Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer whose poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has twelve published chapbooks the latest being: Searching Stained Glass Windows For An Answer (Alien Buddha Publishing, December 2022).
Sam Hendrian is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and poet striving to foster empathy through art. Every Sunday, he writes personalized poems for passersby outside of Chevalier’s Books, LA’s oldest independent bookstore. You can find his poetry and film links on Instagram at @samhendrian143.
Nudist Colony for Ring Fingers
Glanced up at the ceiling
In the way a person does
When they hear their favorite song
On the coffee shop radio.
A purer form of temporary relief
Than food or mood-enhancing drugs,
The flash of a flashback smile
Radiating a room full of anti-adulting adults.
She figured her life would be over
As soon as she started dating
So she ironed her eyes with “Maybe”
And did not dare let them grow wrinkled.
There must be a nudist colony for ring fingers,
A place of connection for the purposefully disconnected
Who celebrate their independence
One closeted tear at a time.
Occasionally compensated with a public park or crowded hallway
But always wound up wondering what the point was
Since everyone was trained to instantly crop out
Evidence of human company.
Sometimes the only voice she heard all day
Was the elevator saying “Going up”
Which tempted her to go back down
Just to continue the conversation.
Rouge-Cheeked Wish
A litter of kittens meowed to canonize
Janitor Jan, hero of the strip mall
Whose hunched-over stance and trance-prone eyes
Were camouflaged by the trash cans and vending machines.
Ensorcelled by the September 1955 mystical vinyl codex ‘a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom’ at age eight, Andrew Darlington embarked on a lifetime quest to decipher the magical incantation’s profundity, traipsing in not entirely straight lines of zigzag wandering across decades of enchantment, yet is still no closer to the true enlightenment revelation must bring. As of now, the seeking continues across a proliferation of platforms, including EIGHT MILES HIGHER .
‘THERE WAS SOMETHING
IN THE AIR THAT NIGHT…’
Live Review Of:
ABBA: VOYAGE
at the ABBA Arena,
Pudding Mill Lane, London E15
Wham! is playing in the toilets, which seems to be not actually catching the spirit of the event.
But there’s birdsong in the Swedish snowfall forest as the audience file in. And a glowing figure half-glimpsed moving between the tree’s relentless verticals… a girl? A stag?... someone suggests an ostrich!
Back in 1976 we were drunk on fighting the Punk wars, as intense and as ground-zero serious as breathing, as sharp as a Stanley-knife cut. ABBA were the despised mainstream Radio Two fluff, they were Mom & Dad fodder. Later, when style-bible NME was defining the ‘perfect Pop’ of ABC or Haircut 100 they neglect to mention that ABBA have already been juggling those equations for quite some time. Except they have global hits too.
Kraftwerk, with immaculate credibility, had nudged transhumanism through robotics and cyber-extensions, but here in the ABBA Arena, they’ve gone way beyond that. While the real group members are somewhere back in Sweden listening to the sweet sound of profits piling up, their avatars – ABBAtars, are performing to a full house – the audience that Benny calls ‘the fifth part of ABBA’, the dance-zone crammed too tight to gyrate little more than a sway and wave their arms. Some dressed in Xmas-tree suits of glitterlights.
This is Bjorn Again, recreated just as they were in 1979, through the good graces of Industrial Light & Magic. Playing sold-out concerts in this purpose-built arena since 27 May 2022. Opening with ‘The Visitors’, title-track of from their 1981 eighth studio album, which also turned out to be their final album of the twentieth century
‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’ stays intact despite the Madonna sample, and the gender-bending TV sit-com.
‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ rises above Alan Partridge, and touchingly, despite the pain and bitterness of divorce and separation, their images are embracing here.
You wonder what you’re actually applauding. They’re not here! You applaud the memories, the spectacle… and there is a ten-piece live band to add authenticity, the band who do ‘Does Your Mother Know’ without ABBA’s participation, with Cleopatra Rey, Carlene Graham and Kara-Ami McCreanor sharing vocals.
There are two numbers from the 2021 Voyage come-back studio album, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’ and ‘I Still Have Faith In You’, in which they became their own tribute band, bookended by the ‘Rora’ video animation that Anime’s Roger Dean’s cosmic Tolkienesque choreography between ‘Eagle’ and ‘Voulez-Vous’, which solidifies into four godlike ABBA statue-faces. While each ABBA member steps out to deliver a humanising to-camera solo conversational interlude. Even though, of course, they’re not really here.
‘Chiquitita’ features a slow eclipse effect behind the four group-images, and Anni-Frid sings against the galactic swirl of stars for ‘Fernando’. They wear their piped Avatar motion-capture suits for ‘Lay All Your Love For Me’ which segues into ‘Summer Night City’. ‘Waterloo’ uses genuine old video clips, with Benny pointing out that the UK Eurovision judges awarded it nul-points! And the audience erupts for the clumsily-phrased ‘Dancing Queen’ which became the group’s only American no.1 hit. You can’t go wrong with a Dance-track in the USA.
As someone points out, if Benny & Bjorn had been called Sid & Dick, the group would have been called ASDA.
