Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

Monday, September 20, 2010

Sam Munson's Hieroglyphs

The first noteworthy element to strike me in Sam Munson's first novel, November Criminals, was not any similarity between the narrator and Holden Caulfield.


Now, I have reviewed economics books for pay for a magazine that is well known to its devotees — but never novels. Writers, actual novelists in fact, who are presumably begged to review new books by august editors at even more august publications such as The New York Times, took a gander at Sam's novel and they all had to make the obligatory Caulfield reference, as if to say, "See, I spent whole summers in Iowa literary seminars discussing things like this."

Not me. I was struck by what I thought was an unusual code to identify the pages. Instead of the usual numbers I saw, at the bottom of each page, not in the center as is traditional, but somewhat edging toward the outer edge of the paper, three discrete black hieroglyphs that looked more or less like the ones I have reproduced below. They looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but they were not numbers.

The one on the left, for example, seemed to me an F with a fat middle stroke. The middle one was more classical a jigsaw piece ... but what was that semicircle doing? The left one looked like a missshapen B and I.


I turned the page. More of them! Different shapes. It was almost like going back to the 1980s, when I didn't have a television, to see the all-lowercase thirtysomething across the screen, so cool, so typographically hip. I knew about it because production people were always telling me we should do this in my very serious, dull as wheat toast, economic weekly.

I figured this had to be some creative stroke of Sam's. Young people these days! [intone as an emphatic, cranky sigh]

I was still left with the problem of how to remember where I was in case the bookmark fell out. Until ... eureka! I suddenly looked at page 19 again and saw:


It wasn't three hieroglyphs! It was color-reversed white numbers on a black background. Kids!

I am not the only one to have experienced this problem. In an informal poll of about two or three people my age and socioeconomic status, the numbering was a puzzle at first.

Let this be a lesson to Sam Munson, who has written a fine novel, superbly sharp at dissecting the white middle class hypocrisies of parents and teachers (I found myself nodding and thinking, "At last someone has said this in print!") in the neighborhood where I watched him — and his friends — grow up.

Ah, yes, the lesson: don't listen to geezers like me.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Writer's Blog

Rummaging through drawers I never go into, I found a couple of short stories I wrote in the 1980s that -- if I say so my fictionally unpublished self -- aren't bad. Why could I never convince a fiction editor to publish anything I wrote? I've had "faction" published in major newspapers all over the world -- well, in a few countries.

Recently I submitted a short story I had posted here. Had to take it down for that reason. Nothing. Maybe I misclassified it as a short, rather than a short story. Maybe I didn't sleep with the right people. Maybe it was lousy.

At one point long ago, when my writing was still unforgivably juvenile, I did send out a whole rafter of stories out. I had a file full of rejection letters, which I think I've since thrown out. I even composed a "form" rejection reply: "I regret that I am not able to reply to your rejection letter personally, but given the volume I receive, it is impractical. Thanks anyway for the opportunity to review yours."

By that time, I had given up submitting stories and thrown away two "novels," an act that probably did the most that was ever done in the 20th century to rescue western civilization -- which, as Gandhi noted, would have been a genial idea.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Borges' Book Life

Struck by a reference by the prodigious Maud Newton to a scholarly study attempting to work out (of all things!) the literary math of the late Jorge Luis Borges, I wondered whether there wasn't a simpler explanation for his 1944 short story The Library of Babel (La biblioteca de Babel).

Like much of Borges' surreal writing, the story occurs in a "universal library" representing iterations of every possible idea ever written, a variation that one William Goldbloom Bloch, a math professor at Wheaton College estimates to yield 1033,013,740, an "unimaginably large" number. To certain mathematically masturbatory intellects reflections such as these is what Borges was all about.

In fact, however, to anyone who knows about Borges' physical relationship with books, from his early librarian assistant's job in the 1930s to his post as director of the National Library in Buenos Aires where Borges worked in the 1950s and 1960s, the point of the story is not mathematical at all.

