Rich Baiocco

WORDS by JEFF MANGUM (yep, every single one of em. guy’s brilliant)

PHOTO SUBMITTED by E.B.H.

CUT-UP by Rich Baiocco

Follow me through, swallow all the halos. I swear I have nothing to prove!  The only girl I’ve ever loved was born with roses in her eyes, and all awaits, what a beautiful face I have found. On the lazy days Holy rattlesnakes and dogs dissolve. It goes.  And all awaits.  What a beautiful face, what a beautiful face!  Let me hold it close and keep it here with me. In the dark we will take off our clothes, lacing fingers through the notches in your spine.  Bend all your notes to me; I am listening to hear where you are, catching signals in the dark—your voice so smooth and sweet.  Silly music is meaningful, magical.  I’ll be laughing out loud.  I’ll be laughing with everyone I see. Love tongue in teeth in a struggle to find secret songs that you keep wrapped in boxes so tight, that secret place where no one dares to go. So foolish to believe to tear out your heart would send all your secrets to me.  Dare to try.  You dream of all the different ways to die.  You watched as your brains fell out through your teeth.  In a blink of an eye you be gone from me.  Only weeks before the guns all sang to say my dream has come, rolling and ringing through me,  soft and sweet.  How the notes all bend and reach above the trees? Oh please oh don’t go away!  I wanted to know you; I wanted to hold you as you made your escape.  But now.  Don’t hate her when she gets up to leave.  But now? But don’t hate her when she gets up to leave. You know this isn’t the first time.  In fact this is twice in a row!  To take on the world at all angles requires a strength I can’t use. I took a look outside and watched the fires that were reaching up to the sunday dream, a match that’s mean and some gasoline.  Pretty girls kissing a torn up picture of a dead and hanging man.  We feel no emotion as we spiral down roller coasters into the ocean, a nickel in a fountain.  And all the drugs I don’t have the guts to take to soothe my mind.  I’m always sober, always aching.  Save my soul from all the grittiness of life.  Occult figurines.  Occult figurines.  Occult figurines.  Oh please oh don’t go away!  Don’t hate her when she gets up to leave.  Love all you have left. I don’t wish to taste of your insides or to call out your name through my phone!

It gets hard to explain. I want to shoot all the super heroes from your skies.  Push all my fat fleshy fingers through your mouth, push the pieces in place, when we break we’ll wait for our miracle, but there is no use in waiting.  Offer up your steps so I can climb.  One billion lovers wave. One billion angels could come. She comes and goes, prettiness seeping through the dress. I will be with you when you lose your breath, chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left. Your teeth believe that teeth are for tearing.  C’mon, tear into me and the scent of you sweating smells good to me.  I’ll meet you up high in your anger.  All of your friends letting you blow, bristling and ugly.  There isn’t such one friend that you could find here standing next to me.  He’s only my enemy.  I’ll crush him with everything I own!  Don’t take those pills your boyfriend gave you.  You’re too wonderful to die!

Hearts hanging open all over the sheets, a force hard and beating till Wonderfully wet and there is no sorry to be sorry for.

Place your body here, my dear.  Move to feel, Slam into me, as we would lay and learn what each other’s bodies were for. All I could want is silver and spinning out from your arms and into the pretty pit of your heart. It reeks with the sweetest belief and is sacred when spoken.  Slam into me. Press yourself against whatever you find to be beautiful and trembling with life.  Now we are young.  Count every beautiful thing we can see…

What it comes down to with me is not that we like or dislike the same things, but rather I’ll trust that if you love and hate your things as deeply as I love and hate my things we’ll be alright.

Wise Blood  d. John Huston

This movie hit me in a way no other movie has. It unhooked my ribs from my spine and untied every grotesque knot in my soul, then dipped the rope in kerosene and lit it on fire.  I watched it on a sunday afternoon at the Whistlestop in southpark san diego after a week where I quit cigarettes, drinking, coffee, writing, art and sugar all at the same time.  In a way it led me back to the church in my hometown, but if there was even a path at all it was long and terrifying. Have a feeling I’ll never watch this movie again.

The Good The Bad and The Ugly  d. Sergio Leone

If you think the guys on Always Sunny in Philadelphia screw each other over for personal gain, check this out.  What I love so much about this movie is how each character is in it for himself, but knows he will need at least a partial bond with someone else to defeat the third guy.  Ever play Cut Throat at a bar?  Kind of intense, you need to scheme a little to survive. Top that with some of the best cinematography of the 20th century and this Ennio Morricone soundtrack and you are set.

SHADOWS  d. John Cassavetes

The movie posters for this were terrible. A close up of Leila sleeping, shadows in the background.  This image though, this one image sums up Shadows for me.  3 characters moving in 3 different directions but forced into one room—no not even one room, one bed!—and benny’s trumpet.  The first time I came into contact with a Cassavetes film was some rainy weekend at my grandmother’s house flipping through the stations on her lousy bunny-ear cable television.  I watched a scene at a dinner table where people were arguing—my grandmother and mother recognized the guy from Columbo.  I felt warm watching this dinner table scene, warm and flushed, like I’d been drinking red wine with them.  Moments later the credits came up and it was Husbands with Cassavetes, Ben Gazera and Columbo (peter falk).  I’ve never been able to find Husbands and watch it in full, but I lionized a lot of his other movies, Faces, A Woman Under The Influence and Death of a Chinese Bookie but  Shadows is still my favorite because it had a reverberation with my fiction in that I was able to see my own interest in the uniqueness of character being a violent and much more natural way to push forward a story than anything I’d read up to that point.  

