New Review of Hot Rain by Ralph-Michael Chiaia

When I was a teenager, a friend of mine once said that people never talk as intimately as when they are cleaning out their ears with a q-tip. I have learned over the years that, although an adolescent made this comment, there is quite some truth in it. Hot Rain is a witty, fast-paced collection of poems that focuses on language, memories, and sound. The author is like a q-tip, and Galluccio’s going to get the wax out. Lo Galluccio, a lyricist and poet, flows between the spiritual path of abstractions into the concrete world of images that she drums up like a percussion soloist. You can hear the beat she establishes pumping through your veins. Then, when she has you in sync she craftily starts to augment and diminish, to run around in circles that examine the very act of speaking, thinking, and loving. In this way, these poems are able to make you anticipate a certain word based on the rhythm and then change course on you and surprise you with a new word, new sound, and new image—a new thought. This is the delightful gift of Lo Galluccio. She knows you’re there and she knows who she’s talking to, yet she’s decided to clean out your ears until you hear her unique, mystical incantations. She takes your hand and leaps into a transcendental world, but don’t think it’s all abstract and flimsy. The images are hard and real and the language is a code Gallucio has studied. Take a look at “1. The Come On” where Galluccio masterfully employs hard, crisp language:

Make me act.
Buy the red dress.
Wriggle—a slut
of gum—for your
hard pink.”

This is a great example of how she plays off a reader’s anticipation. I already hear “a stick of gum” in my head, but she twists the q-tip a bit and changes the words on me. The changes are refreshing and help clear your ears of all those stuffy clichés. In “Sarasota IV — Elegy for Anthony” she discusses missing her father with vivid images and cutthroat metaphors. Look at the first stanza:

I wept into granite to raise you
Did you drink? Has God
swallowed like gumdrops your oracle eyes?
Did morphine blind you like Oedipus?
When will we say our good-byes?

You see her actually dripping into the tombstone and wondering if her liquid was swallowed. These poems are real and physical. Yet they are metaphysical as well. With the sober precision of a brain surgeon, Galluccio talks about the abstract. Then, she jumps on her head, and riffs on about concrete images like a stoned jazz soloist.

She’s a studied musician who has done her homework, memorized those two thick songbooks, digested all the chord changes so her improvisations and songs are grounded and welcomed. That’s what we’ve paid for: a front row seat to see her concoct her magic. And Gallucio’s not trying to hide her tricks. In fact, she’s got her arm outstretched. In “The Witch’s Antidote to Sanity” she lets the reader in on her secret, “An artist must switch/ the landscape/ and preside over tunnels.”

Galluccio’s wonderful sense of sound and rhythm allows her to alter words and images while keeping structure and order. This means that every line is readable yet sizzles with energy. She says, “poets have thieving camera eyes/ the way seagulls are scavengers”. Galluccio is certainly a thieving camera, serving up a slideshow of unique images in a rhythmic incantation. As you read, the poems are as surprising as they are lovely—and relentlessly moving around. She’s riffing, she’s improvising, she’s hurtling across the universe.

Her style is bold and classic at the same time. She shows all the erudition of a scholar with the street smarts of a hustler. “The Witch Looks to Map” and “The Witches Antidote to Sanity” are particularly cutting edge in this regard. They force the reader to think hard about what is language, what is society, even what is to thought itself. She muses on what a YOU ARE HERE map is, an arbitrarily guide to a place someone wants you to go that exists in reality. The memorization of the map’s lines and schema is reality; this is sanity. In fact, Galluccio extrapolates, the map doesn’t really exist just like your sanity and insanity are not exactly as concrete as you may have thought. The map, the language you speak and read, the thoughts you have, Galluccio says, are all encoded. Language itself is a code, and the poet is playing with the code and showing you little glimpses of the spaces between codes, the code-cracker’s perspective. The same code in a mirror may not be what it appears to be when you look straight at it.

I allow myself to be shepherded by logistics
and don’t become the breeder of wild sheep.
The sheep of pirates, of dragons, of deep leap.

She praises codes and language. She feels all would be lost without it: “We’re non-readers tumbling through literacy/ snatching angry letters that snatch us back.” She suggests learning the codes, following them and then she adds a touch of rebellion and suggests breaking some of the rules. “The first thing an artist must do is escape.” Escape the YOU ARE HERE map. Be anywhere but HERE inside the engineer’s logistical map. Get inside and outside the code, be code-cracker, code-eater, become code-terrorist. “The way deformity is beautiful,” Gallucio says in the poem “Some things”, the broken code is gorgeous. The manipulated code is poetry. The manipulated code is here as poems in Hot Rain. It’s the words and beat drumming out this book. It’s Gallucio’s great big q-tip. Sit down. Open Hot Rain. Clean out your ears.
by Ralph-Michael Chiaia
poet & editor (http://formonksonly.blogspot.com

BACK by Hugh Fox

BACK

Going back, back back to the clouds and the
cypresses and smoke, trees, mouldering twigs
and edge-of-dusk bats, skunk-smells, wild turkeys,
everything wild, primal, before guns, torahs,
mosques, in the beginning was the sky and you
and I
evolving into the pre-buddistic-
buddhistic
everything
NOW.

