This inexplicable treatment of a guest infuriates the increasingly obsessed and Lear-like Baron, who bids Bracy depart at once in search of Lord Roland. There, after a brief and inscrutable envoi, the poem breaks off.

Fragmentary and odd as it is, “Christabel” has not been without descendants. The poem reportedly influenced Poe and J. S. Le Fanu, as well as a lesbian romance novelist named Karin Kallmaker, who, writing under the pen name of Laura Adams, adapted it into a novel. Like the underground stream of the sacred river Alph, it sometimes surfaces in unexpected places greatly removed from its original headwaters. As far removed, for instance, as 20th-century Texas. The following are the lyrics to another “Christabel,” this one from the singer and songwriter Robert Earl Keen, who included it on his 1984 debut album, No Kinda Dancer:

It's been seven long days and seven hard nights
In a '62 Chevy with broke tail lights
An eastbound man in a westbound lane
A dishwater blonde about sixteen
Was standing on the shoulder with a ribbon in her hair
Her hand on her hip and her thumb in the air
And I pulled off the road and as she grabbed for the door
I knew the wind was cold 'cuz I'd seen it all before
And I was scared

Things ain't never what they seem
When you find you're livin' in your own dream

Now the moonlight peeked in and out behind the clouds
Now and again on this godless child
And the radio was scramblin', cracklin' in the air
The ribbon she wore looked old in her hair
And I saw the moonlight sliver dead down on her face
I knew it was true she was in the wrong place
In the wrong time, in the wrong tale
I knew when I'd asked her she'd hiss, "Christabel"

Things ain't never what they seem
When you find you're livin' in your own dream

She was after the man who had left her alone
With no father beside her and love longtime gone
And the snake deep inside her a hiss in her head
The rest that had been her was dying or dead
And she'd a taste for young women with pearly white skin
She spat on the floor when she spoke of the man
Who made her like this
Who had written her tale
This medieval maid they call Christabel

Things ain't never what they seem
When you find you're livin' in your own dream

Then she breathed out the story of her lover to be
A knight's shining armor on a silvery steed
Who longed to be worthy so he sought the crusade
While she waited, breath bated, in linen brocade
But a pair of black eyes wove 'round her a spell
The snake they call Lydia seduced Christabel
And she cuddled her tender, she poisoned her soul
She stole her young body and made it her own

Things ain't never what they seem
When you find you're livin' in your own dream

Now the knight would love Lydia in Christabel's arms
And Lydia would have him should he ever return
But Lydia was left with the story undone
No silvery steed, no castle, no throne
Half woman, half serpent, entwined in a spell
A barge black and fancy this medieval tale

And she faded at dawnin', the bird and the beast
Deep in the dreams of those bound for the east Like me

Things ain't never what they seem
When you find you're livin' in your own dream

Things ain't never what they seem …

In addition to the obvious changes in setting and style, Keen's version preserves some features of Coleridge's poem while blithely discarding others. Geraldine becomes “Lydia” — a distinct improvement, I think — Sir Leoline is barely alluded to, and the absent lover, whom Coleridge mentions only in an aside, becomes the motive for Lydia's possession of her victim, with whom she now shares a single existence. The suggestion of lesbianism is made briefly and bluntly (“a taste for young women with pearly white skin”), and there's a sly allusion to Bracy's dream in the reference to Christabel as both “the bird and the beast.” Most interestingly, Coleridge has himself become a character, the man “who had written her tale,” and, by abandoning it unfinished, leaves Christabel / Lydia to wander the highways and centuries searching for a lover who will never return.

Keen has slipped in some great little lyrical touches, while keeping to the general tumbleweed atmosphere. I love “I saw the moon sliver dead down on her face” — did he half-intend “slither,” one wonders? — and the surprising image of “the barge black and fancy” seems the perfect vessel to bear the ageless, deathless Christabel along on subterranean waters from another time.

Winter pieces (III)

As the year waned and the days grew shorter she spent most of her weekend morning hours in bed, asleep if she could stay asleep or just thinking with her eyes closed if she couldn't. She always kept the room a little cold around her; she liked it that way, didn't like having to throw off a layer of the covers that she kept tightly wound around her if she got too hot. In her third floor flat, with the storm windows shut tight against the occasional passing car and the shouts of the downstairs neighbor's children, she would be undisturbed as long as she liked; her friends knew not to call. By mid-morning light would fill the room but she didn't mind; it fell obliquely, filtered by the shades, and by the time she was finally ready to rise it would have taken the edge off the morning chill.

