Jerome Berglund's Review of g emil reutter's DISTANCE TO INFINITY from Alien Buddha Press

 

So far, yet we can taste it...

g emil reutter plots the 'Distance to Infinity'

 

g emil reutter's stunning new collection from Alien Buddha Press, Distance to Infinity is a little red chapbook which will stir the imaginaion and start provoking thought and encouraging ameliorative change before you even open it. For the very subtitle on its cover visible on a table or shelf confronts the reader, citizen and scholar with a bold revelation: "Poets are the voice of the people in times of struggle, times of war, times of oppression", and isn't that the truth! Yet while a shill can be cheaply purchased, credible threats intercepted and turned into controlled opposition who confine their prescriptions to that narrow spectrum of acceptable opinion Chomsky contends debate in a lively manner is permitted exclusively within and relegated to not unlike a 'free speech zone', even so it is rare to locate in any medium or exhibition of creative expression which will be embraced or canonized by the masses or posterity content which does not endorse the causes of fellowship, justice, empathy and understanding, and exceptions to that rule, fluff which does not (looking at you CIA stage-managed abstract expressionism movement, Federal Writer's Project) further integral social and institutional correction should always be scrutinized as highly dubious and suspect.

There are two conflicting schools and viewpoints when it comes to the place of politics in poetry, and it's no great stretch or exaggeration to condemn one (in his principal poem g notes apropos 'the traitors are amongst us') as criminal collaboration, expressly supporting all manner of monstrosity and injustice encoded into our highly problematic status quo and the innumerable errors across history into our tremendously problematic and entrenched present it implicitly supports and condones. For, as national poet laureate Amanda Gorman reminds us, 'all art is political', and Kwame Dawes importantly explains, 'When a poet writes about trees, he is being political [too] both by what he chooses to write about and what he chooses not to write about'. Grace Paley further suggests quite plausibly that 'if a writer says 'this is not political,' it's probably the most political thing that they could be doing.'

Orwell additionally clarified that 'all art is propaganda', and I don't think we should take that necessarily as a criticism (unless it's Triumph of the Will), or in the pejorative sense. For to disrupt and agitate, education, organizing, and encouragement of grassroots, sweeping mobilization is first in order, and literature or its public, economical equivalents in public artworks, placards, trifold brochure (sagaciously Voltaire whispers an aside sotto voce: 'Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It's the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared'), whatever their available equivalents were they played crucial roles in every important social movement of reform and revolt, improvement and abolition throughout history from the dawn of recorded and remembered time.

Just as Pablo Picasso's Guernica tapped into a wellspring of public feelings and the zeitgeist of sentiments of shock and frustration with the horrors of fascism and imperial war, poets from Homer to Pablo Neruda have provided vivid lenses through which the laymen may understand and engage with the distinctive challenges of their day, and there find the seeds of a coarse charted for that long journey homeward towards a better, less fraught and combative future. And while the upper classes may offer more expensive tutelage, laurels and supposed formal accreditation (in the schools of bourgeois thought, philosophy, and praxis) one can always locate more honest, informed, insightful perspectives articulating the everyman and woman's difficulties and yearnings of their day from among their peers in the working classes.

Hence why it is always such a treasured treat and fortunate opportunity when someone from a less privileged background, representing the proletariat and public at large's interests at heart, emerges with great effort improbably to pass along their hard earned wisdom and knowledge. g emil reutter is just such a valuable font of credible subversive mana from below, unearthing troves of treasured constructive critique, and it is fortunate we have the opportunity to reflect upon his revelations thoughtfully as the long and arduous road to 'an endless end' is measured, navigated and by we poor wayfarers cautiously traversed.

I find it so interesting too how some of the keenest, most perceptive voices in the causes of peace and reform, compassion and institutional reimagining come from unexpected backgrounds which afford them unique glimpses into the evils which plague a society from the top trickling down, and the deeply troubling systemic flaws which are hindering their immediate, realistic and possible remedy. Tuskegee Airman put faces, dignity to the civil rights movement, just as Buffalo Soldiers and Navajo code talkers ennobled and vindicated the essential place of people of all colors and creeds within the patchwork of diverse and intersectional america. In the Vietnam war it was returning veterans who truly ratified and proved irrefutable the cries for disarmament, provided chilling testament and firsthand corroboration for the horrors of colonial oppression, and their practice of fragging effectually put an embarrassing end to the atrocity of involuntary conscription. More recently those who served in the middle eastern theater upon returning to ignominious treatment proved integral towards challenging assumptions and the narrative regarding issues of homelessness, addiction, mental health, (our 'flattened cousins' strewn in the gutter which g emil laments in his piece Sweep) and continue to be resounding figures looming large and contributing invaluably to the missions for peace, understanding, and harmony across borders of land and language, and on our own soil no less powerfully.

