Being an introduction to the Clear the Crease bloggers.
Pierre Idiot Trudeau (AKA JeffCanuck): Canadian. Canucks fan. Loather of all Canadian media. Deep opinions about early Def Leppard.
Bogdan von Pylon: Doesn't care what you think. The man who squats behind the man who runs the soft machine. Sharp mind and sharper tongue behind the whole CtC operation.
You can hear Jeff and Collision on the new No Headline AudioZine podcast, released Sunday. Collision and von Pylon got hella liquored up on Saturday. Go Avs Go!
Jew Grimson: Long-lost token Blackhawks fan. Instigator/sensitive soul type, not entirely unlike Sean Avery. DJ. Not particularly interested in hearing your nonsense.
Clear the Crease enjoys the musical stylings of Lord Dying.
here there is none that can guide me aright in the pathless wood.— ... If I've had to howl 'neath the lashes of fate, trust me to find folks I can lash in my turn— ... The corpses all laugh. But their laughter is forced; ... Enough for the day is the evil thereof,— and further: Discount not thy funeral.—
Not long ago, the NHL team from Colorado—dead last in the league—hosted the one from Calgary, second-to-last. The game itself was uninspired but inspiring, in that it led well-regarded veteran goaltender J-S Giguère to go ham on his squad after the game. All this has been more-than-adequately covered elsewhere, of course. Over to The Classical, however, I came at things from a slightly different angle: Losing Again: A Play in Verse. It hosts probably the piece of art I'm proudest of having had a hand in ever: Bogdan von Pylon's pitch-perfect reworking of Raymond Pettibon's cover for Black Flag's Jealous Again.
(Jiggy's eyes are the fountain of the bitter and searing lye of tears)
Aside from the best art you will see today, the piece trickles from a lot of different sources. One is our own semi-tradition of bets here at CtC: Bogdan von Pylon and I renewed our whimsical wager of Shopping of Photos by him or Crafting of Poems by me in the event of "our" team losing. "My" team lost, naturally, and so I began to guide my pen across page—carving and wheeling like the plodding skates of an Avalanche defenseman getting beaten wide—then other, darker roots of influence manifested and from the thick taproot of menace and despair began to bloom weird leaves. I thought of the faces of the goaltenders who worked that night, and thought of their losses and reversals: It instantly seemed that a few short stanzas were inadequate to the task of capturing the spirit of the thing, the meaning of this late-season trudge through the slough. The obvious solution to this perilous lack was a play in verse.
Probably this seemed very necessary because I have of late been reading Peer Gynt, in the aftermath, for all is aftermath, of an interesting staging thereof I attended with the Lady Noodles not long ago. It was, in the words of the program, "a hybrid Peer Gynt [combining] parts of ... three scores—Grieg, Schnittke, and Holloway—with a semi-staged multimedia production". The staging was somewhat light, playing much for laughs and eliding essentially everything from the third quarter of the book, which contains Peer Gynt's attempts to sell himself as a prophet, some still-disturbing scenes in a madhouse, and a sequence of actually horrifying cruelty on a ship. The book used for that performance did elide these sections, anyway. The rather superb Robin Holloway piece "Ocean Voyage" did seem to evoke/embody much of the tumult and sad human shittiness Ibsen built into those passages, though it was incorporated clumsily into the show, being very long and more than a little flow-breaking.
One of the primary themes of Peer Gynt is the frank evil causing/caused-by the philosophy demanded by the Motor City 5: "let me be who I am". This philosophy is of course ascendant now, and not merely in our politics! It has poisoned our writing, too. Essentially every writer within 10 years of my age sallies forth misunderstanding the lessons of confessional poetry/Lester Bangs/David Foster Wallace/Joan Didion/Herman Melville/whoever strikes you as what Ibsen called "Old fossil Highnesses who make it their pride to keep plebeian blots excluded from their line's escutcheon", and reduces every topic to "a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself". But these writers aren't Alice James, or Ibsen, or even Bangs, and the spring of self is stagnating badly.