She would cast a glance at the cover of the paper, dropped on her doorstep before dawn, but then set it aside until evening, make herself some oatmeal or a couple of eggs and a cup of tea, and only then would she change out of her nightgown and robe into a pair of jeans, a layer or two of sweatshirts, an old and ample soft gray sweater, and take her winter coat down from the wooden hanger in the little hall closet where it hung alone. She would collect her sketchbook and a few pencils from the easel she kept by her rarely used fireplace, gather her gloves and hat, and go out. It would be too cold along the harbor, this time of year, so she would head inland instead, climbing to the outskirts of town, to the first ploughed-over cornfield, then walk another mile or so along the road until she came to the edge of the woods. There she would sweep the tail of her coat beneath her and sit on a stone wall crusted with patches of lichen, yellow and blue and grey-green, and with her back to the road she would sketch the oak trees, the frayed remains of an orchard that had been abandoned years before, and the crows that gathered to glean the fields.

She couldn't pick the crows out by sight, but she was pretty sure they were the same ones, from week to week; in any case, there always seemed to be the same number, a dozen or so in the acre's ground she had a view of. They must have been accustomed to the sight of her, but if so they acted no differently, never approached or gave a sign of recognition. She imagined they had their own concerns, and she was not part of them, or perhaps they noticed her but were too polite to intrude upon her solitude. But now and then it would seem to her that one, having drawn near, would considerately pose for her for a moment, just long enough for her to deftly trace its form with her pencil. If so, she didn't signal her appreciation but kept it to herself; it was her treaty with them, that she would never cross that line.

She would have only a few hours of daylight. When the outlines of the furthermost trees began to soften and the wind picked up and bit at her cheeks she would close her book and climb down from the wall, ready for a warm meal, the newspaper, and phone calls. At night she would dream of the crows and in her dream she would hear their histories and they would tell her everything that had happened and everything they had seen from the deepest beginning of time.

Full Service No Waiting

According to the liner notes to this 1997 record by Peter Case, “this album was composed on a '60s Smith Corona manual acoustic word processor & a Gibson J-45 at the Shishim Building, Santa Monica, CA.” The Smith Corona, or one like it, turns up in the back cover photo and the photo on the back of the lyric booklet; the Gibson is the one shown in the cover photo at right. In an interview with the Village Voice earlier this year, Case described the circumstances of the record's genesis at greater length:

I was married and there were little kids around, my kids and everything, and I couldn't write so I rented a room from this guy Dark Bob, my friend, like he had a room in this building. I just went to this room and I wrote. I'd get there, and I was so busy all the time that I just was happy to be able to get to it and I would just walk in and the second I got in there I'd just start writing. And I'd write right off the top of my head onto the typewriter. I could hear the music in my head and I would just write and write and write. And I had a script of what I wanted to accomplish there, like what kind of songs I was going to write. And I just did it. I knocked out that whole album like that.

Making good use of that opportunity gives the eleven songs on Full Service No Waiting a special unity and focus. There's plenty of terrific music on Peter's other records, but I think this one comes together as more of a coherent whole than any of them, with the possible exception of his most recent CD, Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John. It's a strongly autobiographical and retrospective record, in which he looks back on old friends, old haunts, and old joys. Some Case fans, particularly the ones who knew him from his days as a member of the Nerves and leader of the Plimsouls, are lukewarm about the record, which uses mostly acoustic instruments and is more consistently “folky” than his earlier work. That's a matter of taste, of course, but there's little doubt that the level of both songwriting and performance on this record is consistently high. Many of these songs, especially “On the Way Downtown” and “Crooked Mile,” have become staples of Peter's live shows.

What follows is an attempt to scratch out a few notes on the songs, supplemented with some of Peter's comments, which, except as noted, are from a section of the Vanguard Records site that is no longer up but that can still be found archived elsewhere. The more I listen to this record — and I've listened to it countless times — the more I hear in it. My hope is that by thinking and writing about it I will find more things in it still. But there's no substitute for the original; if you don't know Full Service No Waiting already, then by all means get hold of a copy and let the music speak for itself.

Spell of Wheels

Of all the songs on the album, the first cut is probably the least typical, at least in subject matter. Telling its story in just a couple of verses, it's as sharply chiseled and compressed as a gem. It concerns a specific incident, real or rumored.

“Spell of Wheels” is a tale of an experience my son Joshua had in the winter of 1991 when he took a trip North from Kansas City. He's been my road manager for a while, and he lives in Austin and plays in a band called Gold. It's the urban myth of the black car — an adventure in the dark labyrinth of the American Midwest. Since I started playing it live, people have started coming up to me with their own similar stories.