It's intriguing and highly productive to be gifted a glimpse into the minds and lives of those who spent careers serving and protecting the public as g emil did in his younger years, as that can truly challenge and cut through divisive rhetoric and promote the sort of rainbow coalition and bipartisan solidarity we desperately need as a species and civilization. Some of the best things I've read it recent years curiously originated from colleagues who were employed in law enforcement (Leon Tefft and Tim Roberts have phenomenal recent collections on the subject if you enjoy a haiku) and classical and contemporary poetry and literature both contain no shortage of compassionate progressive personages (from Byron to Archilochos, Camus to Hemingway to Edward Abbey) who draw from wealths of informative adventures to reach their weighty and meaningful conclusions. I have family who worked in uniform and/or served, and in reality you will find no group more frustrated with issues of corruption, desirous of completely reinventing (equitably in a form where they are viewed positively and have a friendly relationship, camaraderie with the public and can wear uniforms with pride, aren't perceived as representing private property alone, cannot be accused of overtly continuing traditions which sprung from practices of slave catching or lining pockets via asset forfeiture, filling informal plantations criminalizing and leasing to bidders marginalized populations) the entire concept, than they in our embattled day and age. Entering the era of increasing demands for divestment and abolition (it's heartening to see, in contrast, with wealthy european republics the state withering as it should, with less inequality and thus associated deviances not resulting prisons being closed and resources, personnel being redirected from chasing robbers to more fulfilling and pleasant activities), there is no demographic who we could better benefit from paying close attention to and including in the conversation (incidentally I highly recommend investigating "the People vs. Billie Holiday" and "Rustin") than they, and I can't recommend enough we take a page out of Fred Hampton's handbook and reject the biased mainstream media and politicians' push to both ostensible ideologic sides and realize we are all brothers and sisters and countrymen and neighbors, and the handful of plutocratic ne'er-do-well keeping us down are not we plebs or those struggling to keep civilization together with duct tape, and if like-minded activists and innovators could win a compassionate accord with the police and military nonviolent amicable inroads towards genuine revolutionary changes and reining in of nefarious abusers might become a legitimate possibility.

Particularly in our unprecedented nadir of the modern era, when free speech and dissent are labeled criminal formally, the news is delivered by thinly veiled state instigators and actors expressly to misinform and befuddle, pit against one another ('hate spew[ing] its volcanic power' as Reutter memorably describes it, which 'somebody is making money' from invariably) the conscientious, caring citizen, it is from the independent observer and advocate, the underground poet and gonzo provocateur or merry prankster whether via podcast (have you heard Super Awkward Funtime?) or self published online journal, you'll find no truth in commercially vetted copy (if you can't be bought and try to Gawker like heroic Hamilton Nolan they will shut you down, again and again and again, and bless the whack-a-moles of insurgency!), on the big screen scripts which were approved by billionaire investors (should you produce a program like Underground they will torpedo your entire network) and passed state and military censors' redacting pens. But from the mouths of plebs, and the pages direct printed via Kindle, a few sparse beacons of hope, sparks of possibility may be discerned.

"There comes a time when silence is not acceptable..." Reutter begins his compact treatise from the premise of. Let us salute him and tip our hats to the brave souls not cowed, subdued or muzzled by increasing pressures to desist and comply. You are the last line of defense against those innumerable wolves ('tricksters' and 'fraudsters' as the author describes them, who are no less prevalently to be found clothed in wool) at our gate, this generation and everyone are indebted to your commitments and sacrifices throughout history into the unfathomable future.

'Restoration will come' g ambitiously projects. Let us hope it does not dally!

