Pigeon Town

Heaven by The Walkmen

admin — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:15:16 +0000

The visceral pangs of falling in love and breaking up are rampant in music. Young, arrogant musicians dream of writing their own Blood on the Tracks or Jack Kerouac ode to pretty wild-eyed hitchhikers. Rare are the albums that address the quiet, intense up and downs of long term love and commitment. The Walkmen’s Heaven is that album: quiet, romantic, and sexy. Heaven makes you want to grow up, get married, and teach your future children how to catch fireflies and ride bikes.

The graceful transition into adulthood isn’t littered with apt role models. The creative set is prone to associating growing up to minivans, suburbs, boredom, and death. The Walkmen though, make commitment sexier than a one night stand. Heaven is not about happiness, but about acceptance — that life is full of happiness, joy, love, and accomplishment, but also awash with uncertainty, loss and listlessness.

[Show as slideshow]

“We Can’t Be Beat” starts the album off with a quiet confidence. Not the brash, blind confidence of youth, but a confidence that accepts vulnerability and imperfection. Hamilton Leithauser croons to a backdrop of intimate acoustic picking, “I don’t need perfect, I love the whole/ Give me a life that needs correction.” A true confidence has nothing to prove because as he simply affirms, “The world is ours/ We can’t be beat.”

Continuing with the impetuous youth is for the birds theme, “Love is Luck” expresses how infatuation is as short-lived as the sweetness of bubblegum and that mystery is untenable. Leithauser’s ruminations on love carry on in the brawny, stomping, one step away from a marriage proposal song, “Heartbreaker.” He proudly proclaims that he has “no secrets” and is not “your heartbreaker.” Putting the nail in the coffin of youthful romance, he enlightens some young innocent in the upbeat howl “The Love You Love” that the subject doesn’t love him “just the kissing.”

With a minor to major chord progression, the calm uncertainty of adulthood radiates in the sultry song “The Witch.” Leithauser mutters, “It’s dark, driving through Central Michigan/Listening to the country station/Wondering where I stand.” Adulthood ambivalence remains in the stuck between two worlds southern gothic slow burn “Southern Heart.” One wonders if the subject whose southern heart he’s after is the same as the one that only “loves the love” as he seductively whispers “tell me again how you loved all the men you were after.”

Switching from enlightening kissing partners to enlightening his children, “Line by Line” and “Song for Leigh” impart earnest fatherly insight. The first is a quiet lullaby soaked in love, optimism and fatherly protection. He sings with the same quiet confidence as the opener, “The wicked all die/ How do we know it/ I just know it.” The sweet, buoyant “Song for Leigh” has Leithauser wailing, “I’ll sing myself sick about you” not out of angst, but love and adoration. As if sensing the eye-rolls over the brazen songs of love and contentment, he sings “mock my love, it don’t break” in “Nightingale,” where he somehow makes the everyday grind of life seem splendid and humbling.

Heaven should end with the title track. The last two songs, “No One Ever Sleeps” and “Dreamboat” are repetitive dreamy afterthoughts, b-sides if anything. Singing about long lost loves after joyously declaring, “don’t leave me now, you’re my best friend/ remember, all we fight for” is just asking for a slap in the face from band-mates, wives and those adorable kids. Leithauser has stated in interviews that “We Can’t Be Beat” and “Heaven” were the last two songs written for the album. Just like adulthood, where we don’t always know what we’re doing until after something is over, the last two songs became the album’s thematic bookends, the epiphany after weeks, months, years of artistic process. As a result, they would have benefitted from streamlining the album to fit that discovery, making Heaven a tighter and more thematically relevant.

For now, the Walkmen are tentatively optimistic, they’re our big brothers singing us lullabies and patting us on the back, reassuring us that everything is going to be ok. If you keep working hard, stick by your true friends and lovers, you’ll make it through the anxiety-ridden, self destructive swagger of youth and coast effortlessly to adulthood (which is still full of anxiety but, like, shhh, you’ll get used to it). Ultimately, the Walkmen give hope that cuisinarts, 3am feedings, and fights over nothing will be the most magnificent thing to ever happen to someone.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/06/catching-up-with-the-walkmens-hamilton-leithauser.html

Review: Audrey Avila is a writer living in Chicago. You can follower her on twitter @avilaudrey.

