In John Baker’s thought-provoking, elegant new novel, “Winged With Death,” the past leads the present in an unstoppable tango.

The past is 1970s-80s Montevideo, Uruguay, where the military dictatorship is burying people alive, and a milonguero, a master of the tango, dances in cellar salons. The present is present-day York, England, where the dancer has returned to his home town and is drawn into the personal nightmare of a missing family member. “Winged With Death” is a sweeping novel and yet each step reveals a perfect pattern.

In 1972, eighteen-year-old Fredrick Boyle jumps ship in Montevideo, just as the military—with United States assistance—is capturing, torturing, and murdering people ever more ruthlessly. The people rely on a growing revolutionary group, the Tupamaros, to fight these death squads. But simultaneously, many if not most citizens struggle to deny that their friends and neighbors are disappearing all around them.

Fredrick is immediately befriended by Julio Ferrari, a skillful and well read Tupamaro, who on sight changes the Englishman’s name to Ramon Bolio, an identity he keeps. Thanks in part to Julio’s unwavering friendship, Ramon tutors the privileged children of the military. He falls in love with the tango, which in Montevideo is no ballroom dance. Rather, it “has none of the flamboyance…it is sometimes passionate and sensuous, often lyrical, even philosophical, but it is never for show alone unless it is a show of unity.”

Performed throughout the city, it is “a march for the dispossessed and exploited.” While mastering the tango, Ramon seduces the reigning milonguero’s protégée. With his beautiful, young partner, he becomes a dancer to the extent that the dance becomes his life.

“The inevitability of isolation is confined to the level of the senses. But there is a realm above that, to which we all subscribe, and there, there is the potential to move together, to be as one, to dance.”

Yet nobody is safe. When his neighbors disappear, Ramon has no way to respond. Except that like anyone, he is relieved that it isn’t him—this time.

The present era appears at first like an interruption. Ramon is back in York and his sixteen-year-old niece is missing. The parents, Ramon’s brother and his wife, are mentally slow. At first Ramon thinks the girl is taking a break from her obtuse parents and will soon return.

But time passes and Ramon finds he is again involved in a delicate, dangerous dance. “In the tango both leaders and followers lead and follow.” He bolsters and calms his devastated brother and sister-in-law. Every day he provides emotional support, expansive knowledge, and careful attention. Month after month, the teenage niece remains lost. Missing. Disappeared. “The questions are overwhelming, they hide a world that is too windy and wild to contemplate.”

Accepting the girl’s death is unbearable. Yet while mourning his niece, Ramon helps his brother and sister-in-law establish the rhythms necessary for waiting, grieving, and continuing on without their daughter.

He also finds his thoughts drawn back to Montevideo. During those years, long past, when people were faced with random, unrelenting murder and torture, survival depended upon shrouding reality and maintaining everyday denial.

Here John Baker’s tango comes full circle. “Winged With Death” resonates with time, demonstrating honestly how: “Each moment contains all that has gone before it, and each moment contains all that will follow.”

[Cross-posted here]

Film experts like The Self-Styled Siren and NCYweboy can tell you all about the cinematography and the way different scenes work. But the movie’s social meaning was so clear that even I got it. Set in 1950s USA, the story shows the intertwined lives of a single white woman and her daughter with a black woman and her daughter, who looks white. To my mind, false black/white dichotomy distorts this country as hideously now as then, or almost. In any case, Imitation of Life was the top-grossing movie in 1959.

Manny loves this movie but considers it a “soap opera” with deeper significance. My friend asked her English boyfriend if he considered it a “chick flick,” but he wouldn’t commit to that, even though the movie’s leading man waits a lifetime for the heroine to cap off her career before marrying him.

Imitation of Life is an epic saga in which the two mothers and daughters start out sharing a small walk-up apartment, where the black woman serves as maid and beacon of hope, caring for them all. The friendship between Lana Turner, (Lora, an aspiring actress with a little blonde daughter), and Juanita Moore (Annie, a saintly black woman with the little dark-haired girl who looks white), begins in a chance meeting at Coney Island. Neither woman has employment—Lora has arrived in NYC with big hopes and just enough money for a walk-up apartment. She addresses envelopes for pennies while waiting for her big break.

With Annie answering the telephone and cajoling the milk-man to wait a week for payment, Lori’s prospects improve. When she tells a playwright during an audition that his comedy is better than the lame scene she was assigned, he calls her back, having found his muse.

