Arisugawa Park Illustrations Take Shape

Here are a couple initial illustrations by Victoria Kabluyen, created to accompany my upcoming mystery-thriller novel Arisugawa Park.  I am also blogging a bit on the background of this long-awaited novel.

Vegas is Crazy

Two months of writing in Vegas is crazy. 

not because I did anything, but because of what I didn’t do,

To practice virtuosity one must with restraint

Completely in the flow as a writer 

and I tell you Las Vegas is bedrock, functional. 

I am like a tamed beast,

watching with locals the tourists experiencing the flair

These places are like forgotten, forgotten relics of a mechanical past,

streets here on the Strip are eight-lane freeways––

I am lost a pedestrian out in the wilderness, 

timing my movements to shadows. 

The earth will swallow me up on my way to the Rio. 

The bum asks me for water and I give him my last half cup 

of mostly ice and trickles of life-saving water. 

Water. 

It is so hot under the sun under the sycamores by the freeway, 

that his soul might perish before he found the shore.

Vegas, always Vegas. This city Vast. It is America, but it isn’t. 

It is the America that always welcomes. 

Vegas is a turning point, a flash point, a mob. 

In The Clearing

I'm posting this poem from Earth Fabric because it relates to an article "Nick Drake’s Road: An Appreciation of a 1971 Folk Classic" I published recently in Medium.

                               April Jardine Limuran

In the Clearing

There is no clearing, the jungle is overpowering

with elephant shriek and trumpet moan, 

the man, the dream, the cunning child

closed in, convoluted

The dreaming world, the beach

the screams through the thicket

nature, untrammeled

piercing horror and never ending 

sightless eyes

Cries that reverberate and remind us just how

insignificant is our colony, how 

transient and unnecessary––

we are not moving toward the harbor, 

we are not shifting with the sun

But if we allow the darkness to run inside us

and the labyrinthine shadows to form in our soul

then maybe we are in the clearing, home.

                                 April Jardine Limuran & Nils Sens (Photoshop)

Van Morrison's "Beside You"

Cry and refrain, and musical mimicry, creates works of art with cross-cultural pollination. Sympatique art where people actually converse and listen. Let’s call it jazz, let’s call it rock, lets call it street-sampled beats. Whatever works, douse it with hot sauce and cut it with vinegar. Throw it on the grill. Crack a little pepper, squeeze a little lime. “Spill the wine, take that pearl.” Eat it, chicken bones and all. Harmony, the Ancient Greeks called it––the bastard offspring of love and war.

My life is a little about living jazz, because my uncle Bob (a DJ and poet of sorts) pointed me in that direction. Naturally, jazz is not simply about jazz music. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is jazz because he is with his musicians. He played a few chords and refrains and then said stretch it man, you are buskers, are bluesmen and jongleurs. Are the shit. But realize that this is all part of the blues. And we all know the blues. 

To get at this concept, the rite of passage concept that is music, take Van Morisson’s “Beside You.” In the 1966 Bang session, Van is accompanied by his put-together band of New York studio musicians who have a kind of Dylan Hawks-era greased lightning thing going. The sound is boxcar Memphis South, infused with traces of Van’s gaelic roots. The R&B base and beat hard and steady, the sparse swirling Hammond B3 painting a picture of cobbled streets pattered with rain. The song gradually transcends narrow, European confines and becomes a roaming song, a leap of faith and wonder into a pasture in the fabled countryside where storied Bluesmen roam, and a mythical remembered love exists––

To wander past your window in the nighttime cross the floor

Crying as ecstasy surrounds you

Through the night air your proud time is open

Go well against the pointed idle breeze 

In the night you cry and you want spirits to tell you

Everything's alright

Go ahead and do it one more time baby

You're satisfied I guess, you're way up and the sky comes down

Kaleidoscope 

Open and just hold the lantern in the doorway,

For the freedom of it.

And you take the night air through your nostrils and you breathe

In out, in out

And you breathe just like that, just like that 

The 1968 Astral Weeks version of “Beside You” is altogether a different beast. It is about the jazz and “freedom of it” that have now fully seeped into Van’s work. Little plucks of acoustic guitar and ethereal vibes set the scene. Not a questing sound of anguish, with every sound annunciated to its tip-of-explosion adolescent peak. No more “in my room” teenage yearning and spurting glops of self-love. The music depicts a moment in which women become much more than versions of oneself, where they are the essence of earth and decision. The rite of passage has been completed, the joint passed, and man and a woman are part of the same entity, two incorporeal halves. Music that is part of the process of Aquarius learning, never quite completed but still aching like a heartstring. Jefferson Airplane’s “Coming Back to Me,” Jerry Garcia’s “To Lay Me Down,” The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset." Well worn Turkish patterned rug on a wooden slat floor of a Victorian house in San Francisco. The original Hippy realization that we are all distinct, all part of one orgasmus. 

It is the late 1960s, everything is coming into being in a vast wave of human potential before crime and high rents hit like a heart attack. Before Van Morrison puts his “Hard Nose To The Highway” and becomes a blues curmudgeon. Astral Weeks is a great album that I am still processing. One of my mom’s favorites (in her younger years) that was for many years alien to me. And one of the albums that apparently emanated out of VW caravans along the hippy trail in Kashmir, Goa. Our paths have now converged and passed, as they often do. And I am listening with something akin to wonder––