Don't bother me with facts, my mind's made up!

As someone who grew up in a place where Dr Franklin's sectioned-snake flag is actually history rather than cheap political bullshit-where people died to try to create independence from what they perceived to be tyranny--I am profoundly offended by the gutless, ignorant drones, many of them on one form or other of government paycheck, whose selfishness and cowardice leads them to scream bloody murder only when they think that "someone else" (typically someone who works harder, owns less, came from elsewhere, and has six times as much guts and work-ethic as they) is getting something that they're not.

This cartoon captures it.

Buddhist anger and ancient rage

A friend of a friend has referenced a set of actions as my "having gone all Buddhist commando." I don't think he meant it as a particularly positive or complimentary appellation, but it definitely had the salutary effect of making me think about how one conducts philosophical, political, or spiritual conversations--or actions!--in a fashion that is consistent with the Dharma.

One of the things that the sutras warn us against is what Catholicism calls "quietism"--the terminology employed to describe a state of mind which, mistakenly understood as "inner calm," is in fact more mental laziness. In Buddhist circles, it's "the mind watching the mind be calm."

It's an easy trap to fall into, especially if one is trying to find ways to be "in the world" without buying-in to the rage, spite, or egocentrism that fuels our political discourse. There is a difference between anger and rage. Anger is a response (healthy or unhealthy, appropriate or inappropriate) to a present situation: the sight of a sentient being abused, the wilful or careless destruction of the natural world, greed that serves the few and causes suffering for the many. It is appropriate to feel anger to such injustices, and to use that anger's energy to create positive change.

Rage is a response to old suffering--not to the present. Rage is inappropriate, unexpected, or un-called-for--unsuitable to the present situation. Too many of us--too many of the people currently in the news and screaming at the tops of their lungs--are not angry at present situations, but enraged at past frustration, disappointment, and, mostly, fear.

Buddhism recognizes that anger, however, is an appropriate response to some aspects of the world the way that it is. There are great wrongs in the world. There are evil and ignorant actions in the world. There are people who, knowing where the route of compassion and generosity lies, knowingly choose the path of selfishness and greed. There is thus a reason that Tibetan Buddhist cosmology recognizes the existence of "wrathful deities": manifestations of the Buddha who take on wrathful aspects "in order to lead sentient beings to enlightenment":

"In addition to destroying the passions of the mind, the purpose of gods is also to protect the faithful. The wrathful deities, who symbolize the tremendous effort it takes to vanquish negativity, especially perform this function." [Wikipedia]

It is possible to be an activist, even (sometimes) an angry activist, and a good Buddhist. In fact, MY teachers would have said that, in order to be a good Buddhist, one has a responsibility to be an active seeker of truth, compassion, and justice. It is not enough--indeed, it is irresponsible--to abrogate that responsibility. In my world, such irresponsibility most often takes the form of faculty who just "go in my studio and shut the door"--e.g., rely upon their sequestered experience and their tenured job-permanency to help them weather storms: in fact, to let others bear the brunt of those storms.

For me, that feels irresponsible. My life is one of enormous privilege, personal satisfaction, and material comfort: I'm warm, dry, fed, and protected by the upper-middle-class social safety net--and the much more potent safety net of university tenure. My response is that I have a moral responsibility to work, from this vantage, on behalf of those less privileged. I can't "go in my studio and shut the door." I have a moral--in fact, a religious--obligation to fight for justice.

There are situations of social injustice in which the appropriate response is anger.

This is a common misconception about Buddhism: that its "detachment" equates to a quietism that allows the practitioner to say "I'm just going to tend my garden and let the world go to hell." This is the quietism that led entirely too many Japanese Zen roshis to keep silent about their country's pre-WWII militarization. It is the quietism that led entirely too many American religious or educational professionals to keep silent about our country's pre-Gulf I & II militarization. It is the quietism that leads too many to say "well, this President isn't what I hoped he'd be, so fuck it! The system is fucked, so I'll just go into my studio (into my garden, up onto my mountaintop) and let it all blow over me."

I believe it is possible--indeed, a moral responsibility--to fight for a better world, especially when there is "no hope." The point of Buddhist "detachment" is not that one should "cease caring about the world." Rather, it is that one should abandon attachment to results, and instead work for a better world simply because such work is a good thing to do. Because fighting for justice is, in and of itself, better than passivity, quietism, or defeat. Absent any convictions or attachment to "victory".

When one becomes a Buddhist, in whichever of the traditions, one typically undergoes a ceremony called the "Boddhisattva vows." In this ceremony, the practitioner vows to continue to work toward her/his and all other beings' enlightenment (e.g., "to become a Bodhisattva"), but also--and very crucially--to forgo admission into paradise until all other beings likewise attain enlightenment. It's a vow that says, essentially, "I have the religious obligation to be the vehicle for all other beings' enlightenment. FIRST."