Jerome Berglund has published book reviews in Fevers of the Mind, Fireflies Light, Frogpond, Haiku Canada, Setu Bilingual Journal, Valley Voices, also frequently exhibits poetry, short stories, plays, and fine art photography in print magazines, online journals, and anthologies.

A writer of poems and stories and on occasion literary criticism, g emil reutter was born in Bristol, Pa., raised in Levittown, Pa. and has lived most of his life in of Philadelphia, Pa. A highly decorated member of the Railroad Police, he retired from a 26 year career in the patrol, anti-crime and criminal investigation division. Prior he worked as a steelworker, tea blender and a number of other jobs. A graduate of Neshaminy High School, he graduated from the New England Institute of Law Enforcement Management, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. He attended Temple University and Penn State University among others. His poetry and fiction have been widely published in the small and electronic press as well as numerous newspapers and magazines. Twenty-one of his collections have been published. He published The Fox Chase Review (2008 – 2015). He is currently a contributing editor at North of Oxford .

Belinda's Review of Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water by Clint Frakes

 Clint Frakes’s Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water is a capacious, humane collection that moves easily between intimate lyric confession, mythic imagination, and wry, often mordant social observation. Organized in five sections—Mystery not Always Unkind; Dancing Among the Makers; Unreal Cities; Love’s Lost Horses; The Ways of Water—the book charts a life of attention: to landscape (desert mesas, Hawaiian shorelines, the Rogue and Colorado rivers), to beloved teachers and peers (Ginsberg, Snyder, Collom), and to the small, stubborn incidents that accrete into moral memory.

Frakes’s voice is muscular and eclectic. He can pare a line to imagistic precision (“The Chinese business lady…holds up her golden retriever’s tail / as it shits straight into a Macy’s bag”) and also luxuriate in long, incantatory sequences—the book’s myth-poems and ritual narratives—which read like sustained meditations on belonging and loss. The “Desire” series and longer elegies (notably “Father Fisheye”) show his gift for mixture: humor and grief, vernacular energy and learned allusion. There is a recurring ethical core—attention to indigenous presence, ecological grief, and the residue of American violences—that prevents the collection from mere aesthetic play.

Formally, Frakes is resourceful. He uses short imagistic lyrics, prose-adjacent narratives, litany, and occasional collage; his diction ranges from colloquial bluntness to mythic lyricism. His influences—Beat candor, eco-poetics, Native and Romantics threads—are audible but never derivative: he retools them into poems that feel lived-in rather than performative. At their best, poems like “Chelonia mydas,” “Rogue River Redemption,” and “What the River Dreams” combine natural history, careful observation, and spiritual longing into lines that linger.

What the River Dreams

We carry a tune & often desert it on high

plains amid fencing light & shadow.

It won’t matter for long what I felt or where—

like how water can only fall into itself

each rain, bluer for the turn.

Maybe you finally had enough—

yet the road to which you’ve sewn yourself

touches what you never could have loved alone.

The breath of our lives persists

beyond all foreseen destinations.

The old ones say the water never began

& cannot end, that it garners the memory

of every thread & station it’s met—

from the bellies of stars to the viscera of willow.

From my chosen hill, it’s hard to imagine

its stiller parts beneath the ripple.

What this river dreams is what I long to say.

Overall, Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water is a generous, restless book: attentive, politically minded, rooted in place and relationship, and rewarding for readers who value stewardship, elegy, and a poet willing to mix the sacramental with the profane.

Recommended for readers of contemporary American lyric who appreciate ecological awareness, cross-cultural commentary, and a poet comfortable with both tenderness and provocation.

Where Lies the Passage of Light

after Ammons

“The light became her grace and dwelt among

Blind eyes and shadows that are formed as men;

Lo, how the light doth melt us into song…”

—Ezra Pound, “Ballatetta”

I have considered how light spills without intent,

exposing all surface it surveys

& how the mule deer’s dark morning legs

defy nothing as she nibbles bitter shoots.

Undisguised at my backdoor, light asks nothing

& marks the foreheads of the hills

while I slaughter hourly beasts by its rhythm to weave

another day’s geography of purpose.

I watched the cottonwood leaves rot in the blond grass

under fat beads of October dew.

Only weeks ago I bathed in the spinning silver

they gathered from their tree—

drinking the magnetic river that now pulls them low.

