William Blake

Angels In the Alley

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This piece tells a true story of a remarkable coincidence that I don’t think has been noted before. We’ll start with William Blake. Blake evidenced lifelong faith in his art. Near the end of that life he was still laboring to complete a set of illustrations for Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”, even though he was in even more dire poverty than was the norm for him, even while he was deathly ill with liver disease that may have been brought on by the chemicals his engraving process required.

I recently had a chance to visit England, and one of the must stops for me was the Blake room at the Tate Gallery. The room is deliberately kept in dim light to protect the fading inks and watercolors, and I needed to get very close to the small pamphlet-sized prints of Blake’s work to see the detail. This room was so filled with contrasts. A dark room to protect what had been bright colors. Small prints filled with gods, angels, cosmic events. The work of a man who lived in poverty and general disregard that now has his own room in one of the great art museums of London. Sadness, triumph.

Back to this audio piece now. The first part re-tells an account from one of Blake’s friends of his death in a tiny apartment off an alley in London. You can’t quite visit the site of Blake’s last work and death. The area was later rebuilt. Looking at what was there now, I noted that the replacement building was The Savoy Hotel. That’s when the connection light went off in my mind, something that my twin interests in music and poetry was bound to see, and that’s told in the second part of “Angels in the Alley.”

You see, the Savoy Hotel was a major setting for “Don’t’ Look Back,” the documentary film about Bob Dylan touring England in 1965. And in that film is the famous film clip of Bob Dylan flashing hand lettered cards with key words as his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” blares out. Where was that filmed? In the alley next to the Savoy Hotel. One of Dylan’s Beat Generation older siblings, Allen Ginsberg, is standing in the background as this plays out. Just before the song winds down and everyone walks off, Ginsberg gestures grandly, raising both his hands over his head. It’s like he’s trying to show some kind of mind expansion. Or strike a ballerina pose. Or shape his arms like upraised wings, like an angel.

The gadget you should see below will let you play my audio piece, “Angels In the Alley” performed with the LYL Band.

 

Proverbs of Hell

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’ve talked enough (or too much) about William Blake. It’s time for some of Blake’s own words.

If you’ve read other early posts from this Parlando project, you know William Blake was a childhood hero of mine. As a young person I was attracted to the romantic, mystic Blake, the man who insisted on seeing the world his own way. As an adult, I grew to more admire the persistent Blake, the writer, artist, and printmaker who learned and redeveloped all the techniques he needed to continuously publish his work. This piece features yet another Blake, the social and political radical of the late 18th century.

There are many ways we can see the once singular figure of William Blake in our modern world. I’ve already compared him to the independent “indi” musicians who simply ignored the conventional entertainment world’s structure and gatekeepers, making their own forms of music, making their own venues and recordings, without waiting for permission–a natural thought for me who looks to musical arts—but specifically, Blake was combining words and art, so perhaps he was the first indi comic book creator?

If you want to see how Blake himself presented the work in which the “Proverbs of Hell” appeared, with his own words, lettering, drawings, printing and hand coloring see here.

Social and political radical? As an Englishman, Blake wrote this in a world in which one of England’s chief colonies (the USA) and its greatest historical enemy (France) had both undergone revolutions—revolutions that had instituted democratic republics, something unheard of in an age of monarchy. Tom Paine himself, was part of Blake’s social circle. And Blake was raised in a dissenting religion, as a Swedenborgian, a system of beliefs that fundamentally questioned official religious doctrine. By the time he wrote the “Proverbs of Hell”, he had begun to question if Swedenborg, the religious rebel, had been rebellious enough.

The resulting work has been memorized as the proverbs they are, but lines from it have also appeared as graffiti, bumper stickers and t-shirts. I have heard that one proverb, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” is engraved in gold letters on a wall in Donald Trump’s penthouse library. Oh my! That would be a long post in itself.

The music for this piece has a basic rock band core: drums, bass, guitar and piano; but then I’ve added a little orchestration: bassoon, flute, and some strings. The orchestration may first sound like a repeating loop, but it’s not, each repetition changes subtly as the timing and relative volume of each part vary.

To hear this reading of Proverbs of Hell, use the gadget that should appear below.


 

As August Empties

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In the prairie states of the US, we have come to the season of schools supplies and state fairs. All around the country, the weeks and days that students only lived during the summer now cannot escape becoming a countdown to the school-year.

It’s been decades since I’ve been pinched between the rollers of that calender, but August and September still hold some sense of a time to begin things before something ends or because something else is beginning. That’s one reason this project has been launched this month.

Nearly 50 years ago I met Dave Moore, the chief collaborator in this project, one September. 60 years ago, Frank Zappa met Don Van Vliet, who later performed as Captain Beefheart. 40 years ago, my late wife met the teacher Phil Dacey.

Across the country this fall, people are going to be meeting folks who will alter their lives. You may know or not know that as you meet them. Most likely you will be somewhere between knowing and not knowing—that’s the way our lives are—but what comes from those meetings depends on what you do.
“As August Empties” imagines that middle meeting, when two high school students made common cause over some old blues and R&B songs. Dave Moore plays the keyboard part.

I’ve always appreciated Don Van Vliet/Capt. Beefheart as an artist, but Frank Zappa became a model for me on how to be an artist after a brief meeting in 1970. I had other artists I emulated before that meeting, but I had not met them. For example, I admired William Blake for his visionary imagination and his stubbornness—but I did not yet know the full extent of his self-sufficiency. The William Blake I would have imagined in my youth would have been out there conversing with the angels he found waving in the boughs of trees. I didn’t yet know Blake the painstaking and inventive engraver, the man whose impoverished household none-the-less contained a printing press. Frank Zappa would have laughed himself silly thinking of anyone conversing with angel/trees, but Zappa and Blake honed the desire and skills to take the ideas they had and make them into things. Through a happy coincidence, Frank Zappa was able to be generous to me in showing a little of the making of things.

It’s a mistake to think that creative people are the people who come up with great ideas. No, creative people are the people who make things.

So hop into your Oldsmobile, cruise somewhere with an Internet connection, and then click on the gadget below to hear “As August Empties” coming out of your dashboard.