Film Noir

The Dick & the Dame, or Dave Moore goes Pulp Noir

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This project spends a lot of time in the first quarter of the 20th century where the public domain diamonds are scattered free for recutting and reuse — but If I was able to expand this, I’d probably skip the Thirties and delve into the 1940-1965 mid-century quarter, the era I personally remember through youthful-eyed memory. What were those adults up to then, what were they thinking?

We can never answer that fully. Even through that time’s poetry and other art we can only get shadows and dappled sunlight. The high-level summary is “The Greatest Generation” with its dedication to institutions and its obverse face of turned-away conformity. One way the dark leaked out from this gloss color print with scattered blood stains was through paid-by-the-word hard-boiled detective fiction and the run-fast through the projector snap-traps of film-noir. This stuff was white-male written, and mostly for male audiences too. Misogynistic? Well, yes — and in its defense it’d plead misanthropic. That first quarter of the 20th century had its Lost Generation, but this quadrant had exiles. The former wandered off in search of something and doesn’t know where home is anymore. The latter was sent away from home and was pretty sure it couldn’t go back.

The misogyny can bother me when I read or view it, but the magnetic soundtrack of caustic oppositional views attracts me too. And then the outmoded slang involved can seem almost Shakespearian now, the anarchic becaming archaic.

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“The underwires on this dress are killing me, so don’t think for a moment I won’t use this piece.” Dames on the covers, dicks on the bylines.

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When Dave Moore and I got back together to set down some live “in-the-moment” tracks this spring, Dave brought two outstanding longer pieces he’d written since we last worked together. The first, already presented here was “The Wall Around Heaven,”  a satire which is set in our present day. If you haven’t heard it, you should. Here’s a link to it.  I can’t praise it enough. The second I present today is a re-weaving of pulp detective and film noir tropes, told though. as Dave turns the pages, with his own poetic verve. Language of course was the chief freedom of the grayscale Abelards & Heloises in those stories, and Dave makes the most of that argot. In a note on the copy of the text we performed this spring, Dave wrote that “The Dick & the Dame”  was “inspired by Robert Coover’s Noir.”   Dave marked a handful of lines as “taken or shaped by Coover.”

The music here is Dave’s too, though some of the decoration is mine. There’d be a temptation to dress this set in mid-century Jazz sounds, which I didn’t do here. Afterall, Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives”  went with the end of the mid-century era with its reggae and Secret Agent Man guitar twang. I went with funky electric guitar neck wringing and whammy bar abuse which would scorch the manners of the Jazz cigarette world. The result is longer than our usual pieces, and neither Dave nor I are well-known poets who’ve written well-known poems, so this breaks from our “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” format. I figure: by this point summer is breaking out and there are fewer listeners and readers of this project until fall anyway. Might as well turn it up and go loose today.

Warning: in this crescendo of innuendo, bad words and flawed people show up.  You can hear that and it with the player gadget below, or where that doesn’t show, with this highlighted hyperlink.

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Rats Alley

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing in our April Poetry Month serialization of “The Waste Land”  by T. S. Eliot, it’s come time to perform the next section of the poem, which I call “Rats Alley.”

It just happens that this week I got a copy of Martin Rowson’s “The Wasteland,”  a 1990 comic-book riff on Eliot’s poem as if written by hardboiled-detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler and filmed like “The Big Sleep”  or “The Maltese Falcon.”  Rowson notes that in “The Long Goodbye”  Chandler had referenced Eliot’s “Prufrock”  with a character quoting “In the rooms the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” and having the character ask his detective Marlowe “Does that suggest anything to you sir?”

Marlowe replies, “Yeah—it suggests that the guy didn’t know very much about women.”

Though that’s clever repartee, charges that Eliot was naïve about women or even misogynistic can be difficult to disentangle from his general misanthropy. A female Chandler character may be given more apparent agency than the women in Eliot’s “The Waste Land,”  but both the male and female voices of “The Waste Land”  are frankly damaged and the minor male characters, wraiths and zombies.

Rowson Wasteland1

Sometimes with a dame you gotta show’em some quotations in Greek or Latin.

 

In any case, Rowson’s comic-book/graphic novel is a lot of fun for fans of Film Noir and Chandler, or Eliot and Modernist lit. His drawings have more in-jokes than a season of “The Simpsons”  watched with a finger on the pause button. And from his notes Rowson supplies in my edition on dealing with Faber and Faber and the Eliot estate, it could have been even funnier if any of them had allowed the comedic-take to use any of the lines from the poem. I laughed often reading the Rowson, but never so much as when he recounts being refused the rights to use the ancient Greek and Latin quotes Eliot dropped into his poem, because Eliot’s rights now include them as part of a unique compilation. That may well be legally sound, but it’s also howlingly funny. Eliot as he wrote his “Waste Land”  was clearly borrowing widely from other authors’ work, because he thought it would show us something new when he put them in another context—the same thing that Rowson’s book sought to do.

Which is also what we try to do here as part of the Parlando Project, show you familiar and unfamiliar words in the context of different music and performance styles.

“We are in Rats Alley, where the dead men lost their bones”

“Rats Alley”  is a dialog, and the two speakers are clearly broken vessels. The woman dissatisfied, depressed, afraid, maybe even unstable. The man, numbed, haunted, unable to express even the short expressions of discontent the woman speaks. When he (once in the poem, three-times in my performance) breaks into the cryptic “We are in Rats Alley, where the dead men lost their bones” I decided to alter the voice, to make it a third voice. She’s asking him to speak, to tell her what’s going on, but she doesn’t seem to have heard him say anything, other than a litany, literally, of “nothing.” And so, I’m portraying the Rats Alley line as his inner torment, his monster, that is heard loudly, but only in his head.

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“In the rooms the women come and go, digging riffs from Ahmad Jamal”

 

Rats Alley sounds like yet another reference to some dark Jacobean revenge play, samples from which Eliot has already peppered his poem with. If it is, no one has found that work. Some speculate it sounds like the darkly humored street-signs WWI trench-soldiers hung on their subsurface battle lines. If so, then the last voice, the fourth voice of the piece, an imaginary, comic ear-worm song Eliot has made up, “That Shakespearean Rag,”  could also be an internal voice. It’s sometimes been considered to reference Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder’s “That Mysterious Rag,”  a giant pre-WWI hit with lyrics that say “Did you hear it? Were you near it? If you weren’t then you’ve yet to fear it.” In the hit parade context, the lyrics turn out to be just bragging that this rag is a killer hook “because you never will forget it.” Eliot substitutes Shakespeare in his parody, but is this male voice a soldier, haunted by the trenches and dead comrades to whom old tunes now take on a new context, a sinister edge? It’s a bit of a stretch, but could Eliot have planned to use “That Mysterious Rag’s”  mock-dangerous lyrics as a counterpoint to his scene—wouldn’t that have been a powerful sample!—but was enjoined by copyright issues?

To hear my performance of “Rats Alley,”  today’s segment of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,”  use the player below. You can hear the first section, “The Burial of the Dead”  or the first part of the “A Game of Chess”  section which I performed as “Visions of Cleopatra”  by looking in our previous posts this April as we celebrate #NPM2018.