192. Clive Barker's babe } & Clive Barker's chair.

Re-watched Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (director’s cut, still a disappointment) and noticed in protagonist Boone’s apartment Peter Blake’s “Babe Rainbow.”

Not “noticed”—Barker cuts from a bottle of spilled pills to a hand-held shot of “Babe Rainbow” on a free-standing, wood paneled wall, surrounded by hubcaps. Cuts to another hand-held shot, this from behind Boone as he takes off his t-shirt and steps forward—toward “Babe Rainbow.”

Search Nightbreed + Clive Barker + Babe Rainbow and find “Now watching Nightbreed with my babe” and this quote from the film: “It’s all true. God’s an astronaut. Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where monsters live.”

“Babe Rainbow” is a screen print on tin; according to the University of Warwick Art Collection website, the central image, a woman dressed in a white bathing suit, is “based on a 1967 cover of the French magazine Marie Claire”—a cover image easy to track down (Joanna Shimkus is the model). The woman in the print takes a step forward, from a dark background, beneath an arch. Framing that arch is the rainbow. Beneath the woman are the words “Babe Rainbow.” 10,000 “genuine multiples” of the print were made.

Which means lots of people have an original copy of “Babe Rainbow”—there’s a copy down the hill from me at the RISD Museum. Apparently, Clive Barker has a copy too. And fictional character Boone, too. Why is “Babe Rainbow” so prominently featured in Nightbreed?

There’s lots written about how queer Nightbreed is. Yeah—its coding is ABC. That quote about Oz, for one. Then there’s this exchange between two of the Nightbreed, Narcisse and Ohnaka: “Hey. Love those tattoos” [Ohnaka glances at the tattoos that circle his nipples, runs away; Narcisse, to himself, says] “Sailors.” There’s a priest who tries to stop the massacre of the Nightbreed by a mob of police—the sheriff calls him “faggot”; the sheriff is promptly killed by Boone, who warns the priest away, but the priest pulls off his collar and declares, “No. I have to see. Take me with you.” Once he does, he becomes Nightbreed and destroys the sheriff—who so obviously represents unthinking, violent, and frightened adherence to conformity. Read Trace Thurman’s “The Inherent Queerness of Clive Barker’s ‘Nightbreed’” for a light-hearted examination of other queer tropes in the film.

So, I wondered—is “Babe Rainbow” simply another signifier? Maybe. But why that rainbow?

Another possibility occurs to me. There’s Clive Barker the English horror author and film director and there’s Clive Barker the English pop artist. Clive Barker the pop artist made a collage portrait of Peter Blake; Blake and Barker have shown work together. Maybe director Barker was making an oblique shout-out to pop artist Barker?

(I first learned of Clive Barker the pop artist when I saw his “Van Gogh’s Chair” [1966] featured on the cover of Paul McCartney’s 1983 album Pipes of Peace. As you all know, Peter Blake and Jann Haworth executed Paul McCartney’s rough idea for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.)

191. Fragments } lost & found.

After “Cry Baby Cry,” Paul McCartney sings a little fragment: “Can you take me back where I came from / Can you take me back / Can you take me back where I came from / Brother can you take me back…”—an eerie excerpt from an unfinished cut, McCartney’s plaintive wish not to be lost anymore. To go home. Another fragment, “Golden Slumbers,” McCartney sings, “Once there was a way / to get back home.” From the same period, “Get Back” (“to where you once belonged”) and “Two of Us” (“…you and me Sunday driving / not arriving/ on our way back home / we’re on our way home…”). Is going back home simply a poignant idea that appealed to McCartney aesthetically, or something to do with personal crisis?

The flip-side of his anxious longing for home appears in the fragments of this era too. From the (rather complete) fragment “You Never Give Me Your Money” that begins the Abbey Road b-side suite: “But oh that magic feeling / Nowhere to go.” And another fragment, “The Lovely Linda,” that begins McCartney’s solo break.

190. Napkins at } A Velvet Giant.

What do you do with this: “So excited and honored to have three poems alongside such incredible company in the latest issue of @avelvetgiant!❤️❤️❤️” [Spencer Williams]. It must make sense to somebody. I like Spencer Williams' poem “Masturbation”—in it, the narrator asks Adam to see if the dove that smacked into “the window” died. It did. In death it wears a crown of ants. The best poems in A Velvet Giant no. 3 are Karolina Zapal’s. But let’s be transparent: my name is Adam and my last name is Polish so naturally I’m biased. Kevin Latimer’s author’s photo deserves careful consideration. His poem “Back In the Backyard Again” led me to think about Stephon Clark, murdered in his grandmother’s backyard by the police: “black boy prepared for war / all his life.”