Hugh Fox
from Defiance

THE SANDBOX POEM

Prelude

In a color negative to the beginning
In a color bluer than the start
In a color reconfigured for the therapist:
a color scheme for art

THE THERAPIST REFUSES TO INTERPRET
but prefers her patients
to own the objects for themselves. Yes, it is for them to figure out.
So all I did was turn the color inside out.
All I did was turn the color inside out.

From the Dark Room:

Big-eyed dazed girl is sinking her star into the sand.
Snakes curl candy whips yin yang her.
The sheep inky black, licorice dark, a night-bred captive.
He is shrouded by the blue sand. She does not herd
Him: she too is like the black sheep.

BAA BAA BALOO.

Pie-eyed Japanese sex toy girl is dazed with snake poison.
Night falls and they surround her big dream-head.
Eyes hugely spiraled with pupils and black void.

She has buried the dreams – like particles or atoms – into the
sea-sand. SMASH. Will they explode into star-songs?

SUBMARINE. SUBCONSCIOUS LIKE THE STARFISH
With four arms SHE DREAMED HERSELF ONCE IN NEW YORK.

The lavender electric car will take her WEST to a new age OR
California road RAGE.

The cobalt blue nest is her mother’s heart and emptiness: both –
the dry straw, the perfect circle.

A battle for the past at the edges and the saddest is the fairy fallen,
her voice faded from her hostesses’ fear.
One sky blue boot hangs delicately in the air. Her wings
Maple-SYRUPY patterns
mangled. She flew on pancake saucers. She defied the grave.

A sorcerer outsees unanimities.
His cranked hand juts out of a black robe conjuring waves
of energy. Hoodoo energy. Zoom-impacted waves.
Whoosh, hoosh & sizzles, sinks, mushroom-like.

The horse, an echo of her beat, is now like chalk white, lightening
in front of the pine cone who stands for her father;

A LITTLE ICON OF SPEED NOW FROZEN IN SEA-SAND.
But best of all, and OUT OF TIME, are the turquoise stones – once the BORDER-LINE between past and present –

now pink-spotted eggs. As if to be eaten: sugary and plump.

Maybe there is a chance for the star-based big-eyed daze girl.
Maybe there is a chance of elevation for the big-eyeD Japanese sex-toy who sings.

Signs of life in the sand. Or is it just my imagination?
School teacher of non-object lesson, plant of well-being.
What’s the point but the picture?
What’s the point but to DIG IN.

Lo Galluccio

BLASPHEMY, A Poem from Hot Rain

BLASPHEMY

I think these diamonds are my very own teeth

spat out, admired. There isn’t enough war paint

or cake frosting to flush the twittering rages

that ballet the crossbow of my breasts.

It’s large. Large enough for a crux of rain,

for primroses and the coast of Africa. My womb’s

hot enough to cook Hansel and Gretel and the witch’s

cloak. It will house your wings.

Oh, sky. Shadows of these days cut

my looping hair against his wall. My profile’s

smoke. There’s a gleaming and the fall.

I’m a rumor and my breasts have swelled ¼ of an inch.

PATHS THAT CROSS by Patti Smith

Dedicated to John Allore who I left behind in Houston, TX

Speak to me
Speak to me heart
I feel a needing
to bridge the clouds
Softly go
A way I wish to know
A way I wish to know

Oh you'll ride
Surely dance
In a ring
Backwards and forwards
Those who seek
Feel the glow
A glow we all will know
A glow we all will know

On that day
Filled with grace
And the heart's communion
Steps we take
Steps we trace
Into the light of reunion

Paths that cross
will cross again
Paths that cross
will cross again

Speak to me
Speak to me shadow
I spin from the wheel
nothing at all
Save the need
the need to weave
A silk of souls
that whisper
A silk of souls
that whispers to me

Speak to me heart
all things renew
hearts will mend
round the bend
Paths that cross
cross again
will cross again

Rise up hold the reins
We'll meet I don't know when
Hold right bye bye
Paths that cross
will cross again
Paths that cross
will cross again

"A Sky So Black Where Screams Hide" (for Sarah Hannah, 1967 - 2007) Simply to face the daylight, Screams need to hide Shouldered into the furnace Crammed in closet; plush toy with One eye dark-adapted Becoming that star-nosed mole That ascertains not direction or sky. Screams hide Til the best of ability is disabled. For her, they resurfaced On paper, the ink forged by Chaos decoding life¢s confusion, Screams entered into words then Slued into studious vestments Simply to find daylight; We find our own ways through. Sylvia was her north star, She navigated the night til Her star seen, (unseen). However bright the stars, The sky is black by Mike Amado