Joshua Case shares writing credit on the song, which begins innocently enough:

Kansas City as the first snow of the year begins to fall
she's at a Westport party drunk & leaning against the wall
Skip & Wolf come stomping in someone has a plan
Faceboy goes to fetch his clothes I go to lend a hand
we leave KC at midnight heading north on the interstate
snow is falling hard & fast we're glad to get away
five kids in a beat up car kickin' up their heels
& heading out into the dark
beneath the spell of wheels
beneath the spell of wheels

The arrangement is quiet and unhurried at first, perfect music for starting out on a long car trip: some congas or bongos, a little looping acoustic guitar figure, and a few notes on an electric of some kind (probably Greg Leisz on either lap steel or pedal steel). There's something else in there too, I suspect it's Andrew Williams's harmonium, but the liner notes aren't specific. A couple of minutes in the music suddenly turns darker and more urgent, and the lyrics quickly trace out a harrowing tale of a highway encounter with a strange car and a pointed shotgun. But then, just as we're expecting expect the violent climax, it's all over:

now we're sinkin' low as we can go & waitin' for the blast
Skippie jams down on the brakes that demon car blows past
we pull off on the roadside everybody pulls their knives
the black car keeps on goin' & I guess so do our lives

He wraps it up with a few quick, perfect lines, leaving the listener restored but a bit shaken. Some things you don't easily get out of your mind.

we get to Minnesota spend the winter in monochrome
fall in with small time criminals just like the ones at home
watchin' through the windows for what the night reveals
& waitin' for the spring to come
beneath the spell of wheels
beneath the spell of wheels

After the lyrics are finished the music takes its time coming to an end, giving the story time to sink in. Case plays the harmonica, Leisz's guitar slides slowly up and down like dopplering traffic; then suddenly the tension lifts and there's a shift to (I think) a major chord, but then the last thing you hear is Leisz trailing eerily off.

On the Way Downtown

After that brilliant but disturbing opening, the next cut is a welcome relief, and in a way “On the Way Downtown” is really where Full Service No Waiting, as a set of interconnected songs, begins thematically. It's the first of several songs in which Peter looks back from early middle age at his younger self and at the same time takes stock of where he is now (or where he was c. 1997). In at least three of those songs (this one, “See Through Eyes,” and “Still Playin'”) he does so specifically in reference to his own musical apprenticeship busking and hanging out with the like-minded.

“On The Way Downtown” was inspired by a trip back to my hometown; it's a song of contemporary survival and of connecting the past up with the present. With Eric Rigler's uilleann pipes and Don Heffington's jaw harp and bodhran, we have a combination of Mississippi John Hurt and Celtic music: celtabilly — country blues crossed with Celtic. They're kind of two rivers that run through my songs.

The song begins with a repeated droned beat on a single acoustic guitar note. In live performances I've heard Peter extend this intro for several bars beyond the album version; it's probably a useful trick for beginning a gig until the audience settles in and listens up. Then the guitar traces out the melody of the verse once before the lyrics begin. It's one of Peter's most instantly recognizable riffs, even-paced, big-hearted, neatly tied off with a flourish, rooted in the coffee house guitar styles of the 1960s (which of course drew on the work of earlier generations of players). There's a similar (but darker) riff underlying “Drunkard's Harmony,” and yet another in “Still Playin'.” The song begins with the daily grind of present circumstance, but soon turns to places where the past, as Faulkner said, isn't even past:

how many times have I washed my face
combed my hair & left this place?
felt the shiver in my chest when I hit the door
the promise of something here worth living for?

had a fight with the woman that had my kids
can't get along with anyone what if I did?
I'm going back to the corner where we used to meet
when our dreams were young & the nights were sweet

I'm going out tonight goin' way downtown
where my friends who died still hang around
see what's shakin' as the leaves turn brown
the seasons been & gone
another one's comin' on
& I'm on my way downtown

Three decades melt away and Case is back at a moment of musical revelation, described in more or less spiritual terms:

well it was thirty years ago in the setting sun
& I was walkin' down Union Street I started to run
down into a cellar where the music screamed
I guess it hit me harder than I ever dreamed

in the Palace Theater hall later on that night
there were miracles in store but not a soul in sight
pay phone ringing didn't seem so strange
anything could happen everything could change

Then he's in the present again, reflecting wryly on changes and getting older. The lyrics are about as vivid, precise, and evocative as any you'll hear in popular music; they're both vernacular and elevated, seamlessly, at the same time. It doesn't necessary strike you while you're listening, but it's hard to say, without taking the song apart, what's chorus and what's bridge; there's always a little twist to heighten interest, but in the end it all winds up on the refrain.

we used to gather here flirt & laugh
now all my dreams are cut in half
now the girls are smokin' cigarettes & chewin' gum
they just get scared when they see me come

way downtown the corners moved
the sandstone slabs are worn & grooved
turning black in the first drops of rain
you can smell the earth & sky again

hear the rattle of the leaves the locusts call
underneath the elms by the school yard wall
summers over & the fields are tall
a seasons been & gone
another one's coming on
& I'm on my way downtown

This is, I think, one of Peter's most popular songs with audiences, and I suspect one of his own favorites as well. I've heard him live three times and he's included it in his set each time. I don't blame him one bit.

Let Me Fall

I don't have anything terribly profound to say about this one. It's not a bad song by any means, but of all the cuts on the album it's the one that's never quite gotten under my skin.

“Let Me Fall” is a story about a girl who has to make a big decision about falling in love and letting everything come down. I was born above Niagara Falls, and if you fall into the river, you can get carried away. In Buffalo, you have this idea of being swept away by the river.

