Notes On Jazz, Writing and Other Matters

    

            The following excerpt is from my book CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN.  It is one of those creative moments when my passion for jazz and my passion for writing merge.  I hope that I can spread some light on the value of jazz so that it need not be a form of music that is virtually ignored..  It isn't the stuff of giant boom boxes that get worn on your head so you look like you've just survived an altercation with an assistant manager at Costco.
          Question: are there still Boom Boxes or have those morphed into Boom Automobiles so you can sit inside your sonic vengeance rather than wearing it on your head?

1967: The Zoot Prestige Trio At The Esquire Lounge

                

    

The Esquire Lounge is an archetypal venue: a pure urban jazz club, on the ‘circuit’, right down on Euclid Avenue between the steel mills to the west and Western Reserve University to the east.  The club’s sign has martini glasses jiggling in neon pink and green.  Every time Aaron sees it, he senses that some day it will be a priceless artifact in a museum, “Esquire Lounge” and its dancing long-stemmed martini glasses being studied by serious observers of semiotics and folk art.  

          Zoot and the boys have f inished a week’s engagement at the Jazzland Grill in Columbus.  The drive to Cleveland is a little over two hours.  It is a perfect example of Zoot's genius for scheduling gigs in different cities yet avoiding the road fatigue that can turn a musician's life into a nightmare.

          Before checking into the hotel, before doing anything, Zoot wants to see old friends and examine the new soundboard at the Esquire. The gig is going to be recorded for Blue Note Records.  Rumors are flying in the jazz world that the new band is something special, that Zoot has found a pair of "monsters", as they are called, to back him up as he plays his distinctive bop'n'blues style.  For Aaron and Tyrone, it is their debut.  Downbeat Magazine is going to review the record, it will be written up by critics like Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff. 

          It's big.  It's important.  The album is going to be called “Hot Sax”.

          Zoot enters the club majestically, placing his feet on the carpet as if he is dancing, doing his lanky walk, all his joints subtly undulating.

          “What’s up, buttercup?,” he inqures of the man sitting on a stool behind the bar.  There are five or six people in the club, nursing drinks and chatting quietly.  Two women spread white cotton tablecloths below the bandstand.

          “Zoot motherfucking Prestige!” says the club’s proprietor,  “What is happenin’?” He puts out his cigarette and comes sailing from behind the bar, a tall fat man with a medium afro. He does a series of finger snaps and arcane handshakes with Zoot, then embraces him with a huge laugh.

          Aaron knows these sounds and gestures; they are the greeting rituals of adult black males.  They are tunes of loose laughter, arms and hands swinging wide and making noisy contact.  The words mean little.  The tones of understanding and recognition are everything. He tried, for a while, to imitate this hip black language.  He felt ridiculous.  What kind of spectacle must he be?  A “white Negro”.  What’s that nasty term?  A “Wigger”?  Does he want to be a slang term?  Wait, let’s not forget the Jew.  What is he?  A Nigyid?  A Yidgro?  Oh God, he’s a Yigger!  No, he will speak the way he speaks, act the way he acts, just as he is.

          Zoot does quick introductions.   The club’s owner is Hilton Stubbs.  When Aaron is introduced, Stubbs looks at him coldly.  Then, as if Aaron doesn’t exist, Stubbs points to him and inquires of Zoot, “What is this?”

          Zoot bristles.  “What do you mean, ‘what is this?’, motherfucker.  This is my drummer.”

          “This is a white kid from Shaker Heights, man, this won’t go down.”

          “Hilton, you don’t know shit.”  Zoot extends a protective arm around Aaron’s shoulders.  “You wanna cancel the gig?”  Zoot picks up his saxophone case.  “I can tell Blue Note we ain’t playin’ here.  I’ll go talk to Alvin at Loose End and I’ll have my ass another gig.”

          “Naw, shit man, I won’t do that; but I don’t believe no white kid can play drums with Zoot Prestige and sound like the real deal.”

          “Why don’t you talk to him like he’s here in front of you, fool?”

          Stubbs looks at Aaron.  “Hmmmph.” He lights a cigarette languidly, sizing Aaron up. “Zoot is legendary for being able to find monstrous drummers but I'm havin' a hard time taking you seriously.  You can’t be more than fucking twenty years old, kid.  What do you know about soul?”

          Aaron shrugs.  “Gig starts at nine. You’ll find out.”

          At that moment, several other people come from the back of the club, see Zoot and the greeting rituals are repeated.  Aaron is ignored or treated to a cold stare, a lingering gaze of contempt and then a dismissive de-focusing of the eyes, as if he has simply vanished.  Traveling with Zoot on the circuit, he has gotten a lot of racist attitude. He lets it bounce off him.  He knows that later things will be different.

          The equipment has to be unloaded and set up.  There is already a Hammond organ and a Leslie speaker on the stage. Tyrone helps Aaron with the drums.  At half past five, the recording crew arrives, hauling in a big Ampex eight track recorder in a wheeled case.  Aaron is miked just above his head and in front of his bass drum.  Zoot gets a single mike, Tyrone gets two, and two mikes are placed at strategic points on the stage.   By six thirty the instruments are assembled and a sound check completed.  The band and the recording crew order a few slabs of the Esquire’s legendary barbecue and drink a few beers.