STAND STILL

These are the blue sky days.
These are the blue sky postcard days.
These are the blue sky postcard construction site days.
These are the blue sky postcard construction site orange cone days.
These are the blue sky postcard construction site orange cone
Brooks Pharmacy SUVs I’m not driving days.
These are the Brooks Pharmacy SUVs I’m not driving Iraq war I’m not fighting
in days.
These are the American Idol days.
These are the American Idol pharmaceuticals we’re swallowing
to feel better days.
These are the pill swallowing Genome project sign days.
These are the zebra fish stem cell research days of better pills.
These are the better pill days for American Idols.
These are the zebra fish.

POETRY ON FILMS: An Essay

POETRY ON FILMS: the hours and la vie en rose Published in the September Alewife, 2007 In my first poetry chapbook “Hot Rain” the opening poem is called Being Visited. And in it I wrote from the black vinyl couch of a NY Chelsea studio, “We film too much.” At that point, I had no TV set or VCR and little extra money to afford movies but there was something else at stake I thought, in writing that declaration. Life. I have always had a love/hate relationship with Hollywood films. Sometimes they are too manipulative for me, too gratuitously violent and I honestly think that people sell out their own emotional lives to the stars on the silver screen who’re getting paid millions of dollars to emote. And that bothers me. All our dramas should be big and deep and matter, in my ideal world anyway. On the other hand, I’ve always also had a hard time distancing myself from films enough to just use them as distraction or pure entertainment, the way most Americans do. My boundaries get broken down and I identify too much or get too caught up in the story, forgetting that it is, in fact, an artifice. The wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz, with her hideously pea green face gave me nightmares for years, until I realized that poor Margaret Hamilton the actress had nearly died under the trapdoor she had to emerge out of in a cloud of orange sulfur smoke. Another good example is when I took my Brooklyn Night High school students to see the film Glory, about the first black Union regiment to fight in the Civil War. They were essentially slaughtered but they died with the conviction that slavery had to be abolished and they wanted to do their part. So, there I was the Social Studies teacher in charge of the field trip weeping helplessly next to the Latino street kid who says to me, “But Miss G., it’s only a movie.” Well, it is, and then again, it isn’t. Because movies that try to depict actual historical events are meant to teach us lessons too and can be powerfully graphic tools, much more so than history books. The point here is that poets can change their minds, like everybody else and now I’ve realized the value of great films and have a little spending money (and even a DVD player), so I’m writing poems about films as a new collaborative project. So far I’ve written two: both films about women artists-- very different in style and substance. I haven’t come near to refining this craft because it’s not so much a critique of the film I want, but a visceral account of it’s movement and issues-- something that gives some sense of how the movie impacted me. The first piece is about the biopic just released on the life of French singer Edith Piaf, called, La Vie en Rose.” Piaf rose to fame in the 1950’s as a recording artist and concert hall singer after a nightmarish childhood and apprenticeship in rough Paris cabarets. Like many famous musicians, she became addicted to drugs and alcohol. One reason I chose this film is because I am also a singer myself. Many know her as “the sparrow” and though a petite woman, her voice could be thunderously and tremulously moving. ************************************* Edith Piaf: La Vie en Rose “Hold me close and hold me fastThe magic spell you cast. This is la vie en rose. When you kiss me heaven sighs. And tho I close my eyesI see la vie en rose” Louis Armstrong Oh the dream her boxer man comes to her and sits at her bed. She brings him coffee. She floats on love. Her voice is low and cream. The sparrow has wings. But the boxer has crashed over the Atlantic and the dream crumbles. The soul of the singer is shaking her apart. Breaking her heart. The boxer man from Morocco was her one joy. Both fighters and lovers. She shoots dope. She dreams death. She is pale and withered-- the sparrow, named by the booking agent in the cabarets whose father pimped her for La Marseillaise. She is France. She is the soul of her country. Om Khartoum in Egypt. Billie Holliday in the US. Raised by whores. Anesthetized by alcohol. St. Teresa sees all this. St. Teresa knows Edith Piaf, the sparrow. St. Teresa of the roses. No matter how hard you hit me, I will sing back. I will sing until I collapse on stage. My audience, knows Piaf, will hear my voice until the end. Like Judy Garland -- with those arms gesturing, that body swaying, conducting waves well beyond the lithe frame. My voice is my teacher and she will save me in the end. I will not drown. Then we see another sparrow -- sitting on the beach which is pale and dry like sober champagne. Sand surrounds her and she heals as the rhythms of the waves come in. She is at peace even though it is only silence she commands. Her face is ravaged; at 40, she looks 80. Yet her eyes are the eyes of an astonished child. She knows she too will be gone into an infinity sign, that treble Clef of God. Oh Teresa, where are you? In the end will the sparrow have your roses? Gone, gone, real gone, gone beyond even the most gone. And still her voice remains: the rose. La vie en Rose. ***************************** The second film for which I penned a poem is “The Hours” based on the acclaimed book by Michael Cunningham, who also wrote the novel “Specimen Days” which I highly recommend. The story follows three women living in three different eras whose lives are connected through time by Woolf’s novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.” The story of "Mrs. Dalloway," by Virginia Woolf, first appeared as a short story, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," published in 1923. The novel was published in 1925. Perhaps I chose this film because I’m a writer and suicide is an important theme for me. As some of you may know Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her amazing transformation (with the help of a prosthetic nose) from her bewitching blonde self to the dour moody and brilliant writer stuck in the English country-side. But it is a trio of female actresses who spin the story: Julianne Moore (“Laura”) living in LA in the 1950’with a doting but less than stimulating husband and their boy child who later becomes an award- winning poet dying of AIDS, and Meryl Streep who is for all intents and purposes, a reincarnation of Mrs. Dalloway herself, living in modern-day Manhattan. She is the one who is trying to hold everything together with social grace by throwing a party for the poet and who must come to terms with the fact that her flowers arrangements and catered food are not enough. That no, in fact, something is terribly wrong and a party won’t solve it. He will, in fact, throw himself off the window ledge and free himself from his pain. The party does not go on despite her nurturing ministrations and intense love for him. I wrote a longer version of this poem that still needs revision and a shorter one that I will give you here, inspired partly by Irene Koronas’ work who I interviewed last month for this column: ********************* THE HOURS, based on the book by Michael Cunningham To live or die because of reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Shy Laura takes her friend’s chin and passionately kisses her on the mouth. Two housewives. String of pearls. The boy looks on. He will become the tormented poet. The meat is bloody in Richmond England. And what is this kiss? What does Virginia say to her sister? I AM REAL I LOVE YOU. I AM CRAZY. I WILL TAKE YOU ON THE MOUTH LIKE A MAN WITH MY MOUTH. SEE WHO WE REALLY ARE? THE BREATH OF SOULS. She walks into the river with a stone tied to her leg. The water swirls around her dress as she sinks deeper. She is leaving behind the kisses, and cigarettes, and words, and the breath. Mrs. Dalloway must be reconciled to her own life. We give each other flowers flowers flowers. (Postscript: Virgina Woolf’s beloved husband Leonard made many sacrifices in order for his wife to write and be herself. Eventually, though, she committed suicide so as not to be a burden to him anymore. For me the kisses between the women are significant because it is they who are trying to find themselves, reach each other and who understand that passion is, in fact, necessary for life.)