The song starts out with a quick chugging guitar rhythm, then a harp break, before the lyrics begin. It's a kind of uptempo blues serenade, a seduction song, in that respect maybe distantly akin to “Ice Water” from Peter's first solo record. There's no real verse and chorus, just the three-word refrain, but Peter sings the third and last stanzas a little differently, giving them more urgency. The best lines are in the final stanza:

your friends are outside waiting
'neath the light of a thousand stars
come with me while the dew is falling
out to where the campfires are
let me fall let me fall
let me fall

The percussion and Lili Haydn's fiddle give the song its drive and drama; at one or two points there's a suggestion of a bit of Sgt. Pepperish countermelody on the fiddle. The harp comes back in at the end to lead the band out.

Green Blanket (Part 1)

Peter's written several songs about street people (see “Poor Old Tom” and “Underneath the Stars”), but this one turns out to be a surprisingly cheerful waltz. It's a recollection of San Francisco in the '70s. From the Vanguard notes:

Green blankets are the blankets that used to be given away free to homeless people in California. I lived in a junkyard near San Francisco Bay. I was a young acid casualty. I'll never forget wandering the streets and seeing the golden glow pour from people's living room windows. This experience has colored my work. But instead of just decrying the miseries of the homeless, in this song I'm trying to show another side of it.

It's hard to say exactly what's verse and what's chorus in this song, but the opening lines serve for a refrain:

out on the street it isn't so bad
or all that it's cracked up to be
some are half crazy others plain stupid
some there just want to be free
some there just want to be free

Most of the song is relaxed and pleasant enough, but the real payload comes at the end of the first verse, with its sudden flash of color and tribute to the joys of oblivion:

if this rain keeps on falling it'll wash me away
down through the gutter & out to the bay
where the red & the gold & the silver fish play
that's someplace where no one will find me
someplace where no one will find me

Then, just when it seems like the song is cycling back for another verse, an unexpected bridge continues the thought:

someplace where no one will tell me a lie
block all the exits lock up the sky
they get too close & I tell 'em goodbye
before they tell me why …

The line in the second verse about people sleeping in “cars up on blocks” is from first-hand experience:

I moved into the junkyard. It was right on the bay in Sausalito, a muddy patch of land jutting out into the water, a quarter mile past the last houseboat pier, way behind the Heliport. … There were a dozen or more abandoned trucks, some up on blocks. … I moved into an abandoned yellow school bus, back up the strand. (As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport)

The arrangement is relatively simple and straightforward. The drummer (Sandy Chila) beats time to the waltz, there's a bit of fiddle and what sounds like a tenor guitar or a guitar capoed up high in addition to Peter's own instrument. At the end of the first chorus, and once or twice after that, there's a little eight-bar descending pattern that reminds me a bit of Joni Mitchell's guitar work on the title track of For the Roses.

As far as I know there was never a “Green Blanket (Part 2).” From what I gather he doesn't seem to play this one much anymore.

Honey Child

I have a soft spot for this one. When I first started listening to Full Service No Waiting, nine or ten years ago, I used to have to make occasional Sunday afternoon trips on business to a writer's center in a train station on the lower Hudson. I took the CD along in the car once or twice and had a good chance to air it out and get to know it on the drive down and back, and this was the first song that really grabbed me and made me reach for the replay button. The line about “runnin' by the river” seemed apropos as I drove away with the sun setting over the Hudson.

I was stealin' 'neath the moonlight
and her watch dog let me by
when I spied her by the fountain
well it made me want to cry
'neath a golden halo
blue eyes sweet and kind
reachin' through the dayglo
with all the love I'd ever find

honey ain't no sweeter
clover ain't so wild
runnin' by the river
she's my sweeter than honey child

It's almost certainly a coincidence, given the utter obscurity of the material, but as it happens the third line in the first stanza above can be found verbatim in a “profane love song” said to have been intoned by the Jewish mystic Sabbatai Zevi, as quoted in Harry C. Schnur's Mystic Rebels. Is it my imagination, or is there an affinity in spirit as well in the following lines?:

I was climbing up the mountain
I was coming down the hill,
When I spied her by the fountain,
Melisselda of Castile.

As she bathed in milk-white splendour,
Scorn she flashed with eyes of steel
But her coral lips were tender
Proud infanta of Castille

But here's something really interesting: the name Melisselda (also spelled Meliselda and Melisenda) sounds like a variant of Melissa, which means, in Greek — honey bee. Except that, according to one online source, Melisenda is in fact:

from the Old German name Amalasuintha ("strong work"), which had first evolved in[to] Malasintha among the Lombards and Burgundians. It is therefore a cognate of the modern name Millicent. Melisenda was the name of a daughter of Charlemagne.