Photographs: Jaime Torres lives in Chicago, IL and is a regular contributor to Pigeon Town.

Metric’s Synthetica

admin — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:14:55 +0000

Don’t you hate when people sell out? Guess what, we all have. We are all walking around like zombified social media-bots. People are dying, starving and being exploited here and abroad and no one cares. Most of us have probably not engaged in an intimate face-to-face conversation in weeks. These aren’t groundbreaking revelations . Good or bad, this is the norm for the world we live in now. Indifference tends to be the status quo. Metric’s album Synthetica is about living within that world.

Emily Haines explains Synthetica’s genesis in an open letter to fans on the band’s website. She writes, “Synthetica is about being able to identify the original in a long line of reproductions. It’s about what is real vs what is artificial.” Metric as a synthpop, electropop, new wave, indie post-punk existential glam-rock or whatever the kids are calling it nowadays is a more than appropos vehicle to explore the push-pull between these seemingly contradictory themes.

[Show as slideshow]

The opening track, “Artificial Nocturne” is a slow burn, a mantra that builds to a crescendo. Haines boldly confesses, “I’m just as fucked up as they say.” The reverb drenched synths give the song an ominous, otherworldly feel complimented by Haines’ pensive lyrics. “Youth without Youth” takes the ominous tone to the next level. The track evokes apocalyptic dance music by juxtaposing anger over a lost generation with anthemic beats and catchy guitar riffs.

Upbeat destruction continues with “Speed the Collapse.” Haines hits upon every worldly crisis in this song: economic, environmental and political by singing, “Watched the neighbors house collapse/Looked the other way…All the oceans boiled and rivers bled.” Haines pauses the newsfeed for a bit of sex in the coquettish, “Lost Kitten.” Her voice is sultry, scathing and girlish as she purrs, “I was looking for a hooker when I found you.”

The existential heartbreak continues in “Dreams So Real” with “I’ll shut up and carry on/ The scream becomes a yawn” repeated like an intonation. “Breathing Underwater” and “Clone” are both worthy ballads, if not a bit too saccharine and generic. Haines comes dangerously close at times to overly simple and repetitive lyrics, but she is often saved by the distinctive angsty etherealness of her voice.

At times the gloss and overproduction on Synthetica is overdone, you want to scratch away the sheen and hear the vulnerability of Haines’ raw vocals. Acoustic, live versions of the songs sound radically different, more intimate and interesting, than the album versions. But then again that overly glossy polish stays true to the theme of the album — that we’re all glossy, overproduced versions of ourselves in today’s world. We have impeccably posed Facebook pictures, well thought out tweets, witty text messages, and perfectly busy lives because that’s what’s expected of us. We’re all putting on our best face all the time and that shit isn’t real.

The title track, “Synthetica” confronts these apprehensions by challenging society’s artificial, pill popping, consumerism. A song of action that finally fits the beat, Haines boldly declares without the melodramatic despair “I can think for myself/I’ve got something no pill could ever kill.”

The closing track “Nothing But Time” continues to contrast the despair of the opening tracks by expressing hope. “I got nothing but time/So the future is mine,” she affirms. Emily Haines is fucked up, but it’s ok. We’re all fucked up sellouts, but we still have time to make things better. Our screams don’t have to become yawns.

Review: Audrey Avila is a writer living in Chicago. You can follower her on twitter @avilaudrey.

Photographs: Jaime Torres lives in Chicago, IL and is a regular contributor to Pigeon Town.

Everybody Wants To Be Caesar

admin — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 03:43:28 +0000

Drawing on images of collective violence in the media, Michael Garguilo investigates how groups of men are brought together and torn asunder, and how quickly camaraderie can disintegrate into turmoil.

[Show as slideshow]

Garguilo extracts human figures from their surroundings thus emphasizing the latent awkwardness and ambiguity of physical aggression. Without a specific backdrop it is difficult to discern aggression from intimacy; a tussle may become an embrace and protest may transform into a parade.