Horses

HORSES - published in Audience Review Vol 2, Issue 3, 2007, NYC

My friend Thomas says he doesn’t think that horses have a place in the American psyche Hmmm…. well, I don’t quite know what to say. “Dogs,” he says, “I like dogs.” “You go to Revere Beach and you see a bunch of men running around with their dogs.” “Women, girls,” I say, “I think we like horses.” And Thomas agrees. “Well, you’ve got a point there.” “My sister, my cousins… yup, they love horses….I always thought, well, they’ll grow out of it.” And I offer, “Maybe horses are a bit more, uh, majestic than dogs?” “ I mean they can be dangerous but there is that combination of beauty and speed, utility and pleasure….I mean, you know?” He still shakes his head. “Well, you can’t keep a horse at home.” “ I mean, they’re not domestic.” “Well, no I guess not,” I offer. “Unless you own a ranch.”

Secretly, I’m thinking, “Is he kidding me?” How can you even compare the sleekest greyhound to a wild Palomino? The most loyal black lab to a mustang colt? I don’t get it. Doesn’t he realize that the whole nation was in agony over Barbaro’s injured hind leg and his having to be euthanized after winning two rounds of the Derby? Is this really a gender issue? No, for God’s sake there are plenty of men who would die for their steeds…But this shouldn’t be a battle of horses vs. dogs…dogs are cool with me; it’s a matter of the horses. Horses as mythic, as thoroughbreds, as laborers, as something larger than that….

We’ve gotten together for a writing session and my bid was to write an essay on horses. My question was, really, what place do horses have in the American psyche and are they a sacred animal to us like say, cows or elephants in India? Well, Thomas likes inside things, and not outside things, I guess. But it’s interesting that a creature I consider so quintessentially American, he considers so superfluous to the landscape....


