This Side of Utica: Act I

They sat in silence, side by side in the motorcar as it sped through the empty streets of downtown Utica. With eyes fixed on the pavement ahead, his left hand groped through his breast pocket while his right held steadfast against the wheel. A white package of cigarettes emerged from the folds of fabric; one cigarette clenched between his teeth was lit in a single, fluid motion. He inhaled.
"Put it out," she said. Her voice was hollow.
For ad instant he allowed his eyes to stray over the passenger seat, observing in silence the woman who sat beside him. Her dark tresses held up by pins that were the fashion had begun to fall loose and lay across her shoulders, her head, turned slightly to the right came to rest against her open palm and her eyes, heavily lidded, tok in the last breaths of the sun as it retreated behind the decrepit skyline. It had begun to rain.
"Put it out," she repeated, this time her throat rang with a hint of exasperation.
He inhaled again. Then ever so casually flicking the cigarette out the open window he watched in the rear view mirror as the ember faded into the growing night. With gaze once again fixed on the road his foot weighed heavily against the accelerator while his right hand came to rest on hers. It rained harder. The city shrank.

Genessee Genesis, Pt. 2

Jacobus van der Hoeken, after the departure of his wife, travelled west from Defreetsville to the isolated environs of what we would now call Utica. Here, he learned from the natives of the Oneida tribe valuable tricks of the trade, so to speak. It was here that he earnestly adopted the surname of Genessee and met his new wife, Ilse de Berg, a voluptuous Dutch maiden captured by the Indians and sold to van der Hoeken (Genessee) for a bushel of maize. Jacobus built a farm on the corner of what we would now call Bleeker Street, then a maze of deciduous trees with each acting as willful New World obscurantist for our would-be patroon. Repressed in nature, Jacobus turned to textiles. Yes, textiles! He was a man far ahead of his times. He needed no Industrial Revolution. His farm became his factory, and his son Ezekial soon became his farmer, transforming the virginal soil into a proto-Community Garden.

The year was 1700, and permanent residence in Utica was not to occur for another 74 years if you believe the all too misleading yet popular historians. Jacobus moved around the area, mapping the terrain and swimming in the rivers. He had found a joy, as it were. Yet, when he contracted scarlet fever at the age of 50 in 1711 he could do nothing but sink into the inexorable abyss of death. His body flew to the shades as the Mowhawk river still flies canal-ward to Albany then sea-ward down the Hudson past the world's biggest and greatest town once known as New Amsterdam. Inscrutable to the last, Jacobus left a will and a manual for Ezekial. The will promised his estate in its entirety if Ezekial eschew farming, marry an Oneida woman, and learn the textile trade secrets found in the manual...

Going Away

A brief post this time, I promise. This particular point is not a grand pronouncement or revelation. Rather, it's something very obvious to everyone already. I am feeling very sentimental. Tonight for the first time in a while.

Any given place is meaningless. Utica has about 25,000 households. So many of those houses and homes are virtually identical. Levittowns, suburban sprawl, mass-produced structures. Drive past them, fly over them with disdain. Each one is someone's home, and to them it's not the same. The same for cities. Utica is little different in kind from Albany or Scranton or Plattsburgh or even larger cities, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Columbus. It is not the history of these cities that make them special, not their economies or monuments or landmarks. Only when you leave and become bound by the walls of different gates can you see your lover's veil from without, its true beauty hidden, but not to you. Never to you.

Utica and the Ishtar Gate

Only the entirely desensitized can resist the inexorable drag of the urban lodestones which scatter the globe. Civilization saw its first fruits behind the cedar doors of Ishtar Gate, adorned with the emblem of the aurochs, for we shall never forget our roots. Bulls and dragons stood there too to protect the city. So even today. The 1930s saw the fertility goddess take up her guard again: the century's foe drew up the gate, a mockery in its perfect simulacrum, to herald the new dawn they darkly foreboded.

The Gate's polarizing power has drawn more and more to look on its glory: one person out of two lives in the shade it brought us. But since time out of mind, the covenant the Gate made with us seems less than sacrosanct.

