You Can Go Your Own Way

As he lay in the gully with a broken ankle, the snow gently falling onto his bare head, a Fleetwood Mac song whose lyrics he could never quite understand played on his mind's jukebox. "You can go your own way. You can call it under a long and day." It made no sense, but that's all he could make out through the little speaker in his clock radio back in the 1970s. I should have listened to more Fleetwood Mac, he thought. I never even listened to a full album, never bought one. They had songs composed following unknown strategies. Who was doing what in the songs? He couldn't tell. The drummer looked like a giant, and the band was named after him and the bassist, John. But then he knew more about Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Were they writing rock songs or pop songs? Could the lyrics be understood if one really focused? What were they about? Coming and going? Movements up and down hills? The movement of days? Love staying and love failing? He had heard about all the drug use in California in the 1970s. Those drugs must have been miraculous stuff to permit them to compose such music in the middle of the night in a wooden chalet studio in Sausalito.

A fox approached the man, sniffing him curiously. He tried to talk to the creature. "What do you know about Stevie Nicks? Do you know how Fleetwood Mac went from being a blues band to a rock and pop band?" The fox didn't answer and trotted off in the snow, leaving a trail of little paw prints.

The sun moved across the dome of the sky. A majestic 10-point buck approached the man, looking at him impassively. The man said to the deer, "Do you know how Fleetwood Mac wrote their songs? They don't seem to follow any pattern." The deer gestured upward with his powerful neck and head toward the road. He seemed to be letting the man know that it was time to try to drag himself up out of the gully. The deer traced some shapes in the snow with its hooves. The man interpreted the shapes as the melodies to certain Fleetwood Mac songs. The buck bolted away. And the man began to pull himself up the bank, singing the melodies to certain Fleetwood Mac songs, "Listen to the wind blow/ watch the sunrise /Run in the shadows / damn your love, damn your lies."

                               Scioto Lounge by Terry Allen

                                                               Columbus, Ohio public art

NOT

I am not an art thief plotting my next move

I am not a post rock bass player

I am not a merchant seaman ready to embark north

I am not a longshoreman getting ready to maneuver a crane

I am not a lumberjack afraid of the direction the tree may fall

I am not a jewel thief hiding in the basement until the shop closes and night falls

I am not a boxing coach

I am not a hipster mathematics professor

I am not a sculptor who builds little motorized things that race around going "wizzz wizzz" and that bump into each other and topple each other over

(I am not a pompous jackass - at least I don't think so - even though I kind of look like one in the picture, I think it's just being bad at selfies)

I am not a guy who makes weird sounding hybrid electric/ acoustic instruments - like two cantaloupe rinds with a thin tin cover that can be bonked in a resonant way

I am not a guy who was once a European dead lifter in a very low weight class

I am not a chef who opened the only Portuguese restaurant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

A Day in the Life (of Stephen Miller)

 

2026

More guys named Ringo
Shirt front open
Curly orange chest hair

Hummus & alfalfa sprout sandwiches

In 2026

More singers who look like
Sing like Mama Cass
Big Mama Thornton
In 2026

More attempts to go surfing
On Lake Michigan
The will to surf
Will rise the waves
Will stir the frames of shipwrecks
Up to the surface
For us to explore
In 2026

More fash learning Spanish
Reading Paz, Nicolás Guillén,
José Martí, Nicanor Parra,
Gabriela Mistral, Cortázar
Their minds reeling
They discover artists
Writing in Spanish
Who live in the US
What?!
They stumble onto the Xicago scene

They read Febrónio Zataraín's
Febrónimos

"Dios se está muriendo. Hay una vía para salvarlo: sintamos compasión por Él."
(God is dying. There is a way to save Him: we feel compassion for Him)
"Estaba en el monte y veía el mar; estoy en el mar y no lo veo."
(I was on the mountain and I saw the sea; I am in the sea and I do not see it)
In 2026

Things Seen on a Night Walk

yellow maple leaves
cartwheeling
wind-pushed
along the edge of a gutter
a little dog barking
behind a fence
then his head appears
wait - how?
he's peaking out
from inside a clear plastic bubble
sticking out from the fence

a way to see what he senses walking by?

I know there was a third thing...
a house decorated with
white paddle shapes
on top of the red bricks
of the facade
everybody wants to see the action
or be on the move
leaves, dogs, houses

The Whitening Project

 Following the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, the state embarked upon a project of "embranquecimento," or whitening, of the country, promoting immigration from Catholic countries in Europe. And this is what Donald & co.'s brutal mass deportation campaign amounts to: an attempt to to *whiten* the country through the expulsion of non-white US residents - along with all their deep cultural, intellectual and economic contributions. What this looks like in practice is a twisted game of disappearance. The lady from whom you used to buy tamales and atole on the street corner: vanished. The couple who used to clean your apartment: inside their own apartment, hiding. Your new friend, the mom of your daughter's friend - she's being yanked out her car and thrown down to the pavement because the Supreme Court has ruled that racial profiling is now legal.

Latinos comprise 1/3 of Chicago's population and like the other groups who inhabit the city, their contributions to the visual, literary, theatrical, culinary, and musical arts in the city are immeasurable. As are Latino contributions to progressive political movements and to education in Xicago. Indeed, upon a closer look, we see that it is impossible to separate Latino Xicago from Chicago itself. But this is precisely what the grimly quixotic plan of Stephen Miller and ICE seeks to do: To forge a more cruel and a more dull nation. To forge a nation more white.

The Regrettable Rise of Nicky the Fash Fuentes

 

Well, Nick "The N•zi of Berwyn" Fuentes seems to gaining more and more prominence amongst the Republicans and the American right more generally of late. Most notably, Nicky the Fash enjoyed a long softball interview on Tucker Carlson's show. And Tucker isn't receiving much pushback from his fellow right wingers for platforming a candidly racist, enthusiastically antisemitic, gleefully Islamophobic and loudly misogynist white supremacist. Also of note is that Nicholas let it slip last year that he has ambitions of being president one day. Well, considering I live in the same quaint hamlet as Nicholas, I think it's my duty to offer my perspective on the man.

He is loud. Appears to be confident. He is slyly manipulative of his incel audience. And he is as uncultured and as ignorant as the day is long. He loudly declares that the US needs to dominate the Western Hemisphere, that women and non-white people need to be subservient to white men and that Jews... (insert hackneyed hysterical delusional conspiracy theory here). There's only one problem: Nicholas doesn't *know* anything about the literary, visual arts, performing arts, musical, culinary, architectural, philosophical, theological, scientific and other cultural contributions of the groups he hates and seeks to oppress.

I guess this is how MAGA and right-of-MAGA bigotry works: It is predicated upon ignorance, upon a vacuum of information where knowledge and familiarity should be. Actually studying and getting to know a Monk or Ellington composition, a Cortazar or Toni Morrison novel, living with it, understanding and interpreting it could conceivably decay the bigotry. And so Nicholas remains loud, cocky, snarky, but most of all: IGNORANT.

Perhaps these ideas can be summed up in a story that Miles Davis recounts in his autobiography. From a 2011 Guardian article: "Davis was a man of few words. When he did speak, his words often had a similar effect to a hand grenade being lobbed into the room. In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he'd done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: 'Well, I've changed the course of music five or six times..."

(bebop, cool jazz, orchestral jazz, modal jazz, electric/fusion)?

pictured: Nicky the Fash next to his Berwyn home and studio