In Garguilo’s paintings, what was once the frightening becomes slapstick. This absurdity broaches a distressing subject in a more comfortable way, providing an entry point to confront violence rather than escape it.

Excerpt from an interview by Gina Iacobelli

Michael Anthony Garguilo received his BFA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 2006 and completed his MFA in painting at Boston University in 2009. His work has been exhibited in New York, Dallas and Boston. Garguilo is also the Assistant Director of Big Chimney Gallery in Chicopee, Massachusetts where he curated the exhibition The Plan is the Body in 2009.

Editor’s Note (Summer Feature 2012)

admin — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 03:43:16 +0000

Short and sweet. Very sweet.

The paintings and drawings of Michael Garguilo have been close to me since I first met Michael last year, in Boston. His depiction of suits in awkward withdrawal and repose struck me right away as something not only thoughtful, but pertinent. The non-fictional resonance of this series speaks to Pigeon Town’s want for the real; his re-imaging and re-focusing of strife among suits is refreshing, necessary and in this case remarkably well-executed.

It’s my pleasure to present to you this artist working on his own terms, not wholly negligent of what’s around him, but patient and willing to articulate the peripheral.

I hope you enjoy.

Tom Laverty

Summer Feature 2012

Message from the Editor (May 2012)

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:36:54 +0000

Well, it’s that time again.

I’m sorry, I just wanted to start with well, it’s that time again.

It’s that time when we ask you to send us your work. Your work, as it is, as you feel right about it. That’s all you can ask of yourself, at given points.

A picture of the river Seine, for every step you take from bed to work, in the morning.

A dollar bill pinned to a sweaty polo shirt. Gumball machines.

We’ll take your compilation of tweets, your diner napkin, your beer recipe sonnet, your drawing of a turtle, your belles-lettres, your confessional, your misunderstandings and biases.

Whichever river brought you to Pigeon Town should be the river you float in on.

Show, and tell.

Tom Laverty

Painful Responsibility – Alcatraz

admin — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:37:00 +0000

I have not met a single person who is not guilty of crime and infraction, nor have I ever known anyone good or necessarily evil. The cold floors where prisoners hallucinated in from lack of sunlight and exhaustion are a privilege to touch, for I did not need too much deviation from my current life to have ended up in a place quite similar.

Sometimes you have to grant yourself the painful responsibility of making yourself go somewhere you otherwise may have ended up. For many people that is an amusement park, or walking on a college campus they never applied to. For me, it was spending the day at Alcatraz.

One man was here for stealing 5 dollars from a grocery store; the store also had a small post office in the back, which made it a Federal crime and landed him in Alcatraz.

It is not that much of a difference to end up on either one side of these bars, or the other, and we are all victims in this life and at the same time predators. I guess that is what makes and keeps us human. There’s always just enough fat-ass tourists around who won’t let themselves experience this place per se. They make up the population who needs to check its facebook status and make small wisecracks while they think of where they will consume their next cheeseburger. And, when they finally start pushing those filthy greaseballs down their throats, the will reminisce about having been to one of the most notorious prisons in the World. I remain lying here on this cold ground and unlike the man who occupied this place 50 years ago, my shirt has no button to be torn off so I might pass the hours searching for it. A constant reminder that this is what life could’ve been.

In my life I have stolen many times that amount and cheated a far greater number. I am not starved here like I should be, or looking over my shoulder to pass a note to a fellow inmate when the guard is not watching. I merely bought a ticket to experience just a few moments of imaginary pain and as I walk down the corridors where prisoners weren’t allowed, and then back to where guards dare not go, the thought of life once again strikes.

Luka Dziubyna is an MFA candidate in Berkeley, CA.

Our Neighbors

admin — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:21:52 +0000

Murder-suicide, murder-suicide, my sundown
litany that summer: that strange pairing

of words I’d mouth in bed, eyeing
the neighbors’ house: left empty since

it happened. Police tape snapped the wind.
One lamp lit all night for their dinner table ghosts.

Another light from the bedroom, where we heard
the bloody bodies fell; one patch of cast light

stitched nightly on the yard’s dark grass.
No-one knew this family. Of the mother

who never smiled, my Mom had said odd,
from a chance passing at Farmer Jack’s.