Borges spent his life physically surrounded, and involved in the sisyphean task of overcoming the endless output of the publishing industry. In 1936, Borges' colleagues forbade him to catalogue books, as he could sort 100 per hour, making everybody else look bad. Wander through the claustrophobic aisles of the National Library and the short story that has fascinated many intellectually acquires a visceral reality.

Borges lived awash in books, a writer who went blind, lived much of his life with his mother and, despite two relatively utilitarian marriages, maintained distance from people. This story, as so many others, is a mental flight of fancy entirely devoid of emotions -- except his own.

One can see the librarian at work in this story, the man of paper and carton and wood shelves, used to a dry, somewhat stale environment and endless quietude.

Yes, there is math and brilliance and he was aware of such things. Yet the person, the experience at the bottom is the sense of living a universe made almost entirely of books. There is, perhaps, just a little claustrophobia in the aisles of his mind.

Monday, October 27, 2008

But, What is Art?

The cliché in the title most often refers to the ultra-precious art critic who superciliously hides behind posturing to avoid the risk of a definitive stance. It is also a phrase that evokes effete wine and cheese gallery show openings, with competing artists' and patrons' bitchy gossip about each other. All of these have recoiled in horror whenever I have made the philistine suggestion that the art of our time is commercial.

Think of it for a moment.

Recall three or four posters on buses or billboards, selling whatever it was. Couldn't you connect immediately with what the images were about, with the thousand subtle messages in every detail? Couldn't you do that without Sister Wendy explaining what each item meant?

That was how the contemporaries of Leonardo or Giotto reacted to the paintings that today are in museums. The contextual message was obvious.

In the Italian Renaissance, the established (though weakening) worldview was European medieval Christianity, a world of Christs and Madonnas and of ferocious biblical events. That view was propagated in a largely illiterate society through artifacts sponsored (as in paid for, just like modern commercial sponsorships) by the Church.

The maecena, or patron of the arts, shared this worldview. The world had been created by God, who had called certain patriarchs and prophets until Jesus Christ, who had then called upon certain saints to give witness to the truth. All art illustrated the commonly held narrative.

But that's not all.

Renaissance art rarely attempted to be historically realistic. People from antiquity are dressed as Florentines or Parisians dressed in the 1300s, 1400s and 1500s. There's some interpretation, often veiled for fear of the Holy Office of the Inquisition: Michelangelo painted on Hell's denizens the faces of some cardinals he found obnoxious.

What's the difference? Our narrative is about our god, money, and the power, pleasure and freedom it promises to give us all. Every commercial poster, every TV commercial is really selling the uniquely American mythology that everyone can be and have all they want.

Get X (a BMW, a certain deodorant, a certain credit card) and you will be a beautiful woman or be surrounded by them, on a beach near crystalline waters and be envied and admired by all. Note that I used "BMW." Does any reader not know what a BMW is?

And the technique!

The modern, sophisticated television commercial conveys a whole contextual storyline in seconds: we know immediately she's his wife or he's her father. There are emotions: women fall in love with their cellular telephones, or think that their "chocolate" color is appetizing.

Andy Warhol, perhaps one of the first people to recognize commercial art, where he started, as art, and put the message in the following way:
What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
That is why you can go to some foresaken village in the Peruvian Andes of the mountains of Afghanistan and find, somewhere in or outside the general store that red circle with 1890s lettering that reminds everyone in whatever language that the product offered is "the pause that refreshes."

Sure, in our current economic crisis, those who did not realize that mythologies are, well, myths, are suddenly discovering that, just as God and theist religions have their shibboleths, inadequacies and downright fantasies, Mammon will not, in reality, solve all your problems, or even be there when you're in trouble -- any more than God will.

My point is not about money or religion, but about art. When archeologists of the future come upon your skull or mine and mutter, "ah, primitive man!" they will find ubiquitous among our artifacts a circular red metal emblem.They will thereafter write endless papers on the meaning of the words "Coca Cola" in the art of the ancient past.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Cantautori

Genevieve's post about the cheery subject of her death put me in mind of so many songs by French (and other European) singer-songwriters of note (cantautore, the Italians call this kind of artist), to me more valuable than a mere vocalists. The European version seems timeless.