From Patti Smith’s CD Horses, “Land:”

“When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he’s being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames,
He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses,
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney
Do you know how to twist, well it goes like this, it goes like this…”

The mesmerizing poet-saint of rock and roll. This album – and I hear the word Arabian roll through my mind like a wave – became etched in my aura before I made my first solo CD, Being Visited with multiple voices and poetry cutting in and out of band tracks. Johnny’s horses stayed with me for a long time after hearing this song. Later I would arrange the well-known spiritual “All the Pretty Horses” on my second CD, “Spell on You.” In the break I sang:

“will you have all the pretty little horses, the horses, the horses
all the Palominos, the mustang chargers, will you have all the seahorses at the bottom of the ocean?”

(It’s a song about a white child who’s mammy chides it for not sleeping, and sings that when he wakes he will have “all the pretty horses” whereas the black child lying in the field will not….a strange lullabye from slavery times. The horses symbolize the wealth of white people…I just took it out a bit farther to encompass how high and low, sky and ocean, the horses could take a child’s imagination, our imaginations….)

***************************

Where did the first horses come from? In fact horses evolved on the North American continent for over 50 million years and the wild ones with the conquistadors….long before we were here (barring the tenure of the Native Americans) and eventually they became like our uneasy immigrants, sleek or shoddy, but some fit the backsides of Irish cops on their beats in cities, some leapt through fire in circuses, some of them were bought and bred as thoroughbreds for track racing, and then the 100’s of 1000’s served in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, with soldiers upon them, whipped and gasping for air. They are surrounded like ourselves in dream, in ether, in heroics, and in sweat and motion, on any given day. They are, I think, our supreme objects and occasionally our mirrors, both.

Take the 1961 movie “The Misfits.” It’s the last movie Gable and Monroe ever made. The title fits both the humans and the horses of the story as they both are cast outside of society, wild misfits unable to settle into a satisfying pattern of existence, predatory and preyed upon. It’s Monroe –at the end of her marriage to Arthur Miller, drinking and hooked on pills, arriving late to the set frequently – who convinces the band of over-the-hill cowboys to free the mustangs they rustle up for the slaughterhouses for a living. One NY Times reviewer claimed that it was the only scene in the film that worked, the climax, the scuffle in the Nevada desert when Monroe hysterically “kicks up a ruckus” that pulls down their horse-trapping scheme. She is the woman in love with the wild horses; she’s the beautiful wounded tramp who’s fading fast, but who still knows a creature who should be protected from a cheap death.

***********************

What really kicked off the idea of this essay was one day last week when two female friends of mine transmitted via internet media, episodes about horses which piqued my interest again. Both women loved horses, only one was publicizing a candle-light vigil in New York City for a carriage-horse named Smoothie who’d died after running himself into a tree. Rebecca is a fellow vocal artist and friend from New York. She’s also a political activist who loves animals and identifies with them.


“PROTESTERS DEMAND BAN ON CARRIGE HORSES” the myspace blog reads, Special to amNewYork, September 21st 2007.

“Many in the crowd stood holding candles and sheets of paper with numbers representing the identification codes of horses removed from the carriage business over the past two years, for reasons as diverse as age, injury or infirmity. Lower East Side musician Rebecca Moore stood holding a candle next to the number 3001.”

“They’re not machines,” she said as others began lighting candles, “and to expect the horses to be in such a stressful situation all day, with noise, traffic and heat, is insane.”

The piece ends with the quote:

“Horses don’t belong on the streets in the 21st Century. Smoothie didn’t have to die.”

Three or four comments in support of ending this exploitation of horses follow and Rebecca appends several petitions to the City government to end the horse and buggy industry. She doesn’t mess around. An empathic artist, I know Rebecca sees something special and beautiful in many creatures and must have bonded mystically with Smoothie, even Smoothie’s ghost. She’s just like that. And an artist knows how fast they can be seen as valuable entertainment commodities one minute and disposed of in the infirmary the next. It’s a hazardous life.

In contrast, the other e-mail came from my old grade-school friend Liz Homans’ husband who wrote that his wife’s riding horse Caspian “knocked her down, stepped on her back with full weight, flipped her, and stepped on her right arm and left leg with less than full weight.” What followed, was a detailed medical description and diagnosis of Liz’ condition. She’s a pediatrician who’s loved and ridden horses since she was a young girl. Jeff wrote at the end of the email that Liz faced a “protracted and painful recovery.” Later he would joke that of course Liz forgave Caspian but that he was on thin ice and joked that if anything else happened, he might be on his way to the glue factory. Never was there any speculation as to why Caspian might have behaved that way in his stall toward his owner that day. It should be noted that Liz and I had had no contact in more than five years but that in the 5th or 6th grade Liz developed a rare virus that put her in a coma for several months. Upon recovery through a tracheotomy maneuver and luck, she went on to medical school as a partial penance to the doctors who saved her life. She and her husband, both doctors, live in Arizona and she rides horses for pleasure.

