This Infinite Evening

some call social media

samarov:

few excerpts from an unpublished 28-page poem entitled “Ode to Kissassville” by Nelson Algren

Hog-Butcher, Stacker-of-Wheat, Freight-Handler, Piano-Mover,

Tall bold slugger set vivid among the little soft cities and
All-Around-Rotating-Fink-To-The-Nation
Where else (Contentedly at rest before the evening telly)
Could I watch PROFILE OF A SECRET WAR:
TASK FORCE TUFF KEEPING CHICAGO STRONG AND AMERICA MIGHTY
(WGN-TV assisting the forces of law and order
By entrapping two derelicts into a feeble attempt at mugging)
What other city could show me eight armed cops
Beating the living bejesus out of two defenseless winos
In Living Color?

Show me another city so proud to be alive
That it can fit two citizen-dress men into false bra’s
And tight gowns
Then send them down Skid Row bravely swinging handbags
And hips rolling.
What New York’s police would like to do, Chicago’s really can
In that contented evening hour when we learn to Trap Our Man.

It has stanzas such as this:

The perch — the alderman reminds us well –
Have disappeared.
The underwater population now consists
Of bloodworms, sludgeworms
And fingernail clams.
Yet once, where Marina Towers’ twin-atrocities now stand
The Pottawattomies hunted down both banks
And the river flowed cleaner and more deeply then.

And this:

Under the terrible burden of destiny
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs
Who has never lost a battle
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse
And under his ribs the heart of the people –
Hurray for our side.
If my City of the Big Shoulders
Stormy, husky, bawling
Yipping, yapping, yessing, crawling
Would only stop giggling like a farm-boy wearing earrings
On North Wells Street for the first time
Maybe we could find out what kind of joint we’re living in.

And this:

Again that hour when taxies are deadheading home
Before the trolley-buses start to run
And snowdreams in a lace of mist drift down
And paving-flares make shadows on old walls
When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel
All those whose lives were lived by someone else
Who never had a choice but went on what was left
Return along long walks where thrusts of wintry grass
By force of love have split the measured stone.

(This was part of a post by Jan Herman in Arts Journal from 2004)

When they filled out the forms at the passport office in New York City, the clerk at the desk said to Sun Ra, “Sir, you’re going to have to give us better information that this. We need your parents’ names, your birth date…” [Dancer] Verta Mae Grosvenor recalled that Sun Ra said, “‘That *is* the correct information.’ After a few minutes, the clerk went back to speak with her supervisor. The supervisor was no-nonsense, but after talking to Sun Ra she said, ‘Sir, why don’t you come back in a few hours.’ When we came back there was another person there and he knew about it, and he said, ‘We’ll just give you the passport.’ It just got so out that they just gave it to him!”

That passport gained talismanic force over the years, and musicians shook their heads when they saw it. Talvin Singh, an English tabla player, said: “His philosophy was that either you be part of the society or you don’t. And he wasn’t part of it. He created his own. I mean, I actually saw his passport and there was some weird shit on it. It had some different stuff.”

—John Szwed “Space is the Place: the Lives and Times of Sun Ra” (via mothersnewsofficial)

The Jesus Lizard live at Lounge Ax on the northside of Chicago, May 18, 1991.

TONIGHT ONLY
at Chicago’s famed Empty Bottle