Leo Ferré, for example, the perennially balding singer and songwriter whose work went back to the 1930s and whose whose favorite of mine was inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Les Anarchistes (The Anarchists)
Y'en a pas un sur cent et pourtant ils existent
La plupart Espagnols allez savoir pourquoi
Faut croire qu'en Espagne on ne les comprend pas
Les anarchistes

...

Qu'y'en a pas un sur cent et qu' pourtant ils existent

Et qu'ils se tiennent bien bras dessus bras dessous
Joyeux et c'est pour ça qu'ils sont toujours debout
Les anarchistes

(Barely one in a hundred, yet they exist.
Most Spaniards well know why
they must believe that in Spain they're not understood ...
the Anarchists.

They are barely one in one hundred, yet they exist.
They stand arm in arm
joyfully they are always standing for their views.
The Anarchists.)
Think of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia -- in my opinion the 20th-century's best nonfiction work in the English language -- and the song will immediately make sense.

Or then there's Maxime LeForestier, more of a Boomer contemporary, with a folk sound. I fittingly came across his recollection of childhood called Marie, Pierre et Charlemagne, playing in a music store the day I heard my paternal grandfather, a beloved companion in my early childhood, had died.

My favorite of his is La Rouille (Rust)

L'habitude nous joue des tours :
Nous qui pensions que notre amour
Avait une santé de fer.
Dès que séchera la rosée,
Regarde la rouille posée
Sur la médaille et son revers.

...

Moi, je la vois comme une déchirure,
Une blessure qui ne guérira pas.
Notre histoire va s'arrêter là.
Ce fut une belle aventure.

(Our habits turn us around:
We who'd thought our love
had the strength of steel.
As soon as the dew dries,
see how rust is posed
on the medal and its reverse.

Me, I see it as a tear,
A wound that will not cure.
Our history will stop there.
It was a beautiful adventure.)
You have to pronounce "adventure" the French way, always stressing the last syllable, adventure, to make the rhyme work.

Then there's my favorite Italian cantautore, Ivano Fossati, who sings about boats and the sea and not feeling like going to war and, sometimes, just about a night in Italy. I discovered him in my grandmother's birth place in Northern Italy, when I went there with my then 11-year-old son. Then one night in Rome I went for a walk and I felt the song resonate
È una notte in Italia che vedi
questo taglio di luna
freddo come una lama qualunque
e grande come la nostra fortuna
la fortuna di vivere adesso
questo tempo sbandato
questa notte che corre
e il futuro che arriva
chissà se ha fiato.

(It's a night in Italy when you see
a slice of moon
cold as a blade
and as large as our good fortune
the chance of living now
in this time that skids
this night that runs
and the future that arrives
goodness knows breathlessly.)
The list would not be complete without Juan Manuel Serrat, the Catalonian cantautor, who sings of everything, of Spain and Moors, of wheat fields and of love. He became famous during the 1960s, daring to push the envelope under the Franco regime.
Uno de mi calle me ha dicho
que tiene un amigo que dice
conocer un tipo
que un día fue feliz.

Y me han dicho que dicen,
que dijo que se tropezó en la calle
con un sueño y se entretuvo,
y desde entonces no estuvo
para nada
ni para nadie.


(Some guy in my street has said
he has a friend who told him
he knew a man
who was one day happy.

And I've been told that they say
that he said he stumbled in the street
with a dream and he reveled in it
and from then on he wasn't in
for anything
or anyone.)
What's really most enthralling about all these musicians is the timelessness of their music and their words. Some use touches of rock, like Serrat, but most do not; Ivano Fossati's music is jazzy, then not.

