For a long time, ever since I took over a little closet/office upstairs in our house, I had an idle plan to raise there a trio of Soviet-style banners with the faces of my literary heroes at the time: Kafka, Kleist, and Nathanael West. (The current icons, I guess, though the original three have hardly been overturned, would be Hughes, Hazzard, and Spark.) And then that idea sort of morphed into flags of three non-literary figures I admire from the '70s, who would, the thinking went, inspire me to stretch myself into capacities I don't generally assume I possess: Jimmy Connors (chip-on-his-shoulder perseverance), Bob Fosse (self-destroying commitment--at least as portrayed by Roy Scheider!--to art I don't find all that appealing), and Freddy Mercury (glorious flamboyance, natch).
I'm not the only person for whom Mr. Mercury has served as a muse. In response to my diary entry about dancing around the kitchen to "Flash," my friend Dallas Crow sent along a poem he published in Cairn, called "Frank O'Hara in Iowa, 1980." It starts "In their bedrooms teen boys prance / a la Freddy Mercury" and it ends "you only see some of what you see," and it's fantastic. He's just posted it on his blog as well, so I would have something to link to.
And Dallas's poem reminded me of God Save My Queen, in which Daniel Nester wrote a poem for each song on Queen's first ten records, and pulled it off. I reviewed it for the Stranger back in '04, and here's part of what I said (in comparing it to a long poem about All About Eve that I didn't like as much):
For Nester, the slippage between art and life comes from the fan's perspective, in which your love for the art is what seems to bring that art into being. As confessional as Phoebe is, it never captures the intense identification of a drag queen or a kid in his bedroom the way that Nester does in "Bohemian Rhapsody," when he describes his adolescent ceremony of laying out all the Queen records in order on his floor, 45s neatly stacked on top of each album: "I would then stand in front of this, drinking a wine cooler, as if I were Noah in / the Ten Commandments movie, congratulating myself, clasping my arms behind / my back, as if this was my ark, my own creation." A decade or so later, he's still doing the same thing, lining up all the songs in order and making them his own, refusing to trade in that earnest teen yearning for a more ironic stance. As he writes, in response to the hipster derision that he imagines greeting an amateurish, wonderful drag show (no doubt similar to the contempt faced by any lifelong Queen fan): "Let's say, finally, that enchantment can really happen."
Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with Queen, but I just have to say I was so thoroughly pleased to read today's Paris Review Daily post--about old pop music, there's your connection--by the admirable John Jeremiah Sullivan, in which he calls a song I've loved for a long time but have never heard anyone else talk about "the song I hope to keep if the people in charge of the survival pod say you can keep only one." The song is "I'm Going to Run to Jesus for Refuge," by Charles Barnett, as recorded by Alan Lomax in the 50s and included on one of my all-time favorite records (likely to appear on a future Firmament, as well as this old one), Velvet Voices, volume 8 of the Southern Journey series of Lomax recordings. The song speaks for itself, but I just want to mention that the overturned washtub Barnett apparently is percussing sounds just like the furnace at my childhood home would sound like when you knocked it.
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