Christopher Shillock

Zero Hour

2012-02-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

Careening amphetamine dawn -
cell phone stalkersmob the streets
and there's shelter in your temple
where the air is light and the light
writhes in clenched glass teeth,and the choir's singing
a hymn by Leonard Cohen.
There's sanctuary in your body;
the rising light's a sacrifice
to your long golden hair.
Are you surprised that I wrote you this poem?
Now the clock has stopped,the pale mob transfixed.
The future isn't born yet;
the past will not die.
Is any of this real,
or just that song by Leonard Cohen?
Your knife blade is nervous now;
mercy gleams metallic
when I kneel for the host.
Your trigger finger's twitches
while I'm kissing the old scars
your lovers left behind.
Are you a little frightened
that I raised you this altar now?
Are you surprised
that I made it of gold?

from Invisible Jazz. In tribute to the release of Leonard Cohen's new album Old Ideas.

it was good to meet you, Leonard

Platypus in Paris

2012-01-19T18:21:00.000-08:00

for Justin Shillock

The platypus strolled down the Boul' St. Mich'
Twixt po' mo's and Platonists,
leaving a quandary of philosophers pondering:
the bill of a duck,
fur of a mole,
eggs like a turtle's,
sponge for a breast, claws with venom and a beaver's tail,
asking:
Is the essence of platypus One
or many or else is "platypus" the
deconstruction of the Taxonomic Paradigm?

The platypus slouches through Place Pigalle.
louche, played jazz
with Dali Picasso Braque and Gris,
a panoply of painters plastered in Paris.
sang
footbone connected to the
eye cone connected to the duckbill
connected to the headline
Platypus Bites Man

The platypus scuttled into the Jardin des Plantes
nested in the platypusarium
danced a gigue with Flat Foot Floogie,
a Mlle. Ornithorhynque!
Vexed lexicographers explained: "bird nose",
as ornitho from ornitho-logist bird, conjoined with rhinoceros,
from a herd of rhinocerontes
(and few have heard of rhinocerontes
but fewer still, of puddles of platipodes
except for some folks from the antipodes.)

Thinking Globally - Acting Locally - and Making it Personal

2012-01-08T17:42:00.000-08:00

08/24/2008

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii [..] exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited - Mark Penn, chief strategist for the Clinton campaign.

The Clinton campaign didn't adopt Penn's proposals. Since they'd never shown the slightest evidence of scruples before, I have to guess that they judged their opponent's values and culture to be, basically American.

.....You may have noticed recently that I've promoted the campaign to Save Florence Court.

Florence Court in SouthEast Minneapolis is a grass yard cloistered by row houses dating from 1886. When you walk in there at night, it's like stepping back 100 years. Shaded lamps like gaslights highlight each individual porch and strings of bulbs twinkle across the central garden.

Living there are students and professors, artists, civil servants, punks and hippies, young and old. In the early 80's residents included activist Marv Davidov of the Honeywell Project, Jim Walsh, musician, journalist and heart of Twin Cities, together with a future underground poet-laureate of downtown Minneapolis and his son Ian.

What formed residents into a community was the courtyard itself. On Summer nights we would all gather at the barbecue pit with hamburgers or hot dogs along with potluck bowls of salad and beer. After dinner the entire complex turned into an open house. You could wander into an apartment, sit, talk a while, have a drink and move on somewhere else and a different group of people. Special days were celebrated by the whole Courtyard. I remember the 80th birthday party for a woman who had lived at Florence Court since she came to the US as a refugee after World War II.

Courtesy of Save Florence Court

Throughout the years landlords have tried to develop this prime property near the University of Minnesota. In 1983 the Court residents got a historical designation for the largest building in Florence Court. (Kudos to architect/resident Sally Grans-Korsh.) It seemed like the Courtyard was saved. This year though, a new landlord came up with a plan to tear down the other buildings and to erect a four-story student dorm, right up abutting the courtyard.

Last August 12th there was a meeting of the Minneapolis Historical Preservation Committee to pass on the fate of Florence Court..

.....I'd been in Minneapolis City Hall before, but only to the Police Department on the first floor and the basement where the jails are. Certainly never as high as the fifth floor where the Mayor and City Council had offices and where the Preservation Committee met in an elegant chamber, itself a worthy act of historical preservation.

