Here is today’s mixtape in the effort to live the words of Goethe, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

1. A Song

Downbound Train by Bruce Springsteen is from Born in the USA which just hit the 40 year mark since it came out. Hard to believe. Where were you when Born in the USA came out? I had just graduated from high school….

I like the story of how in putting the album together the producer, Jon Landau, asked Springsteen for one last song. Initially not thrilled with the request, Bruce came back with “Dancing in the Dark,” which was the first single released. Amazing to think that otherwise this song might not exist. Where would Courtney Cox be? Would Friends have been different because of this?

I love how under “reception” on Wikipedia, there are various responses to the song. It’s either the best song or the weakest song on the album. Dave Marsh, who wrote a book on Bruce titled Glory Days, called it “incredibly sloppy” and says, that “the protagonist’s three jobs in five verses are only symptomatic of its problems.” Well, most of us would forgive this song anything just for the lines: “'Now I work down at the car wash/where all it ever does is rain.”

I love this song, and I guess it just goes to show, we don’t all have to like everything — would be a drag if we did. But let people enjoy what they enjoy, right?

2. A Good Poem

I first came upon the work of Sean Thomas Dougherty through his poem “Why Bother” that at one point a few years back went viral. I chose this next poem because I think it goes with the song nicely. I chose it because, the words, “I’m still here” speak to me. Dougherty works or has worked as a “third-shift caregiver and med tech for folks with traumatic brain injuries.” But his bio in the book I have of his that I love, The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things, says, “By the time you read this book, he might be unemployed or on to different work.”

In the Forbes interview he says, “We don’t need to win the Pulitzer Prize, just one poem to save one life, to recognize one life, to witness one life. What is more righteous and humbler than that? ‘To be righteous in small ways,’ says the poem, says this labor.” And he writes about work with such grace. I’m interested in writing that talks about our life in work — which for most of us is a great portion of our existence and one that we are largely stymied from talking about due to privacy and policy and etc. The dream of letting the Sisyphean boulder roll though…just for a moment….it’s rather life-giving don’t you agree?

The Second O of Sorrow

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Somehow, I am still here, long after
transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared

driving from town to town across Ohio
selling things, the music where we danced

just to keep alive. I now understand I was not
supposed to leave so soon, half a century

a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed up the hill
& now for a moment, like Sisyphus

I watch it roll.
I walk through the snow.

I breathe the dirty East Side wind
pushing past the Russian church, the scent 

of fish & freighters & the refinery
filling the hole in my chest—how many years

have piled since I last stumbled out onto the ice
& sat down to die.

Only to look up at the geometry
of sky—& stood

to face whoever might need me—

{source}

Bonus poem by the same poet from the same book:

Why Bother

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

 of your words.

There’s an interview from Connotation Press where Dougherty says the following and my friends will laugh because they know how I am always on about parking which is really why I left my last job:

“I don’t teach anymore. I haven’t in quite a few years. My last teaching gig I was driving two hours to teach at CSU two days a week, and I tried to get them to pay for my parking. I said if you want someone accomplished as me to teach there you need to pay for my parking. They said they wouldn’t do that. Yes I was an adjunct professor driving two hours and I tried to negotiate with my department. But adjuncts can’t do that. Adjuncts are supposed to say yes ma’am and no sir. But I tell that because that really gets at the core of my life, the idea that we are workers and have rights.”

3. A Fine Picture

I like to think about the material of art, and I like to revel in colour. Double Merge, by Sam Gilliam from his drapery series is delightful in its scale and colour and audacity. It’s one of those works that says a lot just as it is, but upon further probing offers up so much more. I recommend the article by Ben Davis on ArtNet if you’d like to do a deeper dive. He begins:

“Here’s an old question that I find is still alive for a lot of people: How do you look at an abstract painting? Are you meant to just immerse yourself in the wordless presence of its colors? Or does it tell a kind of story too—about its author’s ambitions, about its place in art history, about ideas of painting itself—that you are meant to enter into as well? How does it speak to you?”

On his drapery series,

“He was inspired in making them, he says, by seeing clothes hanging on a line. That is, he very much meant to suggest the down-to-earth presence of objects in the world, resonating with the spaces of ordinary people: “what was most personal to me were the things I saw in my own environment.”

It’s interesting to ponder his work in relation to the history of colour field and abstract painting — he was an innovator and a disruptionist — but I think it’s also interesting to look at it in the context of work, the hanging of laundry, that inspiration. The work of painting is still work, however playful, however delightful.

I hope you enjoyed today’s Mixtape! I always find it interesting how art speaks to art. I chose these three pieces somewhat randomly — they just called to me. But with a deeper look it turns out they have things to say to each other, don’t they? And that’s just one more cool thing about art made by actual humans :)

June 13, 2024