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BLACK CLOCK no. 20 SPRING/SUMMER 2015 2 EDITOR Steve Erickson SENIOR EDITOR Bruce Bauman MANAGING EDITOR Orli Low ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Joe Milazzo PRODUCTION EDITOR Anne-Marie Kinney POETRY EDITOR Arielle Greenberg SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR Emma Kemp ASSOCIATE EDITORS Lauren Artiles • Anna Cruze • Regine Darius • Mychal Schillaci • T.M. Semrad EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Quinn Gancedo • Jonathan Goodnick • Lauren Schmidt Jasmine Stein • Daniel Warren • Jacqueline Young COMMUNICATIONS EDITOR Chrysanthe Tan SUBMISSIONS COORDINATOR Adriana Widdoes ROVING GENIUSES AND EDITORS-AT-LARGE Anthony Miller • Dwayne Moser • David L. Ulin ART DIRECTOR Ophelia Chong COVER PHOTO Tom Martinelli AD DIRECTOR Patrick Benjamin GUIDING LIGHT AND VISIONARY Gail Swanlund FOUNDING FATHER Jon Wagner Black Clock © 2015 California Institute of the Arts Black Clock: ISBN: 978-0-9836625-8-7 Black Clock is published semi-annually under cover of night by the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia CA 91355 THANK YOU TO THE ROSENTHAL FAMILY FOUNDATION FOR ITS GENEROUS SUPPORT Issues can be purchased at blackclock.org Editorial email: [email protected] Distributed through Ingram, Ingram International, Bertrams, Gardners and Trust Media. Printed by Lightning Source 3 Norman Dubie The Doorbell as Fiction Howard Hampton Field Trips to Mars (Psychedelic Flashbacks, With Scones and Jam) Jon Savage The Third Eye Jerry Burgan with Alan Rifkin Wounds to Bind Kyra Simone Photo Album Ann Powers The Sound of Free Love Claire Phillips The Lost Psychedelic Episode of Dragnet Becca Shaw Glaser Song for Dead Romance Steven Paul Lansky Jack Acid Arielle Greenberg Sally Simpson Packs a Bag & Goes on a Journey to the Edge of Night Matthew Specktor Bull of the Woods Brian Evenson The Moans David Rice Living Boy Henry Quintero Phone Call in Peyote Gardens #1 (for Nanebah) Shelley Jackson Monoceros Tom Carson Magic Carpet Ride Rob Roberge Summer ’88 Marisa Crawford You Can’t Ask Alice Anything Anymore Bruce Bauman, Steve Erickson, Lynell George, Grace Krilanovich, Jonathan Lethem, Greil Marcus, Devin McKinney, Anthony Miller, Rick Moody, Geoff Nicholson, Howard A. Rodman, Jon Savage, David L. Ulin 4 Norman Dubie The Doorbell as Fiction Howard Hampton Field Trips to Mars (Psychedelic Flashbacks, With Scones and Jam) Jon Savage The Third Eye Jerry Burgan with Alan Rifkin Wounds to Bind Kyra Simone Photo Album Ann Powers The Sound of Free Love Claire Phillips The Lost Psychedelic Episode of Dragnet Becca Shaw Glaser Song for Dead Romance Steven Paul Lansky Jack Acid Arielle Greenberg Sally Simpson Packs a Bag & Goes on a Journey to the Edge of Night Matthew Specktor Bull of the Woods Brian Evenson The Moans David Rice Living Boy Henry Quintero Phone Call in Peyote Gardens #1 (for Nanebah) Shelley Jackson Monoceros Tom Carson Magic Carpet Ride Rob Roberge Summer ’88 Marisa Crawford You Can’t Ask Alice Anything Anymore Bruce Bauman, Steve Erickson, Essential Psychedelia Lynell George, Grace Krilanovich, Jonathan Lethem, Greil Marcus, Devin McKinney, Anthony Miller, Rick Moody, Geoff Nicholson, Howard A. Rodman, Jon Savage, David L. Ulin 5 6 6 The night television, streaks of red moving through a celluloid dark, some thought of philip k’s moving through the rain like a box, or gloom— an unfurnished room with soiled bandages below the narrow windows—a large sow of photons and slop Norman Dubie of an uncertain night crossing: The Doorbell as Fiction It was a delivery from a pharmacy: he opened the heavy door and realized God stood there for the purposes of an interview. Even the French found him mad. LSD & conjugating verbs in Latin. He was just another superior being. Burning oil. The night’s seminarian. The rest of us, early twenty-first century barbarians. 7 7 Howard Hampton Field Trips to Mars (Psychedelic Flashbacks, With Scones and Jam) Ms. Sunshine delighted her pupils at the Helen Frankenthaler Elementary School with tales of her youthful enthusiasms. It was Music Appreciation Day and everyone was supposed to bring an album—“preferably vinyl, but a compact disc or digital download will suffice for those of you who do not have ready access to grandparents.” The teacher went through the recordings her charges brought in, singling out songs, then holding forth on the virtues and demerits of each successive piece she played. “Whole Lotta Love” off Led Zeppelin II, she indicated curtly, was so much “apoplectic wallpaper,” whatever that could be. “Yellow” from Coldplay’s Parachutes was “aptly named on account of its special egg-yolkiness, because infertile mums- in-waiting liked to listen to it while attempting to conceive, and obviously, in at least certain cases, it worked.” Everyone nodded contentedly, picturing breakfast. “Coyote,” on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, elicited a