Tag: david berman

TRACK | Purple Mountains – Nights that Won’t Happen

5/5 golden merles

The bittersweet hyper articulation of this track is a confluence of it’s melody and meaning. But not only the melody, some sweetness is derived from the clarity, it’s own kind of joy.

Ghosts are just old houses dreaming people in the night / Have no doubt about it, hon’, the dead will do alright / Go contemplate the evidence, I guarantee you’ll find / the dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind

From David Berman’s Actual Air:

From Cantos for James Michener: Part II
CI.

The jets move slowly through the sky like they’ll never
reach Denver or wherever they’re going,

and I have the feeling that people are high-fiving nearby,

spontaneously, like a saloon brawl where everyone
suddenly starts fighting as if each man has
a preconscious knowledge of which side he’s on
when he enters a crowded room.

And this fight starts with a Polish joke that a man
at the bar begins to tell, but it’s not funny
as it concerns a stillborn child and an alcoholic
slain by the last European wolf, and even after
three hours there is no punchline in sight.

When he reaches the part where a Polish scientist
who has been navigating through millimeters of wilderness
discovers sub-atomic temples in a rust sample,
none of the men are listening,

they are thinking about their own childhoods

about the deep embarrassment of scoring on your own team

and the view from falling behind.

TRACK | Purple Mountains – All My Happiness is Gone

5/5 golden merles

Howdy, friends, ever bought a digital album from a dead man?

“Lately I tend to make strangers wherever I go / Some of them were once people I was happy to know”

In my estimation, if you ever write a line that good for the rest of your life, it was more or less worth it. David’s death coinciding with the release of this album reminds me a bit of some anecdote from Camus about a young author who wrote a novel then (in part) killed himself to promote it. The joke is that it did get the attention of the newspapers but the work itself was universally panned.

Unlike this dead fellow, Purple Mountain’s self title release is superb. The parallel is only the timing, the creative act, and the demise. I also greatly enjoy Berman’s poetry, like this from 1999’s Actual Air:

“Snow”

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.


Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.


When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.


But why were they on his property, he asked.