Florence Court turned out en masse. Sally and I and other past residents showed up. The most dramatic testimony came from Samir who spoke in broken English, gesturing passionately. He told of growing up in Lebanon during 15 years of Civil War: "killing which decided nothing." When he moved to the US, he had been filled with hatred. He felt frightened and threatened after 9/11 but his neighbors in the Court responded to him with love. He told them he was Muslim. They didn't care. "I used to be a hater. Now I am a lover. This is what America is about." he proclaimed.

In the end, the Committee denied permission to tear down the old buildings. And they did so for exactly the right reasons, because a valuable community had grown up here and should not be destroyed.

And I want to tell this story - not because I care about the U.S., or any other nation for that matter, but because Minneapolis is my home, these are my people.

I need to tell this story now, because, with the exception of one lone Green member, the Mayor and City Council of Minneapolois seem determined on a historical restoration of Chicago, 1968. Soon, in the basement of that same City Hall, the jails will throng with protesters, especially in the blind spots on the video monitors, where the police can't be seen beating their prisoners. .

I need to remember that there are people here who are sickened by Mark Penn and landlords and police and the Republican Party, that such people really can best represent "basic American values and culture".

Thanksgiving 2011

2011-12-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

Home for the Holidays

We shall sit around the table in silence
as you smile your crooked smile
and dance your jerky dance
and tell all those little jokes
that so amuse your witty friends,
for we are your family: stuffed and severe.

We have survived the cycles
of screaming birth and squalid death
through rituals of muted colors
and perfumed notes.
We have held back the Flood
through the unrelenting litany of our judgments.
So your bright lies will not rattle our teacups;

The music of your festivals
will fade away at our doors
as you turn your back upon
that army of stray dogs and children

which follows you through the streets.
Then you shall be stuffed with white meat,
mashed potatoes and gravy,
until your limbs stick out stiff and straight
like a hand-sewn doll with a painted face.
You shall sink down slowly into
the cushions of our couches;
and then you shall become one of us.

- John Christopher Shillock / Irregular Conjugations (1998)

Great Things Have Happened
by Alden Nolan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
- Alden Nowlan / What Happened When I Went to the Store for Bread

1963 for me: I was living with Boyd Howard, both of us just out of college. We had an unauthorized one-room sublet on East 29th, off Park Avenue which, like the building in Nowlan's poem, had fallen in the world. We shared a bathroom with the building superintendent, a crusty old sea dog, and paid him $20 a month not to report us to the landlord. In recompense he took it upon himself to act as our butler of sorts. He washed our socks, dried them on the radiator, made coffee and woke us in the morning when we overslept. The faded elegance, the genteel poverty of it all, seemed normal to us. We were young and bright and everywhere we looked the future stretched out to infinity.

One winter night we were heading out to a party. We got to Boyd's car and it had been snowing. Clearing the windows off, we started making snowballs and throwing them. Soon we were laughing and tossing armfuls of snow at each other. It was cold out and we felt warm and we were engaged in mock battle and and we were best friends. It was New York and all the lights seemed to sparkle like snowflakes swirling through the air.

Thanksgiving day and it has snowed in Minneapolis. I am thankful for the poet Alden Nowlan who can truly bring back such moments. I'm thankful, above all for my children and my grandchildren and for good friends. Also for this whole damn city of Minneapolis and for New York in the 60's and the 1969 Mets. Finally I'm thankful for the internet and this future which it bought about, a future far beyond any of our dreams.

Occupy Minnesota

2011-10-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

I got back from Occupy Minnesota at the Hennepin County Building this morning. I had attended the 5 pm rally yesaterday (there'll be one every day at that time) and tried sleeping overnight. I'm afraid I'm not used to sleeping outdoors and came home about 3 am. . The others who did spend the night were much younger than me, although during the day, there was a heavy mix of generations.

Generally I liked what I saw. There was a positive atmosphere. Everyone was friendly. There was lots of serious discussion and hope. I saw people from the arts community I'd never seen at rallies before.

The police were generally non-intrusive. When there was a march, the police stopped traffic. Indeed the whole collaboration with police seemed strange and scary to me.

But then, what I liked most that nothing was happening that I would ever have planned out. And, as my old comrade Christopher Gunderson points out,"All the things I planned didn't work, so I've learned to stop complaining."