          Zoot leads his band to the Hotel Onyx, next door, where they check in.  Zoot has a room.  Tyrone and Aaron share a room.  They shower, shave, lay on their respective beds and relax. 

          Aaron falls asleep.  At eight o clock, Tyrone shakes him awake.  He has a familiar, crazed look on his face, as if he's about to do something naughty.

          “Hey man, check this out.”  Tyrone holds two sugar cubes in his palm.  They resemble pistils at the center of the long mocha petals of his fingers.  Tyrone’s digits are like the tentacles of a carnivorous plant. 

          Aaron sits up.  Outside the window of the room, a neon sign is going bing! bop! bing! bop!  Rooms!  Hotel Onyx!  Rooms!  Hotel Onyx!

          “Aw shit, what is that?’’  Aaron rubs his face, yawns.

          “Hee hee.  Owsley acid.  The purest.”  Tyrone is full of mad mischief.  His eyes seem to melt and harden like molten glass.  Aaron loves him, loves his playing, loves his daring.  He is virtually illiterate, dropped out of school in the fourth grade, but he is a thinker, a philosopher, a musical intellect.

          “Owsley acid.  It’s always Owsley acid.  How do you know it isn’t bathtub PCP?  With all the shit I just went through being white, you want me to take a psychedelic and play a gig?”

          “I am Tyrone Terry, man, THE Tyrone Terry.  Nobody twacks bullshit dope on me.  I will kill them with my lethal B flat.  What the fuck, man, it’s not like you aint done it before.  Here.”  He hands a cube to Aaron, then sucks the remaining cube into his mouth.  His cheeks dent inward so that the goatee on his chin goes down like a sword blade.  Behind his glasses his eyes are like the fires of a kiln.  Aaron eats the cube with a tiny twist of fear.  He knows taking a psychedelic is like going for a ride on a tiger’s back.  It ccan connect him to the primal power; or it can turn on him and eat him alive.  He will risk it.

          Having made this commitment, Aaron now has other preparations to make. He wishes he hadn’t eaten the barbecue.  It sits in his guts like a greasy snake.  No matter, he will sweat it off.  He sits in a quiet corner of the room, putting himself into lotus position.  There is a terror of annihilation in him, residue from other psychedelic experiences.  He has learned to let go of himself, has even learned to function, to play music, to walk around in the ‘ordinary’ world of people.  It is the initial phases of the drug rush that are the most difficult.  Suddenly, one finds oneself….utterly….without significance, lost in a vastness beyond vastness, so that the personality of Aaron Kantro is some kind of silly joke.  It is this silly joke that Aaron has learned to dismiss with a figurative wave of his hand.  What does it matter if I matter?  Move forward into the risk, take the grotesque with the beautiful, take it all.  Inhale and exhale universes with each breath.

          Aaron hears Tyrone settle down beside him.  Yoga is something Aaron has imparted to his friend, only to discover that Tyrone has a natural ability to settle into a deep silence.  He is, perhaps, less intellectually encumbered.  Whatever the reason, Tyrone is a natural yogi, he meditates and conjures mind exercises of stunning imagination.

          Zoot will come to fetch them at quarter to nine.  The young men must don their tuxedoes.  The drug is working, beginning as they meditate, stretching their imagery into an immense hall in which they can hear one another’s thoughts like echoes from walls of a cave. 

          “We got a gig,” Aaron reminds Tyrone as he uncurls his legs.  Tyrone opens his eyes slowly, and they are like search lights being uncovered, a mighty glow emits from their orbs.  Pulling themselves into the mundane world, the musical brothers dress and look at their reflections in the mirror, giggling.  “Be cool, be cool, “ Tyrone admonishes, sinking his head between his shoulders as if to mimic stealth.  “The Zoot will be wise to this, and he won’t be happy if we’re melting.”

          “Promise I won’t melt,” Aaron confirms.  He is serious, he knows he has a responsibility to his mentor to behave and play like a professional jazz musician. 

          Zoot enters the room, sits in the one easy chair and lets both legs splay over the chair’s arm rest..  He brings out his little pouch and crumples some weed into the corncob pipe.  He examines his compatriots with an air of suspicion, but he has seen this before and has a measure of faith in his sidemen.

          “Dudes look good,” he sayes.  “Feelin alright? Tight?  Outtasight?”

          “Just fine, Zoot.  Lookin’ forward to it, “ Tyrone replies.  Aaron nods agreement.

          Zoot eyes his sidemen speculatively.  “Gonna get cosmological on me?  Gonna do Coltrane riffs?”  This is one of Zoot’s cautionary admonitions.  He loves John Coltrane but knows his bread and butter, knows what the patrons of the Esquire Club have come to hear:  stompin’ blues shoutin bop-till-you-drop tenor saxophone organ trio music. 

          “Don’t you trust us, Zoot?  We know the gig.”  Aaron’s hands are rattling complex drum patterns on his kneecap.  Warming up. 

          “There’s something about you two, tonight.  You’re glittering a little bit.”  It is impossible to tell whether or not he winks, because when he wants to, Zoot can wink but not wink.  Aaron suspects he has winked.  The saxophonist lights the pipe and inhales.  Then he loads it again and passes it to Aaron.  “I will righteously appreciate some discipline from you young monsters.  Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on here.  This ain’t speculative fiction.  This is the Kingdom of Funktonics.  Aaron, you gotta stay inside the groove and let these Black Nationalist motherfuckers know you can play some shit.” 