Some of the people I admire the very most in the world are both strong Buddhist or other spiritual practitioners and also strong activists. Their names are legion, and the full list far too long for a blog post, but here are a few, Buddhist and otherwise, the nature of their practice, and the depth of their political commitment:

• Gary Snyder: poet, environmental activist, Zen practitioner; has worked on behalf of demilitarization, environmental sensitivity, and better stewardship of the natural world for at least 50 years
• Thomas Merton: poet, Cistercian monk, antiwar activist; traced his own spiritual journey in a series of enormously influential and honest books and poems; explicitly opposed nuclear arms race and Vietnam at a time when no Catholics were supposed to do so
• Allen Ginsberg: poet, Buddhist practitioner, antiwar activist; faced down rioting cops in Chicago '68 at Grant Park and wrote poems to his muggers
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Lutheran pastor, theologian, martyred under Hitler
  
• Thich Nhat Hanh: Vietnamese Zen monk, poet, teacher, peace activist; when asked, in the '60s, "do you come from the North or the South?", replied "Neither. I come from the Center."
• Martin Luther King: Baptist minister, author, Civil Rights organizer, martyred in 1968
• Malcom X: black nationalist, Muslim, author, Civil Rights organizer, martyred in 1965
• Dorothy Day: Catholic convert, anarchist, social activist, founder of the Catholic Worker movement
• Robert Baker Aitken Roshi, founder of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship
• William Sloane Coffin: Presbyterian minister, musician, peace activist
• Helen and Scott Nearing: radicals, writers, simple-living advocates, teachers
• Mary "Mother" Jones: socialist, Wobbly, community organizer
  
• Shinryu Suzuki Roshi: Zen teacher, author, founder of San Francisco Zen Center
• Ed Brown: Zen teacher, cook, author of the books (Tassajara Bread Book, Tassajara Cookbook) which first gave me a vision of how cooking could be part of the Dharma
• Gerrard Winstanley: farmer, Quaker, religious reformer, founder of the Diggers, and author of some of the most powerful liberation poetry ever written
  
• Harriet Tubman: Christian, abolitionist, slave smuggler, suffragette
  

These are just a few of the people who have shown me personally how to be a deeply spiritual and a deeply activist person. The two are not self-contradictory: in fact, each is essential to the other.

Sometimes skillful means requires action, conflict, anger, even combat: "gentle violence," Gary Snyder said, "if it comes to restraining some impetuous crazy."

You cannot be an enlightened person (much less a Bodhisattva) if you do not seek--sometimes even fight for--peace and justice for all beings.

"The Office" (workstation series) 100 (Independence Day edition)

Coffeehouse "listening" session last night; old buddy Coop on flute and myself on bouzouki. I really like that duet Irish situation, where I'm the only accompanist, because it provides an absolutely huge palette of choices: I can play a lot or a little, play soft or loud, thick or sparse, reharmonize at will, and so on. I like the way I wind up playing in those situations.

But I fucking hate the contemporary audience's inability to grok that live music ought to elicit a different response than canned music. It's not that they are inherently less-considerate people, but rather that they simply don't grasp that there are live bodies up there making those sounds, and that they might want to tear themselves away from the text-messaging and gossiping and incessant narcissistic self-photography and so on. My buddy Roger Landes, very wisely, has a precept that says he won't take a "listening" gig in any space where they typically play recorded music: he believes that people who regularly come to a space with canned music will have learned a bunch of oblivion-behaviors that make it impossible for them to grasp that, on this particular night, something different is happening--and is called for. I, on the other hand, still take gigs in such spaces, and then (absurdly) get pissed when people behave in an entirely normative way.

So with last night: roomful of posing high-school kids (I have to struggle to remember that, for most people, high school is precisely where they have to figure out who they are going to be as adults, and as a result, many spend most of their high-school time trying out personae, and assessing the external reactions to those variants); large table-ful of kids being led in some kind of Bible study session by a coach-type (as Coop says, "St Matthew says you should pray in privacy, in a closet inside your house with the shutters drawn, and he knew Jesus; why the fuck do these people think they 'supposed' to pray in public?"). We play here because, as with our session pub, though the clientele can be clueless, management is incredibly supportive, appreciative, and respectful. It would be nicer if the clientele was too, but it's hard to blow off management who are this nice. But the posing and the chattering and the just-plain flat obliviousness to their surroundings really get to me.

I have a very short fuse when I'm leading a gig. 25 years ago, I would get snotty with band-mates (Dharmonia can attest to the fact that I was hell-on-wheels as a bandleader in the 1980s). With the advent of many years and just the slightest bit more maturity, I've learned not to take it out on people, and, in fact, to be reasonably charming and easy-going in manner on the gig. This is not however because I actually am "charming and easy-going," but because I've learned to project that in preference to the dismissive short-fused behavior of three decades ago.

But I still have a very short fuse, and very small incidents of what I perceive to be inconsiderate behavior from audience members can evoke absolutely towering rage (see my recollections of policing the room at the old Idler in Harvard Square during Dean Magraw's gigs). I've tried to figure out why this is, and I think I actually know why. Realistically or not, enittled or not, I have a tendency to perceive those spaces in which music occurs as sacred spaces; at least for the duration of the performance, when it's working right, the music actually creates the possibility of an alternate, better mode of consciousness. Many musics know this: African-American gospel, Bach's Masses, Pakistani Qawwali, and thousands of other music idioms were created and are maintained because they make an alternate universe of experience possible, at least for the duration of the performance. Certainly some of my own most transformative experiences have happened to me during, and because of, a musical performance.