The same character, incidentally, shows up in Chapter XXVI of Part II of Don Quijote, as part of a puppet show, under the name of Melisendra. There's a beautiful tone to the acoustic guitar part on this song. The best place to hear it is at the beginning, before the other instruments jump in; it sounds like a guitar capoed up high, but I'm not sure. Its syncopated rhythm is deceptively simple sounding. Peter does his own backing vocals, as he does to great effect throughout the album. This is probably the most danceable tune on the record.

See Through Eyes

Another retrospective song, featuring some great dobro licks by Greg Leisz and some of Peter's most soulful singing. In his words:

“See Through Eyes” are what you've got before you begin to doubt everything you know. I need another pair.

It's a wistful look back at old times spent hanging with friends and making music:

aw man it was great
if you had to be there
we were pulling the songs
out of thin air
played 'em & laughed
threw 'em away
just passing by well I decided to stay
through the black nights & the high times
YES was always on the tip of our tongues
praise was rising like smoke
our flags were flyin' we were constantly broke
we were young & so were the jokes
we had nothin' but time for trouble
& a river that rolled
gold between our see through eyes
now what would I do
for another pair of see through eyes?
what could I give
for another pair of see through eyes?

The upper-case YES is no typo; it's a shouted affirmation, expressing what the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has dubbed "a categorical agreement with being." Of course it can't last forever

so this whole world explodes
I can't tell you why
its got something to do
with a couple of lies
we stopped a moment
lasting a year
next time I looked 'round there was nobody near
yeah we all disappear now it's been a long time
since we took the chance to speak our hearts & minds for a while
& that start of surprise knocked us off our feet
the tide began to rise on the river that rolled
gold between our see through eyes
now what would I do
for another pair of see through eyes?
what could I give
for another pair of see through eyes?

(I've emended the line beginning “since we took” slightly, as a couple of words seem to have been skipped in the printed lyrics.)

In just about every song on this record there's a point where an already memorable song suddenly takes a leap to a higher level and becomes pretty much irresistible; in this case it's from the words “on the river that rolled” to the end of the verse. If you don't dig Peter Case at that point it's hopeless. The song is impassioned and easygoing at the same time, and reminds me a bit of some of my favorite lines from the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade:

Your shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand

No, it's not easy getting that feeling back.

There's a brief tip of the hat to bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins in the second verse. A Case favorite, Lightnin' also makes an appearance in “Ain't Gonna Worry No More” from Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John. Diane Sherry Case shares the songwriting credit on this track.

Until the Next Time

A bright, gentle, nicely observed song that will strike a chord with anybody who can remember back to having an adolescent thing for a girl they thought just maybe one day might work out.

“Until The Next Time” is about falling in love with someone or something that's somewhere in the world, but very extremely distant. A dream.

You can smell the autumn air in these lyrics:

empty street end of the day
kickin' red leaves while the children play
smoky sky got me thinkin' of you
almost wishin' I'd never seen that blue

I'm tryin' to keep my feet
until the next time the race starts
close to the finish line
& down in my heart
I know this could be the start of something
& I know I'm gonna wait until the next time

There are some neat little rhythmic things in the song: the way the three final down beats fall in “icicles hangin' from my eyes ears nose,” the switch from quarter-notes to eight-notes in the bridge, and the delicate little syncopation of what I think is Andrew Williams's guitar behind the verses. My favorite lines are in the final verse:

empty heart you came & you went
beware the magic object & the magic event
hitched a ride slidin' on the back of a car
christmas lights shinin' on a water tower star

Sometimes I think that Greg Leisz's solo after the bridge maybe goes on a few bars too long, but overall the dobro is pretty indispensable to the mood.

Crooked Mile

Starting when I was a teenager, I hitchhiked all over the place. I used to take twenty bucks and my guitar and go out and stick out my thumb. I'd take the first ride and I'd go where it went. Then I'd stick out my thumb again, and I'd take the next car and go where it went. I'd hitchhike and play places all over the Northeast and West Coast — just checking out the world. The first time I saw Lightnin' Hopkins play was on one of those hitchhiking trips to Cambridge in 1970. I'd go to Toronto, D. C., Boston, NYC, all across New York state. Then I came out to the West Coast and played out in the street everywhere from Portland to Mexico. That's a crooked mile.

The first of two songs on the album that deal with salvation, the other being “Drunkard's Harmony,” which could be regarded as the dark flip side of this one. It's a song that Peter plays often, and one whose title, extended to Who's Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile?, was chosen for the 2004 Vanguard compendium of his work for the label, so clearly it has special significance for him. Its description of the frantic journey of a wayfarer is at least roughly autobiographical:

I left my mother's house at fifteen
with her diamonds & a suit of clothes
set to hitch the first car by
& ride it where it goes
who's gonna go your crooked mile?

I got to New York City
where they looked me up & down
at knife point off Saint Mark's Place
I gave up the crown
who's gonna go your crooked mile?

The chorus, which evokes blues and folksong lyrics, sermons, and I don't know what else, is a rush of pointed — and unanswered — questions:

who's gonna go your crooked mile?
who's gonna haul your load?
who's gonna come out in the dark
& find you on that road?