          “We will play some shit,” Tyrone affirms, making it sound like a solemn oath. Aaron repeats it.  “We will play some shit.”

          Each of them has the requisite two hits of weed, enacting the pre-set ritual that is as much a part of their working life as their instruments and their PA system.  They head down the long stairs with its purple carpeting, into the foyer with its thousands of tiny hexagonal tiles and green trim.  Euclid avenue is a parade of horsepower vanity.  Caddies, Continentals and Grand Prix convertibles gurgle toward the traffic lights.  A bit of rain has fallen and the smell of wet pavement and gasoline fumes mingle in the air.  Reflections from neon lights bounce up from the sidewalks.  Aaron inhales and marvels at the wild beauty of the world.

          They walk around to the kitchen entrance of the club.  Zoot gives a signal to Hilton Stubbs.  The proprietor nods and goes to the bandstand.  It is a good house.  The tables are taken.  The bar is already two rows deep.  The recording engineers are perched at their boards like alchemists over tables of potions and unguents

          “Ladies and gentlemen,” Stubbs says into the microphone.  “The Club Esquire is honored to present the reigning Master of Funk, the Prestigious One, The Zoot with the roots and his smokin’ recruits,  the one and only…… Zoot….. Pres…..tige!”

          They come through the swinging door and make their procession to the bandstand. When the applause and whistles die down, Zoot looks at Tyrone and Aaron, snaps his fingers and counts off a blistering tempo for “All the Things You Are”.  They are off! Tyrone’s organ vamps behind Zoot’s solo like butter rolling down a split yam.  Aaron is crisp as a new hundred dollar bill.  The stick in his right hand comes down on the ride cymbal almost lazily; just enough behind the beat to give it tension, to make that indefinable suspense that is the elusive quality of swing.  He pop pops with his left hand on the snare, talking to Zoot’s cadences.  It is a glory.  It is jazz. 

          They play Monk’s tune, “Well You Needn”t.  Then, to slow things down, Zoot calls for “Angel Eyes”.   That’s when the LSD begins working at its full intensity.  Tyrone plays the dark moody chords of the song.  Its story is that of an urban barroom drama, of souls sliding toward damnation but gripping their humanity with ferocious desperation.  When Tyrone’s solo comes, he lands on one of those blue tones that the organ can sustain forever, while his right hand trills and trills pure funkiness.  It is musical laughter.  Aaron’s smile grows larger than his face, a Cheshire Cat grin where the rest of him disappears into the curling lips and glowing teeth.  Zoot rocks his horn and arches his back.  The audience is screaming approval.  The walls start to melt.  Hilton Stubbs looks like a goat or a devil, behind the bar, smiling so that his gold tooth flashes across the room.  Tyrone glances at Aaron, wicked sly wit oozing from his eyes.

          Stay inside, Aaron mentally signala.  Don’t get crazy.  Tyrone nods.  Don’t worry; I can get crazy and still stay inside.  They are IT.  They are tradition.  They are milking all the conventions, all the known things of jazz.  Tyrone arpeggioes to get to the head of the tune.  It is like ocean waves, surf rolling in perfect cylinders toward the shore.  Zoot hears the cue and they restate the brooding melodrama of Angel Eyes.  The tune ends in a splash of cymbals, organ and saxophone.  Perfect. 

          Zoot knows what's  happening but says nothing.  As long as they play well he will let it slide.  He can’t sit on these two young horses.  He can go with them, out to the boundary.  If he feels them slipping off, he will give them the infamous Zoot Stare.  If he can keep them right there, right at the boundary but still within the vocabulary, the vocabulary itself will become the realm of exploration. 

          It works.  It works all night.  At one moment, Aaron takes a drum solo and feels his arms multiply, feels as if four right hands and four left hands are striking and bouncing off the drums with incredible speed.  He is a Hindu God, he is eight-armed Ganesh, the elephant god, the lord of Jupiter.  He rolls and crackles and flames but keeps it together, never gets abstract, hits the One, the downbeat, right where he is supposed to. 

          There isn’t anyone in the room who is wondering if Aaron can play drums. There isn’t anyone in the room who is thinking about black or white, soul or without soul, paid dues, ain’t paid dues, hipness or squareness. 

          There is only the miracle of music.

THE NEWSROOM and SHAMELESS: Television Triumphs

          If I were just starting out in the world I would want to write for television.  Hell, I want to write for television NOW!  I think it's the most influential force on the planet.  It may not live up to its potential.  It may betray its potential every day, betray it so badly as to be a force for heinous criminality.  Still, I would love to work in television.  There is world-saving potential in the boob-tube, but it can only be used in drips and drabs.

          A TV series is like nothing else in the world of writing.  It's huge.  It provides a set of characters and a plot world that arc across vast swathes of time.  How many years does a successful TV series run?  Three, five, ten?  I've seen enough series to be aware of a quality curve.  The pilot episode and the first season are full of birth pangs.  The cast and crew don't even know if they'll have a second season.  Actors are getting to know their characters, writers are getting to know their actors.

          Seasons Three and Four are usually the best.  Then there's a slump as writers and actors get bored, switch out, change tacks, whatever.  If a series gets to Season Six it puts on a fresh coat of make-up and regains the energy necessary to finish out its requisite nine or ten seasons.