In 2005, I was asked to review a book by the famous female poet Lyn Lifshin, a prolific poet on the independent poetry scene with over 100 titles to her credit who had penned a book about a horse named, Ruffian. It was called, “The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian” on Texas Review Press. An incredibly intense book, Lifshin bonds with this star filly and tracks her development almost from birth until she becomes a formidable racer. Lifshin writes that at a young age, she is, “a horse that seems to dance on water.” Or, a dream-like apparition as in, “Some nights I think of Her…lying quietly all night/as if she knew, for the moment,/her body was her friend/A star on her forehead/A star inside her blood/Herons in the distance/gulls. Her star/color of the floating lily/….By Saratoga, Lifshin writes, “She danced to the gate quivering with eagerness, huge and glistening/as if she’d do this as an old mare too/…”And too the hint she’d run herself to death, stagger/to the finish line on three legs”/ I wrote in my review that the fate of the super filly was prophesied before it ended, like Giselle’s possession by the willies, like ballet, almost phonetic in its precision. And Lifshin remembers that, “On Ruffian’s last day, like today, sparrows were flying through the eaves at Belmont.”

There was almost a mother-daughter bond between the two, or fan-celebrity, something that certainly transcended the ordinary.

****************************

Like Monroe in the Misfits, or Patti Smith’s rock and roll chanting, Rebecca’s moon-lit vigil for Smoothie….Lifshin went out of her way to express a large and sustained love for horses and for this particular horse, Ruffian. Something in the blood; something riveting and deep. For all these women, horses seem to have an extremely important place in the psyche, whether as martyred beasts of burden or mythic avengers, or magic thoroughbreds that win and die tragic but brave deaths. However, just because all these horse-lovers are women, doesn’t mean that all horse lovers are women.

Take the recent case of Barbaro the race horse who fell in the Belmont Stakes when his jockey Prado was riding him. He’d won the Preakness and the Triple Crown three weeks before. The owners decided that they had to give this particular horse, a powerful colt, every chance to live, despite an injury that usually spelled death to a race horse. Most of America was caught up in the saga of whether Barbaro would actually overcome this huge obstacle, the splintering of his right rear leg. Eventually he was euthanized by his owners who spent huge amounts of money trying to keep the colt alive. A horse is usually in too much pain from losing one of its legs. We know this even from that movie title about marathon dancing made in the 1930’s, “They shoot horses, don’t they?”

So, what does this amount to? Was it a silly question to begin with? Have we come to terms with how we treat our horses when they race and get hurt, when they hurt us, when they become destructive, when we love them too much? Are they sacred to us? Or do we expect them, like most of us in America, to be part of that crazy game of survival of the fittest, of having to prove their prowess and smarts and worth? And isn’t that the societal question we all face right now about America as a competitive society? When we ask “Is racing animals cruelty?” aren’t we sort of asking the same question Michael Moore’s asking about the health insurance industry being profit driven in his latest film, Sicko? Because yes, horses like Barbaro and Ruffian might be born to run, but what about the others who are bred to race and lose anyway? Who are we to know? But maybe that’s just the way the wheel is turning and maybe it’s progress from horses being sold as dog food or used in wars.

So, yes, I think horses are to Americans something like what elephants are to Indians. We are proud to have them on our land and we are proud of their beauty and their speed and power. They symbolize something grand and deeply identifiable to us. To take ownership of a horse is a great responsibility, greater than that of a dog or cat. There is something wild and spectacular and gentle and generous about riding a horse and bonding with him/her. Sometimes they kick back. Our humanity is part of the responsibility we take on.

That’s really all I know.

Lo Galluccio
October 7, 2007

Birdman - A Memoir

BIRDMAN: A memoir



"You were an emperor with a sword who looked wounded
like a birdman after a storm. Your tongue like a garter snake enchants me…"
Lo song lyric

I wore an army jacket with brass buttons, double-breasted and green and walked around the night in sunglasses. Gloss on night: darkness over darkness to see the night, to be alone. Taking the A train, I went up to Harlem one day to find Jean Michel Basquiat’s paintings. I’d run into blonde-haired and waifish Billy Martin (of Martin, Medeski and Wood) at the MoMA and for some reason, he also loved Basquiat. I guess part of that was Basquiat’s association with John Lurie, Bandleader of the Lounge Lizards, who Martin drummed for. John ran with Basquiat in their dope days, dope days that killed poor Jean Michel, that Lurie and others recovered from.
In a small Harlem museum, there was a ring of Crown King paintings, black with silver and gold and colored chalk. Basquiat invented his cartoon icons of America as an outsider. And I was feeling this in myself. I remember the exercise of taking the subway up there and staring for hours at the paintings to memorize them. To switch my right brain on and open up my imagination synapses. My soul trembled with delight and said yes to the inverse narcissism, the codes, the blackness and the bones of the paintings. He became my favorite post-modern painter. He began to open up my eyes. Why were they shut tight? And why did I feel blinded? This I will come to.