That's also what I try to create when I play music: at least the possibility, for whichever members of the audience might understand or intuit same, of a transformative experience: something that will take you right out of your body and show you the possibility of an entirely different way to experience the world and other people. I go way the fuck out of my way to try to do that: in terms of sequencing tunes, in terms of involving other players and the audience, in terms of what's said or done, how people speak or move, how we respond to feedback from the audience and so on. When it's a formal setting (concert hall or theatre) you have a lot more control: lights and sets and start-time and so on: in fact, I'd argue that this is one of the great afflictions of 19th/20th century concert music: composers (only slightly down the hierarchy of creation from God, and substantially higher up the scale from the conductors whose existence composers reluctantly acknowledge) were so obsessive about control, critics were so dependent upon an odor of superhuman Greatness, that they conspired to take everything away from the audience.

But I'm a jazz and roots musician and I was raised up to make things happen for an audience, with the audience's participation. The problem is that, to make such things happen, the audience has to get it, if not to the same extent then at least in the same experiential universe and values-system that the musicians are occupying. When you're dealing with an audience who don't know this and are barely conscious that it might exist, then you're already fighting an uphill battle.

Which is why so many of our gigs demand audience education--teaching people (usually by demonstration and example) about what the music can provide, if they engage and respond. Mostly you have to do it implicitly. At the Celtic Christmas, almost all of the staging directions, lighting, programming, pacing, and so on, are set up to create a sense of the circle around the croft fire at the show's opening, and the experience, for the audience over the whole course of the show, of that same circle getting bigger and bigger and bigger, until it encompasses everyone present. Mostly it works. But it's a hell of a lot harder to accomplish when you control almost none of the parameters.

I have a standing joke with my students that, in "my parallel universe, musicians drink for free." That sounds like an aphorism, but I'm deadly serious: we don't set up gigs where we, or any of the participating musicians, have to pay for their booze. Drinking or eating for free, even absent any cash changing hands, in exchange for playing music, takes us back way before Romanticism, out of the modern world, back before the Industrial Revolution, to the places where the music began: the fireplace, the campfire, and the sacred circle. And when people in an audience don't get that, it really chaps my ass. And when the Bible-study leader decides to stand up and fake his way through a couple of faux-Riverdance steps, I have deeply unholy reactions.

So here's my parallel Universe, and the real Independence Day celebration, and the real American heroes, in that universe:

Where the marching band is Jim Reese Europe's 369th Hellfighters Band, sashaying down the streets of Harlem, playing charts by Charles Ives, with Charley's beloved-but-died-too-young father George, the youngest bandleader in the Civil War, trades off the baton with Lt. Europe, with James Brown as the drum-major, with banners heralding Peace and Freedom and Justice flying at the head; and marching in the van are all the boys who didn't have to die in America's contemptible elective imperial wars;

with a picnic on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, where Buddy Bolden, healed from the "madness" that was the only possible to the insanity of Jim Crow, trades trumpet licks with Clifford Brown, who walked away from the car wreck miraculously unscathed, and Janis, with a man who loves her and a church family that supports her, kisses Jimi and congratulates him on a fair record deal, and Bessie Smith, the Queen of the Blues, donates her royalties to a charity hospital for poor people;

and Blind Willie Johnson asks the blessing, and Gary Davis sight-reads the hymns, and Duane Allman and Charlie Christian trade choruses on the offertory while their grand-babies pass the paper plates, and Bird and Trane and Dolphy and Ayler man the horn section, and Fela and Miles swap licks and each agrees that the other is the greatest player;

and Zappa gives the patriotic address, and Bo and Mr Jelly Roll and Mongo and Lemon and Robert Johnson compare their versions of the hambone and argue good-naturedly (while the beer never runs out) about whose is better;

and there's corn and slaw and pickles and peach pie and mashed spuds and sweet tea and pulled pork and barbecue and Hebrew National hotdogs and fried chicken, but no animals ever had to die to provide them, and Tom Binkley approves the hummus and dandles his grandkids on his knee,

and my father is there, sober and happy, sketching the scene,

and saying "just lemonade, thanks."

I will work until I die to help make this nation more what it could be.

"The Office" (workstation series) 098 (samsara edition)

To conflate two aphorisms: some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear shits in the woods. Some days the world is at pains to confirm the wisdom of the First Noble Truth: that life is, inescapably, filled with suffering (dukka). To be born, to live, is to commit to suffering. For me, one of the greatest sanities in Buddhism is the unblinking recognition of this: suffering is not, at its fundamental root, due to "sin" (Original or otherwise), but rather to the ignorant attempt to deny this Noble Truth. If we try to avoid suffering--if, even worse, we mistake the causes of suffering, attributing it to guilt, or sin, or "ungodliness", then we increase suffering .

You visit cities in China in which, as buddy Coop points out, "there's not a square meter that's not either under construction or under cultivation," cities where 'most everyone subsists on a tenth of the material possessions and a quarter of the living space of the "average" American, and, by anecdotal observation, works about twice as hard and has about 1/3 the body fat. Places where you literally can't see more than 5 blocks because of the air pollution. Because "environmentalism," in the modern world, is a luxury for First-Worlders--poor people around the world are still just trying to find enough to eat and clean water to drink. And this is the nation that, due to the and incompetence of the American presidency, now owns (and will continue to own) most of our credit: we're not going to get to dictate environmental policy to the Chinese. Or the Russians. Or the Saudis. No matter how much cartoonish sabre-rattling the war criminal in the White House engages in: they own our fat asses.

