Testament to Gil Scott-Heron

On Friday evening, May 27, We were attending an open mic poetry session at Modbo in Colorado Springs. It was getting near the end of the evening, and a brash slam poet recited some Langston Hughes, then announced that Gil Scott-Heron was dead. I was stunned. He had been a soundtrack to my life since I was 16. I wrote this overnight, then discovered many friends such as Dom Gabrielli, Marilyn Basel, and Aad de Gids had written pieces of their own about Gil. He had survived many years of prison, many years of being strung out, and had come back with an exceptional 2010 album, I'm New Here, as well as an exceptional remix album in 2011 produced by Jamie Xx. I guess dying in a time of renewal was preferable to dying when broke and forgotten, but it still hurts all the more. And I guess that learning of Gil Scott-Heron's death at a poetry slam was the optimal way to find out.


Days Gil Whispered in My Ear

I. “And what would Karen Silkwood say to you, if she was still alive?”
I know precisely what she’d say, Gil.
She’d say it’s high time to wake up.
Protestations of broken alarm clocks and dissipated late nights aside,
I picked up a placard in 1976.
I never let go. My arms grow weary.

II. “Tuskeegee 626, scientists getting their kicks.”
Dolores DeLuna beams a benevolent mannequin smile
On Iggy’s Lust-for-Life grin
And the somber Leninist busts of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson.
“It’s so social realist,” you say as I slit shrink wrap.
I go grand-mal trembling in an excess of social realism.
Gil almost lost Detroit, I lost Detroit that day
Unwilling to play bedsitter to a Michigan gone Alzheimer’s.

III. “My name is what’s-your-name, you might reject my claim,
I expect that you won’t vary from the norm.”
The riot of desert color in Tempe, Ganado, Buckeye,
blossoms resembling the obscured face of an
Iranian exchange student in rectangular white mask
The shah is
“You mean to take it as a symbol”
a U.S. puppet,
“But look closely, who does it resemble?”
down with the shah!
Fedayeen collapse in multitudes as the first of dozens
of bearded stern faces are displayed in our shooting gallery
providing room for decades of bogeymen keeping us awake at night.
“Shah Mot. Shah Mot. Shah Mot.”
(Gil was the one to inform us that the chess warning of checkmate
is derived from the Farsi declaration that the shah is dead.)

IV. “It’s 1980. There ain’t no way we can reclaim ’75,
much less 1969.”
This is what democracy looks like!
This is what checkmate looks like.
as Gil Scott-Heron and Captain Beefheart go silent 30 years.
Silent all these years.
The needlework of desire keeps Gil from showing up
in New Mexico, Colorado, stations of the cross.
While this same needlework traces out the map
of a different desire, the material gone global,
gone derivative,
where even the chronicling of the exponential cancer
makes for hunger, makes the fingers twitch.
Brecht is there, sitting in for a silent Gil,
“even anger against injustice makes the brow grow stern.”
Hands on the placard falter,
but this remains an act of love, not fear.

V. “Womenfolk raised me and I was full grown,
before I knew I came from a broken home.”
Gil’s voice returns unexpectedly,
not hoarse in bitterness and regret,
not angry at 30 years’ unchronicled injustice,
but happy and humble in declaring that the
African-American male is only defined
by the women who shape him and carry his burden.
Works in all colors, Gil, works for all men.
Women as the strongest heroes
pulling a lost cause from the fire,
the one with dicks taking comic sidekick roles,
Vichyssoise, vichyssoise,
as they remind us again and again not to slacken the placard grasp.
The chador, the burqa, the undrivability in Salafist climes
opened the floodgates to chase the bearded ones away.
And Gil was there, learning dub step with Jamie XX,
discovering the untapped power of being new here.

VI. “The sheriff of Monroe County had disasters on his mind.”
The brash poet with shaved shining ebony head
announced Gil Scott-Heron is dead,
bookending Gil and Langston Hughes in
a declaration that will never stop reverberating.
“And what would Karen Silkwood say to you, if she was still alive?”
In my dreams she’d say, “Job well done.”
The real words mouthed by these lips,
“Go then and do likewise.
Do not falter. There is still a world to win.”
Gil wholeheartedly agrees.

Loring Wirbel
May 28, 2011

Unanticipated Renaissance

"I don't know where it came from, it certainly wasn't in the forecast," he told her. "I only feel blessed to be here at this time, in this place."

There were atmospheric disturbances through the summer of 2009, to be sure, little fronts with meta-tags such as Beth Ditto, Lee Upton, Jay Farrar & Ben Gibbard, Florence Welch. But with the jet stream in such a ragged disarray, it was hard to know if these were summer showers or harbingers of things to come.

Somewhere around Thanksgiving, the torrent of prose got serious. Richard Powers' dazzling tribute to ecstatic daily living, Generosity. Jeanette Walls' deliciously tragic Half-Broke Horses. David Byrne's trips with his bicycle. Barbara Kingsolver's best novel yet, The Lacuna. Patti Smith's beautiful memoir of life with Robert Mapplethorpe. Spring book lists show no signs of slackening.

In late January, the musicians joined in. Xiu Xiu's Dear God I Hate Myself. Joanna Newsom's triple-disc, two-hour tribute to Victorian courtesan Lola Montez. Quasi's chaotic American Gong. Shearwater's memorial to the refugees from the Bikini Atoll. Local Natives' high harmonies. Tindersticks' turn to cowboy living. Vampire Weekend's turn to covert-agent living. The triumphant return of Gil Scott-Heron to the spoken word. Vibracathedral Orchestra's massive two-hour raga dances in six parts. Robert Pollard. Magnetic Fields. Laura Veirs. Retribution Gospel Choir. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. The last Jack Rose before his untimely death. The farewell kisses from Yellow Swans. And plenty of clouds on the horizon bearing names like Liars and Flobots.

The media hasn't paid much attention to a flowering of unprecedented proportions under the spring rain, maybe because it's difficult to discern any particular theme like punk, grunge, Latin American surrealism, whatever. The one unifying theme I see is the integrity and uncompromising position of the artist. This is not a renaissance designed for the benefit and convenience of consumer or patron. The books are complex packages not well-suited to either ADHD attention spans or electronic e-readers. The musical compositions are often an hour long or better, demanding a return to the old concept-album format, and ruthlessly denying being compressed into digital file formats. Gauntlets have been thrown down, and I will be eagerly awaiting to see if visual arts, film, dance, etc. follow the lead of prose and sound.

We can argue endlessly as to why this happened now - ongoing economic crisis? A move from below against digital homogenization? Not important. What is important is that you are present at the creation, watching one hundred flowers bloom at this moment, in this place.