A good friend lost his brother this week. They grew up in P.A. If only they could still go local together and hear Kurt Vile’s latest. While the video may be too twee even if my buddy wasn’t grieving hard right now, I’m hoping he might find some peace in Vile’s piece someday (soonish)…
Underneath my own pleasure as I listen to Kurt, I hear Douglas Cushman’s stony poem about the Sixties.
St Marks Place
Here and there men in line
for the church basement
talked to themselves, still on trips.
We bought sodas and walked around.
The old bookstore was there.
I was glad it still sold rough young poems.
There were vendors hawking psychedelic posters,
a pottery shop, places selling incense and acid tapes.
Nothing much came of it, I said,
though a few kept the city
they’d begun to see.
My son already knew.
xxx
I’m glad, though, Kurt Vile never learned. He may be the last true heir of the counter-culture’s days of gold.