Many have songs that start out sounding as if they were classical instrumental pieces, then burst into words. Occasionally they've put famous poets into song, notably as Ferré did with Paul Verlaine and Serrat with Antonio Machado.

The only North American near-equivalent is Joni Mitchell, who has played with music as well as lyrics and transcended genre.

They are all modern troubadors, some (like Serrat) under censorship or (like Ferré) against the current, singing of their times, their loves, their people ...

Monday, July 09, 2007

Falling Slowly

This is a media experiment, on the theme of the last post.




A special live performance by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova of "Falling Slowly" at the LA press day for the film Once.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Once is not enough

The weekend so far has been spent in a sleepwalking reverie of singing in the streets of Dublin, inspired by the independent film Once.

A few tidbits that won't give it away for those of you who haven't and absolutely must see it include
  • The ever-pleasant, unplastic beauty of European film faces.
  • The wonder of Dublin's bay.
  • The ever-present bleakness of Ireland and the British Isles.
You have to like music -- and you will if you didn't -- to appreciate this mildly autobiographical short story put on film about a singular musical affinity between a man and a woman.

The trailer and publicity attempts to cast the movie as a romantic story, a chick-flick (a genre I happen to like), with the slug "How often do you find the right person?" The film's title is supposed to be the answer.

In my opinion, it isn't -- you'll have to see it to test my view against yours.

What I got was the intrinsic value of having something deeply in common with someone else, feeling attraction, enjoying certain things together, all without dwelling on matters such as making hot monkey love -- or the consequences thereof. I was reminded of intense friendships I have had with women whom I never even kissed.

Some were very lost souls. I tend to collect them.

I remember a weekend in Montreal with a fellow student who was temporarily homeless -- actually locked out. We went everywhere together until her housemates got back. I didn't have a girlfriend at the moment -- I was new in Montreal -- and there might have been an attraction but neither of us made that necessary move. We ran into each other in hallways and on the streets after that, but never reconnected.

Also in Montreal were the months I spent going to the movies and ice cream shops with a young woman who was very pregnant and staying in a home for unmarried mothers-to-be. I knew her brother incidentally but we clicked and went everywhere together with nothing more affectionate than a hug. Then she delivered, her boyfriend reappeared from AWOL and she went off with him into what I surmised would be an unhappy sunset.

Susan remains to me a blonde, very pregnant young woman with the sweetest of smiles on a face that stretched too-long and yet was too unfurrowed for her manifold problems.

It's the sort of thing that happens when you travel. On a ship, you dance with someone, even the slow dances, and back home she runs to her boyfriend. On a plane, your father has died and you hold hands for half the trip home with a total stranger you will never see again.

It happens when you're young and you go to coffeehouses where poetry is read. It happens when you try out a new religious movement. It happens when you visit family friends in London and the oldest daughter seems perfectly in synch with you for one great day that you remember for years, with even a song for it.

That's the other thing: get the music after you see the film. Listen to the lyrics and they will all ring true.

So, I confess, I couldn't stay away. I went to see the film Friday and went again Saturday. Because once is not enough.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

An Unbounced Echo

What a pleasure when one rescues meaning from melancholy prompted by a serendipitous and joyful confluence of experiences! Allow me to explain.

Tangential brushes with history or literary fame, which are endemic to my work and background, often cast me in the role of the proverbial fly on the wall. I am privileged to observe and record the momentous. Yet I remain unseen and hidden safely behind what a friend of mine jokes is the "cover" I rarely break.

This means, positively, that the news of which I often speak comes first hand. Of course, it also means a lifetime of missed connections with people with whom I sense intuitively a common ground and of encounters with people with whom I have little in common at all.

The surprise is the flood of insights that began with a rare escape into literary conversation. On Sunday I spent two delightful hours in a Spanish book club discussing a Peruvian novel about an imagined Trotskyist insurrection in the 1950s. It was the sort of thing I did in university, when I went to poetry readings and dreamed of writing publishable literary works.