One of things I heard discussed was the need to focus on a concrete set of demands. I've come to the opinion that the lack of bullet point is actually one of the strengths of this movement - partly for reasons listed in this articles kasamaproject.org/2011/10/04/how-did-i-get-here-a-problem-of-know-it-all-subtraction/, partly because the lists I've seen range from the trivial "take down the statue of the bull by wall street" to the obvious "people over profit" to the simplistic "Smash Capitalism Now" and partly because, once you articulate your demand, either you win or you lose, but in either case the movement dissolves.

I think we may have a case of political ju-jitsu: turning what were formerly our weaknesses into strengths.

My Room - My Books - My Self

2011-10-04T06:36:00.000-07:00

My last girlfriend used to complain that my apartment looked like Miss Havisham's parlor (I always did go for the literate ladies). Now another woman wants to come up here and the place has metastasized into a one-room Collyer mansion. (As you can see at wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers, the Collyers were well read gents, but truly awful interior decorators.)

It had reached the point where I would bring a package home, set it down and never find it again. I see now why old people make such a fuss over little things: minor details, unattended for long enough, build up into major disasters. Something had to be done; so I started in a total clean up which was to take me 4 months.

The hardest part was going through my books. People always say they can't bear to part with their books. I always held onto my books, the ones I enjoyed, with the intention of rereading them some day.

I had to admit though, at age 69 I would never be able to read all the books I wanted to; even another lifetime wouldn't suffice. And, given the choice between rereading a book, or picking up something new, I always chose a book I hadn't read before. What's more, my room had already reached the saturation point. In order to bring in a new book, I had to remove an old one.

Out went books I had already read . It wasn't much of a problem for fiction or genre novels, mostly mysteries - except for the classics of course: those I might want to consult at least, perhaps, some day - so I held onto them.

The Internet influenced other choices. All my maps and atlases got tossed. - its been decades since I've used anything but Mapquest. Art books which were falling apart also went: see Google image search. I suppose I could have gotten rid of 2 shelves of foreign language dictionaries and grammars - they haven't been used for years, but you never know when a really obscure word might pop up. Plus, there aren't any usable Greek- English dictionaries on the net.

Also given away were books in languages and subjects I hadn't quite mastered: medieval philosophy in Latin or Italian poetry. I once read that Shelley learned German from reading Goethe, so I picked up an edition of Faust with English notes & vocabulary - to become like Shelley. That went on the discard pile. But then I realized - Faust is a classic - so back it went back into my shelves.

All together, I had 15 boxes of books packed up and set out in my hallway for the people in the building to pick through. I also set out about half of my belongings. The books hardly moved, not much demand for Averroes in Latin, but my heavy furniture quickly disappeared into my neighbors' rooms.

I was going to sell the remaining books at used stores. But then my friend, Dwight Hobbes, told me about Hidden Treasures Thrift Stores which will come to your place and pick up your books. I thought a minute and realized that was a lot better than schlepping all over town to get, maybe, 10 cents on the dollar. One phone call and 15 boxes of books vanished from the hallway.

Used cd's are a lot easier to sell - a couple trips to Cheapo Records did it. But first I transferred my 500 + cd's to a 1 terabyte external drive, about the size of an old Modern Library Giant volume. In my lifetime I've seen 5 formats for playing music come and go: 78 rpm shellac disc, 33 rpm vinyl, cassette tapes, cd and mp3. The last is the handiest and I hope is sticks.

One final space-saver from the Internet. I had always wanted a coat tree by my door: it hardly takes up any room and it's right there when you take your coat off. But I could never find one. There weren't any "Coat Tree Stores" in the Yellow Pages and I never saw coat trees in a furniture store. I went on the Internet and had one delivered in 2 weeks.

Finally when my son Ian came to help me cart everything off to resell or recycle or donate, it took us only a couple hours.

There was one last item I had to attend to. When I moved into my building about 20 years ago it looked like a hotel from a movie set, specifically the Bradbury from Blade Runner (a movie that's always given me comfort.) The hallways had no electricity. You needed a candle to find your way into the bathrooms. Whenever it rained or snowed, the ceilings poured and the walls flowed with cascades of water. It was like having an indoor fountain right in my room, for only $200 a month.