The Gate brought teeming multitudes of the eager to Utica in the 19th century; they poured down the Processional Way, the Erie Canal, and found in truth the promise of aurochs, bull, and dragon fulfilled. Warp and weft, but by machine, and for the benefit of the entire land. They made colors never before seen by man, not from snails or berries but from purer and more vibrant substances never seen alone in nature. They made for themselves the tools the hand needed to earn its ease... manufacturing! Its aim, its own obsolescence, achieved, the machines worked for man and Utica flourished. In the 1920s, Utica was the radio capital of the world. The martial might of General Electric propelled the city to its zenith; here, the distance that had so long vanquished man became prey.

Two men with radios are side by side. Beyond the Gate's wildest dreams, Utica made possible for the first time the even yet unrealized reversal of Babel. Through pride and joy they tore turgid Nebuchadnezzar from his alabaster sepulchre (but his stink will still infect the world until we seal the door of his mausoleum forever).

But the Gate is a relic as forgotten as its city and a thousand others: Ur, Babylon, Seleucia, Ctesiphon, someday Baghdad; all once the largest city in the world, the latest is bound in manacles, but may yet evade its coup de grace: Ishtar's fickle bounty gives the lie to her open loins. Utica's lodestone is a grass-covered rock, infused with as great a power as that half-hearted image. Most of the people know. They leave. Piece by piece, they take the aurochs and bulls and dragons with them, until not even cows remain. But still some come to Utica, drawn by the Gate's vestigial visage and the need to fulfill that covenant, the same passion that made Babel rise.

The Native Sadism of Alfred Kinsey and the Mama-Papa Taxonomy Reports

What, no
other activity? Polonski is,
yes, no longer.

Tits, boobs,
big tits, huge tits, small tits, tiny tits, nice tits--
tons of tits,

Most were
classified, systematic, with a mixed diet
and cream floating

On top.
A robust picture is best restricted,
sometimes separated, shifting

Temperate forests
where great-bellied elegant-winged
chickadees discuss relatives

In claves.
The feeling, charge of rhythm, her feet against
the bed, hips

Squeezing him
relaxes desire, a pillow for Aquinas, or
"the serpent manners"

That explain
the available data, are not
slowing the angle

Or easing
the advantage your Persian slippers sense
simulating the clitoris.

Psychological contact,
that lively little she-devil, a common
ancestor in arms,

Nesting in
the aspect of focus, for the first
time is chosen.

Virgin hand
in range expansion suggests a nomenclature, since there
are no answers.

GIVE ME A MAN! Sayings from a 50s Fan Magazine Reprinted at ForeverYours.com with Permission of the Original Authors and Copyright Holders

Note:
the thing done
in this
photograph
was done
actually
in a Kodak
lab
in the 1940s:

I seem to recall
reading
some time back
an article in Reader's Digest
punctuated
with a frenetic
sensuality:

Big Jake!
The greatest guy I ever knew!

Out of his
mind with
apologies to John
Ford, so
shy and just
wanting to know
Hollywood,
a man to
lean on. . .

When we
put on,
tall and easy,
took to the
island
we used to go
each summer,
this trick of
Duke's--
well, rape
happens: Get away
as fast as you can!

I was nice
and relaxed, asking
the
National Institute
of Health for
the real thing, its
meaning, remember
that?

Beauty,
though often suppressed,
is waiting to
come to
adore her
children
and dote on
her pals, only
she can't, at
least in no
one place:
the extra
mile
stops at
nothing.

Is it true
love?

Envision
which scenario
cracks
eye contact
like
a hawk
eyeing its
first date.

Is it true,
love?

I can
picture
the day and
one thing's for
sure:
It don't need
continual analysis: Just
watch:

My sister Sue
(right)
is holding a
tiny sparrow.

Fire

The Utica summer began on the 29th of May with another portent of the ruin that clear truth foretells and Pandora's gift conceals beneath an artful glamour. The F.X. Matt brewery burned half to the ground, a candle in a final vigil. The serene tabernacle took root in 1888, a trinity of years after Francis Xavier Matt, first of his name, yearning to breathe free in an untainted new world, forsook the Black Forest which had succored his line since first roving bands out of the farthest reaches of Ultima Thule had laid down their weariness beneath the beautiful interplay of light and shadow which those trees engendered.