He drifts across-country and has an encounter with a woman that is summed up in a few quick lines, never to be alluded to again. The questions return, insistently; they overflow the chorus to fill out a verse

out in California
I was spinnin' 'neath blue skies
I fell hard, all for a girl
with raindrops in her eyes
who's gonna go your crooked mile?

now who's gonna hold your lily white hand
who's gonna drive you south?
who's gonna be your mornin' dove
& kiss you on the mouth?
who's gonna go your crooked mile?

Finally he can go no further, then unexpectedly finds redemption:

& when my run was over
I got down on my knees
& I felt the touch of the Holy Ghost
when I said 'Jesus please'
who's gonna go your crooked mile?

The last verse encapsulates a newfound view of his life on earth:

now the mile still runs crooked
the highway's up above
& the only thing I've found that counts
in this world is love
who's gonna go your crooked mile?

I've added an apostrophe in “highway's” that isn't there in the liner notes; I think it's important to an understanding of the song not to have any confusion about what this pivotal line is saying: that the highway — the true way, the place where the only real journey that matters takes place — is up above. The crooked mile — that's down here, and as crooked as ever. But that isn't the road that counts.

It's impossible to talk about this song and not address the issue of Peter's religious faith. It may not be a Bible-waving, literalist, self-righteous faith, and it may only be explicitly manifest in a few of his songs (see “Beyond the Blues” and “Somebrightmorninblues”) but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate it. Its cornerstone is the unwavering, unqualified statement that ends the final verse: "the only thing I've found that counts / in this world is love."

Judging from his songs, Peter seems to take the equation of God with Love very seriously. At the end of another song “Poor Old Tom” from The Man with the Blue Post Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar, he concludes the story of a homeless ex-seaman with some unexpected lines:

Now the radios blare newsak and muzak
diseases are cured every day
the worst disease is to be unwanted
to be used up and cast away.

So as we make our way towards our destination
fortunes are still made with flesh and blood
Progress and love got nothin' in common
Jesus healed a blind man's eyes with mud

I don't see Peter's point as necessarily being that progress and love are inevitably incompatible or opposed; it's that they have nothing to do with each other. Love and compassion can be present in the most abject circumstances, and can carry out their labor with the humblest of raw materials. Scientific and economic progress, on the other hand, provide no guarantee of benevolence; cruelty and indifference to suffering did not go out of style with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern democracy.

One other, tangential, point about the lyrics. I don't know what to make of the implication that the narrator of this song (not to identify him with Peter, for the moment) stole his mother's diamonds, other than the fact that it makes a great line. It's interesting, though, to compare “Crooked Mile” with Freedy Johnston's “Gone Like the Water,” another song (also possibly autobiographical), about a young man arriving in New York City:

An old suitcase she'll never miss
Leather coat he used to wear
Thinking tough, looking tired
With Mama's money and Daddy's ring

He's gone like the water down to NYC
Sleeping on the 8:02 along this river, running down
He's gone like the water down the depot drain
Disappearing in the city

The songs have little in common otherwise, and certainly Freedy's has no “spiritual” side, but in both songs the appropriation of “borrowed” accessories serves to underline both where the subject has come from and how much he has separated himself from his parents' world. Inheritances — intentional or otherwise — connect us to the past, but they are also things that we “take away from” our parents' world when we leave it behind.

As far as I can tell Peter plays alone on this one, which he does nowhere else on Full Service No Waiting. There's hardly any need (or room) for another instrument, as the bravura guitar arrangement provides all the drama you could want. The singing is particularly inspired as well. In live performances I've heard Peter let the guitar fall quiet at the end and finish the song with a half-sung, half-spoken final “who's gonna go your crooked mile?” You don't necessarily have to agree with the implied answer — that God or Jesus will go it — to appreciate the seriousness and urgency of the question.

Beautiful Grind

Is there a better and truer song about married life? And has Peter Case ever written a more romantic — not to mention erotic — song? His own comment is brief:

“Beautiful Grind” is one of my favorites on the record; it's another song about contemporary survival, and I love Greg Leisz's pedal steel on this one.

Like “On the Way Downtown,” this is a song about taking stock, about coming to grips with the inextricable joys and burdens of growing older and finding yourself entwined with other people who depend on you and also give you a reason to keep going when things gets tough. One of the things that impresses me about “Beautiful Grind” is how the opening verse switches seamlessly from past to present not once but twice. In doing so it manages to portray two distinct stages in the story of a relationship at the same time:

seven years ago we were friends at first
started off slow developed a thirst
one hot night the thunderhead burst
the flood rushed us away

now there's daily bread & love for real
dirt & pain & wounds to heal
first time I kissed you by the steering wheel
I knew our time had come

& there's work to do & children who
need our love & time
I see you there & you give me the sign
I feel the current in my heart
I only see you when the lightnin' strikes
it's a beautiful grind
a beautiful grind

The neatest transition is between the two parts of the second stanza, where the kiss is a sudden shift back to the past. I've always assumed that everything after that was in the present again, but it occurs to me now that the lines beginning “I see you there …” could easily be in both past and present, especially if you connect the “thunderhead” of the first stanza with the “lightnin'” at the end, which doesn't seem unreasonable.