Lora is persistently romanced by a young photographer named Steve (John Gavin), who has sold photographs he took of little Susie and Sarah Jane at the beach, thereby securing a job as art director for a major beer brand. He asks Lori to marry him within weeks. She refuses, preferring the theatre to a housewife’s life. Fast forward then: Lora establishes a magnificent career as a glamorous actress. (This is, afterall, Lana Turner.)

Annie manages their fabulous new home, and raises both Susie and Sarah Jane, who insists whenever her mother’s not present, that she’s “white, white, white.”

From the beginning, Sarah Jane is determined to gain acceptance as a white girl in a white world. Lori consoles Annie, implying the girl will grow out of it. Annie knows better, saying, “How do you tell a child she was born to be hurt?”

Soon, six-year old Susie is sixteen years old and played by Sandra Dee, and eight-year old Sarah Jane is eighteen-year old Susan Kohner, whose secret white boyfriend, Troy Donahue, beats her upon discovering she’s “passing” for white.

Steve, who has risen to executive level while cooling his heels waiting for Lora’s career as an actress to wind down, rescues Sarah Jane when she runs away to become a chorus girl.

But Sarah Jane runs away again. The next time Annie finds her—again in a chorus line of white girls—she pretends she’s the glamorous girl’s “Mammy,” preserving her daughter’s masquerade. It’s clear from Annie’s devastated expression and her defeated posture that the woman who had always buoyed and mothered everyone, is now dying of heartbreak.

Thanks to Lora’s success, they’re living in a resplendent 1950s house in Connecticut, complete with thoroughbred horses. While Lora makes movies around the world, Annie takes to her sickbed.

But when Lora returns from a jaunt in Italy, Annie from her bed reveals trouble in the family—Susie has a crush on Steve.

This perplexes Lora so much that, while pouting, she tells Annie this is a “real problem”—nothing like Sarah Jane running away from her heritage. (A line that earned the black and white audience’s biggest laugh.)

Annie dies soon after, and her wish for a grand funeral (in what looks like Harlem) is honored. Mahalia Jackson sings “Trouble of the World” so gloriously, I often strive to hear it replay in my mind. Many years ago, I saw this movie in an-about-to-close, great old theatre that showcased Mahalia Jackson’s magnificent voice. The small park near Wall Street, with less than great audio equipment, didn’t do justice to the performance. But it couldn’t diminish it either.

As pallbearers take Annie’s coffin to a horse-drawn hearse, Sarah Jane arrives in tears, ripping open the back of her mama’s hearse, sobbing that it is all her fault. John Gavin and Lana Turner gently pull her away and comfort her in the limousine while Sandra Dee sheds delicate tears.

Susan Kohner, the grown-up Sarah Jane, was nominated for best supporting actress. And Juanita Moore, the angelic Annie, was nominated for best actress.

Prior to the movie, New York City’s River-to-River Festival showed a short, current film. Twelve African-American boys and girls about five years old were offered a choice of an American Girl-style white baby doll or a very slightly darker skinned one. All but one boy preferred the white doll. Upon off-screen questioning, the children, except for one boy, said the white doll was “good” and the darker doll “bad.”

Every dark child pointed to his or her chest as being like the dark (bad) doll. If there weren’t thousands of others reasons I’m voting for Obama in November, this alone would convince me. We certainly do need change. Vote for Obama.

(Cross-posted here)

That’s a major joke in the play, of course: writers worrying over their precious and ceaseless words and whether those words are “great art,” or strange, ridiculous, and pathetic.

The character central to the story is an amateur writer (like me) and his artistic limitations compared to his aspirations torment and infuriate him, which sometimes amuses his family and other times worries them, seeing as he’s so unbalanced and perpetually miserable. Add to the mix his failure in love and eventual, off-stage suicide and oh boy, what fun! But it was.

The play shows us a successful writer, too, who is a slavish lover to the bad writer’s famous actress mother. (Famous actress mother and failed writer son quote Hamlet to each other before the son stages his very bad debut play for the family’s entertainment.)

“The Seagull” offers the audience two actresses and two writers—men. The mother and her lover are famous. The son and the aspiring actress with a sad fate (whom the son loves throughout) overreach. They share an ambition for fame (writers were more famous then—that’s my guess) and an ability to create transcendence, which they associate with fame. Or at least the young actress does. The poor bedeviled son is less sanguine. He’s desperate and distraught and hilarious.