In the reading group we shared our questions, our impressions of the background, our various puzzles until we came to the literary puzzle of a peculiar ending. Then, bits from one, bits from another, we hit upon the possibility that the final chapter, written like the rest of the novel in the voice of an explicitly self-conscious author/narrator, is about the protagonist developing independence from his creator, refusing to act in character.

(If anyone is interested, the book is "Historia de Mayta" by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated as "The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.")

Until Sunday, except for the literary update my older son and me give one another when he comes to town, the literary stirrings of yesteryear have been limited to a dim reflection, the author readings at a bookstore half a block away from my home. I posted, for example, the visit of Richard Dawkins.

Most recently, I missed the appearance of Michael Ondaatje, whom I would have seen in what for me would have been a significant second time.

Coming across the Sunday New York Times book review of the latest novel by Michael Ondaatje (you may recall his work The English Patient, made into a film), I found myself staring into his now grizzled face, perhaps a more hirsute version of my own, having one of the now ever more common fly in the wall flashbacks.

I had imagined going to his reading as a kind of reunion. Back when I was a student, Ondaatje, then a relatively obscure Canadian writer, came to my university for a poetry reading. He had recently published The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a poetic visit to the bandit's life, which I had read listening to Aaron Copland's work, the symphonic suite Billy the Kid.

I wrote him a letter with a poem I composed about the reading, having to do with the feedback of a microphone.
Poem for a Poetry Reading

Sound-sound
of sound-sound
reverberates
just as Kennedy's oath
rang across from the Capitol
just as that voice,
sound-sound,
reverberates again
as Michael mentions a dog and America
and Ellen glances at me
and john echoes that glance
pointing their eyes at me
the American.

Sound-sound
again-again
Ondaatje's microphone
like the a's in his name
repeats his words
and the walls repeat them again.

And just once
a girl in the audience said
the echo was good.

Montreal, November 1972
Yes, I was influenced by Brautigan at the time, and aren't you glad that neither my poetry nor fiction have ever been published? Ondaatje wrote back a polite short note, saying that the particular reading I had attended had meant much to him and that someday "magically" we would meet again.

I showed the letter to my son a few years ago, when he came home from seeing the The English Patient movie and decided to get the book. My literary memento from a now-famous author.

Then I saw that Ondaatje was coming to read at the bookstore near home and I weighed going there. But what would I do, read my poem to him? Would he even remember? Wouldn't it be embarrassing for two grown men to recall the boyish fascination of one for another?

Besides, my social and work lives are pretty busy. It was on a Tuesday night. I was tired of work spent, precisely, writing and editing.

Sunday I came across the book review by Erica Wagner, which begins:
“I come from Divisadero Street,” Anna tells us in Michael Ondaatje’s fifth novel. “Divisadero, from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’ ”
It's the second. The meaning, I mean. I'm impressed that Ondaatje, a Dutch-surnamed native Sri Lankan and adoptive Canadian, would get the Spanish right. Then again, why wouldn't he?

That's another thing that's uncanny about Michael Ondaatje and me. We're both part of a much studied cultural subgroup known as Third Culture Kids or Global Nomads, defined as "someone who [as a child] has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture."

So it's not really that I'm a lonely fly in the wall, but it is true that I rarely break cover. That's because I am a bit of an alien everywhere and belong only among those who, like Ondaatje and myself, can enjoy a good multilingual, cross-cultural joke -- and a good multi-directional insight.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Blue for Elizabeth Hartman

Few pieces of music have expressed my own recurrent melancholy over the years as well as the Jerry Goldsmith score for the 1965 black-and-white film A Patch of Blue. Few actresses enfleshed the feeling of sometimes being "like a motherless child," as the spiritual has it, better than Elizabeth Hartman, who played the young and blind Selina D'Arcy.

Music, directing and acting meshed particularly well in A Patch of Blue.