It's here, sir, that one is oneself with a vengeance; oneself, and nothing whatever besides. We go, full sail, as our very selves. Each one shuts himself up in the barrel of self, in the self-fermentation he dives to the bottom,—with the self-bung he seals it hermetically, and seasons the staves in the well of self. No one has tears for the other's woes; no one has mind for the other's ideas. We're our very selves, both in thought and tone, ourselves to the spring-board's uttermost verge,—
And, well, fuck that. Since I wish to speak of the rough infinity of things more interesting than myself before I speak of myself, the formal play of a play in verse seemed Just The Thing. Plus the third and fourth influences plaguing, or maybe blessing, my every word; I speak, naturally, of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and of Thomas Pynchon—or at least I speak of the urge so potent in them to STOP
(Let's put on a show!)
everything and break into song. And so what was conceived as a pair of poems turned into a play in verse turned into a rock opera—or at least a musical. Which, again: you can read over at The Classical: Losing Again.
But why goalies in particular, you probably aren't asking. There are several reasons. First, as I learned from Manufacturing Consent—not that one, the other one—the name of the game is to try to build up an analysis of the whole structure of capitalism by looking closely at the shop floor; so why not start my look at the shop floor with a look at the goalies? (Charles Fort is instructive here: all life is connected and "One measures a circle, starting anywhere.") Second, if hockey itself be of interest, then surely goalies are of interest, for as one brilliant observer querulously asked "Is [the goalie] not worth between 50 and 60 percent of his [sic] team?"
Okay, so that brilliant observer was legendary goalie Jacques Plante, who perhaps is not the disinterested historian one would wish most for. Nevertheless, goalies do seem important. Third: their helmets are colorful and interesting and draw the eye.
Perhaps, despite all good faith and honest craft, the project failed. Perhaps the result was still and all more an autobiography than an analysis, revealing only my needy vanity, my own failure(s) and rotten (mis-)appropriations of the work of others as an attempt to reclaim what the world stole from me. Perhaps my foolish project is too much like Peer Gynt's, self-serving always, ignorant and arrogant, doomed to an inherent and meaningless uniqueness that can never be special; nothing more than my identity in prose form, a portrait of no more than a shallow and sickly self.
It's true—my grounding's by no means thorough, and history's wheels within wheels are deceptive;— but pooh; the wilder the starting-point, the result will oft be the more original.—
The magnificent Tomas Rios read last week's Captains-in-Summer insanity and looked into his heart, and found a quivering bird there, and he did stroke the bird, and did fead it milk and sugar and drops of Buffalo Trace bourbon, and when the bird began to hop, he encouraged it, and, in due time, that bird breathed deep of the ether, and spread its wings, and took to the skies. Free. Cawing. Shitting on all that lay beneath it, its eyes sensitive only to weakness.
That bird's name is SHADE AVERY, and its nature is that of a television show built of Sean Avery criticizing people's fashion choices. Because he is a gentleman, Rios allowed me to help him nurse this shining, soaring bird to health, after which time David Roth came in editorially and taught the bird how to do amazing tricks, and made Tomas & YT both look a hell of a lot better. Then we bro'd down on the Internet for a while and now you can watch the bird soar at your leisure.
By way of a value-add to justify this post, I will note only that I wrote the following, and I have no idea what it means.
Part Two of Captains in Summer is up over at The Classical: check it out for all your N-through-W team captains needs! To pimp it, I shall provide you the greatest blurb I expect I'll ever receive, from eternal class act editor, rad dude, and infinitely kick-ass writer David Roth:
In my head, this two-parter was a thirty-parter, a slideshow with each captain lavishly illustrated by CtC's own Bogdan von Pylon, the world's Sorry Your Heinous, or the Classical's incredible and essential Samarov or Eli Neugeboren. In my head, I can also dunk a basketball.
Here is a HEAVY TUNE for you to listen to while you read.
So you may have heard this, but the NHL owners have actually locked out the players, and nothing much seems to be happening negotiating-wise. Not all that much is happening on the ice either, the Joe-Thornton-to-Rick-Nash first-period-hat-trick last week in Davos, Switzerland, notwithstanding.
However, real leaders never quit grinding, and each NHL captain is demonstrably using this time to his advantage. In the spirit of 22 Short Films About Springfield, I give you 30 short stories about NHL captains during the lockout:
Fire up the Screaming Blue Messiahs, for a little slice of life background HEAVY TUNE action, and hit the link.
As a value-added for this here post, here is a joke that got cut, about the ever-jokesome Florida Panthers franchise: It is funny that the Panthers fired their mascot three whole days into the lockout in a cost-cutting maneuver unrivalled since contractors lowballed the deck-chair supplier for the Titanic.
As a note for y'all, there may not be any jokes in it as funny as the one below.
Pretty sure Goodell thinks the bio of Patton he keeps by his bed but hasn't read tells him ending the ref lockout is unacceptable surrender.
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