Lou Reed: Things Even Out - Issa's Sunday Service

There's a bit of magic
In everything 
And a bit of loss
To even things out

~ Lou Reed

The Last Interview

  Nine Songs by Lou Reed

from The East Hampton Star
 

"To our neighbors:

What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.

Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.

Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!

Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us."

— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

to saintly eyes
they are bodhisattvas...
cherry blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

PS. Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 181 songs

Power and Glory: Issa's Sunday Service, #134

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens

(Click here if above link doesn't work)

There is a lot in this beautiful, intimate little song by Lou Reed, who is making a fourth appearance on the Sunday Service. The reference to Leda and the Swan is what lands the song on the list, though there are other nods to literature, too, including the title itself.

Power And Glory

I was visited by The Power and The Glory
I was visited by a majestic hymn
Great bolts of lightning
lighting up the sky
Electricity flowing through my veins
I was captured by a larger moment
I was seized by divinity's hot breath
Gorged like a lion on experience
Powerful from life
I wanted all of it--
Not some of it
I saw a man turn into a bird
I saw a man turn into a tiger
I saw a man hang from a cliff by the tips of his toes
in the jungles of the Amazon
I saw a man put a red hot needle through his eye
turn into a crow and fly through the trees
swallow hot coals and breathe out flames
and I wanted this to happen to me
We saw the moon vanish into his pocket
We saw the stars disappear from sight
We saw him walk across water into the sun
while bathed in eternal light
We spewed out questions waiting for answers
creating legends, religions and myths
Books, stories, movies and plays
all trying to explain this
I saw a great man turn into a little child
The cancer reduce him to dust
His voice growing weaker as he fought for his life
with a bravery few men know
I saw isotopes introduced into his lungs
trying to stop the cancerous spread
And it made me think of Leda and The Swan
and gold being made from lead
The same power that burned Hiroshima
causing three legged babies and death
Shrunk to the size of a nickel
to help him regain his breath
And I was struck by The Power and The Glory
I was visited by a majestic Him
Great bolts of lightening lighting up the sky
as the radiation flowed through him
He wanted all of it
Not some of it


Leda and the Swan

    A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
    Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
    By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
    He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
    How can those terrified vague fingers push
    The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
    And how can body, laid in that white rush,
    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

    A shudder in the loins engenders there
    The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
    And Agamemnon dead.
                                          Being so caught up,
    So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
    Did she put on his knowledge with his power
    Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

W. B. Yeats

Here is Mr. Hughes with a spirited reading of what he, perhaps, admired most in nature, or man, or both.

Or neither.

----------------------------------

Photo by Yashi Wong

in the lightning
how he laughs...
Buddha!

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

With this post, the regular Sunday Service is back. In fact, there will be a little more activity around here once again after a bit of a working hiatus. Perhaps more on that at a future date.

We'll just have to see. Meanwhile, Bix Beiderbecke beckons.




best,
Don 

PS.Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 134 songs

Dirty Blvd.: Issa's Sunday Service, #124

Perhaps it is appropriate, with the Occupy the World movement (including Sesame Street) in full swing, that this week's selection is Lou Reed's powerful "Dirty Blvd."  It is one of Lou's heavy narrative lyrics and he manages to turn Emma Lazarus "The New Colossus" on its head with a swift backhand:




The New Colossus

   Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
   With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
   Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
   A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
   Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
   Mother of Exiles.  From her beacon-hand
   Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
   The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
   "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
   With silent lips.  "Give me your tired, your poor,
   Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
   The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
   Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
   I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

                     Emma Lazarus

In addition to paraphrasing lines to deadly effect, Lou renames the famous Statue itself:

Give me your hungry, your tired,
your poor I'll piss on 'em
That's what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses
Let's club 'em to death
And get it over with
and just dump 'em on the boulevard

Never one to take prisoners, Lou's perspective is every bit as relevant today in light of the recent nationwide protests as it was in 1989 when it first appeared on his dynamite New York album.  We think of this as an urban problem, but obviously its universality is becoming more and more apparent.