Quick as they’d arrived on our street one spring
morning with moving trucks, their two daughters

circling figure eights on their driveway while men
huffed couches and beds through the garage,

they left: wheeled gurneys carrying two bodies
up the ramps into ambulances. Two gunshots slashed

through that June night while their girls watched
TV downstairs. How fast we neighbors, who never

came near this family, how fast we left our homes
and surrounded theirs, trying to get as close

as we could. How we craned to look, leaning in
and whispering, a sudden forest hissing

around a clearing’s edge, our faces half-lit
and flickering, leaves in the siren fire.

Robert Fanning is the author of American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award 2003). An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University, his poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, The Hawaii Review, and other journals. Fanning’s writing awards include a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan, the Inkwell Poetry Award, and the Foley Poetry Award.

Eyes

admin — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:21:28 +0000

You could eat them if you had to.

You have two.

Unless you are the Hathaway Man, the Pittsburgh Pirate,

or Cyclops throwing eyeballs from an island in the Aegean

at the dovecote of a boat (the eyelids, the little eyelash oars),

and your one eye is the lonely earth, bald, impecunious,

dreaming of a drawer full of glass eyes lined up like the universe,

at the Opti-Prosthetics Clearinghouse in Van Nuys, California,

where they could send out a replacement if you wanted

staring up from a styrofoam case, and no one could ever tell,

except the kids in Miss Peebles’ geography class

when she calls them up for conferences just before the bell,

her eyes playing tennis with each other, one repeatedly rushing the net.

Or you have none, both gone out, Iliad and Odyssey,

and you are Samson, son of Jihad, or mujahadin,

and a bomb you were making has blown up in your face.

Or you were the one driving past Flathead, Montana,

when a three thousand pound wrecking ball fell from a flatbed in front of you,

crushing you in your car, your two eyes popping out,

not hanging on the sides of your face like David’s slingshots,

but completely gone, rolling down a drain,

two aggies as gifts for two kids stuck in hell,

two lost cities of Atlantis, Helen Keller at a ballgame,

your sockets like antfarms or two caves in Croatia,

the veins like cave paintings, arcing birds, pink flamingoes.

All in the eyes of course, their dopey insistence,

as they look straight ahead or dart to the side,

the way the kid on the seventh grade field trip

looks this way and that before lofting a penny

over the curved security fence on the Empire State Building,

the way it falls all the way but does not go through someone’s head this time,

dropping halfway through the roof of a cab instead,

the slit a slot on a piggybank,

the eyes of the Mediterranean driver big for a second

like the wolf in grandmother’s bed,

the weight of that penny tipping the world just a little, its avoirdupois,

until a kid in Paris drops his mother’s realia from the Eiffel Tower,

and the world tips back, gladly,

until another kid, big-shoed, heads to the Grand Canyon’s edge,

and another at the Pyramids, Taj Mahal, Lookout Mountain,

all the coins little eyes on the steady scales of the world, annuit coeptus,

drachmas and reals on the eyelids of dead presidents,

their heads blown open in the blinking of an eye,

that drifty half-second when someone was turning away,

when one of the assassins eyes was closed,

when the slow motion bullet went right through the apple,

when William Tell’s eye fixed on the space right above his son,

that place in the air that holds the bright temple of God,

the spot where the swordswallower angles his dull sword,

that one lit window in the city where Edward Hopper’s wife is sitting,

like the woman near you now whom you imagine as your lover,

who would turn from you eventually, her eyes filled with pink light,

sunsets, cave drawings, Croatian flamingoes.

And you, what are you looking for right now,

straining, earnest, heroic, keen,

from your deep, impenetrable darkness?