My contribution to A Velvet Giant no. 3 is four Napkin Poems. When I look at the issue on my laptop, I can’t view whole napkins—I wonder if on a desktop the experience is better? I do, however, like the close-up presentation, because the Napkin Poems are very much about texture. The actual napkins (as opposed to the scans) are now radically curled.

189. Whistling tunes } he will soon unfold.

My youngest likes Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” She digs the Dalek-intoned “I AM IRON MAN” and the coda—signaled by Bill Ward’s snare at about minute 4:40.

stevieray56 helpfully explains “Iron Man” (comment on “Black Sabbath ‘Iron Man’.” You Tube, posted 20 Oct. 2014):

…the story of a man who time travels into the future and sees the apocalypse. In the process of returning to the present, he is turned into steel by a magnetic field. He is rendered mute, unable verbally to warn people of his time in the future and of the impending destruction. His attempts to communicate are ignored and mocked. This causes Iron Man to become angry, and drives his revenge on mankind, causing the destruction seen in his vision. Now that is Heavy Metal!

stevieray56 makes sense where there is no sense: Iron Man may “Have traveled time / for the future of mankind” but he “Kills the people he once saved”—at what point did he save the world? If he saved the world, he prevented the apocalypse, then kills the people he saved but who mocked him. And stevieray56 can’t decide if Iron Man traveled in time physically or mentally. I’d argue physically, through a “magnetic field” that turns the Iron Man into steel. (If you pass an iron man through a magnetic field he would remain iron but become magnetic. To become steel, he’d need to be melted and alloyed with carbon. Whatever.)

Don’t worry, stevieray56! The lyrics don’t make sense.

(“Vengeance from the grave”—what grave? There’s no grave!)

It doesn’t matter if the lyrics are dopey on the page; what matters is the way they’re sung and generally what they describe.

I’m taken with the dumb steel man “the people” wonder about. “Has he thoughts within his head?” the people ask. A dormant god. Woken by…? “He just stares at the world” then “Now the time is here.” I’m reminded of Talos, the bronze man who defends Minos’ Crete from invasion and is ultimately defeated by Medea as she travels with Jason and the Argonauts. Is Talos a leftover from the Bronze Age—simply an example of what men were? A metal man who traveled through time the way we all travel through time?

My youngest refuses to listen to any other song by Black Sabbath.

In the wake of the 2016 election, a colleague asked what music I found myself listening to; Black Sabbath and Philip Glass. Mostly Master of Reality, the song “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” and the Elektra Nonsuch Music with Changing Parts. That semester I taught John Darnielle’s Master of Reality:

…and I was living my teenage dream: up to my elbows in sticky bloody ground beef, which I was feeding methodically to a loud and potentially very dangerous machine. I was alone, and in control, and nobody was going to bother me, and I sang along as loud as I could with my Black Sabbath tape.

On the highway in between Connecticut and Rhode Island I listened as two FM signals crossed. Peter Gabriel’s “Spiel Ohne Grenzen” blended with Queen’s “We Will Rock You”: “Shouting in the street, gonna take on the world some day”; Gabriel’s cheerful whistle; static.

188. Notes made yesterday } & today.

[ image: scan of first poem in Poetry, November 2018 issue (Lucia Perillo, "Say This") with cross-outs ]

Brookline Booksmith 7:04pm packed house. Maybe two people of color in audience for Teju Cole / Elisa Gabbert conversation.

Elisa reads “Variations on Crying.”

Gone With the Wind made Elisa weep; controversy re. Vanessa Place retweeting Gone With the Wind line x line

“When I was 26, I got 13 stitches in my chin after fainting toward a French door and breaking a pane of glass with my face.” Twenty-six? More than a decade ago? I shot footage of those French doors on my Motorola RAZR.

T. Cole offers “a special shout out to the nonwhite people in the audience.” He claims he’s the reason they’re at the reading; E. Gabbert says, “I brought you.”

T. Cole reads his anthology of cliché observations.

Elisa reads “one more”—“We’ve never owned property, and our families aren’t in a position to contribute to a down payment.”

Mentions her friend Katie, crushed by a gallery wall, in both essays. The power of this anecdote. Richard Serra.

T. Cole talks. Doesn't lead a discussion or engender conversation. Elisa listens. T. Cole asks of the audience if anyone is happier than they were ten years ago. Four women respond. He categorizes each response. He is pleased women commented because, he says, it’s usually men who comment. He interrupts Elisa. He decides to read another essay from his book during q & a. He tells anecdote about losing keys and worrying that he’ll end up in the news like Henry Louise Gates. He asks, “How is everybody feeling? Uncomfortable?” Yes—when will you give Elisa an opportunity to speak uninterrupted?

She answers a question about the lack of an index in The Word Pretty. Is frank about it—there was a rush to get the book done. She's asked about craft. Her answers are concise and honest.

Outside Booksmith, police cruiser, lights flashing. Blue.