There's a spot in the South Pacific which consists of a giant, swirling island of accumulating plastic, the final, deadly detritus of our addiction to fossil fuels. There will be no polar ice cap within fifty years. Polar bears, running out of living space, are drowning. Or swimming to Ireland, where the fucking gardai shoot them for fun. T. Boone Pickens is quickly developing a monopoly on clean water in the American West, because, as he admits himself, the way to get ahead in America is to figure out whatever non-renewable resource is next to run out--and to buy that. The Bush Mafia family bought hundreds of thousands of acres in Paraguay for the same reason, because, until a leftist government just got in, Paraguay had no extradition--which is why Nazis fled (and flee) there.

Reading today about the emigration of potato Famine refugees from the Lansdown estates in Kerry to Five Points in New York, and the scope of suffering that they both left, and traveled with, because the factor Trench who was charged with managing their emigration cut corners everywhere he could in order to pocket the difference. Was re-reading yesterday Thomas Berger's great Little Big Man, about the only white man who survived Greasy Grass because having being raised by Cheyenne--and about the greed, suffering, and stupidity which caused the '76 Sioux Rebellion. Last night talking with buddy Coop about Lubbock's burgeoning homeless problem, and the Town Fathers' typical reaction (confiscate their shopping carts and sleeping bags and tell them they have to "get off the street"). And then caught a fragment of Fernando Meirelles's great version of John le Carre's The Constant Gardener, a quasi-documentary thriller about the complicity of international governments and pharmaceuticals in the continued genocide and exploitation of Africa; as le Carre says "By comparison with the reality, my story [is] as tame as a holiday postcard." Even filming the story was so harrowing for the cast and crew (Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz leading) that they created an NGO to at least address the suffering of those they met. The wheel of fortune turns and turns again and the poor and powerless are always, again and again and again, ground into dust by the wealthy and powerful.

Suffering is real. No-one escapes suffering and suffering will never end. Refusing to accept that First Noble Truth is precisely the cause of suffering's continuation (the Second Truth says "the cause of suffering is desire"; I would add "the cause of suffering is the desire to avoid suffering"). We have to accept that suffering is real. That we are probably environmentally doomed. That children and animals will be tortured, starved, neglected, and exploited for the gratification, adornment, or luxury of the rich. The wheel of samsara will never end.

But, as Sokei-an said about Buddhism in America, "you must hold the lotus to the rock, until such time as it should take root." As one of our own great teachers said, "You have to show up for the impossible."

More: in this generation, we have to show up for the apocalypse. As the world crumbles and suffering logarithmically increases, through greed, ignorance, and delusion, you have to take one positive action.

Because the only alternative is surrender.
----------------
Now playing: Chumbawamba - Song on the Times
via FoxyTunes

"The Office" (Workstation Series) 05 (+ bonus)

First things first. This is the view from the Hickok station, but bumped sideways to monopolize a 4-seater table on this slow Saturday at the coffeeshop--need more space today to spread out additional work.

The texts, all things out of my own library which I am revisiting for the minstrelsy project, are:

Allen, Robert G. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Very interesting, detailed, and insightful study by a theatre and American-culture specialist about the social, class, and gender implications of burlesque, and the very complicated layers of semiotic association which the genre represents in late-Victorian American culture. I'll never look at a lobster the same way again...

Lott, Eric. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Fantastic work--all of Lott's work is--by an American Studies specialist. Very effective, deep, multi-faceted study of the way that minstrelsy embodied and enabled white, male, working-class critique of class issues in Jacksonian America.

Tawa, Nicholas E. High-Minded and Low-Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800-1861. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.

I studied with Nick Tawa at U Mass Boston in the 1980s, and didn't realize the treasure trove of primary-source information he carried in his head. It's only years later, as an American-music specialist, that I've come to realize how ground-breaking his books were: he was tilling the fields of American musical culture (at all social levels) before almost anyone was. His described and preferred research method was index cards, and the books read a little bit like that: more bibliography and source-study than analysis or interpretation, but invaluable as compendia of musical activity across social classes.

Lhamon, W.T., Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Rip Lhamon is an English professor, but has specialized in the theatrical and material culture aspects of minstrelsy. He's published several books (Jump Jim Crow is a fantastic resource of minstrel texts), but this one is both my favorite and his most far-reaching. Like a lot of American musicologists, Lhamon intuited that there are aspects of African-American performance aesthetics (garb, body vocabularies especially dance, terminology especially as regards expressive taste) which have been remarkably consistent and resilient through all the epochs of African-American impact on culture. This in itself is not a tremendous revelation, but the clarity and readability of Lhamon's prose, his obvious engagement with and love for the repertoires, and his very strong command of the earliest primary sources, make his linking of minstrelsy, vaudeville, "coon" shows, film, and MTV video especially immediate and compelling. Very moving.

Wondrich, David. Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003.

Like Strasbaugh, essentially a journalist's fan-letter to African-American popular culture, in Wondrich's case, black music from the 78 era. Very accessible, good for a general audience, but not providing much in the way of original insights (as opposed to original expression, which he's good with). Severely hamstrung by his lack of musical/technical knowledge or insight: that is not to say that someone writing on black music must have such knowledge--but lacking such knowledge makes it essentially impossible for Wondrich to talk about musical style traits. He tries to do so anyway, and is forced to coin his own idiosyncratic terms to describe musical phenomena (for example, in Wondrich's construction, "stomp" is a strong downbeat 4/4 emphasis, driving the straightforward dance grooves; while "swerve" in his construction is upbeat emphasis, hemiola, syncopation, and/or polyrhythm-polymeter. Of course these are essential characteristics for the discussion, but Wondrich expends unnecessary effort generating unique terms, which he employs inconsistently, and as a result distances his text from usability or interface with other analyses.

Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977 (rev. 2003).

Standard and seminal text, based in primary source study (newspapers, plantation records, printers' bills, street literature, etc), on African-American musical contributions prior to 1861. First published 1977, when it was a rare resource for this material; lightly revised in 2003, without a great deal of new material, by which time it had been supplanted by other, more up-to-date, and more critical/analytical texts. However, it's a while since I've read it, and I have not re-read at all in light of the minstrelsy project. Very often, we'll see things upon re-reading texts which we missed during the first reading: the Epstein is no exception.

Bonus image: because the view from the Hickok chair gets a little repetitive (like so many things in academic research), I append a bonus image. This is the back room at the same coffeeshop--originally the small theatre where they showed the art-films in the '70s, I'm told--now converted into an events and concert space. This is the first place I heard "Celtic" music in Lubbock, 7 years ago: I was in town in May 2000 for my interview sequence, and on the last free morning, after obligations were done and it had been made remarkably clear to me that the committee wanted to hire me, I rented a car and drove around the region. I was pretty sure the offer would come and I knew I needed some kind of information to give to Dharmonia regarding whether we could possibly survive living in the Buckle of the Bible Belt.

I drove all over, scoping out neighborhoods, and all the way out to the "resort lake" community in a canyon east of town--I was fuckin' desperate! But there wasn't much that was convincing, so I drove back into town, and while heading up the main drag east of the campus, I heard Cathy Jordan of Dervish singing on the radio. I was very excited, pulled over, and ran into the nearest 7-11, saying to the counter kid "what're the call letters of the public radio station around 89 mhz?!?" Figured out it was the local public radio affiliate, that the program playing Dervish was locally produced but now airing on tape.

While in the coffee shop, I looked at the local excuse for an arts weekly, and was shocked and pleased to see that there was a listing for a "Celtic music session". Belatedly realized that said bi-monthly session was happening today, and that it was happening (finishing up) right now. Ran back to the car, drove like a bat out of a hell the few blocks to this coffeeshop, and sneaked into the back room, where there were a half-dozen people playing tunes out of loose-leaf binders: mostly song tunes and harp tunes.

Seven years later, Dharmonia and I own a house (the first we've ever owned) a block away, and the teaching session I founded in Indiana in 1993, and have taught in Lubbockl since 2000, is moving into a new home in this same back room.

One insight that growing older makes available is that the Big Wheel really does come full circle. I'm glad to be here.

To work!

Now playing when I hit "publish": Burning Spear, "Slavery Days"

"The Office" (Workstation Series) 03

[Early-morning triple-espresso vitamin-D edition]

First things first. Same neighborhood coffee shop.

I don't usually like working outside. Maybe it's partly because of being an Irish musician (a genus and species congenitally light-averse), or because of the potential distraction, or because, by 10am in W Texas it's already too warm to be easy to concentrate. Tough one today: when you're essentially off alcohol, two pints of microbrew at a going-away party the night before have enough hangover potential to make the early trip to the cross-trainer require more than usual effort.

View from outside table, west toward the park and the rich end of the neighborhood. There's a biorhythm to a neighborhood place like this: if you go every (or nearly every) day, you do start to notice other people's patterns, and how consistent they are: when the cops will come in for their takeaway espressos, when the retired arts types will come in for a leisurely read of USA Today, when (and for how long, and at what table) the poets will sit and transcribe from their notebooks or the artists sketch in theirs, when the off-for-the-summer high-school teachers and skateboarding punk-rockers will show up to sit outside and smoke American Spirits and play chess, when the alternative-waiters and family-subsidized artsy kids and coffee-swilling graduate students will come in, and where they'll sit, and what they'll say to each other.

That all sounds like I'm complaining or dispensing snark, and I'm really not: it's nice to live in a neighborhood in which there is at least a semblence of a street/arts culture and in which you can get to know names, faces, and personalities.

Tonight: weekly coffeehouse gig--this week blues solo, as the Usual Suspects are out of town.

On the docket for the day: going to take a 1- or 2-day pause from "100 Greats" posting: I'm not convinced that anything close one-a-day necessarily maintains quality--to say nothing of the fact that it's rather emotionally exhausting.

Instead, it'll be notes on these, for the long-term minstrelsy project:

Strasbaugh, John. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture. New York: Tarcher, 2006.

Not really a scholarly book, and not really offering tremendously new insights. He wants to argue that blackface, throughout all the epochs of American history (and in its earlier European Renaissance and medieval manifestations), cannot be simply understood as pure racist caricature. He ties blackface’s comedy, carnivalesque capacities, and culture-boundary-crossing to the larger issue of the “American experiment,” and to other creolizing impulses throughout our history. And, of course, he’s right: but it’s a point that has been made more meticulously and less derivatively already, by others, including especially Eric Lott and Rip Llamon.[1] In these respects, the book is rather like Wondrich’s Stomp and Swerve, another passionately-argued but analytically problematic text by a journalist which essentially takes others’ effective historical insights and popularizes them. However, it’s a quick read, he has a good range and a very accessible knack of expression. A good book to recommend to non-scholars who presume blackface is merely noxious caricature.

