Waking in the New Year

Survival Transformation

pendulum targets pragmatic dancers
swollen fleeting down the lifeboat floor

*

a crux of water / walking on wood  
where piety boats follow the blind
rafter diffusion essential theorists

walking corollaries 
leather-faced, dead-eyed

parallels in consequence
reach a withered crescendo marker
buoyed sequence to reef

*

infusions needed lay no claim 
to finite darkening / their talk

breeds encapsulation shutters
chancing dogmatic interludes 
caterpillar etymology transition

*

morphology tactile as presence

in form or manner of discontent




Increase in Direction

rudder placebo tactics inure
federated tax rations from 
pillbox allure stations passing
travesty bandages bellied
past leaking feats of renown
a vantage known past giving
leaky memoir facades intruded
on welling masses encasing
voluptuary lace and massage
embracing furtive sex bandits
in transaction predilection pits
shifting gears to transition tides
mud rising to practical heights
where radium artists dream
peptide auguries in rebellion
the nodal fury seams ripping 
sure passions decreed impure
where practice barns evade
rapture sessions turning rare
under every pelota template 
inflecting caterpillar paper
mushroom fandango suites
play appellant apertures fixed
in garnish cream slathering
fluid emotion tentacles prey
summer ensures blood dreams
no amnesty packets allowed
domestic infusion bracketing
sure as practiced a cappella 
wipers hood their ornaments
before living applause clasps
future swallows before breath
takes a year to harrow its toll
exchanges relay cold affection
toned the penalty box fiasco
more to the rolling grasp oiled
beyond mention or standard
deviation eunuchs assemble
pantry lies that slowly inhabit
parchment reciprocity guidelines
implementing rabbit precursors
under stadium frontage laws
passed in rearview mirrors fit
to stage an ampersand colony
accord gauged treaty removal
supplemental labors rescinding
the hold on where the profits sit 
much nearer than the rearview
offers for its unpaid hindsight
relived as memory vacations
narrowed to a blink and wallow
rankling crossroads motor events
where baking canon fodder meets 
a slow delirium mix banking on
a shore curve resembling hidden
angles to simulate belfry chatter
timing the clinical mix to fixation
rides aching in the saddled more

True Class

Epidermal factotum cluster

goitered rumors bared below

the gusto meter. Clairvoyant

as a vacant shredder climb,

the mustered stealth depicts

canceled aficionado cults.

Embossed subtonal rapture

sheds hidden currents to

mirrored dicta. Matters fed

to the misconstrued grew

abstract from data removal

at the outlet. Gaunt crossings

rout the decay with tactful humor

shared as wealth. A message

relayed the act, approval shattered

the retrospective somnolence,

moving the total muster to

latent centipede clatter.

Slowing the act of gathering

breeds the needed hovel insignia

who dare a shared display

of absence while the shadows

cleave to labors of the caste.

Moebian Rerun

to the hydrant 
where the tickle corps assembles 
its cleavage, 
even there blood tanks have meaning: 

an indelicate casserole
rushed, ahead of caloric double takes
assembled
for the graffiti pit induction

conducted
heirloom dividend porch vents.
Castrati instamatic,
roomed with isolate vocation, stammers

a camera. Enamored
of its polyflux intake, stratagem’s
savagery  
at an influx date’s repellent humor

acts charming as
flying a cursive meat bandit
bravado
multiplied by accessory tangents.

Freely modeled
scanner panels flashing darkly
pass returns

as if they were slowly going

Depth Surface

cranberry mystic placebo infusion
metropolitan transfer umbrage 
thickets patrol matador infusion tanks 
partial avenue casters litigating
subtle membranes adage nostalgic
felicitations and fare well despite
inversion tactics breeding reversals
as Tantric onslaughts ticketing lumber
managers at adornment diffusion 
seeding next breed of errant seminars 
at fox seating aquarium hostels
where attrition folds need with 
confusion to confiscate greed 
for admonitory proverbs linked to
selfish gerunding untimely slights 
of matter or presence as sentiment
or precedent allowable under 
incidental scrutiny insights lacquers 

gained from veneering greater depths 

Here's one of my "lost" works that was never discovered in the first place. And some praise:

I really can't remember the last time I read an extended work in one sitting. Vernon Frazer's Commercial Fiction is a great book, a book I've always felt someone should write, thinking maybe I would do it at some point--and now I don't have to. Vernon Frazer taken the shallow, mind-numbing world of mass communication and used it against itself, appropriating its techniques and making them work as fiction, as a text that can inspire intelligent reflection rather than consumer idiocy. At the same time, he's taken the possibility of media critique through fiction and shown that it's already trapped in precisely what it intends to subvert. Yet he makes this work as an aspect of the critique, since his position as meta-author is ultimately outside the pseudo-maelstrom of commodity capitalism and its image system. Or is it? By spilling past the putative closure implied by his meta-authorial perspective, Frazer forces us to confront the possibility that any "victory" over mass imagery is dubious. And Vernon Frazer makes it all so much fun. I blew snot repeatedly. I loved the monster movie references at the end. And the transformations, juxtapositions, the shifts in levels of "reality" that occurred throughout.