All the characters are hilarious and sophisticated in that they love laughing at themselves and their pretensions—it’s all such a game. Except they love playing the game and are so adept at it because it mirrors them so well. They see that. They love looking at themselves and laughing at life, because, really, what else is there to do? Cry?

A marvelous and witty commentary on the privileged (i.e., not serfs), “The Seagull,” as directed by Viacheslav Dolgachev, who is the Artistic Director of the Moscow New Drama Theatre, resonated with the audience. The gestures, the language, and its inflection felt familiar, I think, to the NYC audience, spring 2008. For example, when the uncle is dying in Act Four and the bon vivant doctor chides him for fearing death, he says only those who believe in an after-life fear death and that’s only if they fear punishment for their sins.

“—what sins have you committed? You’ve worked in a government office for twenty-five years.”

The characters wink here, because certainly no one in government has any occasion to sin.

In Act Three, the failed writer son and famous actress mother argue, initially about the successful writer (the mother’s lover), who is now pursuing the young actress, whom the son loves. At first the mother and son accuse each other and apologize, rant and then try to connect. Dianne Wiest playing Irína looks up at one point, saying “Such a bad mother!” I couldn’t find the line in the old paperback of Chekov’s plays but the timing and Wiest’s beautiful, wry delivery were memorable enough so that I felt compelled to look it up.

In the same scene, the same argument quickly turns into a shouting match.

Irína: Miserable decadent!

Treplév (her son): Run along to your precious theatre and act in your rotten feeble plays!

Irína: I’ve never acted in such plays. Leave me alone! You couldn’t write a tenth-rate farce. Provincial shopkeeper! Scrounger!

Treplév: Miser!

Irína: Symbolist!

Dianne Wiest hurled that last accusation, so suited to the play’s attitude toward symbolism (the seagull’s cry is haunting but the carcass hauled on stage is ridiculous) so fiercely, I looked it up, too.

My copy has Irína’s final insult as: Tramp!

Maybe the differences are in translation. But if the production took liberties here, they were stand-out choices. Chekov’s “The Seagull” is a masterly, classic comedy and could even fit Aristotle’s proclamations regarding comedy. If you interpret Treplév as better off dead (not inarguable, really), his fortune has risen. If you can’t countenance suicide as a rise in fortune (an equally valid argument), you might consider Irína the play’s most sympathetic character. Chekov may well have sympathized with her since in general his most egocentric and callous character alone finds fulfillment. You might say vain, selfish Irína’s fortune has risen now that she’s no longer weighted down by a soul-sick and mentally ill son. Her reaction and everyone else’s to the suicide is oddly diffuse: everyone disperses with an air of confusion, and some of them softly but not sadly hum.

The original production in Petersburg 1896 was a disaster and according to one essay, its failure sent Chekov into an enduring funk. It’s easy to imagine an amateur—or no, let’s say—clumsy production coming across as ponderous, not funny. And while I personally side with the overreaching failures, Chekov reportedly viewed the rich and famous as rightfully worthy. Even so, Irína can only be admired as an actress. Diane Wiest was right—such a terrible mother!

Like “Hamlet,” I well understand how people might devote a scholarly life to Chekov’s writing. And I’ve no doubt written past my limitations here. But the cast requires attention. The actors and actresses were extraordinary.

So, in order of appearance:

Medvendénko, a schoolteacher: GREG KELLER
Másha, daughter of Shamráyev: MARJAN NESHAT
Pyótr, Irína’s beloved older brother: JOHN CHRISTOPHER JONES
Tréplev, Irína’s son: RYAN O’NAN
Yákov, a hired man: RYAN HOMCHICK
Nina, daughter of a wealthy neighbor, aspiring actress: KELLI GARNER
Paulína, wife of Shamráyev: ANNETTE O’TOOLE
Dorn, the local doctor: DAVID RASCHE
Shamráyev, retired army Lt., who manages Pyótr’s farm: BILL CHRIST
Irína: an actress: DIANNE WIEST
Trigórin, a novelist: ALAN CUMMING

Cross-posted here.

After reading Claudia Roth-Pierpont’s arresting Shakespeare article in The New Yorker (the November 19, 2007 issue, now available online only in synopsis), I decided to read Hamlet first, since I had not yet read or seen the play.

I swore, too, to revisit Henry IV, parts one and two, Henry V, and possibly Richard III. Although I now intend to avail myself of that qualifier “possibly,” regarding Richard III, because Henry IV alone has bullocked me.

In truth, Roth Pierpont’s article mentioned Hamlet in passing. Her thought-provoking piece concentrated on Shakespeare’s historical plays and Laurence Olivier’s and Orson Welles’ simultaneous efforts to make movies of them. She chronicled Olivier’s and Welles’ shared rivalry and grudging regard toward each other. The knighted Olivier and struggling Welles directed and acted in Shakespearean movies that in her estimation enriched and newly enlivened Henry IV and Henry V, among Shakespeare’s other plays. Both men’s films brought Shakespeare out of academia to earn acclaim among the masses. As the USA and England fought Nazi Germany, Shakespeare’s monarchs’ rallying cry to war and triumph spoke to the crowds. Olivier achieved box office success.

Alas, the films, while renowned through the 1940s and -50s aren’t readily available now. But Shakespeare’s plays, luckily, are.

I chose Hamlet first, not only because my teachers failed to assign it and I had so far failed to read it on my own, but possibly, too, because of a vague awareness that plots about warring for land and lordship rarely interest me.

Hamlet, however, not only kept me reading and rereading night and day, the text prodded me to find the movie on Netflix, starring Olivier as a somewhat old Hamlet, although naturally the actor manages to convey a young person’s deep bewilderment and fury upon discovering betrayal. The resplendent Jean Simmons plays Ophelia with a virginal quality that’s almost inconceivable among modern actresses.

Reading the play without the benefit of others’ criticism, no foreknowledge of “the Freudian Hamlet,” the cowardly Hamlet or calculating Hamlet, I regarded him as a high-minded, mad-eloquent existentialist. Further, Hamlet impressed me as great enough to claim a worthy scholar, actor, or director’s entire career.

As for Henry IV as Prince Hal as good-time Harry? Whereas Hamlet kept me up all night reading, Henry IV has not. In the introduction to Henry IV, Harold Bloom lauds Falstaff as rich in wit and wonderment. So far, I’ve missed that. Not finished—even though I allow no novels or short stories to divert me—I find Falstaff and his roguish wit largely a case of allowing Hal and his friends to call him names and indulge in bad-boy pranks. I’ve grown tired of the play, despite its brilliant text. Enough with jack and sack and fat guts already. Without Harold Bloom’s introduction professing such devotion to Falstaff, I’m not sure I’d plow on through. But of course I would—and will—out of stubbornness.

Happy Anniversary newcritics, and many more.

Now I can, thanks to This Is Your Brain on Music (suggested to me by newcritics’ music editor Jason Chervokas). The book by Daniel J. Levitin makes the case that while no one understands entirely why certain music becomes an obsession to some people, neuroscience can show what music does to our brain: it lights up every known region of our gray matter, whether we like the tune or not. Further, finding someone who shares our love for certain music may cue like-minds toward a resounding serendipity. Finding a full arena of ecstatic, kindred souls (an experience unknown to me—fear of crowds) must leave an indelible and even sacred imprint.

Daniel J. Levitin’s book offers “a neuropsychological perspective on how music affects our brains, our minds, our thoughts, and our spirit.” A sound engineer, producer, musician, and cognitive scientist, Levitin conjectures about our minds, thoughts, and spirits, which, like the musical term “pitch,” are not physically apparent.

Levitin’s roaming philosophical, clinical, historical, and personal insights offer fascinating examples that include classical music and jazz, but focus mostly on rock and roll. One of his chapter subtitles, What We Expect from Liszt (and Ludicris), only suggests the book’s range. Indicative of his style, page 143 includes references to Wittgenstein and Led Zepplin. Yet his presentation is playful, not forced.

For an expert listener like me, who’s nonetheless ignorant of music theory, he lays out a concise primer on: pitch; rhythm; tempo; contour; timbre (rhymes with tamber); loudness; reverberation; meter; key; and harmony. The circularity of pitch perception compares to the color wheel. The octave provides the musical base for every known culture.

In case you suspected I was a bit quick to claim my listening expertise, Levitin holds up two standards for what makes an expert. Most five-year olds recognize an off-key note. They may prefer simple music over complex but they can tell when it doesn’t make sense. We’re all experts when it comes to musical taste. Past that, Levitin cites numerous studies that set the expert point at ten-thousand hours. Scientists, the author explains, routinely find this nice round number popping up in their studies. “Ten-thousand hours is roughly equivalent to three hours a day, twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years.”

The number holds up in studies of master composers, basketball players, ice skaters, and even fiction writers. But a truly notable artist will also possess talent by genetic predispositions, as well as a passion to play.

Generally, we learn to love music most during adolescence because teenage brains make new connections at an explosive rate. Myelin, which speeds up synaptic transmission, develops mostly between ages fourteen and twenty. We can learn music, mathematics, and languages best during these years, and while the window can vary somewhat depending on the person, after one’s mid-twenties, acquiring complicated new mental schema will always require work. No matter how proficient you get, it probably won’t feel natural.

Of course, during adolescence many of us are especially influenced by the time and place that belong to us and our friends. Beyond this, Levitin attributes musical taste to personality. The musical balance between safety and adventure, simplicity and complexity will differ for everyone. But as John Hardford said in “Tryin’ to Do Something to Get Your Attention” and as one of my favorite pop stars concurs, “There is Joy in Repetition.” (Prince) There’s joy, too, in the backbeat and in surprising our expectations: Beauty rises from the notes between the notes.

“This Is Your Brain on Music” bursts with intelligence, instruction, science, and soul. If I were looking for a complaint it would be that for a book about meticulous organization, reading it makes you run all over the place. It’s rich with lore and lists. Did you know the end of “A Day in the Life” on the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s CD has a few seconds of sound at 15 KHz—usually inaudible to those over 40?

When asked to bring over six songs that would explain rock and roll to an eighty-year old lecturer on psychoacoustics (excluding Elvis, because the man had heard him), Levitin brought:
1. “Long Tall Sally,” Little Richard
2. “Roll Over Beethoven,” the Beatles
3. “All Along the Watchtower,” Jimi Hendrix
4. “Wonderful Tonight,” Eric Clapton
5. “Little Red Corvette,” Prince
6. “Anarchy in the U.K.” the Sex Pistols

To this day, the author would like to make adjustments.

Lo and behold, the museum was featuring an exhibit called Listening to Our Ancestors. The American and Canadian Indians of the Pacific Northwest, it turns out, also rely on music. It may even affect their individual heart-beat and brain waves the way Miles and Mingus and Coltrane do mine. Their music shapes their culture and informs their every day life. It heals and protects them. Sacred rhythms marry the spiritual with the material. (A museum plaque informed me that these tribes use the present tense exclusively, to prevent anything from falling into the past where they might lose it.)

The exhibit displayed carved power sticks and beautiful rattles. Shamans clap the power sticks together in special rhythms to entice the spirits. They heal the sick with a series of beats using grizzly bear claws and beaver teeth. A separate rattling song reveals the weather. Spiritually gifted men and women clap masks open and shut over their faces, using the sound to make the Unseen Manifest [their capitalization]. Villagers play ancestral beats to the children and others rhythms to soothe or exhilarate the tribe as it might need.

The exhibit included special sticks that set the pace for different gambling games. The games, too, were on display in wooden boxes the size of a backgammon set. Apparently, each type of gambling requires its traditional theme song.

The communal story/history songs, two of which we heard performed by visiting singers and dancers, originate from a supernatural exchange with birds. The songs we heard are sacred. One, the narrator explained, tells about a drowning mother and children, who just as they go under, discover they can walk on water. The real miracle becomes manifest when the mother realizes a killer whale is lying on its side to lift them up. As a rescue canoe arrives, the whale slowly sinks and swims away.

He plays mostly his own compositions, some of which I’ve heard before, but he plays them as if invented on the spot. Rooted in the blues, his music is deeply African-American and makes you feel both the culture’s anger and its deep spiritual freedom. His improvisation on Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” was so vibrant and original, so unexpected but still familiar, it turned the old into new.

Not only does he play both tenor and soprano sax, but he sings as well—powerfully, running seductively through the dynamics between a throaty whisper and a deep, ululating shout. His voice mirrors his rich, devilish tenor-sax riffs.

Archie Shepp’s quartet, with Amina Claudine Myers on piano, Cameron Brown on bass, and Ronnie Burrage on drums, is at Iridium on Broadway and 51st in NYC this weekend, and if you can get there, I swear, you won’t be disappointed.

Syncopated within these apparently familiar destinies is an italicized, first-person voice, almost whispery at first, which belongs to a decisive and calmly selfish mystery woman. Unnamed until the last third of the book, this outspoken but soft-spoken woman mirrors Chloe Dale. They’re both strong, intelligent mothers who remain attractive despite wielding their personal entitlement and beliefs against their children.

The Dale family joins Toby’s group of anti-war students in an “out of Iraq” rally. They agree that the Democrats elected to Congress are cowards. Interspersed with these scenes, fraught with tension as Toby and Salome’s relationship becomes definite, the mystery woman’s story gradually brings the atrocity of the Serbian/Croatian war so close to the Dales’ cozy lives in the Catskill Mountains that it factors, albeit indirectly, in the family’s dissolution.

While much of Trespass recalls light, palatable novels about academic families, the dark secrets and aftermath of a recent war enmesh the family in a remarkable and complex web. Ms. Martin’s deft touch sets the plot so carefully that the reader hardly notices as a subterranean penchant for violence insinuates everyone’s life. Trespass risks seeming ordinary when it very much is not.

Of course, I don’t enjoy all rap and/or hip hop music but then I don’t enjoy all of any kind of music. Certain songs and musicians, though, inform my whole life, and some play through all my dreams, waking and sleeping.

A few of them belong within the hip hop tradition, which has influenced popular music widely enough over more than enough years to rank among this country’s great musical traditions. Hip hop springs directly from funk, jazz, soul, rock, blues, and some would argue, bluegrass and country. This music is both proliferating and accelerating. So it pains me when otherwise knowledgeable people, some of them musicians no less, define hip hop solely as angry young men ranting and cussing about how violent and misogynistic they are. This portrayal fits only certain rap songs, and happens to land quite close to punk rock and shock rock, which, while not especially lauded, are not derided nearly as frequently.

Some of this is plain racism, but some of it may spring from the age-old pattern where an older generation strives to hang on to the music filling the air waves when it was young. But the need to hang on to great music, historic or current, is very much the point. To each his own: no one’s favorites are likely to disappear before civilization itself does. Meanwhile, one older generation’s complaints are the same as their parents’, saying the new music is nothing but “noise,” and bemoaning that “they just don’t make music like they used to.”

Of course, that’s another stereotype. Generations do not divide into distinct time frames, no matter what the demographers decide. When my children discovered Grand Master Flash’s rap, The Message, I recall feeling astonished that the song came out before they were born. And that back when I was first hearing this new music, the deejay, who changed familiar songs by “scratching” records, was the master. Grand Master Flash was among the first, back when hip hop was all about starting a party. Rappers were extras until records were released and videos appeared on MTV. The commercial presentation put the deejays in the background, making the rappers the stars.

Now if the pendulum isn’t swinging back, at least equilibrium has developed. The deejay and producers of hip hop are full fledged artists, steeped in an encyclopedic familiarity with U.S. popular music going back fifty or sixty years. And their favorite samples often come from obscure recordings—or at least ones unknown to me.

In any case, take a minute and let Mtume ya Salaam explain how to listen to hip hop as bona fide art:

“To fully understand and enjoy modern music, you have to learn to recognize the sonic fingerprint of entire songs. And not just songs as in four or five minute collections of rhythm, harmony and melody. If you’d like to consider yourself a knowledgeable fan of modern music, you’ll have to learn to recognize bits, snippets, fragments and pieces of songs. You’ll have to retune your ears so that you can pick out tiny slices of one song spliced into another. You’ll have to develop the ability to recognize a drum pattern even after it’s been slowed down or sped up; a string melody that’s been replayed on a keyboard then sampled and placed over or under something else; sounds stretched into words; words taken out of context; contexts shifted, so that the singer or rapper says things they never intended. You’ll have to develop the patience to track down this sample or that one, playing detective for nothing more than the fun of hearing a sound you’ve grown accustomed to coming from a place you never imagined it.” - Mtume ya Salaam

In Breath of Life, a blog about black music, which Mtume shares with Kalamu ya Salaam, you can find unparalleled insight and elegant writing about black music by both black musical scholars once a week. A jukebox offers three MP3 picks, which you can download the week they’re posted. The write-ups , of course, remain available in a Breath of Life’s archives.

More and more, the favored beats and phrases among deejays depends on obscure sources. The death of two huge influences in 2006, however, has set off tributes to both men and their related styles. It’s Dilla’s World is intended as a tribute both to the original artist, James Brown, and to the hugely influential hip hop deejay/producer Dilla (aka J Dilla, aka James Lancey). Dilla, at age 32, died of a blood disease complicated by lupus on February 10, 2006. James Brown, as probably more people remember, died on December 25, 2006, at age 73, while hospitalized for pneumonia.

My musical inadequacies make it impossible for me to listen the way Mtume ya Salaam suggests. I get a fraction of what’s going on. But that fraction is both breathtaking and haunting.

(Thanks to a Lily Kane for assistance.)

But as a mother, Gretta is never going to be as independent as a man. Her desires will always circle back to her children. She hesitates and worries as she drives an old Chevy truck in search of her children’s father, an American Indian (or Native American—the political preference being in flux). Her babies cry and call for her, long for her and she for them even as she indulges in pints of Gilbey’s gin, or roadside, midnight sex.

In her failing truck, Gretta’s trip, from Ponticello, Idaho to Fort Defiance, Arizona, should take a little more than twelve hours. There she plans to ask her children’s father, Lance Bitsilly, a Navaho, if he will return with her to resurrect their marriage and family. If Lance would rejoin her and they were to drive directly home—or even if she were to learn she must drive back alone—the trip—and her babysitter—should require a day and a night and perhaps a part of the following day.

But Gretta finds it impossible to drive directly to the reservation. She arrives first in Moab, Utah prepared to fill her prescription for Dilantin. The drug, however, haunts her almost as much as her neurological seizures the drug is supposed to control. Gretta admits she doesn’t take it reliably because it doesn’t work reliably. And of course she’s aware it can’t work reliably if she doesn’t take it reliably.

Thus, her one and a half day trip expands to a week on the road, which always seems to bear a sign indicating that Moab, Utah lies five miles ahead.

The novel’s structure lends itself to the concentric circles formed by one responsibility rippling out after another. Told in thirty-eight brief chapters, the story traces huge, elegant arcs through Gretta’s past and present. Her hope for the future waxes and wanes above the changing horizon toward which she drives. She is driving to Lance, hoping he still loves her, while not entirely sure how much she still loves him. Her deepest desires are double curves, not the linear, single-minded quest of a man.

For all its lush detail, its circular inclusion of past and present, “The Arc and the Sediment” gives the reader a lucid portrayal of a tormented and lovelorn heroine. Her wit and determination, her struggles and motherly love appear here as fearless, sensitive, and unflinchingly honest. Allen-Yazzi’s vivid, feminine Gretta may suffer terrible confusion, but Allen-Yazzi’s readers never do.

What a talent and what a life. From the age of 19, Anita O’Day , until she died Thanksgiving morning, 11/26/2006, sang, swung with big bands, bebopped with Charlie Parker, and proceeded into a solo career in which she matched Ella, Billie, and Sarah in her ability to make songs her own, not to mention her brilliant vocal improvisations. Perhaps the high point in her career–which was very much her life itself–was her performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. She sang “Sweet Georgia Brown,” starting oh so slowly and then breaking out into a sexy rendition unlike any other. If you want to know why people make a fuss about Anita O’Day, watch the clip.

Her voice of course was beautiful; her stage presence as an authentic, tough, lady jazz singer was always remarkable. But what made her vocal interpretations transcendent was her unique and fluid timing. (When she was a girl, a surgeon removing her tonsils had accidentally sliced off her uvula. To replace vibrato, she relied on quick strings of eighth notes.) The documentary’s directors, Robert Cavolina and Ian McCrudden, capture Anita O’Day’s signature sound with a clever, syncopated editing style.

Other than the breathtaking songs, the high point of the movie comes in an old clip from the Today Show, maybe in the 1980s. An unctuous Bryant Gumbel interviews Anita in her late middle age, after she had kicked a fifteen-year heroin habit and written an autobiography called High Times, Hard Times.

He presses relentlessly on her life’s struggles, specifically, “rape, abortion, drug addiction…..” Apparently, he wanted her to repent or express a worn-out weariness after such a long toll. Smiling easily through his staccato questions, she says, You got to be a good loser, that’s all.

Good loser, he says, you sound bitter.

Not bitter, she says, still all smiles. Good. A good loser. But when he bemoans her acceptance of “a loser,” she turns and snaps. “Yeah, well that’s just the way it went down, Bryant.” That line got the most spontaneous applause from the movie audience, except of course until the lights went up.

As a diligent but mostly unknown fiction writer, I beg to differ. The inherent quality of fiction, the pronouncement that it’s good or bad, is entirely subjective. Beyond that, fiction requires shelf-life. Many of our best writers finish a piece and put it away to rewrite when time has brought them to a different vantage point. Then, too, what’s bad today could easily be judged good tomorrow. Or the opposite—what was considered breakthrough literature twenty years ago bores us now. Fiction is an art. While many might agree that fiction with an indifference or ignorance of structure , grammar, narrative, character, and/or story arc qualifies as despicable writing, others might know some of the writer’s other work and declare the same piece experimental. Any writer, afraid to risk writing badly, will never manage the daredevil feats unique fiction requires.

Of course, not many people care much about unique fiction, or any fiction until it’s transformed into a movie or TV series. That development may not disturb me as much as it should. What does disturb me is the idea that bad fiction writers are an assault upon society. Why fiction writers?

Why not bad guitar players or bad sculptors? It’s not much harder to toss out a bad short story or dump a boring novel than it is to turn away from a bad painting or photograph. Bad drummers may not be as popular as I imagine, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t tolerated with a great deal more sympathy than the struggling, searching, over-reaching fiction writer. Even though bad drummers, if they’re experimenting in your apartment building or garage, intrude on your privacy much louder than any fiction writer sweating to find a line of angry, screaming dialog ever could.

One commentator expressing anger toward bad fiction writers referred to the MFA writers’ programs popular throughout this country as a waste of money and energy. I don’t know, being a self-taught fiction writer. But I would no more want to put writers’ programs out of business than dance schools or fledgling theatre groups or even a garage band with more attitude than chord changes.

Speaking for myself, you’re apt to find my penchant for writing fiction is among the least of my obnoxious qualities. Years ago I gave up almost all hope of publication. But I would no sooner give up writing fiction than I’d give up my life. Honestly, my plea here is not for myself alone. Tolerate me or not—I know quite well how little difference I’ll ever make. But earnest young writers determined to master their art? Are they really so abominable? How hard is it to say, “Keep at it.” They work alone, in silence, and dupe you into spending your money about as often as they win the lottery. The very worst fiction writer might someday become the best. No one knows. It costs nothing to say, “Work hard enough, long enough and you’ll eventually become the writer you were meant to be.”

]]> http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/03/20/kill-all-the-lawyersno-kill-the-fiction-writers/feed/ http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/02/18/the-artistry-of-keith-lee-morris%e2%80%99-%e2%80%9ctestimony%e2%80%9d/ http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/02/18/the-artistry-of-keith-lee-morris%e2%80%99-%e2%80%9ctestimony%e2%80%9d/#comments Sun, 18 Feb 2007 20:18:08 +0000 Kathleen Maher http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/02/18/the-artistry-of-keith-lee-morris%e2%80%99-%e2%80%9ctestimony%e2%80%9d/ Keith Lee Morris’ short story, Testimony, in the latest issue of A Public Space (03) is among the best I’ve read, which is saying a lot, since I have been reading mostly short stories for a year. On the surface, it is a straightforward tale in which a first-person narrator, under questioning in court, relates a tragic chain of events. But on closer look, one can see how the story gains its exceptional power thanks to the writer’s artistry with perspective and voice.

The first-person voice puts us in the head of the narrator, Michael Bond, while he undergoes questioning as state’s witness in a murder case against his friend since childhood. After establishing the courtroom, jury, judge, and lawyers through Bond’s eyes, the author tells the story of the crime through a series of third-person questions, questions posed ostensibly—but not explicitly—by lawyers for the prosecution.

At the same time, the narrator thinks of questions he hopes no one will ask him, only to discover that by alluding to them on his own he has dredged up memories and allegiances extending beyond the crime. The more the narrator tries to push the inquiry back and search for excuses, the more the fault lines in his defense appear.

Although the author has presented the lawyers as discrete characters, the use of the disembodied third person questions here is not merely a literary device, but a classic form of self-protection. Sitting on the witness stand, Michael Bond relies on that third person interrogator who, of course, is himself, to bring about a more tolerable perspective. For him and most readers, however, the technique achieves the opposite effect. Driving the story from a deliberately removed position brings about an unexpected and horrific immediacy.

The murder case involves four young men: One the leader, who is on trial, two followers, including Michael Bond, and a fourth, the murder victim, who always stood apart from the group. Through the voice of Bond, the friends’ competitive posturing feels nearly innocent at first. Their joking one-upmanship is not so different from a bravado all but endorsed in the United States, except that the friends happen to be methamphetamine users. Keith Lee Morris slowly turns their bantering behavior until we see its underside. The consequences of a sporting aggression matched by a “cool-guy attitude” are irrevocable.

By the end the narrator finds his moral failing sickening. One young man has died, thus the legal trial. The remaining three live on, but ruined, and the narrator has realized, too late, that had he seized the moment he could have changed their fates.

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