John Hodgen is visiting assistant professor of English at Assumption College, Worcester, MA. He is the author of four previous books of poetry: In My Father’s House, winner of the Bluestem Award; Bread Without Sorrow, winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; Grace, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; and Heaven & Earth Holding Company (Pitt Poetry Series). Hodgen is the recipient of numerous other awards, including the Foley Poetry Prize, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Grolier Prize, an Arvon Foundation Award, and the Chad Walsh Prize in Poetry. In My Father’s House will be rereleased by Lynx House Press on April 1, 2012

God Save the Foundation and Lucas Duda

admin — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:21:08 +0000

Before Lucas Duda was Lucas Duda there was no Lucas Duda. For thousands of years people wanted Lucas Duda, they needed Lucas Duda, but there was no Lucas Duda until the blessed birth of Lucas Duda. So god save the foundation and sweet Lucas Duda because Lucas Duda is born. There can be no confusion here, no ambiguity. From that blessed day he was born until the day he dies and he might never die, never lose the battle of life, not our Lucas Duda, perish the thought and god forbid because there is no Lucas Duda without Lucas Duda, who is made from better stuff than that, better stuff than mortal men and women, the earth and sky, the hopes and dreams, the sperm and eggs. Saints preserve us and saints preserve Lucas Duda so that Lucas Duda should live forever because Lucas Duda is a man’s man, a ladies’ man, a family man. The day is long and the night is longer and there is Lucas Duda. Time is short and the evening sun sets itself down into the west country and there is Lucas Duda. People harvest wheat and bake bread and fashion rope from tree bark and after all of this Lucas Duda is still Lucas Duda. This is who we’re talking about and what we’re talking about, children. The father is child of the man and the father is Lucas Duda, the child is Lucas Duda and the man is Lucas Duda. There can be no misunderstanding here, no confusion. So let the word ring forth, from this time and this place that Lucas Duda is a man of god, a man of the people, a man among men. He is everyone we need him to be, all at once, all at the same time so that now he belongs to the ages. There is only one Lucas Duda and god save the foundation and Lucas Duda with it because Lucas Duda is the foundation. How dare anyone doubt in the face of Lucas Duda. How dare anyone call Lucas Duda into question, believe in something other than Lucas Duda. There can be no confusion, no ambiguity. If we are lost in the forest of life there is Lucas Duda next to us. If we are broken on the boulevard of dreamlessness there is Lucas Duda to mend and keep us so what is left to say. Sure we can say that we all of us make up Lucas Duda and so we do. We can say that the best of us make up Lucas Duda and so we do. We can say that our better angels make up Lucas Duda and that all we aspire to makes up Lucas Duda and so we do because this is all we can do and all we will do. We can do nothing else and we will do nothing else. We will do the work of Lucas Duda as Lucas Duda himself does it. So ask not what Lucas Duda can do for you, but what you can do for Lucas Duda. Let us praise his name because his name is Lucas Duda and our name is Lucas Duda so that Lucas Duda is us and we are him. Let us leave each other today knowing that we will spread the good word of Lucas Duda and that god will save the foundation which has always been Lucas Duda. Let us spread the good word of Lucas Duda to those that need Lucas Duda knowing that everyone needs Lucas Duda. Let us go forth and do this and let us only meet again when the job is done, when it is accomplished. Let us meet when we can look each other in the eye and say Lucas Duda and nothing else. Let us go forth and do this so that the good lord may take a liking to you and to me and most especially sweet Lucas Duda, but not too soon.

Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and a collection of short fiction, Asunder.

Forget in the Knick-Knack Factory

admin — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:20:44 +0000

Something fell or you shoved it from that shelf
inside you a jarlid of seaglass or buttons or her

cheekbones are your cheekbones though the eyes
are yours alone you can clapboard shut so long

and turn the same corner with the same two
cars mangling over and again with an impact

you can never undent or unscrape or unhinge
the bathroom door and enter without seeing

him waist down and naked his leg propped
on the toilet the towel sopped at his groin

oh yesterday’s son oh yesterday’s mother oh
yesterday’s cleancut man say obsidian again

an artery missed or a stomach pumped or
a witness fell from a shelf or pushed to see.

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of In the Carnival of Breathing, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and Back-Talk, winner of the ROOMS Chapbook Contest. She is a doctoral fellow and poetry editor for Quarterly West at the University of Utah. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Seneca Review, Third Coast, American Literary Review, The Journal, Best New Poets, and on Verse Daily.