The Connection by Shirley Clark

 The Connection

It was so funny because ‘The Connection’, by Shirley Clarke was instantly recognizable to me. Like a dream, my dream, if I’d been that age: an adult. Actually I was about a year old in ’60, when the movie was made, so there you go. I was there after all, a little baby hidden in the corner like a puzzle where you look for the oddball shape, and just like the smart phone puzzle my partner does endlessly while we watch boring tv in the evening and despair, almost silently. You see, Trump. And we’ve been through Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2, and now Trump 1 and of course Trump 2 is a 100 times to the right. All the way fascist. And we knew with Reagan, when I was twenty. This was the flowering of punk, new wave, goth, art rock, industrial, the eighties all the way up to Nirvana. Wether you like it or not - I wasn’t wild about anything with a steady pounding beat, change it up!@!@- it was music of resistance or at least avoidance. “Ignore the White Culture”, a slogan of Missing Foundation, with an upside down champagne glass as a graffiti symbol. They were a band connected to the squatter’s movement of the lower East Side, I got them to come to Philly to the warehouse me and some cronies were running. My big fat red old Ford pickup got that graffiti even for some reason. I’ve heard a few of those squats are still going, legitimized or something, but there sure aren’t any abandoned buildings left in Manhattan. If its anything like Philly. Das Kapital has moved in. And Trump and despair. But the Shirley Clark and the Living Theater (I wikied it) in Connections (on Criterion) and it’s so live! it’s the exact opposite of this White Lotus & ________, I can’t even remember the name of it, with Tina Fey and the guy from Office. And yea, they’re probably about my age or a little younger, and its some commentary on all of that, and they gay guys to me are laugh out loud funny and also sweet and heartening -the heroes if you will, but jeez, has it come to this! Has to be in a resort. Money again. And entitlement, that big black SUV they show up in. I think that’s why I like the detective shows in gloomy England or snowy Nordicland. (Though I’m tired of them now, thus this message in a bottle.)
The Connection had gloom times a hundred, you see and that’s what Joe McCarthy’s 50’s was all about for my parents I’m sure, even with my Mother’s bobby socks. So of course there is a bunch of junkies waiting for their connection to show up and it’s a very poignant wait til then, with live soliloquies from several of the crew, and at least a couple freakin great pieces by a jazz unit, bebop galore and to the point, with who is that, Jackie McClean? you see this is out of my sphere. The voices from before I was born and I never really looked back like I am now so it’s embarrassing and refreshing because I’m realizing that it was jazz, all along, now that rock is dead. Or almost dead, we’ll know for sure when Neal Young, who is the last of the Dinosaurs goes down. Goddess bless his soul. We’ve still got Buddy Guy though, I heard. Blues.
So I’m proposing that it was jazz all along because I’ve noticed there’s quite a scene of so called ‘Free Music’, Joe Morris’s phrase, I’m reiterating it because of the workshop i went to recently that appeared sold out.
Like the old man that I am, sadly, still working like a dog as a carpenter, lifting twenty 2x10’s and 2x12’s in a very dusty attic in Manayunk, and on the tail end still stinging very smartly, of a shingles attack (get your vaccines people) and all I can do myself is some chordless music, not that I don’t like chords its just the practicing required to become like Coltrane or Monk, damn sure no bodies paying me for that, to play everyday, so at least theres a basically chordless scene out there. I hear from my helper on the job site there’s still a punk rock scene, very underground in Southwest, but it’s all under 40 probably, and I’m not prejudiced, I just don’t know where I fit in, that’s all, in America. See this run on sentence, coffee fueled approach to describing resistance, dropout America? I do have two kids happy, healthy and affectionate so I’m not a junkie in that way. I’m become more of a jazz head is what I’m saying, at this late stage in life. Celebrating the history what little I know, and still playing improv style ever since I got out of high school -as well as other stuff along the way. New Wave one time, now improv rock noise jazz.

And wondering what a 21st century remake of The Connection would look like, now that we can’t find any downtown paint peeling everywhere cold water top floor attic garrets big enough for twelve people including some post jazz, sound performers to speak some truth. In the nearby community oriented yoga studio, they’re doing avant music and performance.  Though I hear the turnout is pretty low. Well, that’s fitting then. Maybe a good spot for a movie of the Theater of Cruelty, aka Antonin Artaud. Trump combined with Tina Fey, but local, here and now.
But what I really want to do is write, write, write. I’d be Lester Bangs who survived, cuz they didn’t know about drugs like we do now (I’ve seen alot). If I only had an up to date Creem/Fifth Estate/Paris Review combo mag to contribute to. And if I could do a few more dishes so my partner would like me again. Cuz writing takes time.
Do I have enough time to read some James Joyce, Ulysses in particular? Kathy Acker? Or enough focus to be like Hemingway? Stop reading the headlines.