Also

Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows. Metuchen NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1980.

Sampson’s dissertation (currently not available in general publication). Haven’t delved deeply yet. But it, despite its relatively dated nature, this text seems to represent a particularly meticulous and comprehensive sourcebook on primary materials; a good corollary to Llamon’s much more recent text on the same topic.[2]

And

Mahar, William J. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Part of UIC’s excellent Music in American Life series, and one of the standard contemporary texts on minstrelsy. Very solid musicological scholarship, very detailed, beautifully (and expensively) produced. However, primarily deals with the pre-Civil War history of blackface troupes, and in particular the parodic European and light-classical sources of minstrel texts and theatrical entertainments. A useful source, but needs to be complemented and counterbalanced by Lott’s and Llamon’s work on street culture and African-American sources, and by Dale Cockrell’s seminal Demons of Disorder, on blackface’s earliest and ongoing thematic associations with carnival and class criticism.[3]

These join a number of other texts already informing the work.

[1] Specifically, Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip HopLove & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[2] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Street Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003).

[3] Cockrell. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

"100 Greats" #063: Various artists: National Geographic's Songs and Sounds of the Sea"

Several years back Dharmonia and I had the exterior of our little Cape Cod-styled house repainted (pretty severely out-of-place on the High Plains of West Texas, but it feels at least a little more familiar, and a little more peaceful and comforting, as a result). Part of the job, offered freely by our fantastic renovation specialist (who took a year to do the job, but went over every inch of the exterior, literally, with a little blowtorch and a 1-inch scraper, taking off every bit of every layer of the scabrous old paint), was to renovate the decrepit kitchen door. He asked me if we wanted a replacement for the pneumatic door-closer, or if an old-style spring attached to the door jamb was OK. I thought the old-school vibe of the spring suited the original date of the house (and those pneumatic openers never work right anyway), so I told him to go ahead. The very first time I went through that door after he was done, I unthinkingly let it swing shut behind me, and it banged home against the door frame. And I laughed aloud, saying to Dharmonia and Darryl, “I can hear my mother’s voice yelling ‘Don’t slam the screen door!’”

Sounds can do that. The cognition specialists say that smell is the sense that most strongly evokes the lobe governing memory—and certainly smells are powerful for me too—but for a musician, I think sounds might be even more powerfully evocative. I know that if I hear the first two or three notes of any of the records I went to school on—any of the “100 Greats” records, for instance—I can instantly recall not only all the songs on the disc, but virtually every aspect of the performances, live or studio, brilliant or error-ridden, and usually also the circumstances in which I first imprinted on the disc.

Not necessarily the first time I heard the record—but damned sure the circumstances in which I listened to it again and again. I hear the opening notes of Born to Run, and I am in that dorm room in the East Village in 1976; the opening notes of Albert King’s Live at Montreux, and I am in that little dusty house on the east side of Midland Texas in 1979 ; the opening notes of the Planxty Black album, and I am in that damp dirty basement apartment in Brookline Mass in 1981. It’s an invaluable skill for a musician, of course, particularly a musician who is interested in learning a vernacular music: Lester Young went to school on Jimmy Dorsey records; Charlie Parker went to school on Lester Young sides; Eric Dolphy went to school on Bird solos; I went to school on Eric’s records (of which my revered teacher David Baker said, inimitably, “I think Eric just heard that shit”—evidently, so did I). It’s an act not only of homage but also of intelligent education—there is no way to learn a vernacular music from sheet music: ideally, you learn it from a live musician-mentor; failing that (and ever since the 1890s at least), you can learn it from mentors on records. When cultivated intelligently and consistently, it becomes the aural equivalent of a photographic memory. Those with such memories are not necessarily remembering semantic content, I’m told: more commonly, they are able to recall a visual image of the text in question—and thus reproduce it. What I’m talking about, then, is the aural equivalent: a kind of phonographic memory.

My home town was founded in 1629 by a couple of reprobates ejected from the proper Puritan town of Salem Massachusetts (where they were shortly to get down to proper Puritan business, fanning religious hysteria and persecuting witches): thrown out, two of the town drunks floated across the harbor in a hogshead, and set up housekeeping in that same hogshead. A woods-and-granite natural peninsula sticking out into Massachusetts Bay, my home town had a long succession of blue-collar identities: sheep-herding ground, fishing settlement (and probably smugglers’ haven), shoe-manufacture town, Coast Guard encampment, and, latterly and disappointingly, yuppie bedroom community. It’s beautiful there now—the Zoning Board’s draconian restrictions have managed to maintain the 17^th century beauty of the old town—but I could neither afford nor stomach living there anymore.

But when I was a kid, it hadn’t yet been totally gentrified: there were still crusty old fishermen putting out of the harbor, families still ran lines of lobster-pots on licenses they’d held for 6 or 7 generations (and it was still a given fact in local lore that if you were caught stealing out of someone else’s pots, they could shoot you—it was that serious a crime), and, though no kid ever realizes it, the sense of history, some of the oldest European history in the New World, came up out of the cobblestones, off the clapboards of the old red- and white-painted houses near the harbor, and out of the stories that the old-timers, the houses, and the town’s own records told.