---Stephen-Paul Martin

Author,Changing the Subject

Commercial Fiction

www.scribd.com

An author writing Commercial Fiction while working for a government agency awakens in such a disoriented state that he can’t tell if he’s writing at work or at home. His attempts to regain his sense of reality whirl him though a wonderland of hilariously conceived characters and situations. The host...

Vernon Frazer and Thomas Chapin Live at the Middle East 1992

Over the past week or so, I've posted segments of a 1992 performance Thomas Chapin and I gave at the Middle East in Cambridge, MA early in 1992. I've tried to keep the flow of the performance going from segment to segment to show the kind of interaction Thomas and I shared

Thomas and I enjoyed a seventeen-year friendship, during which I wrote about his music and attended his performances not only to listen to his music, but, eventually, to hang out with him during intermisson, as well. In 1986, he became my first collaborator in a nine-year project of fusing poetry with music, primarily from the jazz spectrum. His work helped shape the sound of my 1988 LP recording, Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike. He also played on occasion with the poetry band I ran from 1988-93. In 1991, Thomas and I performed our first duet at the Knot Room in the orignal Knitting Factory. We enjoyed playing together so much that we played the Knot Room several times more, then added the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Downtown Music Gallery to our roster of performing venues and tried to find performing opportunities wherever we could. 

This performance shows the kind of rapport that made performing with Thomas such a joy. It's the only video I know of that documents the period when fusing poetry with music was my primary focus. Over the past twenty years, my poetic style has changed considerably. I hope you enjoy this event from two decades ago. The links are below:

Part One --  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGfuF7W553w&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Part Two --    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufBQfSqeVcI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Part Three -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KWqPNmvL10&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Part Four --  http://youtu.be/EIUjE2qpfB8

Part Five --        http://youtu.be/JoaRaGAsQ-s

Part Six --  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufBQfSqeVcI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Part Seven -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiehJEn7up0&feature=youtu.be

Part Eight --  http://youtu.be/SlyFZd8FBzg

Part Nine --        http://youtu.be/5G-d8dTUC74

Part Ten -- http://youtu.be/tokOSGIZ5Ls

Part Eleven -- http://youtu.be/XgTxtIKsyW0

At this time, the Chapin family has begun fundraising efforts for a film on Thomas Chapin's life and career. He died at age 40 from leukemia, before he had truly peaked, and just as he was about to headline events that would have brought him the acclaim and attenton he deserved. His legacy includes music that no saxophonist has surpassed since Thomas has been gone. I enourage you to support the project:

Tax-deductible donations for the film are being received by Akasha Inc., a nonprofit organization furthering music education and the musical legacy of Thomas Chapin. Go to www.thomaschapin.com to donate with a credit card.

Checks or U.S. money orders should be made out to "Akasha Inc."

Send to: Akasha Inc. P. O. Box 721032 Jackson Heights, NY 11372 USA

Thomas Chapin

www.thomaschapin.com

Here to Stay: Thomas Chapin’s Never Let Me Go”

While waiting for my copy of Never Let Me Go, a 3-CD box set of Thomas Chapin’s quartet recordings, I realized that I’d heard Thomas play primarily in quartet settings, usually on the several times a month he played in Connecticut jazz clubs in the 1980s and 1990s.

Late in 1980 or early in 1981, the freshness of his music helped bring me back to the
jazz scene after a three-year hiatus that came because I found myself anticipating the soloist's next “sound of surprise” too frequently in clubs and concerts. When I heard Thomas play a familiar pattern, he'd spin it in an unexpected yet unerringly logical direction. I couldn’t anticipate his next line, even when I tried. His love of making music generated a contagious exuberance that led his rhythm sections to transcend themselves or risk falling behind. On more than one occasion, the healing power of his music lifted me from the funk of a foul day into the ecstasy of the moment. The music on these recordings characterizes the transformative powers of Thomas’s playing. Simply put, it features some of his finest playing on record. If you’ve never heard Thomas Chapin before, Never Let Me Go will introduce you to the music of one of the most accomplished and innovative saxophonists and flutists of the 1980s and 1990s.