The score is dominated by a soft, soft piano used in the impressionistic manner of Erik Satie and a wistful harmonica, at the time a Goldsmith score trademark, which distinctively Americanizes the sound. As Aaron Copland once remarked of his own Appalachian Spring suite while in rehearsal, Goldsmith achieved a sound that is "Amerikanisch ... the sentiment's not expressed on the face."

The director specifically chose black and white, when color was readily available. It made a point crystal clear against the backdrop of the then-growing civil rights movement.

The fresh-faced, freckled and pale Hartman was aptly chosen over Patty Duke and Hayley Mills to play a blind urban Southern adolescent girl who lives in her drunken grandfather's grimy tenement apartment with her tawdry mother (Shelley Winters). She plays her handicaps the way the music plays its sentiment, in a restrained, accepting way that is all the more touching, without ever crossing over to the cloying.

Taken to the park one day by the kindly employer for whom she strings cheap necklaces, she chances to befriend an educated professional man whom she does not realize is black (Sidney Poitier).

I won't spoil the film any further, but perhaps the premise hints at the poignancy that was brought to mind a few days ago, when I brought out the film score vintage record (yes, vinyl LP) sitting in my collection.

Then I realized that I had never again seen Hartman on the silver screen.

Hartman was nominated for the Oscar in 1966 as best actress for the performance. However, it was headliner Winters, then a veteran, who was given the film's only Oscar (the score, cinematography and setting were also nominated). Hartman's work on the film did, however, win her a Golden Globe for most promising female newcomer.

What was Hartman, who turned 22 on the year of the film, up to now?

A little bit of googling gave me a quick answer: she died on June 10, 1987, in a fall from her fifth-floor apartment in Pittsburgh, in a suspected suicide while undergoing psychiatric treatment for depression.

She had told an interviewer in 1969 that Patch had the ironic effect of beating her down, as she never met similar success ever again, despite a number of roles opposite famous actors for roughly 20 years after that film. Hers was an understandable feeling in the cutthroat world of acting; perhaps it was made worse by the collapse of her marriage several years before her death.

So few people, however, have the chance to make a similar impact on such important topics at such a key historical moment. In the minds of all who watched her for just that one film, I would venture, she remains a success whose demise turns a little patch of our hearts blue.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Light on the Other Side

What if there really is a light on the other side of the river ... ? That's the thought that lingers after sharing what Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler confessed was his first night in Washington, D.C., on March 10.

The question comes from Drexler's hit song “Al Otro Lado del Rio” (On the Other Side of the River) from the film The Motorcycle Diaries, which in 2005 became the first Spanish language song ever to win an Oscar.

You may also recall the pitiful way the Academy Award event's television producers shot themselves in the foot by refusing Drexler the chance to perform the song, opting instead for a substandard performance by bigger names Carlos Santana and – hold on to your hat, Zorro! – Antonio Banderas.

The visiting Latin American artist combines pre-Columbian beats and computer generated sound with the strumming of his guitar. In his performance at the Lisner Auditorium I even saw him at one point flip his guitar and sing into the box.

For this particular song, however, he chose only traditional syncopation, his guitar and his balladeer's voice, a tenor just slightly reminiscent of Paul Simon as a young singer yet imbued with a beguiling intimacy: he is sighing his words only for you.

Certainly, “Al Otro Lado” was a perfect coda to the film's retelling of the young Ernesto “Che” Guevara's motorcycle hegira with lifelong friend Alberto Granado from Argentina to Peru, some time before their respective appointments with history.

In the film, the song is a fade on a fade on a fade, the sort of thing that abounds in Drexler's music.

What in 1952 was the prosaic takeoff of a lumbering cargo DC-3 from a distant airfield in a South American jungle gets telescoped to the North American present of 2000-and-something with a voiceover reminiscence performed by the actor who plays Granado, the Argentine Rodrigo de la Serna, actually related to Che in real life.

Then comes the fade-in of the wrinkled face of the real Granado.

Finally you hear Drexler: Clavo mi remo en el agua / llevo tu remo en el mio (I nail my oar in the water / carrying your oar in mine). Creo que he visto una luz / al otro lado del rio. (I think I've seen a light / on the other side of the river.)