Here is a version of "Dirty Blvd.," along with "White Light, White Heat," done as a duet with David Bowie on the occasion of the later's 50th birthday.








-------------------


This week's featured poem from the archive comes from Lilliput Review, #64, December 1964, which has been featured before here and here.   This is the 12th poem featured from that issue and it's a good one.

When Asked To Name The Seven
        Most Beautiful Words. . .

              carnelian
              quince
              cloud
              fire
              gillyflower
              cane
              dusk

             Jeanne Shannon

red clouds--
above the butterfly too
autumn dusk

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

PS Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 124 songs

Subscribe to Lilliput Review

A Walk on the Wild Side: Issa's Sunday Service, #69

For anyone from (or who has spent lots of time in) the NYC area, today's Sunday Service selection hardly needs an introduction - still, there is the rest of the planet to consider.  Since Wikipedia says it reached #16 on the Billboard charts in 1972 and is #221 in Rolling Stone's "Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time," maybe I'm wrong about that

Guess those 500 songs must mean 500 "rock songs" cause, well, the Cole Porter and Irving Berlin seem to be missing.

Just saying ...

Lou Reed has told the story that the song originated from a supposed planned musical of the Nelson Algren classic novel of the same name.   A novel about the down and out, the alienated and alone, A Walk on the Wild Side, along with The Man With the Golden Arm, cemented Algren's reputation as an important mid-20th century American novelist. About Walk, Algren noted, "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives."  The New Orleans down and out are the direct antecedents for Reed's cast of NYC's disaffected, a group that comprise some of the most memorable ever portrayed in a rock and roll song.

Of course, there is nothing new in the world - one only need look to the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter to find a slightly earlier versions of Algren and Reed's powerful characters.

Here is the amazing title sequence from the 1961 film adaptation of Walk on the Wild Side.  An exquisite use of black and white (the cat's shadow as it walks in the opening moments is astounding) and visual metaphor.











----------------------------------------------------------------------


This week's featured poem comes from Lilliput Review #103, April 1999.   Ray Major passes the word: instructions are optional.

Cooking Rice

If I gave you two handfuls of rice
You would figure it out,
The size of the pot and how much water.
You would not starve
You would learn how to cook rice
And see that for the miracle it is.
Here then, here
Are two handfuls of words
Let us eat together.

Ray Major

though overlooked
the rice field grows...
summer moon

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue 

best,
Don

PS  Get 2 free issues     Get 2 more free issues     Lillie poem archive

Sweet Jane: Issa's Sunday Service, #44

Patti Smith & Lou Reed

It's time for a shout-out to all the poets (who "studied rules of verse") out there and, for the Sunday Service, I can't think of better way than Lou Reed and Sweet Jane.

This live acoustic version from Spanish TV is worth a look-see, especially for the chord thieves amongst us:





Lou is a god in NY, but, aside from this little number and "Walk on the Wild Side," a future LitRock selection, I'm not sure this is the case everywhere else (well, of course, there is always France and, it would seem, Spain). I'm a huge Lou and Velvet Underground fan, so there is no objectivity here. This Sunday Service is all about the worship.


-----------------------------------


This week's feature poem is from issue #68 of Lilliput Review, April 1995. In a previous post, 6 poems were highlighted from this issue. scarecrow's poem is about the ultimate transcendence, which all attain, no matter religion, race, or sex.

¶dreamed that my face was large
-composed of sifted red clay dirt,
-yucca,
-snakeweed,
-mesquite,

-hoofprints abounding.

scarecrow

in cuffs dragging
through the dirt...
plum blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don


PS To listen to all 44 selections so far (or to pick and choose individually), see the Issa's LitRock Jukebox on the sidebar. Or visit the spin off page here. Background info on all the songs and links back to the original posts can be found here.

As always, I'm offering the two current issues of Lilliput Review free (or have 2 copies added to your current subscription) for any litrock selections that I use in a future post. Just email me at: lilliput review at gmail dot com.