At the time Never Let Me Go was recorded, in 1995 and 1996, Thomas had achieved a technical mastery of his instruments that allowed him to express his ideas with a facility almost as natural as breathing. Playing at the peak of his creative powers, his work on this box set should put to rest any remaining attempts to categorize him as mainstream or avant-garde. Those who followed his music knew he was both---and much more. Thomas didn't straddle two worlds; he embraced them as part of one vast spectrum of music. He was a musical omnivore whose passion for ethnic music led him to play many wind and percussion instruments from other cultures. He performed punk rock, tango, and classical music, and backed poets, always playing his distinctive style with an spot-on sensitivity to the musical context. His intellectual and emotional capacity enabled him to to synthesize his broad musical vocabulary into a core expression appropriate to the musical moment. This box set doesn’t pretend to present the full breadth of his musical vision, but it presents him in one of his most comfortable, familiar and accessible formats, the quartet.

Never Let Me Go emphasizes the jazz at the core of Chapin’s sensibility, and offers a musical stew with more than enough spice to heat and flavor it. The repertoire itself reflects Thomas’s taste for challenging material. His original compositions reveal the passion of his lyricism (“Sky Piece”) and his willingness to improvise within complex structures, as well as create open-ended structures that afforded him maximum creative freedom. In the fare offered here, we see the choices of material that made Thomas unique among his colleagues. In addition to his own compositions, he chooses standards you don’t commonly hear. Chapin devours the changes of the opening tunes, “I’ve Got Your Number” and “Moon Ray,” with joyful passion. On the latter, he risks playing an extended interpolation from “Nature Boy” beyond “Moon Ray’s” harmonic structure, but deftly ends the phrase within the structure and refers to the passage several choruses later during a climactic build. On the bop classic, “Red Cross,” Chapin devours the changes, incorporating pianist Peter Madsen's substitutions and building to shrieking climaxes that stretch but retain their ties to the tune’s harmonic structure and tonality. He also delves into popular music that I’ve yet to hear any other jazz musician attempt: Ray Charles’ 1962 hit, “You Don’t Know me” and the 1960s hit “Wichita Lineman.” In a live performance, he once gave “Red River Valley” a decidedly urban interpretation. Thomas also recorded several lesser-known Thelonious Monk compositions, capturing their spirit with sensitivity while adding the distinctive Chapin interpretation, a gesture of respect deeper than mere imitation. Disc 2 of this box set opens with Chapin and pianist Peter Madsen rendering Monk’s seldom-played “Ugly Beauty” as a sensitive duet.

The other members of the rhythm section aren’t as familiar to me as Madsen. In conversations, Thomas had mentioned touring Japan with bassist Kiyoto Fujiwara, but never mentioned the quartet to me as a working unit. Thomas usually spoke in very general terms about his projects, I assume because any new artistic undertaking carries as much uncertainty as enthusiasm. But Fujiwari and Scott Colley, whose work I’m hearing for the first time, accompany Chapin with drive and empathy, as do drummers Reggie Nicholson and Matt Wilson. Among the drummers I’ve heard with Thomas, Nicholson and Wilson tend to play the deeper tones of their trap sets, compared to Michel Sarin and Steve Johns, whose work I’ve heard more frequently.

In addition to releasing excellent and unheard material from a voice gone too soon, Never Let Me Go underscores the brilliance of Thomas Chapin’s work and reminds us that nobody in the past fourteen years has surpassed him. That he is irreplaceable is a given. Another given is that Never Let Me Go is a keeper.

Correcting the Flesh Connection

AFTER AN EXTENDED ABSENCE

It's been five months since I've posted an entry to this blog. Granted, I've never figured out how to blog to my best advantage; the act seems secondary to my writing and multimedia work. For the most part, I've used it to announce updates on my publications to those who stumble into this part of the cyberspace gulag. Moreover, I don't have a strong incentive to post opinions on matters I have no strong opinions about. But this delay came about for a more fundamental reason:

I've been sick.

Since July 2010 my body has undergone a number of changes that have kept me riding a medical merry-go-round. No doubt the visits cost me a fair amount of writing time, but I didn't feel well enough physically to write consistently, either. In the past, when my sleep disorders left me floating through the day with all the verve of a Caribbean zombie, I nevertheless managed to write. I even gave my wife instructions: if I die, prop my body in the chair and put my fingers on the keyboard, and I'll produce a voluminous body of posthumous work.