For me, it was the recap of a lifetime: I was alive, just barely, the actual day depicted in the film; but in my own early years I did travel the first segment of Che and Granado's route, from Buenos Aires to the Andean village of Bariloche. Two-and-a-half days by train, I took it in both directions several times.

The first two hours you were in the suburbs and exurbs of the big city. Then the open country started; now its starts a couple of hours later, encroached upon by the metropolitan octopus that is home to a third of Argentina's population.

It was also the land in which I often went camping. A flat, verdant and endless land, the so-called "humid" pampa. Back then it still had a few rivers one had to ford on foot, or in a boat, or in a raft -- as in the movie.

At night the pampa I remember was a countryside lit only by the constellation of the Southern Cross. A light at ground level was a miracle -- or a mirage. Creo que he visto una luz ...

Yet I'd guess Drexler thought up this line looking out on the Rio de la Plata, an estuary that at its widest puts 138 miles of sweet, potable water between its Uruguayan and Argentine shores. From Buenos Aires, built near the river delta from which the waterway opens, it would take a very clear winter night when ships were at harbor to see a little twinkling miles away: Colonia, Uruguay.

Drexler's hometown perch in Montevideo is almost at the teeth of the river's mouth, where the river meets the Atlantic. If he thought he saw a light, at nearly 140 miles' distance, I'd say he imagined it.

Yet seen as a commentary on the decades of Che's historical life and the firestorm he set off, in what Washington strategists today call an “asymmetric conflict,” with thousands tortured, made to disappear and die, the song feels iconic.

Like Che, I was once shocked by Latin American scenes similar to those in the film. I just didn't think violence would change anything.

Let's not kid ourselves. The song is a Hollywood artifact. Drexler has even gone the extra mile of inserting the Christ-figure allusion, often made by some of Che, in the notion of not merely dipping one's oar in pursuit of a light, but nailing it.

So which is it, mirage or miracle? Is it possible any more that there is a light out there far on the other side? Hasn't it been doused out of sight with new cities, lively commerce, cleverly developed new injustices?

All this confronted me as I stepped out of the concert and back into the modern, globalized world.

How do I sum up the reason my eyes well up on the verge of tears? Drexler provides a soothing, hope-filled answer to explain the crossing of the river:

Sobre todo – he sings -- creo que no todo esta perdido. (Above all, I think, not all is lost.)

Sunday, August 20, 2006

What Would It Have Looked Like Now?

Few aftershocks from what is now yesteryear, to my great surprise, equal my discovery yesterday that Mimi Fariña died five years ago this summer. You have to be a bit of a folk music aficionado to even remember Mimi and it helps to have lived through the 1960s.

Mimi, nee Margarita Mimi Baez, was the sister of superstar folksinger Joan Baez, but she was best known as the feminine half of Richard and Mimi Fariña, the husband-and-wife dulcimer and guitar duo that flourished in the mid-1960s.

While digitizing the beloved, pristine LPs of their music that I've kept through the decades, I discovered that the two albums I have were recorded in 1964 and 1965. I didn't discover them until 1971, when I graduated from Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell to Bluegrass and some singers of whom no one but true-and-tried folkies have heard.

I mean real folk music that has not been mass-marketed, engineered -- or, as Paul Simon memorably put it in A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Lyndon Johnsoned Into Submission), referring to the recording engineer and music entrepreneurs who built him into a commercial legend,
I been Phil Spectored, resurrected.
I been Lou Adlered, Barry Sadlered.
Real folk music is found in the memorable year 2000 film Songcatcher, about a musicologist who, while visiting her sister's rural school in Appalachia, stumbles upon ancient Scots-Irish ballads and decides to record them sung by memory, just as they were passed down, from generation to generation. You hear purely performed a capella singing, occasionally the intervention of a stringed instrument, and lyrics that tell stories of woe, of faith, of warning to playful young maidens and hasty young men.