A spider darts along the twinkling curtain rod

that staves the rays that bare all shape

& slant eddies of meaning.

Breath deepens toward the need for meat & grain.

I am certain what should be cleaned & what gathered:

children to be taught their great ascent.

Nothing escapes the trail of Earth’s cascade

as I turn toward & away from comforts & pains—

my ears ringing in their own hollows.

Dawn’s horses shake their manes

against the spectrum of wide tomorrows.

The heart is a basket of such flutters,

passed from night to this

& stars will fade into light’s excess.

Clint Frakes is a poet, writer, teacher, editor, ceremonialist and naturalist living in Sedona, AZ since 1992. His poetry, prose and narrative non-fiction has appeared in over 100 journals, magazines and anthologies in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and Argentina since 1987.  He was named one of the 50 Best New Poets of 2008 by former American Poet Laureate, Mark Strand, and also received the Josephine Darner Distinguished Poet Prize (2008). Other awards include the James Vaughan Poetry Prize (2006), The Pudding House Chapbook Prize (2008) and the Peggy Ferris Memorial Prize for Poetry (2006). 

He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute (1989), Northern Arizona University creative writing program (1994) and received his Ph.D. with emphasis in creative writing from the University of Hawaii (2006). He is the former Chief Editor of The Hawaii Review and Big Rain. He has taught in Writing and English programs across the country. Clint specializes in nature writing and spiritual memoir.

Su Zi's Review of PLANT DREAMING DEEP by May Sarton

 

On reading May Sarton Plant Dreaming Deep

It might happen that to the hand comes a book: hardbound with cloth, dustjacket long gone. The tightly woven canvas of the book is green and has a texture; the book has feel. The inside cover is still tight and green and gracefully sun struck. Thumbing the text against the palm is a remembrance of high-quality paper, of books with deckled edges. Suddenly, there is also the remembrance of how one reads such books—with care for both the entity and the words within.

The volume has a 1968 copyright, and photographs. Prior to generic pixels, means of reproduction involved plates, and this book has a number of them: of the author across from the title page, across from each of the fifteen chapters. It is a testament to the prowess of the publisher then to have been able to release such a book; and there the crest of  WWNorton.

Of course, an AI overview of the work at hand is infuriatingly superficial, but not untrue—let consideration for such broad gloss not be here. Yes, the work is a memoir of buying a house in the middle of the twentieth century—readers will gasp at the minuscule monetary amounts mentioned. Nor ought to readers, getting a glimpse of the list of previous publications, be surprised that the author, May Sarton, is readable. What becomes striking about the work becomes its nuances—as if coming across the volume itself—once a ubiquitous version of a book, now a vintage treasure—were not clue of serendipity enough.

Sarton’s reason for buying a house begins with her commitment to her ancestry: “ I enjoy beginning this chronicle with an evocation of two ancestors because in this house all the threads i hold in my hands have at last been woven together into a whole” (19), but she purchases her particular house in a remote location because of a bird

[...]under a stand of old maples, and there, a little back from the road, behind its semicircular drive, withdrawn from the village itself, stood the house. [...]The whole impression was one of grace and light within a classical form, and i was so bedazzled by this presence that for a moment i could only see, not hear. But then I heard it—an oriole, high up in one of the maples, singing his song of songs” (28)

For any bird lovers, Sarton beguiles aplenty throughout the seasons; she maintains feeders in winter “And sooner or later I must push hard to open the front door against the drifts and get myself out with seed for the bird feeders” (86), and weaves these perceptions with ones about solitude and the life of a writer.

Sarton also gardens, because she: “considers flowers a necessity, quite as necessary as food. So from spring until late October i spend the hour just after breakfast in the garden, [...]for whenever I look for the rest of the day there is always somewhere a shaft of light on flowers, and I feel them strongly as part of the whole presence of the house” (57). 