The original of the Spirit of ’76 hangs in the town hall, the headstones in the old cemetery reach back to the 1640s, and the foul-mouthed fishermen (and probably smugglers) in John Glover’s Continental Regiment not only helped win the battles of Princeton and Trenton for George Washington’s Continentals, but got Washington out of New York, and into New Jersey, thereby turning the tide of the American Revolution. And then at the end of their enlistments they went back home and signed on as privateers: they weren’t done with those fuckin’ Excise Commissioners, and they weren’t above turning a profit in a good cause, either.

I remember my home town.

The Fort on the northeast headlands of the harbor, whose guns had protected the USS Constitution (and, for that matter, the US Constitution) during the War of 1812, where my father ran the local arts festival, and where I once saw an outdoor high-school production of Arthur Miller’s Salem - as - McCarthyism parable The Crucible which is still the most terrifying theater I have ever seen (in that place, with that ground's history, when those delusional girls started screaming about seeing “spirits in the trees” that surrounded the stage, you believed them);

The park about halfway down the harbor, whose bluffs looked east over the water, to the peninsula where the rich folks lived (and past whose Newport-style summer mansions we’d drag-race), to the Atlantic ocean, and beyond, to the places over the sea from where, generations before, most of our families had come from—and where, one summer night, Pete Seeger docked his sloop Clearwater, and gave a concert as the brilliant white full moon rose behind him;

The inlet we kids all knew as Screaming Woman Cove, where popular legend had it that the ghost of a woman kidnapped by pirates, who had drowned herself to escape rape, still held sway;

The tavern that had belonged to “Black Joe” Brown, a Continental-era free man of color, in whose pond there was a venerable and legendary snapping turtle whose shell was bigger than a trash-can cover (but whose presence didn’t keep us from swimming in the summer and skating in the winter), and whose wife “Mammy” Creasie (in the ‘60s, we didn’t know that that appellation was no longer OK), had baked gigantic, long-lasting “Joe Frogger” gingerbread cookies which were prized by the town's codfishermen heading out for a summer on the Grand Banks;

Redd’s Pond, named after one of the poor women who was tortured and martyred during the Salem Witch hysteria of the 1690s, above which loomed the old cemetery where my brother-in-music Larry and I spent more than one spooky night playing tunes, and where the worn headstones around us were marked with the crude skull-or-bones mementi mori of the old Congregationalists;

The beach at the foot of my childhood street, where in winter we would ride sleds down from the steep hills, and where—if we weren’t careful—we’d wind up skidding off the road and right into the harbor—closely followed by my Black Labrador, who thought it was all a great game. But where, in summer, we could still harvest uncontaminated clams and mussels, and, with lobster from family pots and corn from roadside farm-stands, dig a pit and have a real clam-bake—and across whose mile-wide harbor, one year, as a challenge to myself, I swam.

Thus this record. Just as the slamming of a screen door in West Texas in takes me back to my home town around 1966, so the opening of this disc (now, sadly, long out of print and attaining all the more admiration for its unavailability), takes me back too.

It’s simply the sound of leather-shod feet walking on a wooden platform. But I know that sound, and its specifics, exactly what produces it, and it instantly takes me back 40 years: to the worn, sun-bleached, salt-encrusted docks of the Atlantic seaboard where I grew up. I can not only hear that sound—and remember all the thousands of times my own feet made it, as I walked down at midnight to board a local lobster boat, so we could be out on the beds in time for sunrise, after which it was legal to pull (your own) pots; or to climb aboard one of Fred Hood’s boats and help set the sails his loft made and that helped win the America’s Cup year after year; or (as a very small child) to climb onto the ferry, strapped up in a life jacket, for the ride out to the island where the YMCA ran a summer day camp.

In memory, I can see it and smell it too: the smell of that waterfront, a compound of seaweed, dead shellfish, and salt water—and the clean, clean smell of the Atlantic wind.

This record captures that, as much as any audio-only source can do. Recorded in 1973 on and around working sailing ships out of Vineyard Haven, off the coast of Massachusetts, it included what seems, in hindsight, an absolute dream-team of folk-revival players and singers (most of them in the early flowering of their young, hungry, visceral musical conceptions):

the fantastic “sea-songs” duo of John Roberts and Tony Barrand, two musicians (voice, concertina, fiddle, guitar) who between them were absolutely fundamental to the New England folk revival (and, in the person of the indefatigable Barrand, “Mother” of the Marlboro Morris Men and author of Six Fools and a Dancer, of the Morris revival as well);

from the studio, the Scottish/Irish supergroup The Boys of the Lough, at that time just beginning to crack open the North American market for the explosion of “Celtic” groups who would follow in the 1980s;

the great Joe Hickerson, a New Haven native and later folk-music archivist for the Library of Congress;

the indefatigable Lou Killen, born in Durham but emigrated to the States with the Clancy Brothers in the ‘60s, who brought the spirit and intensity of Ewan MacColl’s songs and political stance to North America;

and [also from the studio] the great banjo-player Michael Cooney, whose version of The Dreadnaught (which also shows up in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous), is a high point of the disk;

They sang shanties—forebitters and capstan shanties and “long-hauls” and short-drags and stamp-and-gos—and they played and danced hornpipes and polkas (favorite moment, “Oh, You New York Girls, Can’t You Dance the Polka?”), and they did it on-board ship. Those were the places that these songs and tunes were played and sung to make the work go faster, and you could tell the music was at home there.