That's more or less the way Richard and Mimi Fariña played, even though Richard attended Cornell University and penned his college-age early writings in the company of folks such as the future novelist Thomas Pynchon, while Mimi swirled in her sister's wake of folk stars (even Bob Dylan, the god, accompanies them in a few tracks).

For a brief two years their musical stars were ascending with a sound that was old and new, delicate and challenging all at once in the then-little-heard sound of the dulcimer and guitar. Then came the fateful surprise birthday party for Mimi on April 30, 1966, and the motorcycle accident that killed Richard instantly.

That day Richard Fariña joined the pantheon of heroes of the 1960s whose lives were unexpectedly cut short. The memorial wall, were there one, would begin with John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.; the names would include the enigmatic, energy-filled Lusitanian-Celtic, enigmatic young singer with promise Richard Fariña; then it would pass through Jimi Hendrix, to end perhaps with Phil Ochs, who committed suicide in the late-1970s, or John Lennon, killed like Kennedy, closing the circle.

Richard Fariña might not have distinguished himself for his music without Mimi. But he certainly left behind an unreadable little novel with a title that often comes to mind: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.

Upon hearing their music again after several years I googled them, hoping to see middle-aged Mimi with at least a few extra pounds to match my own, a middle-aged woman to whom it didn't seem to have looked so down way back when. She had been stuck with the role of widow of the young creative hero, which apparently wreaked havoc with her romantic life, much the way being stuck with being Joan Baez's sister didn't help her musical confidence.

Middle age has a way of softening things. She was getting ready to retire from music in the year 2000, following the 25th anniversary of a famous prison concert in which she had played with her sister. Fate denied her a ride into the sunset: she was diagnosed with cancer and died a year later.

Makes me wonder. According to Nobelist author Nikos Kazantzakis, Jesus' last temptation occurred on the cross, when he had one last option to recant and die an old man surrounded by his wife and grandchildren.

So even now I'm left to wonder what would life had looked like had Kennedy and King, Fariña and Ochs and Brel, the young disappeared of Argentina, the dead in Vietnam and the Congo, Patrice Lumumba and Che Guevara, had everyone lived to be old, their life's work rounded out to match their bodies.

Maybe the young existential angst, the earnestness, the deadly conflicts and issues, the poignant music and poetry, and life itself, all might have seemed so silly, so trivial, so beside the real point for so long.

Then, maybe and at last, it would all now look like up to all of us.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Clouds of Unknowing

Upon giving a friend the Joni Mitchell CD Dreamland, one of her recent retrospectives, I happened upon three new gems: three old songs re-recorded in her now gravelly voice, with a full orchestra behind her.

I was particularly touched by the new version of "Both Sides Now." You know the song ... particularly the refrain

"I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all"

Behind it, this time, her voice seems more hesitant, as if she's really, really, really looked at things from various angles and concluded, as we all eventually do when wisdom begins, that she knows nothing at all.

Before, in her young and haunting voice, or in the orchestral arrangement once sung by Judy Collins in her young voice, the refrain was the fatuous claim of a youth. Yes, at 20-something, or even 10 or 20 years later, we think we've seen it all and we think we know it all.

Most of all, we think we're immortal and accordingly live hard.

But to really know requires being able to sing from experience as Joni now does: "So many things I would have done ..." To have regrets and should-have-beens -- in Joni's life perhaps it is the child she regretfully gave away for adoption in a turbulent time of her life. Even though the story had a happy ending, it takes living through it to realize that life is what happens when you had other plans.

That's more or less when it hit me: the retired musician Joni Mitchell ("I'm a painter now") now knows she is going to die.

Wouldn't it be something if, a few years before singing no more, each of us got a chance to sing one of our old compositions -- even a wordless, soundless song, in a medium other than music -- with a retrospective flair? What if we, too, had an orchestra backing us up, with a soulful clarinet wailing the lament that all the life's learning was only to arrive at not knowing life -- hit it, Joni -- "at all."