 It might seem, to those who are quintessentially transient, to be so thoroughly stay at home, and to do so in solitude. Sarton does socialize—she has guests, and becomes participatory in her community, but she also travels to teach. There might be some who consider Sarton’s determined retreat to be quaint; others might find themselves already in the solitude of which Sarton speaks. Certainly, the perceptions here are worthy for many reasons, giving Sarton’s simultaneously simplistic and complex style her worthy iconic status.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

ANDREW DARLINGTON's Review of ‘Down River: In Search of David Ackles' by Mark Brend

DAVID ACKLES: THE OTHER ‘RIVER MAN’

Book Review of:

‘DOWN RIVER: IN SEARCH OF DAVID ACKLES'

by Mark Brend

(2025, Jawbone Press)

http://jawbonepress.com/down-river/

ISBN 978-1-916829-22-0, Softback, 148pp+8 photo plates

To follow their hit single ‘This Wheels On Fire’, Julie Driscoll with the Brian Auger Trinity recorded a superb five-minute take on David Ackles’ ‘Road To Cairo’. It failed to chart. Later, the Hollies – with Mikael Rickfors, covered Ackles touching ‘Down River’. Spooky Tooth also recorded the same song. Born in Rock Island of ‘Rock Island Line’ fame in Illinois (20 February 1937), David Ackles was a songwriter who never wrote a hit. He released four albums, three for prestigious Elektra Records, with fan-man Bernie Taupin producing his brooding, elegant and eclectic masterpiece American Gothic (1972), after which there was a final Five & Dime LP in October 1973, for Columbia. 

He family moved to LA, but he didn’t live a Rock ‘n’ Roll life. He wasn’t cool. While other kids were out rocking around the clock he was listening to clunky old musical The Desert Song. Raised in a Presbyterian religious theatrical family he did Hollywood toddle-on parts in six Rusty movies – a kind of low-budget Rin-Tin-Tin variant billed as ‘Great Kids… A Wonder Dog!’. Out of step with teen-trends he favoured all-round variety to the Twist or the Boogaloo. If Bob Dylan referred to himself ironically as a ‘song-&-dance man’, David Ackles started out as the real thing.

Intending simply to demo his songs for other’s consideration, Ackles accidentally fell into recording his eponymous debut album (1968, EKS-74022). He’d already turned thirty and had yet to play a single solo live date. Jac Holzman’s Elektra was likely the only label with the open foresight to sign him. Producer David Anderle used session players, including former Iron Butterfly and future Rhinoceros musicians. They may simply have overdubbed Ackles existing demos without Ackles even being present, on songs such as the thumb-tripping screenplay ‘The Road To Cairo’; or the warm-voiced conversational piano-led ‘Down River’ – which he performed for a DJ John Peel Radio session. It tells the tale of a freed prisoner who returns to his hometown to find his girl has found someone else, yet he accepts the situation with sad grace. ‘Blue Ribbons’ controversially – at the time, is about a white woman pregnant by a black man. Then there’s the liturgical organ that complements the ‘arms of grace’ lyric of ‘His Name Is Andrew’ (covered by Martin Carthy on his 1971 Landfall album). 

Despite writer Mark Brend’s scrupulous research, which considers unreleased outtakes and lost songs, the session details remain uncertain. Yet Brend perceptively writes, Ackles ‘wrote as a dramatist or an author, creating songs like one-act plays or short stories,’ while under the influence of the Brecht-Weill partnership. It was difficult to place Ackles in context, he was not quite Randy Newman, neither was he a darker Harry Nilsson, he might have been chanson, Jacques Brel, or maybe even his Elektra labelmates Tom Rush or Tim Buckley? To journalist John Bauldie Ackles’ songs are ‘often dark vignettes of the sorrows and inevitable seriousness of experience, poetic sketches of not-so-beautiful losers and unlucky lovers, hopeless vagabonds and embittered misfits, set to tapestries of tune. It’s grown-up stuff’ (‘Q’, February 1994).

After failed sessions with Al Kooper and Don Ellis, the eight tracks that make up Subway To The Country (1969, EKS-74060) use lush widescreen Fred Myrow settings – an arranger who’d worked with Jim Morrison and would score Charlton Heston’s Soylent Green (1973). The title-song has a ‘got to get back to the land’ father-to-son brightness, other tracks such as ‘Mainline Saloon’ – with its dubbed-on ambient lowlife Bar sounds, and ‘Inmates Of The Institution’ with its chilling atmosphere of community derangement, in particular are disquieting and deeply unsettling. While the macabre character-sketch ‘Candy Man’ about maimed war-veteran Oscar, jailed for unapologetic peado offences, is possibly his bravest song, in that it adds psychological depth to a disreputable individual. But where Jim Morrison or Lou Reed were writing from their own life-milieu, good church-going David Ackles appears to be assembling his cast in the way that a playwright creates characters. His songs are story-songs.