Maybe the reason I called Tronzo Birdman, was the look he had on the Queen of all Ears CD, the Lounge Lizards record. You see him --bald with squint bright eyes – wise bright eyes and his funny bird nose at the camera. And that was the creature of a man who had mesmerized me with his anger and his guitar’s heavenly blues oratorios. He was my former lover and boyfriend, Tronzo. Most people downtown then in New York knew the Lounge Lizards was the hip white Duke Ellington orchestra of our day. Or Count Basie to the Jazz Passengers’ Duke. Still Birdman and Lurie were rivals of a kind. Tronzo was happy for the gig but he always found Lurie to be egotistical and too much a showman. I loved them both, though Tronzo would later say I was more like John because I had stage-presence, was the singer.

The reason I needed to re-configure my mind’s eye was because I’d been pink-slipped and put in a psychiatric ward by a man named Dr. Dollar a month or so before that. Dr. Dollar (real name) was a Southern psychiatrist to whom I’d been referred by several friends who thought I needed medication for my "depression." After the Birdman cast me out I was punished for a suicide attempt in a way that forever changed my life. And this is a story about that, and about how grief will run it’s course. Larry explained to me that "pathology" means, in Greek, "the logic of grief," not mental illness. Larry Joseph was my mentor back then; a brilliant law school professor who wrote a book called, "Shouting at No One." Here in America we still pathologize our imbalances and emotions. I learned a harsh lesson that by trying to take my own life, it became the property of others who could lock me up. Lock me up away from the source of my suffering, but not heal it with deeper understanding or joy. No, it was yoga and the piano and winter and mysticism and love that do that…or almost do.

My father, Tony Galluccio, died when I was 15. A child of grief and unclear about real world machineries, psychiatries, confineries – after refusing pain medication for my busted neck, I took those same pain pills to kill me. And I fell asleep like a dream of dying, not a massive overdose or bloodletting like the Godfather’s failed lieutenant. The kitchen window in my small studio was covered up. And after swallowing 6-7 Naprocyns, I turned on the oven and fell asleep. I woke up an hour or so later, feeling queasy. And I knew I wanted to live, that it had been a childish attempt to erase my life, under the shame of losing his love, which had been so great. The Birdman, that is.

Let me tell you something more about the Birdman. He could play his guitar like a laser beam of violet blues light. He’d internalized the blues of the early 1900’s like John Lee Hooker or Blind Lemon. He had the ego of Santana or Hendrix. But he’d boozed when he first came to New York City and blown up at bandleaders and got into mighty trouble despite his mighty talent. The first night we made love together…it was a slow fade into dawn with him sitting behind me like a birch tree, his arms coming around me as we walked ceremoniously to the bed. Like a rocking horse he took me. He hadn’t been with a woman for awhile. It hurt me a little and I also loved his taking possession of me physically with ecstasy. The next morning we sat in his little kitchen in the E. Village and he wept. He wept and I knelt down before him. He said to me it was because of all the guys he’d lost to booze in Times Square. He couldn’t believe he was still alive and they were all gone. I was amazed at this display of sorrow, the intensity of the grief.
Already, I’d played my song, "Queen of Mars" for him, in rough form, and I’d already gone to dinner on India Row with him on Thanksgiving, both of us apart from our families. I felt like he was my guide, in love and in art. There I was in a cream-colored trenchcoat, looking like a French movie actress, working as a secretary when we first met on the Upper East Side. We were both staying with friends until we found places downtown, within a few blocks of each other. So when he cried and I thought to myself, "Oh, no, Oh, yes," What do I do about this man? I either run now and keep going…or I say, I’m here for you and we’re together. Later I would write a poem about the little fisherman who would come into his head and ride the ocean of the tears he cried. It was called, "The color of January." That day, I walked away, down 6th Street, knowing love, and knowing too, that even more than our damage and desire was the music. The music was what I wanted.
"Your eye a scar, slants bird toward me winging in.
And the corner of your eye…became a bird.
And the corner of your eye…became a bird."Birthday, a song, Galluccio/Tronzo

It was at a Lounge Lizards’s concert. It was John Lurie, the actor and sax-man who always reminded me of an outfielder, with his stance and Roman God’s profile. It was my dream of a bomb going off – the color orange. It was another dream. Later I would look back and say, "Why didn’t I follow the message of the dream?" The only orange in my apartment was Tronzo’s amplifier, and the bomb exploding was him. That was what my psyche was warning me about. So, why not avert catastrophe?