          We know that THE NEWSROOM will last three seasons.  The HBO execs have told us so.  I can barely imagine any drama so powerful needing much longer to tell its story.   

          I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin's writing.  The Newsroom shows Sorkin's evolution as a writer and maker of TV drama.  Some of Season One episodes are so good that they achieve that amazing and rare quality of....of MAJESTY.  That's right.  Majesty.  Goosebumps.

          The show's opening titles are a bit long but they convey to us the reverence with which the producers view the tradition of broadcast news.  The iconography is there: Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, the faces of American television news in an era when news was on at six o'clock every night and it was THE NEWS.  It was not info-tainment.  This tension between the exalted past of journalism and the present tawdry state of...whatever-it-is...drives crucial pieces of the plot.

          Jeff Daniels plays news icon Will McAvoy, a monolithic newscaster hewn in the Mt. Rushmore style of the Old School.  He's young enough to be in the Peter Jennings mold, yet crusty enough to harken back to the days of black and white television.  He's a bridge figure: he brings echoes along with him.  He brings the times when The News was honest.  He's an Institution.  He's powerful and widely trusted yet his job hangs from a teeny thread that's held by the Network's owners.  Said owner is Leona Lansing, played by a feisty Jane Fonda.  Her son, Reese Lansing, is the network CEO.  Reese is in bed with Teabaggers, the Koch Brothers, all those crypto-fascists.  He hangs over Will McAvoy like the fabled Sword, and there you have just a fraction of the plot.  Love interest, check, psychotherapy, check, a staff full of college-fresh Millennials, check.  Everything required to build plot tension in a loamy garden of Relevance.  That's all right with me!  Bring on Season Two!  Five Muskrats!

SHAMELESS: Not A Shame At All

          The role of Frank Gallagher must have made William H. Macy shout with shameless joy. His character is the ultimate shirker.  He's a sociopathic alcoholic single father of six children.  They  range in age from toddler to twenty-something.  He could care less.  Frank cares only about booze and cooze.  Frank never knows where he will wake up from a night's carouse.  As often as not, he regains consciousness in a dumpster.  It's a miracle Frank never freezes to death on the streets of Chicago's South Side.  He seems to have one of those special angels assigned to feckless drunkards, the angels that see to it that lushes emerge from head-on collisions without a scratch, that they are one step ahead of the piano that crashes onto the sidewalk.  That kind of angel.  Frank nurses a spark of amoral opportunism; he may sit at the bar, fully addled with booze, but his wits light up when some fool blurts that he's just come into money.  Frank slides his stool over.  Frank survives. 

          I hate Frank.  This is wonderful because a good villain drives a drama like nothing else.  He's a malignant narcissist.  Underneath all the sloppy booze behavior he's cunning and articulate.  He's left all his motherless children in the care of oldest daughter Fiona.  It's Fiona who has dedicated her life to packing school lunches, getting kids to band practice on time, to being a de facto mother of six at twenty two.  Fiona is desperately trying to keep the kids out of The System, heroically striving to give them foundations of stability.  Fiona is one big sacrifice.  Her only indulgence is to have a boyfriend.  These boyfriends have been historically abysmal, so when Steve shows up he seems too good to be true.  He is, of course, too good to be true but it takes a while to unravel his riddle.

          Every character in this drama is finely drawn.  Every casting choice is sublime.  Oldest son "Lip" (for Philip), is graduating high school with a 4.6 grade point average.  He has no plans for college.  His counselors, his siblings and his teachers gnash their teeth over Lip's lack of ambition.  He's being offered full scholarships to MIT, Harvard and Columbia.  His girlfriend secretly filled out college applications because Lip has no ambition and regards personal achievement as a game for suckers.  Lip sees a world on the brink of collapse.  Why waste all that effort getting degrees when they're going to be useless?

          The striking thing about the Gallagher children is their loyalty to one another.  Each carries his or her weight.  They have one another's backs.

          Their feelings about their father are complex. The younger ones tend to adore him.  Nine year old Carl is Frank's disciple, taking lessons in larceny.  Eleven year old Debbie thinks she's "daddy's girl" until one day she learns the hard way that daddy doesn't give a fuck about her, that "Daddy's Girl" is a bottle of Scotch. Fifteen year old Ian is gay and has relationships with both an older rich man and a thug who pretends to be homophobic.  Everything about the Gallagher family is complicated because that's what life is: complicated.  Every solved problem begets two new and more serious problems.  Most of the problems devolve upon Frank's escapades, cons, thefts and maybe even an inadvertent killing or two.  We know that he buried Aunt Edna in the yard so he could keep collecting her Social Security checks.  Frank leaves craters with every step he takes.

           SHAMELESS is real life writ large.  Dysfunction exists in the air, it is a basic component of modern oxygen and there's no escaping it.  Frank Gallagher stumbles around and through the maze of existence as if with night vision goggles.  He can see in the dark because he's the one who made the dark.  He's the perfect role for William Macy.  He's filthy, his hair is matted, his clothes are rotting, he hasn't shaved in weeks.  He should NOT have such a perfect set of teeth but I think the producers weaseled out of that choice.  It would have made Frank unbearable, a visual trial more awful than he would have been worth.