A sparkle in his eye led Francis Xavier to Utica, never knowing that 130 years later his gift to the world would perish much as the progenitor of its location. No praetorians coaxed up these pillars of flame, but the Matts bear no name but Barca. Generations of love and toil they lavished on their home, but the gladius of fate brooks no consequence it does not choose. The air fills with poison, toxic smog, the earth plowed with salt, prosperity is desert sand. Nothing at all remains. Join your voice to mine and sing the last canticle.

Nick Matt vows to rebuild. The mayor exhorts the people to imbibe in solidarity with their chastened paladins. But no one has ever defeated Rome.


Only barbarians.

Genessee Genesis, Pt. 1

Upon review, my previous post seems rather curt, and I would like to rectify my reputation on this blog through an injection of gravitas. As I mentioned in "Bleecker Street Blues," my family originally hails from Utica. We date back to days of the great Dutch migration to the New World. Those days of yore, when Peter Stuyvesant was regent of New Amsterdam and the Fondas established a proto-cinematic settlement under the grey hues of upstate New York. In the following years, Vernon De Freets was to capture the metaphysical torment and spiritual chaos that, in a perpetual ebb and flow, ran through the oft-seeming monotonous landscapes that crawled out from the primordial basin of the Mowhawk river.

My earliest relative in the colonies, Jacobus van der Hoeken, was disowned for marrying a sexually precocious Seneca girl (perhaps representative of the strain that this foreign soil would have on his nerves). Exiled from the burgeoning Dutch community, Jacobus adopted the name Genesee (a Seneca word meaning "pleasant valley") and then changed it to Genessee (adding the extra "s" in order to pass as British). He converted to Calvinism, but lost his faith when his dear wife (her name unknown to this day) departed for Montreal with a Quebecois fur trapper with a lisp as noticeable as his aversion to effete Old-World-ism. A rugged man for sure, but certainly a troublesome rake, who, if we are to believe the records at the Montreal city hall, drowned himself with the Molson Ice Expedition Company in Newfoundland. His soul, according to the subtext of that document, was as likely to flourish in city-life as Jonas Salk was as likely to find a cure for the clap (which never happened--an addendum that the self-conscious historiographer must always attach).

Isolated, alienated, abandoned for a drink-sodden frog from Montreal, Jacobus fell into effeminancy. The land...too tiresome. The soil...too rocky. Prospects...bluish-green. Yet, his basket-weaving and innovations in textile would eventually elevate him to a higher stratum where his family would reside until a disastrous financial decision during the War of 1812.

The Death of the Pastoral

Gone are the days of simple, ordinary sorrow. Do you remember the embers of the campfire, glowing low, sure to fizzle? As we navigated the circuitous path, gradually finding the spot clearest on a moonless night, and you asked Who is leading us?, and I felt the tremors crumble down my narrow spine, and felt anything but assured, and called back to you, Godot! Godot! It's Godot we're following! Then I felt like moving and never standing still. The night took me up into its airborne wings, and in the winds of our slow decay I knew the meaning of at-one-ment for the briefest moment.

In that brightest glare you looked upon me as if I were a wise man from another time, (in those days) a magi wearing the rags of the shepherd. You dug your heels into the earth, and I felt your desire ripple through the blackened dirt and coal. I knew your name, and you knew mine; what could be more plain? I was the Nazarene in his shop, eyes intent upon what?, before the fiery claw of the unmoving mover clutched him and flew him to the Tree of Life where a bleating lamb sits and bellows. For heaven's sake don't move for you are fast in the fire's gaze.

What my fingers touched expired like a sigh into air.

And afterward you laughed at the scrapes on your knees. Suck me of my essence, and you answered aright, having spent your last scream. You watched me as I looked away and found the earth's center in the maturing balance of the sapling. Your body makes a beautiful figure with its speech, you said, and I blushed for the first time in my life. You laughed euphoric in the night's euphony.

And then what meteor fell to earth? Time allowed us this greenery before it sent a debtor to reclaim its debt of hours, days, weeks, months...The moon is no crescent but a scythe to reap the harvest! And in solitary places, later but not much later, I tried to envision your slow maneuvers in the voice appealing through a jukebox. Finally, in the darkened booth where the moving pictures flash before us, I saw your face on the silver surface, and near-refused to recall the emblazoned night you said you would always remember as your screen test.