The notes were good, as I recall, though at the age of 11 I didn’t really register the details, but I remember the photos in the elaborate National Geographic gatefold jacket as clear as yesterday: Roberts and Barrand with concertina and banjo in the foretop of a New England coal-bark, the whole crew of singers and players tailing onto and hauling away with the halyards the raised the mainsail. The interpolations between music (gulls, the sound of sheets flapping, waves slapping against a close-hauled heeling wooden hull) mesmerized me, because they were the sounds I heard around me on a daily basis (I still only register that I’m home when I hear the gulls in the morning)—they were the sounds of my childhood. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that this might have been one of the very first times I ever experienced the possibility that the sounds of my home town and of the “folk” musics I was just beginning to discover might actually emanate from—and belong in—the same place. I am indebted to this record for the realization of the astonishing creative resources that the history of my own home town, and the people of that history, might represent. One of whom is my brother.

My younger brother is one of the most manually talented people I have ever met: the ways in which he can visualize and then create objects of stunning physical beauty, usually on historical models, with nothing but his mind’s eye and a few hand tools, humbles me every time I witness it. He entered a museum-quality cabinet-making program at seventeen, built the Immigration Officers’ desks which were the focus of the Ellis Island memorial, and runs his own business making reproduction window sash, usually for Colonial and historical homes. And a couple of times—for fun—he built boats, based on the Nathaniel Herreshoff designs which were indigenous to our home town and transformed the craft of small-boat design.

He’s also much more of a New Englander than I am, I think: having lived his whole life there, and married a State-of-Mainer, he’s still got much more of the accent, vocabulary, and mannerisms. That's why I'm always surprised--and enormously gratified--when people can tell we’re brothers.

The harbor above which my parents live is widely regarded as the safest Atlantic anchorage for wind-powered sail north of Virginia. It was always a center for sailing trade: fish, rum, or the current debasement of ugly plastic yachts with stupid names which are a mark-of-status toy for a certain kind of greasy little yuppie. But it was also that harbor (and the tough sons-of-bitches who manned the cannon at its mouth) which saved the ass of the USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides”, from pursuit by two British frigates during the War of 1812.

Closed and secure to the East, South, and West, it’s vulnerable only in one direction: to the very infrequent, but very ferocious storms which blow, contrary to the Gulf winds and current, out of the Northeast, down from Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland beyond. In that kind of weather, we’ve learned to tape the windows, lock the shutters, and lay in canned food—especially in winter, you don’t want to be out in a Nor’easter.

But one winter we had one. My brother had built, entirely by hand and by eye, a beautiful 18-foot lapstrake rowing dory, based on a Herreshoff design he’d found in our local library (itself the only place in my home town I felt safe, the topic of another “100 Greats” post, and the place where I first heard this record). He had it anchored at my step-dad’s inherited mooring, near the base of the harbor, and had carefully weighted the anchor so that there was no possibility of it dragging and fetching up against the rocks of the beach.

But some of those greasy little yuppies with the bloated plastic boats didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, or were too lazy, or too busy making money, or too unaware of what North Shore weather can actually be like, to do the same. And at the height of the storm, when the temperature was 12 degrees below freezing and the sleet was pounding horizontally into my folks’ windows, and anyone with any brains had long since pulled or double-moored their boats, a couple of those yuppies’ pieces-of-shit dragged their anchors. And they blew down toward the granite-fanged rocks at the base of the harbor. And they took my brother’s dory with them. And they fetched up against the rocks, and they began pounding his boat to pieces.

As I was told the story, he ran down the wooden stairs from the house, and was barely prevented from diving into the surf to swim to his boat and haul it out of danger. It’s a measure of the man that I am absolutely confident that, had he not realized the boat was already flinders, he would have succeeded: he would have fought his way out through that below-freezing water and howling wind and saved his craft. I know it.

My step-father, who's cut from the same cloth, was a mine-disposal engineer in the Second War: he lived 14 months in a job where the life expectancy was six weeks, and he came home in one piece. He’s a calm, taciturn man: after those experiences, I guess you’d learn to be. He sailed his own boats for years, until chronic pain made it too risky and too frustrating.

Now, past 90, he navigates himself around my folks’ house in an office chair because he refuses to use a wheelchair. He still works in his garden when there’s not too much snow on the ground, and still watches the barometer and the sky, and can still, infallibly, predict the weather. And at least one last time, before that Nor’easter storm, my brother and step-dad had a summer's day on the water, just the two of them, in the boat my brother had built himself, according to the old old patterns.

Because that’s how they do—and have done, for the past 350 years—up where I come from.

This is a poem about them, and about my home:

These Wooded Hills

These wooded hills and rocky shores
are the
memory of my childhood;

whipped by salt Atlantic waves,
traced by crumbling dry stone walls;
marked by cowshit and the cry of gulls,

gouged by retreating glaciers of a last Ice Age;
and the faint whispering voices
of old wars, old words, old violence, old victories.

Granite, oak, slate, and pine;
topsoil's topography ripped away,


leaving the bones.

--cjs 12.23.02

This post is dedicated to my younger brother and to my step-father—the carpenter, and the combat vet—two self-reliant Down-Maine saltwater sailors and Yankee men-of-their-hands who I am proud to call family.