“Carnival Life (with Tommy Treacle)”

Host: Great Exudations has the supreme pleasure to welcome back Tommy Treacle, our timeless troubadour, with his tales from the backroads of America and thoughts on the present state of our culture. Tommy, how have you been since — was it Christmas?

TT: It was the Yuletide! Well, I’m mostly on the diagonal of late. Not on my back but not quite upright. Yet ever hopeful.

Host: As I always like to ask at the beginning of these sessions: what are you reading these days?

TT: I just finished a wonderful short story by Ambrose Bierce called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. He was a Civil War veteran on the Union side, and it’s about the hanging of a Confederate sympathizer in Alabama. This one packs a real punch.

Host: He’s that famed author who went missing in Mexico during their revolution in the early 1900’s?

TT: Yes. He was apparently the tenth of thirteen children whose names all began with the letter A. Wrote war stories, ghost stories, and a running newspaper column for the Hearst papers. A sharp and acerbic wit, indeed. The H. L. Menken of his day — until he left “for an unknown destination” in December 1913 and was never seen again. Spooky. Like one of his own stories.

Host: Incredible. I’ll check it out.

TT: Oh, and it turns out we share a birthday, June 24.

Host: Well then, Happy Birthday, old friend! And what are you listening to out on the road?

TT: Plenty of Miles Davis — “Bitches Brew” is my new “Prufrock” — at once both familiar and yet inscrutable. In the best art, there’s always something new to be discovered. Also Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — I love his newsletter Red Hand Files, which has both wit and wisdom in heavy doses. When I drive, I like to sing along to Patsy Cline. So classic. And recently, I’ve been revisiting Sufjan Stevens’ older stuff, which is so great. But right now I’m trying to unlock the vast musical secrets of JJ Cale. He was such a fantastic songwriter, one of the best. For me, he’s the Harry Dean Stanton of country-rock music. I just can’t get enough.

Host: Old HDS played a little music himself, you know.

TT: I did not know. Add that to the list!… both of things I didn’t know and things to do.

Host: Have you been watching any shows while out on the road?

TT: Oh, yeah. I absolutely love “Hacks” and am quite sad to see it end. Bittersweet, in fact, since you also don’t want them to overstay. I’m really digging the horror-comedy mash-up of “Widow’s Bay” with Matthew Rhys and Stephen Root. It’s hard to get either genre right and they kill, literally, in both! “Rooster” is excellent but, then, how could it not be? And “The Bear” is coming back this week!

Host: Any films?

TT: Not so much these days. I really didn’t care for “Marty Supreme”, although Tim Chalamet was terrific in “A Complete Unknown”. The Netflix adaptation of “Lord of the Flies” sucked all the life from the book. Some fine performances but the pacing was all wrong. My recent favorites were a few of the Live-Action Oscar Short Films, particularly “The Singers”, “A Friend of Dorothy” and “Jane Austen’s Period Drama”. All brilliant.

Host: Any comment about our politics these days?

TT: Don’t get me started. A bunch of malignant idiots run amok. It’s the Dunning-Kruger administration. Franz Kafka meets Terry Gilliam. Or else we’re living the interminable winter of a 19th century Russian novel. Take your pick. The man can’t be gone soon enough for my tastes. I look forward to our wiping his grubby fingerprints from our body politic, which feels as if it’s been violently raped (spits). I’m TEAM ALGAE all the way!

Host: Enough said. But maybe that’s an opportune segue for introducing your new song, which is called “Carnival”. It paints a few characters that would fit in quite well with the Trump administration.

TT: Ha! Yes. This song has a colorful genealogy. One night, a few years back, I was staying with an old friend in the DC area. Let’s call him Joe since his name actually is Joe. Well, he served me what we called back in the day some “dry cocktails”… what they now call “edibles”. It had been a while for me and I overshot a bit, but it did lead us to a funny moment by the fire pit. Somehow the topic of carnivals arose, as it does, and Joe posited the fully reasonable question of how one ends up working at such a venue. I imagined an answer and we shared a laugh about it. The moment might have died there, but I quickly decided to record it for posterity. I was in that mode of taking pictures and capturing sounds with my iPhone, so it wasn’t so unusual for me. A few years later, I added some carny sounds as part of a little creative experiment I was working on. Then a year or so after that, it gave birth to this song. The whole process speaks to the notion of captured spontaneity. I had been lamenting the inevitable disappearance of all the wonderful small moments in our lives — the jokes, the insights, the silly texts, the delightful off-handed comments, etc. Where do they all go in this vast universe? I don’t like the fact that we can’t preserve them, or at least some of them. Collect our moments, to be revisited and shared later on. These devices are intrusive and, in many ways, separate us from one another. However, if used wisely they can become living archives that strengthen our interconnections. And this song serves, for me, as an example of the snow-ball effect that small moments of creative inspiration can produce. It’s a fond memory that is now fully etched, not lost. The next step is to use A.I. to make a cartoon video from the song. And why wouldn’t you??

Host: I agree whole-heartedly. And there is something so provocative about a carnival.

TT: Definitely. They combine all the bright enthusiasms of youth with the dark underbelly that inevitably creeps into more adult affairs. Cotton candy, acrobats and Ferris-wheels give way to graft, violent drunks, and mistreated animals. You run the whole gamut of human experience in one traveling road show. They are a microcosm… containing multitudes.

Host: Yes. So true, Tommy. Thank you for that perspective. And with that, here is the end-product of the dry-cocktail hour that will, hopefully, live in infamy — “Carnival”: