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Occasionally we get free tickets to plays at the Geffen Theater, provided we write a wee review. This is what I wrote for Conor McPherson's The Seafarer.
It’s a stout-dark Irish view of things, and it goes something like this: we are all failed men, buttressed by our wits and good fortunes; and brought low by our weaknesses and bad luck. We find the grace of God now and again in helping another along and being helped along, often on whiskey and sarcasm, steering each other clear of the devil and women, except when absolutely necessary.
Conor McPherson gets this bleary, lyrical view of life down perfectly in “The Seafarer.” And the actors in the Geffen production, John Mahoney, Tom Irwin, Paul Vincent O’Connor, and Matt Roth are captivating, in a claustrophobic basement flat, as they weave through the contradictions, idiocies and wisdoms of Dublin pub poets on a Christmas Eve piss, as they say. Mahoney’s blind Richard is as domineering as he is vulnerable. O’Connors’s Ivan, always on his way home but never quite getting there, is as devoted to his wife and family as he is negligent. Roth’s Nicky is as sincere as he is shallow, and Andrew Connelly’s heart-sick Sharky is as lost as he is home, trying keep sober while caring for his brother Richard. When Tom Irwin’s slick, Faustian devil gets into the mix, the boozy band of brothers unwittingly prevails and the stark loneliness of each man’s hell is averted for another day. It’s a victory for life, a victory for which a grand hangover is, indeed, a small price to pay.
Caught the Ditty Bops Sunday night, early show. Angels singing.
Perfect Day
Watch out.
You might get what you're after.
KLIS!!!
Red Sox 16 - Yankees 11
I'm a little wary of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. He too often rests his turns of thought on turns of phrase. But this recent paragraph has stuck with me.
"Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …
We can’t do this anymore."
I'm staring out the window, thinking about my father, who died 14 years ago today, in mid afternoon, in Fort Lauderdale Florida.
"
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
W.B. Yeats
"If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat"
Lyle Lovett
"There is absolutely no way this will stimulate the economy," argues Brian Riedl, a senior federal budget analyst for the Heritage Foundation. He believes funding for the NEA — like several other items in the stimulus package — will not grow the economy. "The only way to increase economic growth is to increase productivity," Riedl says. "Government policies that make people and workers more productive will increase productivity. But simply borrowing money out of the economy in order to transfer it to some artists doesn't increase the economy's productivity rate. It doesn't help workers create more goods and services, and it won't create economic growth."
Hmmm. Let’s see here. Mr. Reidl might have a point. Funding for the arts doesn’t grow the economy. Keeping some heart-broke, three-chord busker fed doesn’t seem like it’s gonna to get General Motors and Morgan Stanley up and running at any time soon.
But the key may be in the 'soon.' Take Woody Guthrie. In 1941, Guthrie was hired by the Interior Department to write songs about the Columbia dam projects, which were basically propaganda about how the government can help grow the economy by investing smartly in development that benefits the many and not just the few. But it was propaganda Woody believed in, so he took the money and wrote the songs, 26 of them in a month. Linking documentary art to the Bonneville Power Administration kept Woody Guthrie, the songwriter, alive, during a pivotal time for him, and for us, as it turned out. Before his time in the Northwest, he was for the most part an itinerant musician with local, leftist followings. When he returned to New York from the project, having written some of his most popular and powerful songs including Pastures of Plenty, Roll on Columbia, and Grand Coulee Dam, he was able to establish himself as a member of the Almanac Singers, a recording artist, and writer, in short the Woody Guthrie who endured.
What kind of investment was Woody Guthrie? Well, start with all of the people who bought his records and records of his songs by other people. Let’s take one, This Land is Your Land. Woody wrote the song in 1940, but didn’t get around to publishing it until 1945 with all the Columbia River work and all. Now that song been recorded and sold, by, I don’t know -- how many is in a shitload? As in, a shitload of singers. Heck three shitloads of singers. Then take all of his other songs, hundreds of them. All his children’s records, and his autobiography, and the biographies of him. And the movie, Bound for Glory; which was a hit. Just think of the guitars and strings and lessons bought by all the kids who were inspired by someone, who was inspired by someone, who was inspired by Woody Guthrie. And Woody’s songs are STILL COMING OUT. A few years back, Woody’s daughter gave British folksinger Billy Bragg a box of Woody’s lyrics without a hint of the tunes Woody had in mind, and Bragg and Wilco have been mining it ever since like a vein of gold running underneath Woody’s Mermaid Avenue home in Brooklyn.
But if you really want to know what Woody Guthrie has meant to the economy in the past seventy years, try a little George Bailey at the Bridge experiment with him. No Woody, no Dylan. No Woody, no Bruce. No Dylan and no Bruce and no . . . don’t even try to go there, your brain will explode. No Woody, and what kind of a music economy would we have had built on Honey I Miss You and The Night Chicago Died? There are, it's safe to say, thousands of musicians who owe a debt to Guthrie as they made records and concerts, bought equipment, and generated billions in radio advertising revenue alone. A shitload of money. Maybe to the tenth. Shitload of money to the tenth. Including the two hundred bucks I personally shelled out to see Dylan and Springsteen in the past year. And there's even something called the Woody Guthrie Foundation.
But let’s take one of those thousands of musicians. Just one, a younger one, Ani Difranco. Now, trust me on this: no Woody, no Bob, no Utah Phillips, no Ani.
Now Ani has sold two shitloads worth of records and made five shitloads of dollars at concerts where young females in the audience have, it's well documented, moments of peak physiological intensity to lines Ani wrote twenty years ago. Woody’d really have liked that. (Really liked that). So this Ani Difranco has just reopened a 19th-century Gothic church at the corner of Delaware Ave. and Tupper Street, in Buffalo, Jack Kemp’s old district. With the city’s help, she poured $10 million into its renovation, to create “a diverse but interrelated arts community.” She calls it Babeland, as in Righteous Babeland. Woody would’ve played Babeland, trust me on that, too.
Meet me back here in fifty years and we’ll compare the economic contributions to the GDP traceable to Woody Guthrie and his disciples, including the Bobs, Bruces and Anis yet to be born, to impacts caused by, say, the gaseous Brian Reidls of the Heritage Foundations of the world.
Of course, Woody wrote in Pretty Boy Floyd;
“Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”
And that’s what pisses off the Brian Reidl’s of the Heritage Foundations of the world. The politics. If it weren't for the politics, they might even have noticed the money, the giga-shitload of money.
So let’s take a few dollars from that stimulus that is bailing out CitiBank and Bank of America, and toss it into in the guitar case of a heart-broke, three-chord busker. Might be the best investment we ever make.
P.S. No Woody Guthrie, no Joan Baez as we know her, no below:
Tonight, we went to book release party for a beautifully written and illustrated book by Jim Harris commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Santa Monica Pier.
The party was held in the wonderful, built in 1922, flying horse carousel, which was featured in the opening scenes of The Sting. It was an intimate affair by local standards, felt fortunate to be there.
Among the guests was Joan Baez, who spent considerable time in a close friend's apartment in the carousel's attic in the 1960s. Joan got an award for her work on the Pier's behalf. She is on the centennial steering committee along with Randi. After Joan got the award, she sang. We were about seven feet away. She sang Gracias a la Vida and then The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is, for all intents and purposes, about the downfall of Randi's family in Richmond in April, 1865. Joan stayed in a lower octave for her, leaving me la-la-laing a half step above her, Joan Baez, singing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and then she took a spin on the horses.
Sigh.
I haven't written about the inauguration because I don't have the words. As a country we now such a cauldron of hope and fear. I filled up when Pete Seeger sang the radical verses of This Land Is Your Land on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I felt inspired by the inaugural address itself.
But this was is favorite story of the week, which I found on the blog, Talking Points Memo. attributed to initials:
"We were at the Mall yesterday but our son was getting cold and shivering so we had decided to give up and go home. As we left the Mall walking up 18th Street we saw that DAR Constitution Hall was open, with a huge screen on stage (and two smaller screens on each side)--a warm place to sit, with real bathrooms.
As we sat among a mostly African-American crowd watching Aretha Franklin begin, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", an 80-year circle came together--Marion Anderson singing that song at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after not being allowed to perform in the very hall were were sitting in--Martin Luther King, Jr., on the same Memorial steps, speaking the lyrics of that song and calling for freedom to ring from Stone Mountain in Georgia and Lookout Mountain in Tennessee--and now the daughter of Martin's friend C.L. Franklin singing, at the other end of the Mall, "from every mountainside, let freedom ring", just before Barack Hussein Obama was to become President of the United States of America. It was incredible."
I had to write to Steve this morning. Way back in our dangerous days we were both fans of Tom Rush, in particular a 1965 Elektra album, just called "Tom Rush," of old songs like When Your Man Gets Busted and Long John. (I was so young when I first heard Tom Rush and Bob Dylan--thank you, my cool sister Carol--that I thought blues and folk music was created over in Cambridge by Harvard students). Steve and I believed that the last song on that album was maybe the greatest American song ever. For a long time, that old album was the only place you could have heard it. Tom Rush seldom played it live for years--just too much work, I suppose. The album has been out of print forever and there's no cd. More recently, however, Rush has added it back to his live shows, and I think it might be on some greatest hits cd, but it's still a rarity.
And it's still, God Bless you Bukka White, maybe the greatest American song ever.
Steve--
So last night, Randi and I went out to see Doug MacLeod at McCabe's Guitar Shop, which is as close as I have to a church these days. I mainly knew MacLeod because he hosted a blues show on local public radio when we first moved here. Knowing him just by radio I was about 120 percent sure he was Black. I was a little stunned when I saw him. There's hope for the Irish. I knew that he played some himself and I heard a clip or two that was sent on to me by a Sonny's regular. He sounded pretty good. But last night I learned that he is just brilliant. It was a "how the hell did I miss you all these years when you were right in front of me' moment."
So I'm blown away at the end of his set, and he comes out for an encore. He starts introducing the song . . . this morning I found a version of him doing it on You Tube.
How the hell are ya?
Bill
P.S. Worth checking in on Tom Rush and Doug MacLeod. I don't know whatever happened to that Bob Dylan guy.