vermouth chuckle: “A zoo tune is always agreeable. Have you been? That’s where all the animals are behind department store windows and non-alcoholic bars. I should have brought in my copy of Pet Sounds, another demonstration of how deeply grown-ups love the domestication of wild things.” Ms. Sunshine then dropped the needle on a staticky “White Rabbit,” from the Great Society’s Conspicuous Only in Its Absence. Her ears perked up: “At last, children! A storybook episode, à la Harry Potter or Pasolini’s Winnie the Pooh!” The music meandered forward, “deliberate and woozy as a Spanish drunkard,” she marveled, whilst a saxophone imitated a harmonica or maybe it was the other way round. In any case, “a West-to-East Indian love call,” she dubbed it, as the spidery, chomping guitar simultaneously spun and undid its web. The solo “turned in tight spirals the way an anal-retentive cat toys with a ball of yarn,” as a hush descended on the record and in the classroom. A slightly fire-alarming voice came out of the left-hand speaker. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is Gracie Slick, once upon a time a very great and very wicked witch.” The children puzzled over how she could be both at once, but the stern, imploring voice on the record crying Feed your head did not seem to be either one thing or the 8 HOWARD HAMPTON other but both and neither. “You all remember Old McDonald, not to be confused with his awful scion Ronald. He had a neighbor called Lewis Carroll, who had a farm-with-a-Ph, what Little Gracie might have called a pharm-a-see—can you all say that, girls and boys? It is a kind of farm for your head. On this farm he and his Alice had rabbits and dormice and caterpillars of the community, as well as white knights and red queens with and without heads to be fed. He grew words like crops, and the crops resembled pills and tabs and bitter potions and powders you could take so you could see all the different animals and multi-color-coated people that were invisible to the naked eye but were everywhere once you broke through the barn doors of experience. Do you understand?” No, not really. It didn’t matter. Ms. Sunshine carried the class along with the tart-honeyed cadence of her voice and that of the good-bad witch. Perhaps they were sisters or belonged to the same sisterhood, in the way that she previously explained Mary Poppins, Doc McStuffins, Catwoman, Dora the Explorer, Buffy, Eloise and Dorothy were all part of the same unbreakable “chain of becoming.” “When I was scarcely more than your age, my dears, I used to hitchhike to the Matrix and the Fillmore to watch the psychedelic”—here smirking slightly at the passé ring of that term—“bands and their eye-boggling light shows. To be young was very heaven, indeed.” Tiny oohs and ahhs came from the intently listening and cheerfully mystified students. Ms. Sunshine spoke of the Great Society, before Gracie left it on the Jefferson Airplane, which the children gathered was like Air Force One painted funny colors and made out of the special plastic used only for credit cards and Star Wars costumes. This next part was confusing, but it appeared that the Grateful Dead were friends of Charlie Brown’s and that his friend Pigpen had run off to join them after carelessly “dropping some acid” when playing with his new chemistry set. The Grateful Dead came and tidied up his mess. Their shows were like those inflatable castles you went into at birthday parties, magically predictable in their choreographed spontaneity. “Those boys were nothing but hairy Mormons,” as Ms. Sunshine scrunched her face and shoulders in the manner of a toothless Muppet, and everyone laughed themselves to near-tears. “Soundtracks for trips were strictly for pussies anyway,” she declared. “Straight, no skip tracer, is the only way to get good and properly gone.” She believed that if the music were far out enough, it could surpass any chemical enhancement. Remembering an American bunch called Kaleidoscope, she beamed, “In ’68 at the Civic, they played ‘Egyptian Gardens’ for twenty solid 9 minutes, and by the time they switched over to ‘The Cuckoo’ I could have sworn the whole scene was being directed by Orson Welles from a perch atop a giant Ferris wheel, stage right. “If you listened avidly enough to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica while watching Captain Kangaroo’s show on a black-and-white Zenith, you could actually teleport yourself from Laurel Canyon to the Mojave Desert without leaving your bowl of Froot Loops.” Her favorites were Can and electrical Miles Davis, “Afro-Cubist Voodoo-wop-bam-boom.” She also had a weakness for Soft Machine’s Third and pre-1970 Jimi Hendrix, and staunchly believed Pink Floyd’s early children’s records were of pedagogic value, particularly their bracing safety lesson, “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” which she now played to conclude the school day.

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