The apparent lyrical naivety of ‘Thank You For The Music’ – ‘I’ve often wondered, how did it all start? who found out that nothing can capture a heart like a melody can?’ is rescued by the throwaway quip ‘well, whoever it was, I’m a fan.’ Featured on their fifth studio The Album and the flawed 1977 ABBA: The Movie, there are now suspected traces of AI fabrication in Agnetha’s facial close-ups. Or maybe I’m being too scrupulous? We all had a secret crush on the blonde one from ABBA, even during the Punk wars! While if the pain of divorce lies behind ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – saved as the encore, it might just take their lyrics, ‘the gods may throw a dice, their minds as cold as ice, and someone way down here, loses someone dear’ into a kind of universality. Yes, that surely touches even the coldest hearts.
The four group members appear as they are today in a final cameo, although you suspect there’s been a little digital massaging even here. As Bjorn points out, it’s a time-travelling Tardis event, pleasingly mangling credibility and temporal continuity into a nonsense.
GAS: Poetry, Art and Music welcomes Su Zi as a monthly columnist!
Zoeglossia Fellow 2023
Poet-writer, artist, equestrian
Creates Red Mare, an eco-feminist, poetry chapbook series that is handmade (each cover is a numbered block print, each copy is bound by hand sewing, editions limited to under 50, publishes at summer and winter solstice).
Publications in zines as well as full titles in poetry, essay, art – Multiple contributions to Unlikely Stories, automachination, GAS.
Titles from various publishers include: Danke, Flux , Chirp, Sister Woman, Solstice Epistles, Three Days, Chicago Poems, Pillar of Salt, Lit, The Tissue of Language , Building Community, Transgression in Motion,Tropical Depression, #100TPC
Comfort Music (Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”)
In the social unsettlements of spring, we might find ourselves spiritually beleaguered. For those for whom the old ways of community interaction are no longer viable, there’s respite in archival music. While current times see archives themselves as being under a bit of a barbaric threat, it’s our history—the embers we pass forward as our legacy.
If we consider the span of time for a generation to be around the half-century mark, we may find the influences of our forebearers upon our current culture. In the case of music, many automated playlists will routinely include music composed at a different time. Of all the arts, music has become the most accessible form, for while it might be some privilege or risk to attend live music performances, recorded music allows for a timeless and global experience.
In the case of plundered libraries, archival activism exists to ensure preservation and often these are curated from private collections; in music, these collections might include the holdings of a broadcast company, or someone’s private collection, and a variety of swap meets. Of course, there’s the accessibility of cyber download, from songs to the entirety of an artist’s work, and for the reason of accessibility, let us consider a widely disseminated work as viable for general social solace.
A half century ago, a single musical work that was widely disseminated was a hit, a cultural moment; as our culture has staggered into our current era, how hot is that once hit tune? While the complete works of this artist are indubitably influential, for our needs for solace, allow a listen to Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”, which has an Apple AI falsely cheerful introduction that includes “the revelation is that political music [...] can be inviting” and an odd reference to hippies.
A cautionary note for this-century listeners: this is analog music. There’s an orchestra playing every line of sounds on this recording—the credits list some twenty-five musicians, including two groups for additional vocals, and two people playing violin. The production team—those who published this work a half a century ago, number just under a dozen. This vintage work, an auditory composition of just over three minutes—a work of art with minimal physical existence—was the collaborative effort of dozens of people.
The piece itself begins with multiple instruments, including a piano, playing a chord twice, followed by two chords a half step higher on the scale, and then the initial vocals, which begin with the song’s chorus, it’s thesis “things ain’t what they used to be”, the repeated refrain occurring four times in the song’s three minutes. Gaye sings the single, seven syllables within the four beat bars as ditrochaic, emphasizing the “Things/What/Used /Be” and sometimes using a more trochee rhythm to stretch his tenor on the vocals for the following line. The song’s lyrics are two-line stanzas that may or may not employ end rhyme or consistent meter; instead, they read like koans, although they are structured as three citations of evidence with a fourth being conclusionary. This conclusionary stanza poses the still unanswered rhetorical question:
“What about this overcrowded land? /How much more abuse from man can she stand?”
Gaye sings the multiple syllable word as a ditrochee, speeding up his enunciation in a manner that was (and still is) a demonstration of technical ability, but which both matches the timing of the song’s general tempo.
In counterpoint to Gaye’s smooth vocals is a saxophone solo that comes at about a minute, and after the lyrics conclude with a five-line supplication that is a change from the four, two-line lyric stanzas that support the song’s thesis. The saxophone plays for six bars that climax with the blues squeal famous from that instrument. It is here that the tempo’s emphasis on the third stress is most audible, and listeners often find this opportune for dancing—for interaction with the work. The final minute of the piece engages additional vocals for six bars, and a kind of denouement of instruments, a soprano voice.
Despite the remove of time, Gaye’s lyrics are unfortunately relevant still, and, in certain lights, the use of the pronoun “she” to reference the planet might still be controversial. Indeed, the song itself might be seen as controversial, since the thesis is one that asks for compassion for our obviously distraught planet. Nonetheless, the song’s elegant orchestration, still-relevant thesis, and Gaye’s sensitive tenor are still a rich offering of musical food for our soul.
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