          A special award, an EmmyGlobeOscar, toEmmy Rossum as Fiona.  She plays this character with strength and vulnerability.  Fiona is enduring stress and carrying responsibilities that would break a lesser spirit.  Her eyes show a desperate clinging to what's left of her will.  She's "this far" from the edge, one more straw on her back will overwhelm her. She's sexy but exhausted.  She has the look of a woman who, unless she catches a break,  will age with terrifying speed after thirty.

          The cast is a brilliant ensemble.  The series shows the love and joy with which it is being made by the production company.

          This is a great TV series, one of the best I've seen.  Five muskrats for SHAMELESS.

The Mentalist: Sherlock Holmes Meets TV Psychic

December 31, 2013

            There's just enough here to keep us watching.  Just enough.  Simon Baker as sleuth Patrick Jane exudes enough wit and humility to keep the rusty old plots together long enough to be entertaining.  If it's easy to guess the killer and be right most of the time, it's a sign that the writers are being lazy.  Where's the suspense?  What's the fun if we know who murdered the victim within ten minutes?  It seems as though the writers are getting plots from a software program and fleshing them out with a strong leading cast. 

            Mind you, this is halfway through Season One.  I decided to order Season Two on the basis of a good story on Disc Four.  Maybe the series will get better. Maybe the producers got the green light on another season and decided to put more effort into the writing.  We can always hope.  It's a good gimmick, the reformed phony psychic turned cop, or "consultant", in a Special Crimes Unit.  Described that way, it reeks of Network TV, but, again, there's the work of Simon Baker.  It would be easy to sneer at a dude who looks like Simon Baker.  But his character, Patrick Jane, has been broken.  His wife and child were murdered by a serial madman named Red John.  This is the crisis that changed Patrick Jane from a show-biz psychic to an investigator who uses his skills at reading people to ferret out the criminal.  Baker as Patrick Jane carries himself with a large degree of appealing self mockery. 

            Red John hasn't been caught.  The show's producers seemed to be keeping him in a storage closet in case they got renewed.  Now they've gotten the budget for a Season Two (and, looky! They're still in production for Season Six). Now they can bring out Red John and start building a story arc that may generate some real suspense.  Meanwhile, we will keep watching.  So far, The Mentalist is a C/grade series with promise.  If it builds itself up, it might become worth three muskrats.*

*Muskrats are my grading curve.  The highest accolade for media production would be a grade of five muskrats.

Is This Story Worth Reading?

November, 2013



When I go to the library I check out five or six books at a time.  I hope that one or two will be worth reading.  I know in advance the rest won't grab my interest.  I like fiction and non fiction, I'm a reader as omnivorous as The Monster That Devoured Cleveland, except that I'm the Monster That Devoured The Cleveland Library.
I tend to avoid any fiction that features government security acronyms.
CIA, FBI, NSA, etc etc.  Those are red flags for potboilers.  Those are the books about plots to assassinate the President, the Vice President, blow up the White House or nuke Los Angeles.  I'm categorically against nuking anything, even Los Angeles.
In  spite of this common sense injunction I picked up a novel that screamed
"rogue operative", a Bourne Conspiracy-style suspense story.  I read 140 pages of the stuff before I came to a screeching  halt and asked myself the simple question: Is this story worth reading?  Was it worth writing?  It was probably worth writing because it was making its author a bit of money but I would have been embarrassed to put my name on it, much less a full page picture of myself on the back jacket cover, all dressed up in a suit and tie and looking like a Yale Law School graduate.
The nerve of the guy!
In my mind, this question is at the heart of every writing project: is this story worth telling?  If it's not, then don't tell it.
What makes a story worth telling?  I look for three elements in narrative.  I look for entertainment, information and inspiration.  If it isn't entertaining the story will belly flop like a fat clown jumping into a sandbox.  The question, then, is what makes a story a page-turner?  We have to insert the standard elements of story , i.e. a hero or heroine.  We need a villain to obstruct the hero and raise the emotional temperature of a story.  And we need a stake.  What's at stake? What does the hero want?  To save the world?  To win someone's love?  To prevent the conquest of his country? The annals of story telling are saturated with causes and quests and their corollary threats and jeopardies.  A good writer doesn't wait long before getting his hero into trouble. Stories are about trouble, about overcoming long odds, about persisting beyond the normal limits of endurance.

When I say that a story should inform, I don't refer to article-style content about a peculiar subject.  The informing is done by establishing a unique world-view.  A writer informs the reader by building a consistent milieu.  In science fiction or fantasy this Informing goes on all the time.  In conventional narrative the information flows from the slice-of-life view that the writer invents.                     Odd subcultures offer fertile ground for story telling.  The writer can be a subculture of one; he/she can be eccentric to the point of madness.  THAT information must flow through the story: the protagonist is nuts.  Inform the reader of this fact.  Achieve the alchemy of suspense by having the hero put his oddness to use in cracking the case, or neutralizing the enemy.
Inspiration is the most difficult thing to achieve in story telling.  If I finish reading a story and I'm inspired to write, I consider that a successful story.  "Inspire" is defined by one dictionary as "To fill with enlivening or exalting emotion."  That works well enough for me.  The original Greek word means "to fill with spirit," or even "To Breathe."
It's hard to bring these three crucial elements together to make a compelling story.  A writer might get two out of three.  The story may be entertaining and informative but lack inspiration.  My standards are high, I admit.  I want it all.  I want to feel lifted by a story.  I've loved reading since I was seven years old.  I'll love reading for the rest of my life.  All I need are writers to provide me with material that gives me pleasure.  I want to feel intellectual, emotional, psychological and spiritual joy in my contact with the written word.
          Nothing less will do.