I saw Lurie on stage and Tronzo was playing in the band. We’d been together for a year and collaborated on many songs. Our band, "FishPistol" delighted audiences in downtown clubs. I was Lucy to his Ricky. I was also just myself. When the Birdman took me home that night, angry I’d shown up at the wrong show time, and on his way to Europe with his trio, he snared me. In that apartment on 6th Street that reminded me of Amsterdam, where we’d written "Creamsplit" and "Birthday" together and I’d woken up early and gotten to Arrow Shirts to earn my living, Tronzo threatened to strangle me to death. See-- when you say Tronzo, it could be a Japanese gangster also. But it was also the Birdman who exiled me at 3:00 a.m. into a dark New York night. His plane to Europe cut through the sky and my stomach turned the next day when I felt my heart leave the planet Earth.

About a month later, after that suicide attempt, I woke up and threw up and felt okay. I was not okay about losing the love of my life. I was okay about death not eclipsing me. I was okay that fate had kept me alive. What really happened was this: instead of showing up for an appointment with a shrink at St. Vincent’s I called and told Dr. Dollar the truth. The hospital scared me. He called the police and five of them showed up at my door to take me to the psychiatric emergency room. It was a two-week incarceration in a locked psychiatric unit with idiot doctors and a bunch of poor trapped inner-city adolescents. The guard, when I’d signed in under coercion, said to me, actually said to me, "It’s like walking onto the moon, huh?" Too hurt and terrorized to speak, I didn’t say, "No kind of moon, I’ve ever seen." My roommate was a girl named Cecilia. She talked and talked about her adoration for Barbara Streisand. The first night inside, I stuck my fingers in my ears to block her out. I didn’t sleep for 48 hours because I was afraid of what it would do to my mind’s eye. A tall man with white hair arrived on the ward who smelled of books and patchouli. I trusted him. He said to me that his wife had been an ex-model who couldn’t take aging so took 60 seconals and turned purple on her side of the bed. He was so depressed, he was having shock treatments. Cecilia had had them since she was younger. She painted. I grew to like her. It was a wild wild ride, a grim story. However, what finally turned things around was a fifteen-year old Latin girl named Danae. She had been walking around silently with her hands pinned to her thighs. She has been there for months. One night I watched Danae pick up a framed print off the main corridor –and there really was only a long one and a shortish one in an L-shaped ward—and smashed it on the ground. And she started screaming. "I’m too young to be in here. Let me outta here. I’m an artist and this just messes me up." That’s what she yelled over and over to the nurse’s very uncomfortable astonishment. This statue of a girl, had completely flipped over into rage and a voice. It was revolutionary music to my ears. The next day she was released to her parents. Soon after, so was I. Not before I watched Cecilia straightjacketed; not before I was threatened with brain scans because they thought I wasn’t thinking "clearly" when I questioned their methods.

Then I wrote "Bright Star/Shot Horse"
You take me down a corridor where dreams turn into television.
The color of your potions won’t replace the color of my visions.
You ask me do I hear voices. I hear voices like the sea.
You want me to take my trilophon, I drink my asylum tea.
The color’s red in my museum, it won’t fade in your cure for me…"

I didn’t want the Birdman to know I was in there. He found out anyway.

When I got out, the first night out on the town, I caught a cab with John Lurie. Think I had on the blue-striped shirt Tronzo had given me and some purple bell-bottoms with sneakers. When I told Lurie what happened, he said, "Sweetheart, you’re much braver than I am, trying to kill yourself." "I could never do that." I told him all the kids in the unit said, "mad this" and "mad that." This was the same Lurie who plays it cool in the movie, Stranger than Paradise. He’s an immigrant who knew how to gamble and travel and bide his time til something better happened, free in America. That was the John Lurie with the penetrating eyes and the off-hand remarks and the temper flares just shy of real violence. Once I looked for work in stores in Soho with giraffes in them because he also reminded me of a giraffe.

So Lurie might have "killed" the Birdman for me. He carried me upstairs to his loft and I had on a 1950’s dress from a tour of Greece. He said he did that with all the girls. I laughed. And then that night, another dream, interrupted the action. Before we made love, I dreamt of Tronzo, my Birdman. It was a simple dream but we were together in bed holding hands. I was startled and guilt-ridden and knew he still had a spell over my soul. And I lost Lurie too for awhile. I lost Lurie forever until something very strange happened when I made my own first record. It had a queen in it too. And she was my double. The CD was called, Being Visited and on the front cover I was Queen of Mars, an elegaic pop anthem that almost healed me for good. Because the song was written in code about my father also, trying to tell his story too. And Queen of Mars was the tarot card on the wall, maybe Queen of all Ears, and she was me. Long pink hair, and sharp teeth. She used men and was tricked by them, "my twin, my nemesis, Queen of Mars." And there it was, the music given by those slide-guitar hands, come back to me. And I could transform the grief. Like Ikkyu’s bird. A bird of paradise. Stranger, New York, than paradise. Birdman, John Lurie. -- you go to my head like champagne. Danae -- your bravery kept my heart from shattering. I was changed, but my soul remained.

Lo Galluccio