This past year I couldn't even begin my pre-posthumous work. My mind felt flat. It wasn't a terrible feeling, in and of itself. But I've always run on an inner fire, a desire that overcame inertia and many subsequent obstacles. Now I could barely start my inner kindling wood. The urge to work out, especially on the heavy bag that tightens my focus, seemed less appealing than lying on the couch with the morning paper. Matters that I handled routinely now confused me. On a good day, when I'd slept well and my newly-acquired reflux hadn't made indigestion a three-day adventure, I felt like what I imagined a typical retiree felt like. I'd get through the day with some reading, some literary activity, some TV and a noodle float in the pool. Since I wasn't writing a lot of new material, I used those days to publish a large backlog of material I'd written since the late nineties. On my bad days I felt like an old man slowly dying.

Around March, with no diagnosis, I decided I was in a “malaise.” After fifty years, I'd written myself against a wall. My work received praise when people paid attention to it, but I'd never received the level of recognition I'd hoped for. The way the game worked, the next literary superstar would be half my age. Why go through all the hoops one more time for a predictable result? Conducting literary workshops and teaching special classes didn't interest me the way they did when I was younger; the pension from my job allowed me to live modestly without working. Only a MacArthur Foundation grant would make a difference in my personal and creative life, and my ears weren't burning with their whispered nominations. It was time to smell the flowers, live the quiet life I enjoyed, and let posterity keep or not keep my work alive.

But my slow fade into the sunset wasn't always so comfortably blasé. Whether I felt good or bad on a given day, I still had medical problems to address: a chest X-ray revealed calcium buildup in my cardiac arteries, a surprise since nobody on either side of my family experienced heart problems before their late seventies. Finding the source of the calcium was the biggest of a half-dozen problems that had surfaced the previous summer. I had places to see and people to meet: doctor's offices and doctors.

Riding the Medicare merry-go-round of specialists for over a year proved debilitating. Eventually, tests indicated my body's calcium level was too high and that my parathyroid glands were causing the problem. A little online research told me calcium controlled the signals my central nervous system received. The excess calcium was making my existing problems worse and triggering new ones.

The site that offered me the most information (www.parathyroid.com) explained my problem and how it had affected the past twenty-one years of my life.

In 1969, I received cobalt therapy to treat Hodgkins lymphoma in the left side of my neck. A number of people who received this treatment later developed benign tumors in one of their parathyroid glands. The tumor prevented the other glands from working. The list of symptoms related to the condition chronicled my life of the past twenty years, starting with the fatigue problem that began in 1990. By summer 1991 I found myself experiencing fatigue two hours after I woke up; a few months earlier I'd been working 15-hour days at my full-time job, writing, practicing bass and running my poetry band. On my job I began to make mistakes that threatened to undermine my reputation for producing accurate work. When I could barely stand to perform with my poetry band on community access TV, I knew I needed a leave of absence to rest. Despite three months off, I never fully recovered. Instead of being the last person to leave a jazz club, I now settled on my sofa in front of the TV when the first set started. I only went out at night to perform with my poetry band, my duo with Thomas Chapin, or as a solo poet-bassist about twice a month.

In short, I could trace my parathyroid symptoms back twenty years. In turn, I had to revise my personal history. In 1993, I'd broken up my poetry band and stopped performing because I'd come to hate the business aspect of the performing arts. The exhaustion I felt when I practiced for engagements in Southern New England and Manhattan seemed to result from my frustrating relations with presenters after the long hours I put in. Now I realize the exhaustion I was fighting when I practiced came from my parathyroid, not the presenters. Even with 20-20 hindsight and good health, I'm not sure how long I would have kept the band going, even though I viewed it as my most significant artistic achievement. I never enjoyed pitching myself to presenters. Fortunately, the work I've done since I broke up the band has made me revise my opinion of what I consider my most significant work to date.

Eventually, my team of physicians determined that I had a mildly hyperactive parathyroid gland. Treating it was another matter. According to NIH standards, my calcium levels weren't high enough to warrant attention. The parathyroid.com site insisted the calcium level should be lower. My team couldn't decide what to do, even though I was growing less capable by the day. In their opinion, it was a minor condition---until a bone density scan revealed osteoporosis in my left hip. The surgeon I selected determined the condition had gone undiagnosed and untreated for at least eight years. I say twenty, but my oncologist in the eighties and nineties never tested my calcium levels according to records I received, so I can only judge by the way my body has felt.

Since my surgery, I've returned to writing regularly. My wife hears a vitality that's been missing from my voice. Not only have I noticed a spring return to my step, but even my relaxed pace seems to have picked up some speed it hasn't shown in many years. Physically, this past year I've grown so out of shape that I've had to exercise to get into the kind of shape that will allow me to do teh exercises th atwill help me drop the weight I've gained. I'm making progress on all fronts, but have to remind myself I'm recovering and have to pace myself while all the pieces come together.

Next time I post I'll try to update my publications and performances.