The Animal Companion Book Circle

This is Bear

General Stonewall Jackson Cichlid

          In my efforts to remain the world's most obscure talented writer, I have enlisted the help of my household animal friends. I've told the story of Bear's rescue from the puppy mill. http://bit.ly/evbFda
I've told of my encounter with General Stonewall Jackson Cichlid. http://bit.ly/i9nDav. I'd like to introduce the other members of the book circle and give a thumbnail description of each of my friends.
           Bear is certainly the leading intellect of the group. He is willful, stubborn and sometimes hard to motivate. He learns dog tricks as if they're beneath his dignity, (which they are), but in order to please us he sits, shakes hands and rolls over.
          Bear is the most loyal of fans. He loves my writing and his critiques are incisive and sometimes painful. But that' as it should be. A writer needs to hear about failures from someone who is supportive. A book circle such as this one, dedicated to the work of a single author, is a special vehicle for the writer's work.
          Bear's loyalty is demonstrated in his absolute devotion to his sex partner,
a stuffed dog named Samantha. Here it is, almost a year since his nuts were cut off,
and Bear still humps Samantha two or three times a week. He has no shame in these public displays. He does a little dance around Samantha. He jumps up and forward in a canine declaration of love and dominance. It's a complex movement. His hind legs make a motion as if he is kicking dirt backwards into the faces of any rivals. Those legs stay on the ground while Bear raises the front of his body to a forty five degree angle. This is accompanied by a simultaneous hop forward by a few inches. This dance is done in a circle around Samantha before Bear begins the serious humping.
          "Ufff ruff," he says. Samantha lays on her side. She's a toy, she's inanimate. It doesn't matter to Bear. When he was just a puppy he had his first girlfriend, a toy brown dog named Greta. Somewhere between Greta and Samantha, and before we had Bear's nuts chopped off, we mated Bear with a real toy poodle named Snickers. That's another story. The union, however, produced another member of my Book Circle. This is Gabriel Kuruk (pronounced koo-roook).
         Gabe is a dog of mischief. He was the runt in a litter of two. His sister Kiani
is about the size of her mother, Snickers. Gabe barely weighs three pounds. Bear is a hefty hunk of muscle tipping the scales at seven pounds. Undaunted by his smallness, Gabe is fearless and clever. As a critic of literature he's a joker and is apt to make snide comments about my Philip Roth-style stories of Jewish life in the suburban sixties. Still, it takes all kinds to make a dynamic Book Circle.
          We know that Gabe prefers comic books. We also know that he's not stupid.  He takes his time learning things like "shake hands" but once he's mastered a skill he takes it to breathtaking extremes. Gabe shakes hands with everyone and everything.
          Bear always knows which end Samantha is the business end.  Gabe doesn't care. He messes with Samantha just to piss on his father's head.  So to speak. On our walks with the double leash it's Bear who usually pisses on Gabe's head. It only seems fair that Gabe will take any approach to Samantha:
head first, hind end forward, I don't think he really knows the difference. Besides,
it's too late for Gabe to attempt any production of heirs. He lost his nuts the same day Bear's gonads were separated from his body.  It seems to have done little damage to the father-son bond. They may tease one another, they may piss on one another's heads, but they remain close.





(More tomorrow about the Animal Companion Book Circle, sharing the works of

the world's most talented obscure writer, Art Rosch.)

A Brief Lesson In Sunshine

A solar flare of considerable size and power

Don't park your go-cart on the sun

don't park your skateboard or your razor on the sun

don't park your mountain bike or scooter with

a clown horn or a hooter don't park anything NASA's not tutored

on the sun.  Don't mess with the heliosphere

don't fuck up the corona don't throw old popcorn or discard soda

don't park your pickup to kiss your girlfriend

within a light year or with your door open

a solar mass ejection might damage your erection
even wearing goggles don't go there for a snoggle

don't do back flips or wheelies on the sun.

Taken in ultraviolet light. Temperatures of areas shown as white: one million degrees

The solar magnetic field.  It flips every eleven years.  It's getting ready to flip again.

From Playboy Magazine: Sex And The Triple Znar-Fichi

Copyright law prevents me from doing a straight scan of this story, so I've cut and pasted some of the graphics and re-typed the text.  This appeared in the Fall issue of Playboy (let us say it's been a few years, shall we?).  It won Best Story Of the Year Award.

          Sitting indolently in his gravity couch, Nerl Forfeech was drooling over this month’s Plaything centerfold.  The shiny cellulose pages fell all the way to the floor, because on the planet Znar-foot there are six genders, and the photograph included all the erotic subtypes.

          In this issue, as always, a gorgeous nude Six sprawled in the typically

suggestive pile, gravity being so low on Znar-foot that any other arrangement would have resulted in the lovers floating away.  Their faces were lit with the ecstasy of romantic communion, their organs photographed in a teasing way to be almost, but not quite, visible.  Nerl, idly fondling one of his protuberances, sighed as he viewed the tinted nipples, the arousing half-glimpses of fur-covered apertures.