By now though, the landlord had plugged the roof. My outside wall, by the windows, was left a slowly crumbling heap of plaster. Several coats of paint weren't enough to hold it back. Fortunately my friend Scott Vetsch lavishes the same care and precision on home repair as he does on his poetry. He looked at the wall and had it taken down to the brick in 2 days for half what a commercial contractor would have charged.

Finally, somewhere in the world. I had made a place for myself. With the masterpieces

of literature, history and music were all at my fingertips, I had my life back again.

<<< "The rooms in which writers (that subspecies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container to their thoughts. Here the writer can make his own bed among the books, be as monogamous or polygamous a reader as he wishes, choose an approved classic or an ignored newcomer, leave arguments unfinished, start on any page opened by chance, spend the night reading out loud so as to hear his own voice read back to him, in Virgil's famous words, under "the friendly silence of the soundless moon."
Alberto Manguel- The Library at Night ..

What I did this Summer - 2010

2011-07-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

Have you ever looked at a map and wondered about the places you find: remote highways, cities with strange names, provinces with unruly borders? I had always been curious about two dots off the coast of Newfoundland. They are a different color from Newfoundland, or Canada or any other place on the map of North America. They are, in fact, a different county. The islands of St. Pierre & Miquelon are part of France, the last motes of a territory that once stretched halfway across the continent.

I've started traveling again, in my old age. I get Social Security, which is barely enough to live on. That means I need a job too, but the two together bring in more money than I've ever made before. So this summer I had the means to indulge my curiosity.

Still, the two specks of France seemed too small and too remote to merit a visit: population 6,000, and only accessible by ferry or air from the province of Newfoundland. However I've always had a special love for Newfoundland - because of a dog we had when my children were little. Our Newfoundland's name was Jonas and he was 160 pounds of shaggy strength and love and soft warm fur. Like Lord Byron's Newfoundland, Boatswain, he possessed

Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man
without his Vices.

(virtues which Lord Byron himself possessed, but along with all those vices). Sentimental perhaps, but surely the land that bred such creatures would be worth a visit.

Lastly, I knew that there were great summer Jazz festivals in Canada. Since I was traveling alone, it would be good to have something to do at night. Newfoundland does has a jazz festival, the Wreckhouse Jazz Festival in the capital of St John's, but none of the performers seemed familiar. I won't pretend I know every great Jazz musician in North America, but I didn't want to travel 2,000 miles to see people I probably wouldn't walk down my block, to the Dakota Bar, for.

However, the week before the Wreckhouse Festival, St. Johns was hosting something called the Sound Symposium: an "international festival of new music". It featured some famous performers, like Moritz Eggert from Germany and Eve Egoyan from Toronto. There were other performers I didn't know, but they all sounded interesting too. So I decided to spend that week in St. John's, Newfoundland and take off for a few days to ride the ferry to France.

The harbour of St. John's reminded me of Duluth. On one side of the inlet the city marches up the hill in stages, like a diagram of urban history and the advance of technology. Down by the water is the Age of Diesel, gritty with international freighters.

Next up, you find the Age of Steam, and the massive stone emporiums of the Victorian Era.

Above that are the houses where people live. The buildings are colorful and cheery (unlike Duluth), to brighten up the cold dreary Winters.

And, at the very top ridge, a fringe of the North Woods.

The place to take it all in is the top of Signal Hall (red circles above). It's where, in 1901, Marconi took advantage of the height, 500 foot above sea level, and the unimpeded sweep 2000 miles across the Atlantic, to receive history's first wireless signal across the ocean. (Marconi got the credit and fame for inventing the radio. It wasn't until 1943 that the priority of Nikola Tesla's patents was recognized in court.)

I mention all this, because the city of St. John's and the sea itself became part of the Sound Symposium. The festival opened by the waterfront with the Egyptian songs of Maryem Tollar and Middle Eastern dancing by Roula Said. ("New music" apparently meant "music new to us." The Symposium included a Zimbabwean mbira player and a Vietnamese throat singer and it was all fresh and utterly fantastic). Then, immediately, the whistles of all the ships in the harbour opened up in a fanfare: the Harbour Symphony, which was repeated, with variations, every day of the Festival.

