Chris Stroffolino’s Top Ten — February 25

by Chris Stroffolino
25 February 2007

What’s your theme, little girl?

If you had 10-15 would you play?

1. Grace Hartigan

   The great abstract expressionist.

2. John Ashbery and Rudy Burckhardt, “Indelible, Inedible”

   Well, the film makes the poem seem more dated than it might otherwise, but an early pioneer of the “poetry video” format, which may soon be sweeping YouTube, but I still think Jean Luc Godard does it better, in part because he’s not really trying.

3. Bobby Rush, “Garbage Man.”

   “Everytime I see a garbage can/ I think of her and that garbage man/ My woman left me for the garbage man.” Beautiful slow blues….

4. Flipper, “Ha Ha Ha”
5. David Grubbs with Squirrel Bait it not Susan Howe

   Remember when a lot of people felt taken or put-on when Steve Malkmus said the lyrics to a Pavement album were taken from, or based on, John Ashbery? Funny that none of these people seem to have much complaint about David Grubbs’ collaborations with poet Susan Howe. It’s the kind of collaboration that seems to me to perpetuate a conception of poetry as a ‘serious’ (elitist) form of art. I won’t say joyless or pretentious, but there’s still a disembodied sense (in the Biblical sense) of the word preceding the flesh that makes me feel that with ‘popularizers’ of poetry such as this, well, who needs obscurantists?

6. Ornette Coleman, Ornette at 12_

   This album with his then pre-teen (I’m pretty sure) son on drums! After he won the lifetime achievement award, some ‘purist’ types in the poetry world took it as an affront that he was reduced to having to then give an award to Carrie Underword. Ugh, get me out of your petty attitude, poet-people, Ornette has a lot to teach you (and not just about music!). Luckily, two poets, David Baptiste Chirot and Joel Lewis, understood where Coleman was coming from, as one quoted Coleman saying that it would be no worse for artists to go to business school than art school….

7. The Fugs, “Dirty Old Man”

   So, who do you like better? Ed Sanders or Tuli Kupferberg?

8. Philip Walker, “You’re So Cold”

   He was Robert Cray’s teacher, but don’t hold that against him.

9. Inspector Double Negative, “Girls”

   Because sometimes you just have to….

10. Green on Red, Live at the Town and Country

    Great songs, and the first time I heard a sample of what Chuck Prophet can do on the guitar.