          Then, suddenly, the door-iris swooshed open and Cloong walked in.  Nerl hastily stuffed the segments back into the magazine.  He almost fell from the couch as he attempted to hide the issue under some cushions.

          Cloong giggled at her embarrassed partial lover.  “Oh, go ahead, “ she piped.  “I know what you're looking at.  I don’t care.  They ARE rather lovely... but so impossible, don’t you think?”

          Nerl threw down the magazine in disgust.  “I wish you weren’t so right. I’ve had only two Sixes in my entire life, and both of them got weird right away... right after....”

          His voice trailed off at the memory of it.  The ecstasy!  And then, inevitably, confusion.

          Cloong took Nerl by the trunk nooks, and they clung together in mutual  frustration.  Cloong was Nerl’s Two.  And together they had a tentative Three with Albolon Farfing, who, unfortunately, was doing a loose sort of thing with a Two, Three and Four down in the Freesex District in the city of Fichi Forfoot.   Albolon had a tendency to be unreliable, but still they loved him, if a bit reservedly, in return.

          “What do you want to do tonight?” Cloong asked, licking Nerl’s eyeknobs playfully.  To Nerl it only made the craving for someone to be inserting into his side slits more powerful.   Cloong was only a quasi-fem, good for sucking and the like....but he shouldn’t be too unfair to her.  After all, he was only a quasi-him.  His abilities were also limited.  Like it or not, it was the way nature made them.  With dozens of erogenous zones, the Znar-fichi needed flesh on all sides, working in combination to produce the orgasmic culmination of multiple personalities.  You could get off with Three; Four and Five were even better.  But being a Six was the only way to achieve the ultimate OMYGOD-gasm.

          “What can we do?” Nerl echoed distractedly.  “Is there anything we can actually do to remedy this feeling?”

          “Sure,” Cloong cheerfully volunteered.  “We can go pick up Albolon and cruise a Triples Bar.  You never know what might happen.”

          “Not again,” Nerl groaned.  “I can’t take it, the futile games, the flash and glitter.  I’m not a complicated person.  All I need is a good, simple five-to-one relationship.  That’s not so much to ask.”

          “Come on, “ urged Cloong, lifting her appendagtes in his trunk nooks.

The effect was sufficiently erotic.  “You’ll never meet anybody if you don’t show your faces.  What can you lose?  Would you rather stay home all night and masturbate in the washing machine?”

          “Okay okay,” Nerl gave in.  “Let me get my threads on:  my jewel-studded trunk shapers and my simulated-tumescence trouser pads.”

          “That’s the way!” Cried Cloong, getting up off Nerl’s abdominal folds. “Dress up sexy!”

         After picking up Albolon, the three of them strode snout in snout down the flamboyant promenades of Flesh-Bargain City, the official cruising ground for Znar-Foot’s frustrated sexuals.

          Cloong was bouyed up between her partial lovers, dressed in a revealing mini-suit that left quite a few of her tubes exposed.  The night was torpid, just right for the ongoing voyeurism of Six Sex Street.  Albolon and Nerl were elegant beyond compare in their striped priapic enhancers.   As they progressed down the brightly lit avenue, they caught the envious stares of  lonely Ones or Twos, and occasionally the pitying glances of bustling Fours and Fives.   But there were no Sixes.  The Sixes would undoubtedly be at someone’s apartment, either having sex or arguing.

          Cloong, Nerl and Albolon stopped to peer into various clubs and bars, to see which ones were running Threes that night.  

          As they walked, peering through the transparent view bubbles of the different clubs, they were inevitably accosted by street hustlers making suggestive offers:  “Say honeys, I got just the Three for you, never been Sixed before, any of them.  Got a taste for some fresh action?” This came from a character who sported a mustache grown straight across the top of his skull crest.  Anotoher tout wheedled at them: “Need a massage, sports?  Got a lovely pair, just juicin’ to get their trunks on you.”

          Ignoring the lascivious stares and remarks, Cloong, Nerl and Albolon at length came  to a well-known place, The Sexagram Club, and saw that it was running Triples that night. The house band, The Numbers Racket,  could be heard raucously blaring.  The partial-lovers' pulses raced with anticipation at the wild action within.  The Racket, a successful Four offstage, never failed to turn on the audiences with their erotogymnastics and jerk’n’jell music.  Cloong, Nerl and  Albolon showed their IDs and entered the crowded room that smelled of stimu-mist and trunk-pit persp. 

          “Hey babies,”  a Triple called out, rocking past in an orbiting dance.
“Hey hey, let’s get it on.”

          Cloong pulled back.  “How unsubtle.  Come on, boys, this is no place to meet nice people.  Let’s get out of here.”

          But Nerl and Albolon had already spotted some promising looking action.

“No, let’s stay, Cloong.  It was your idea in the first place.  If we don’t like it after a while, we can go someplace else.”  They pulled her farther into the seething mass, where dancing bodies yanked and plopped spasmodically, imitating sex.

          Onstage, The Numbers Racket had sprawled atop one another in a simulated orogenital configuration, while  dancing Threes screamed their shock and delight.