He was still playing shoes-optional Folk-dens supporting Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell… such as the ‘Bitter End’ on NY Bleecker Street, until he played a support slot at the ‘Troubadour’ on Santa Monica Boulevard to an audience of the counter-culture glitterati there to witness rising star Elton John. It was 25 August 1970, and although Ackles performance was overshadowed by Elton John’s career left-off, there was rapport between the artists that led to Ackles crossing the Atlantic to live at ‘Farthings’ in Wargrave on the Thames at Berkshire, from where he could commute, scoring his own arrangement charts, to record at the IBC studio at Portland Place with Bernie Taupin producing. 

‘It seems like you get a sharper perspective on your own country when you’re away from it’ Ackles explains on the sleeve-notes of American Gothic (USA Elektra EKS75032). This time there were eleven tracks with a full 43-minute playing time including the 10:05-minute ‘Montana Song’ which is a search for rural ancestry roots taking him to a ‘long abandoned farm,’ all interpreted through diary entries. But there was still what Brend calls not ‘enough of the familiar’ to hit mainstream preconceptions. No chorus. More string quartet, piccolo and cello than Rock guitar. Even Brend concedes that ‘it is also the most inaccessible of his records’ which requires repeated plays and close attention to yield its rewards, ‘it’s not a record for the streaming age.’ For Ackles himself, he’s quoted as saying ‘I like parables, little morality plays.’ 

Critically the album was well-received, from Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone to Derek Jewell in the Sunday Times, drawing comparisons as diverse as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. Chris Van Ness, writing in the Los Angeles Free Press, announced it as ‘the Sgt Pepper of Folk’. But as Brent admits ‘critical acclaim doesn’t always sell records.’ After it peaked at no.167 on the Billboard album chart, Ackles amicably parted company with Elektra. Only to be picked up by Clive Davis of Columbia, for a more modest low-budget album project.

The newly married Ackles produced Five & Dime (1973, USA Columbia KC32466) on a four-track TEAC machine in his Pacific Palisades home, inviting guest musicians – including Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean (on ‘Surf’s Down’) to visit in various combinations, before the tapes were mixed and mastered. Inevitably, the resulting album got lost within label and management politics. It was what Mark Brend calls ‘a more personal, intimate record – a step back from the big statement of American Gothic.’ Twelve tracks this time, including the black horror of ‘Aberfan’, which records the events of 21 October 1966 when a small Welsh village was engulfed in a landslip of saturated slag with a tragic loss of life. Ackles succeeds in riding a precarious edge between being maudlin or exploitational.

By now, ‘the fissure between talent and sales that was a feature of Ackles’s recording career from the start became a chasm.’ There were no more albums. But he wasn’t in it for stardom. He was in it for music. With the advent of CD there was a mild ripple of approving reappraisal with the reissue of his Elektra albums. A 2CD compilation There Is A River (2007, Rhino 8122-74884-2) included all three Elektra LPs plus ‘unreleased songs & rarities’ with Bernie Taupin and Elvis Costello liner-notes, although the edition was subsequently withdrawn due to legal conflicts with Ackles’ estate. And there were nay-sayers. Some reviewers considered that after such doses of intricate prettification it was necessary to syringe the ears with the Ramones or Motorhead!

A tall dark-haired affable man, David Ackles didn’t die a Rock ‘n’ Roll death. After retiring from Pop he wrote TV scripts, enjoyed a long academic career while writing and producing low-key musicals and ballet scores. His ambitious musical projects ‘Allendor/ Prince Jack’ and ‘Sister Aimee’ remain unstaged, while his collaboratively scripted Word Of Honour was filmed as a TV movie starring Karl Malden and a young John Malkovich. David Ackles survived having part of his cancerous left lung removed, but died of a relapse 2 March 1999 in Tujanga, California, aged sixty-two. Yet his reputation persists. Elton John and Elvis Costello sing his praises. Mark Brent’s book is a personal quest to discover the truth about the man he got to speak to once, on a single phone call.

 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 .

44 Spa Croft Road, Ossett, 

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