ROCKPILE on the road

3rd day in the Quality Inn in Bernalillo, NM. Today we lunched at Flying Star, a cafeteria style eatery serving thoughtful, healthy food — when possible, locally grown produce, meat & poultry — had a glass of organic Chardonnay, felt instantly immortal. Sooner or later in my blabbing blahg, I’ll tirade off into a critique of “green” vocabulary, but now want to try to figure out where we are, i.e., what the text of highway, strip malls, meta malls, uniformity & deformity reads like. Like all of us, alert to subtext. F’rinstance: a billboard looms above the Inn: “Dos Lunas Tequilla” on the top in white florid script on a black page. In more sedate type: “New Mexico . .” More signage along the way that puzzles me endlessly as to how to “read” it. Does Dos Lunas make you see double? As a geezer, I have dim kid memories of driving Route 66 to Los Angeles. I don’t recall the roadside plaques, stacked w/ corporate symbols, before any turn-off in any remote isolate spot along the highway. Everything the same which I suppose brings comfort. But to whom? Yeah, I know the story of the incorporation of USA & then the Globe starting in the 19th century. Yeah, I know about the constant standardization & rationalizing of so-called reality; its reconstruction into the familiar neutral spectacle. Yeah, I’ve read & re-read Debord’s dense masterpiece, “The Society of the Spectacle,” a trash-compacted encyclical in maybe 100 pages of numbered units of critique. Yet the impact of its totality on the American roadscape & TV & cyber inscape has, thanks to the Rockpile tour, become inescapable to me. Old news, yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less easy to succumb to, to surrender to. & I don’t & won’t. But I can read it resistantly, as a poet, digging deep into each word, icon, image, as well as trying to understand how folks read & internalize all of it in everyday life. I can also appreciate the remnants of poetry in ad copy & imagery.

Am listening to the local “classical music” radio station like its brother & sister stations throughout the States, it plays “lite”, a movement from a symphony or string quartet prefaced w/ peppy thumbnail sketches on, let’s say, Beethoven’s deafness or Mozart’s precociousness a la People. At the local Walgreen’s bought a copy People’s 35th birthday issue. Need to read it now to discover where US is & who its heroes, heroines are at this moment. More later, David Meltzer