          Against the walls of the room, stimu-mist vendors lined up next to sensory-enhancement dealers, exchanging money balls for popular brands of dope.  The rest of the room was all dance floor, with sufficient space in which to flirt, writhe and show off simul-sex aptitude.

          Cloong and her hims moved onto the dance floor, their eyes constantly shifting across the room, taking in the more attractive groups, canceling out the ones who held no immediate appeal.

          Since their tastes were relatively alike, they intuitively crossed through the various combinations until they were close to another sexy Three who seemed alone.

          Perfect!  A Three with two fems.  Cloong lowered her tubes a trifle suggestively at the him of the group.  Meanwhile, Nerl had shown a definite tumescence at the she in the flaming orange trunk gripper.  They danced closer, coyly initiating eye contact.  Albolon, however, didn’t move correspondingly.  He was too busy eyeing a fem in a different Three altogether.

          Cloong jerked at him and he staggered forward.  “Idiot,” she hissed, but the cute Three had caught the little interchange and had indifferently moved away through the crowd.

          Nerl reprimanded Albolon. “You blew it for us, man.  Didn’t you see those gorgeous fems?  We would have been perfect.  I just know it.”

          Albolon cursed.  “Ah, the one in the dotted tube-throttler was a pig.  I almost scored another Three for us all by myself until you pulled at me so obviously.”

          Cloong waved her eyeknobs impatiently.  “Look over there.  Do you think we can all agree on one Three to come on to?  How about that short-tall-tall number in the corner?”

          Al and Nerl furtively checked it out.  “Okay.  Let’s go.”

          Again, they spasmed across the dance floor, dodging single and double Triples to get near the attractive Three that Cloong had pointed out.  This one was a good dancer, doing all the most fashionable orifice-openers among several maneuvering Threes.   They were dressed in one of the latest cozy-suits, a gauzy garment that joined the three bodies in a spacious but intimate arrangement.  There was an obvious zipper where another Three suit could easily be hooked in.

          “We don’t have one of those suits,” Nerl commented negatively.
“This Three’s too uptown for us.  And look at the competition.  I hate standing in line.”

          “Don’t be a onesyhead,” said Albolon, who lusted after high class liaisons. “We’re artists.  Rich Threes need us.”

          “Now that I think about it,” said Cloong abjectly, “rich people have no sensitivity.  Maybe we should go check out that long-haired Three over there in the middle.”

          By the time they were in close,  Albolon was dragging the others.  The music lulled for a moment.  Agressively, he leered at the Three and said, “Hey, babies, didn’t we meet at a sensory-awareness clinic in Big Stir?”

          The chic threesome laughed disdainfully and, without even answering, lost itself in the crowd.

          Nerl and Cloong clung to each other in utter embarrassment.

          “Albolon,”  she said sadly, “if we don’t get our relationship together, pretty soon we’ll be a Two.”

          Albolon farted from his side vents in frustration.

          “Would that be so bad?  I’ve heard you guys whispering together, I know what you think.  You think I care about that Trip up in Snort Beach, the one you guys can’t stand.”

          He was beating his trunks up and down laboredly.  Cloong stroked the pits with tender solicitation.

          “No, no,” said Nerl, “we’re not jealous of them, Albolon.  It’s just that sometimes your crude come-on ruins our chances.”

          Albolon backed away petulantly.  “You’re just possessive, that’s what.  Just because I have my own style and like to check out things on my own.”

          He turned, broke away from them, while they stood there, stunned.  All around, Threes were watching them and giggling.

          “And you know,” Albolon said stingingly, “I do get off on my other Trip. At least my Snort Beach floozy gives me plenty of space.  Not only that, but they give better trunk, too.”

          “Albolon, you’re crazy,” protested Cloong.

          “You see,” he said, his eye nooks wide, “that’s what you really think of me when I’m being honest.  Well, we're finished! Goodbye.”
          He pivoted and was lost in the whirling bodies.  Cloong and Nerl tried to catch him, but the door of the club hissed and shut and Albolon was gone.

          Shocked, under the mortifying gaze of  twittering Threes, they left the club.  Outside, the street was empty of Albolon.

          With tears rolling down their face-folds, they made their way across the livid avenue, but the lights and gaiety had lost their charm.

          “Let’s go home, Nerl,” Cloong said mournfully.  “This is no way to find your nice, simple five to one relationship.”

          Nerl stood stubbornly in one spot. “Go home?  You must be kidding!  We just lost our Three.  I don’t want to go home alone tonight.  I’m just not ready for it.”

          “You’re NOT alone,” said Cloong, a trifle peeved.

          “You know what I mean,” said Nerl, regretting his spite.

          “I guess I do,” she said, fatalistically.

          Nerl gazed up into the dimly visible heavens, reddish in the glow of the street lights.  All his anguish at the way they had been constructed poured out of his heart and flailed weakly against the indifference of the cosmos.

          “There are are some worlds out there,” he said distantly, “where I’ll bet they have only three genders, or maybe even just two.  Different arrangements entirely.”
          Cloong laughed and took his center trunk with her snout.  “Come on, Nerl.  That’s absurd.  Think how dull life would be.  It would all be so simple!  TOO simple.”

          He shook his shaggy mane, as if to dispel the far-flung fantasy.  Taking his partial girlfriend  by one of her more exposed tubes, he led her down the hysterical walkways in search of a Four-Two club.