There's a similar transition, by the way, in “Poor Old Tom,” Peter's song about a homeless ex-seaman who may have undergone an involuntary lobotomy years before. Neatly paralleling the man's wandering thoughts, at one point the scene switches, without warning, from the conversation Case is having with him to Tom's own recollections of events long past:

Now his eyes bulge out as we talk on the corner
He turns on the gurney they held him down
'Till one morning they wheeled him to another building
A surgery room with doctors standing 'round

Leisz really is very good here. The arrangement is uptempo and pretty straightforward; it's just Peter's picking, steady support from the rhythm section, and Leisz, who is almost always playing something but never gets in the way.

Drunkard's Harmony

If the pun can be forgiven, this is the most sobering song on the album, the one in which Case inverts the story of redemption sketched out in “Crooked Mile” to capture the state of mind of someone whose spiritual hunger — spiritual thirst, if you will — has brought them to the abyss. Except that the abyss is described in terms that sound strikingly like grace. Peter's own comment is blunt: “'Drunkard's Harmony' is about the spiritual side of being shit-faced drunk.” The lyrics are among his best.

The track begins with a single long bowed note on David Jackson's double bass. Peter's guitar plays little percussive patterns behind it; then when the bass drops off the guitar lays out the melody, a darker, more anxious variation on the kind of picking style heard in “On the Way Downtown.” The first stanza begins:

raised by wolves beneath the sputnik sky
your best friends were birds & bees
missing child of a missing child
then one day you found the key

I don't know whether the song is meant to be addressed to another person or to Case himself, or even if it matters. The “sputnik sky” reference makes it clear that it's someone of his generation, but the free-spirited “missing child” seems equally akin to both the female figures in “Let Me Fall” and “Honey Child,” and to “Crooked Mile”'s runaway.

In this descent into the netherworld, it is the bottle that takes Virgil's part:

took a first drink full of wind & stars
next one led you to the shore
there you stood with your empty glass
& all you wanted was some more

After these two stanzas the melody changes — let's for simplicity's sake call each of the song's two intricate halves one full verse — and the lyrics offer an idyll of

sweet summer nights
strollin' the diamonds
out to the trestle the first frost of fall
roamin' the fields with your fast companions
& all you could hear was their call
the harmony
broken harmony
pure
drunkard's harmony

“Strollin' the diamonds” is a beautiful phrase, even if I'm not sure what it means (baseball fields in a public park perhaps?). [As for the trestle, it may well be the one Case is shown walking across in Tom Weber's 2011 documentary Troubadour Blues] Notice that the stanza goes from summer to fall; this is more than a one-night bender. The “fast companions” could be friends, but then again maybe not, because as the verse concludes their are more voices calling, and they seem not to belong to this world:

LAUGHTER shining from your eyes
stranger voices harmonize
free from death unbound by time
stay and the spirits will sing
in harmony
drunkard's harmony

The spiritual elevation achieved by means of drink delivers what all mystics seek: transcendence, harmony, union with the divine. (I don't know why the word “laughter” is upper case in the lyrics; it may just be a typographical fluke.)

The second verse returns to earth, resuming the description of the drinker's education begun in the second stanza of the first verse. The reference to “heading west” in the wonderful third and fourth lines suggests Case's own westward migration, but no doubt much more than that is intended:

learned a trick to stop the spinnin'
when you couldn't slake your thirst
kept heading west but you never arrived
somehow your shadow got there first

(And it would be literally true, would it not, that someone walking westward at the same pace as the sun, and with the sun behind him, would be preceded by his shadow all the way out?)

This verse doesn't have a further stanza before the melody changes to the second part, for another vision of comfort and union. Notice that the seasons have continued around:

now the clock stops
it's 3 am forever
under the bridge where the winter turns Spring
safe in the cradle loved & protected
hearin' the voice of the King
in harmony
broken harmony
pure
drunkard's harmony

The praise of the sheltering King is unmistakeably religious in language, even if the object of the praise is not what one usually expects. And then there is one final, perfect stanza, addressed — I think — no longer to the drinker but to the one he (or she) worships:

smash the gifts your servants bear
hear this broken midnight prayer
not height nor depth nor dark despair
can hide from the love that He brings
the harmony
drunkard's harmony

In the first line the “you” of “your servants” must, I think, be the King, the false idol represented by the bottle; the servants, by that logic, would be the drunkards. Their offerings, perhaps, are their very lives, which the King then contemptuously destroys because their only value for him is in the pleasure of destroying them and in the fealty embodied by their tributes. He is an enslaving god, not the true God who liberates the spirit, but for his faithful the intoxicating “harmony” he offers is indistinguishable from what they think they seek from the divine. Has any song ever captured better the sinister allure of addiction?