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The Movie:

The Novel:

The Man With The Golden Arm  is probably one of the best Novel/Movie combos I’ve ever read/seen (the other is probably Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood). It’s Pulpy, and it’s druggy, has everything I aspire for as a writer concerning plot and the literary and cinematic world’s manage to stay out of each other’s way.  First off, the novel is written by Nelson Algren, one of Chicago’s best.  The movie stars Frank Sinatra.  Enough star power in each medium to push the interest of the piece beyond comparison.  

Regarding the plot, I won’t give away anything major, but what more can you ask for in a drug film: A heroin addict cleans up while in prison and gets released with a new lease on life.  Tries to get a job as a drummer—his true passion—but opportunities are slim and money’s tight.  His clingy wife is ‘mysteriously paralyzed’ and restricted to a wheelchair throughout the picture.  You learn early on that he got the two of them in a drunk driving accident and that’s why she’s in the wheelchair—he’s felt guilty about it ever since.  As soon as the main character, Frank Machine, hits the streets again his old heroin dealer starts showing up in his life and tempting him to get back on the fix, and his old boss who runs an illegal casino out of his apartment wants to hire him to deal cards, because dealing, although not a passion, was one of Frank’s true gifts in life, to his detriment.  Frank wants to stay clean so he’s wary of the illegal casino and the riffraff it sucks in even though he needs the money.    He gets a drumming audition with a big band and asks a con artist friend of his to get him a suit, but the friend shoplifts the suit and Frank is caught by the cops wearing the stolen merchandise and is subsequently thrown in the clink.

In a tough spot in prison, Frank is of course visited by his boss who offers to bail him out if he’ll come work for him.  With his back to the wall he agrees and you can probably guess the complications that arise from here on out.  Frank tries to stay clean and meets an old romantic interest named Molly who is also married, but believes in Frank and wants to keep him clean, but she is wary hustlers and addicts and con artists from a life of getting shit on.  This, THIS, is what really grabbed me.  

Now another stranger wants you to ignore his dreams

as though they were the burden of some other

Oh you’ve seen that man before

his golden arm dispatching cards

but now its rusted from the elbow to the finger

and he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter

—Leonard Cohen, The Stranger Song

I’ve always loved the Leonard Cohen ballad The Stranger Song and heard it had something to do with the Algren novel.  The song is more or less about a women who gives love and shelter to a gambler, and gambles herself on her own emotions trusting this untrustable man, trusting that she could know him, and God forbid save him. She can’t.   I’ve been in that position from two angles.  I’ve been that reckless uncaring person who’s taken advantage of every bit of generosity for my personal greedy hotstreak, and I’ve also been that battered woman who has hoped against hope I could save someone else from their demons with my love.  The only thing both have in common is Restlessness with a capital R and the unbearable despair that always looms around the corner, after the casino scoops up your last dollar or when the other person doesn’t come home at night, doesn’t even call.

Cohen is fantastic on this duality, but Algren is able to write the character into his drama.  Molly represents all that Frank can be proud of in his life if he could just stay clean and absolve himself from the guilt of his wife’s car accident and paralysis.  At one point when he finally gets his Musicians Union Member Card he’s walking with Molly down the street and she says how do you feel?  and he says I feel like if you don’t hold my hand I might float up to the sky like a balloon.  In the movie it’s a clever ploy for Sinatra to get the beautiful Kim Novak on his arm, but it’s also a great line to show that hyper-elated feeling newly sober people get when they feel like they’ve won.  It’s so hard to hold onto it when your demons are hunting so close and Algren doesn’t skirt the tough stuff with addiction.  But he doesn’t make an anti-drug commercial either. 

That is the beauty of The Man With The Golden Arm:  It’s not Requiem for a Dream—a shocking warning. It’s not Less Than Zero or Rush or something cold and unsympathetic, and it’s definitely not Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or something that brings you the drug experience.  It brings you the addict experience.  And it brings you so much more.  Read the novel and watch the movie.  Let me know what you think.

I’ll burn my religion if you’ll throw yours to the fire;

2 million turns of evolution

          was enough time

          to memorize the best lines.

Can we climb down from these righteous Idealogical pedestals

and confess to face in the riots of our prejudice

the new human myths?

I’ve moved around a lot between California and New York in the last 5 years (7 times) mostly sublets or couches/floors or other cheap transitory shelters.  Back in April I signed a year lease on my own place in NYC and I’m excited to grow a small library for the first time since San Diego.  

Due to too few funds or failure to find I can’t get my hands on the following books.  If you could help me out I’d be willing to trade just about anything from my collection (listed after the break), or work out some other sort of barter.  My email is in the Bio section.

much appreciated,

~rjb

*ps—if there’s something of mine you’re interested in reading, get in touch and we’ll work something out. These books took me a long way for a long time and I’m happy to share.

Good Morning, Moonlight  Jean Rhys

Altmann’s Tongue  Brian Evenson

Collected Stories of Breece D’J Pancake  Breece D’J Pancake

Collected Stories of JG Ballard  JG Ballard (The thick one that came out in 2009)

Under The Volcano Malcolm Lowry

Under Milk Wood  Dylan Thomas

Notes on the Cinematographer  Robert Bresson

The Subject Steve  Sam Lipsyte

Rape Children  Kendra Grant Malone

My books to trade are after the break.  Asterisked are like reference books, you can come read them at my place, but can’t sign them out. Either they are not mine, or I’m still precious about certain things I guess.

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