On the final night of the Sound Symposium, we were bussed to Cape Spear, where a park and lighthouse mark the easternmost point in America. After wandering improvised performances by all the musicians, they gathered at a bunker facing out to the ocean to play Moritz Eggert's thundering barcarole across the Atlantic to Europe.

St. John's also gave the festival a friendly, small-town feeling. It seemed like the entire arts community of Newfoundland came out for the Sound Symposium. And, as the participants and audience kept running into each other all week , a community was spontaneously generated. You met and talked to famous artists - and they talked to you.

Hearing Eve Egoyan performing with the precision of a lacemaker and her ironic delicacy was a pleasure. To meet her and talk to her was an honor - also she gave me one of her cd's. Others I got to know were Ben Grossman who played an electric hurdy-gurdy with electrodes poking out all over like a robot centipede. Also Frank Pahl and his partner Terry Sarris from Detroit. Terri is a film maker and Frank plays automatic music installations and toy instruments. He also recorded several of Eugene Chadourne's cds. They introduced me to the Parisian Tran Quang Hai who seemed to participate in and enjoy every aspect the Sound Symposium.

Photo by Tran Quang Hai

I did tear myself away from St John's for a couple days to take in the French island of St..Pierre: five hours drive and 2 hours on a ferry blindly churning and skipping the waves through the fog. The islands, indeed any land, were invisible until we passed a small lighthouse that marked the harbor of St. Pierre. Alongside the ferry though, we saw whales playing in the icy waves.

Photos by Tran Quang Hai

It was like an encounter with God. The whales were immense and mysterious and perfectly at home in the endless depths.

When we got to St. Pierre, the people spoke French, and deployed the Euro.. Indeed they speak mainland French rather than the French of the neighboring Quebequois. (Newfoundlanders too have a distinct accent, like an Irishman speaking in pirate.) The people of St. Pierre are resolutely French; even more French than the Hexagon. They still close down the island between 12:00 & 2:00 PM.

It took me an hour to walk through town and across the island. I'm sure St. Pierre was a typical small French fishing village. There were no sidewalk cafes, no used book stalls, no kiosks with 10 daily papers. Aside from several gourmet restaurants. there were no treasures of French culture. I realized it isn't so much France that I love, as Paris - the way I love Minneapolis or New York, but not the U.S. Incidentally, I did meet a sweet couple from New York City named Fred and Lenore. They've posted some fine photographs of Newfoundland at Fred's Domain.

Back in St John's, by the last day of Sound Symposium there were still two things I hadn't done: go to the top of Signal Hill and see Newfoundlands. I had seen statues of Newfoundlands and postcards; it is, after all, the national symbol. Of course, in 55 years in the United States I've only seen one bald eagle in the wild, so I shouldn't have been surprised. I asked the tourist office where the Newfoundlands were. Perhaps I had a vision of a park where packs of wonderful shaggy beasts would romp and paddle around They looked at me strangely: Newfoundlands in Newfoundland are referred to as "Newfoundland dogs".

I had had an accident with my rental car and the only way up Signal Hill was by foot. I started out late morning about a mile and a half and 500 feet up. It took me an hour, plodding on the steep places, catching my breath on the level spots. Finally, at the top, I had my panorama of the inlet and the harbour and the city. And, posed upon the ramparts like a guardian spirit, was a Newfoundland. Just then the ships in the harbor all blew their horns like a brass choir on the opening bars of the last daily Harbor Symphony.

What more could I ask for?

SOME OF THE GREAT MUSICIANS I MET

Tran Quang Hai sings Amazing Grace with overtones in one breath.

EXCERPT - Eve Egoyan performs Inner Cities, a 5-hour piano piece by Alvin Curran.

Benn Grossman playing the electric hurdy-gurdy with Autorickshaw

Door-to-door Doorbell Salesman with Frank Pahl

from recent movies

2011-04-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

All that we disclose of ourselves forever
is this warning
Nothing that you built has stood
Any system you contrive without us
will be brought down.

- Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire

Sean Parker:I brought down the record companies with Napster.
Eduardo Saverin: (Facebook co-founder) Uh, sorry. You didn't bring down the record companies.They won.
Sean Parker: In court?
Eduardo Saverin: Yeah.
Sean Parker: Do you want to buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?

- Social Network.