Peter's guitar and the double bass carry the arrangement, with a powerful harmonica solo between the two verses and another after the second. At the end it's just the bass fades out and the guitar part slows down, then there's a little tinkling bit of percussion, like a swizzle stick being rattled inside a glass.

Still Playin'

And then after that ominous ending the next cut strikes up and it's another of Peter's signature guitar figures (this time backed by David Jackson's accordion) but now we've returned to major chords and happier thoughts to wrap the record up with. Once again he's looking back at younger days spent playing the streets of San Francisco:

we used to call 'em the dirt capades
buskin' on the corner the masquerade
walkin' 'round playin' guitar in the rain
singin' on the street as they come & go
killin' long hours when the crowds are slow
reachin' for the high notes as the world runs down the drain

(I don't know how many times I listened to this song before I noticed that the second through the sixth lines all start the same way, with present participles.) Here's what Peter had to say about the song:

“Still Playin'”: For years, I was a street musician in San Francisco, and this one works into the lyrics a lot of references to songs I used to perform when I was busking: Gene Autry's “Strawberry Roan,” Mance Lipscomb's “Cherry Ball,” Mississippi John Hurt's “Payday,” Lazy Lester's “Jailhouse Wall,” Gus Cannon's “Stealin',” and Reverend Gary Davis's “Cocaine Blues.” And the J-45, of course, is my Gibson guitar.

After the opening stanza the melody varies a bit for a few more lines, then there's what sounds like it's going to be the chorus:

still playin'
judgin' every note I play
only request I heard all night
was 'can you sing far, far away?'

But just when you expect it's going to start over for another verse, the pace picks up and there's yet another variation (this is where the song references get worked in). If you listen carefully it actually is more or less the same as the opening melody, but because of the double-timing it doesn't feel like it. Then there's a longer version of the “chorus,” and only after that does it finally circle back and take up where it began. The song is five minutes long, but because of its spun-out structure there are (depending on how you break it down) arguably only two verses, separated by just a few bars.

The second verse skips ahead to the present — or maybe it's still the past, or maybe it's both — in any case it sounds like we're in the interior of Dark Bob's room as the songs that make up Full Service No Waiting are being written:

& I'm up in a room with a J-45
waitin' on a wire wondrin' how to survive
with a scrap of yellow paper & a broken pen
older than I ever thought I'd be
with more responsibility
& I know I'm bound to stay
& pray & pay & play again

(Those are the printed lyrics, which may be outdated; it sounds like what Peter actually sings is "& I know I'd pay to play again," which falls off the tongue a lot easier.)

Coming where it does, the song brings us up from the depths of “Drunkard's Harmony,” but it also serves as a kind of response to a song like “See Through Eyes,” in which the communal joys of making music with friends seemed to be lost forever. In this concluding song Peter Case portrays himself still surviving, still playin' on into days to come, finding the joy in it, in spite of age and care and family responsibilities. It's an upbeat finish to a record that has covered an astonishing range of emotional and spiritual territory.

Acknowledgment is due to the participants at pcblog for sharing their insights over the last few years. — CK

Bread

She stood by the sink looking out through the window. It was dusk and a line of crows were passing above the bare trees, all flying in the same direction, heading for their winter roosts in the valley a few miles to the west. They knew where they were going but showed no sign of haste.

The backyard brambles were bare and stiff. The fruit trees had gotten out of control again; she would have to tend to them but not now, later when the worst of winter was over.

Her children were grown, gone. She poured flour into a bowl, scattered in a little sugar, salt, and yeast, then mixed it with a wooden spoon. She took a glass measuring cup and filled it at the tap, then poured the water in, scouring and beating the mixture together with a few efficient strokes. She added more flour, until she could no longer turn it with the spoon. Rolling her sleeves up, she gathered the uneven mass in her hands and worked it until it came together. She spread another bit of flour on a wooden board and began to fold the dough, slowly, strongly, with a practiced touch, adding a little more flour when it began to stick.

She thought about the motions she was making, how they had been performed, with little alteration, for thousands of years, from the time when some woman unknown, somewhere in the Levant or North Africa, had taken flour she had likely querned by hand, coarser and darker flour than this to be sure, and worked it together with a bit of saved and soured dough, then set it aside to let it ferment and rise.

Her own yeast came out of a jar, the flour came from god only knew where, all the ingredients had passed through a complicated nexus of exchange, had been processed, reduced to their most elemental and negotiable state, packaged, transported, sold and re-sold. But as she finished kneading and set a damp cloth over the dough it was no longer a commodity, it had reverted to its ancient identity, beyond all that. It would rise for a while and then she would bake it and eat it on her own, with a little leftover soup she had made two days before.

And she would keep on doing so, for a long time to come.