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Early afternoon. Rehearsal with La Portuaria at the Trastiendo club in the San Telmo district. They are well prepared. As well as a couple of their own songs we practice a couple of Talking Heads songs and, at the end of the rehearsal, there arrives a small (6 person) choir to sing the choir parts of "Road To Nowhere". It sounds incredible — I usually cut that part of the song if I perform it, as it is impossible to do without a bunch of singers — so this is a treat.
We finish rehearsal just as the Mexican and Argentine players enter the field for the World Cup match that will decide which of them continues to the final rounds. The entire city has stopped for the game. All the club and band technicians gather round the TV. The national hymns are sung and the players take the field. Diego drives me to my hotel — he’s not a big football fanatic — the streets are almost deserted. All shops and restaurants are closed except a few where televisions can be seen with clumps of people huddled in front. All worshipping at The Church of Football.
We stop at a sandwich shop for a late lunch. It is manned entirely by women, which might explain why it remains open — though there is a tiny TV sitting on the bar, which competes with the techno music. Diego mentions that he was in high school during the dictatorship. The world cup was here then — in ‘78 — and he says that some claim it was used as a screen for many to go missing and become disappeared. The government supported the event massively and used it as a clever way to disappear people when few were paying attention.
Most people were then, and even now remain, in partial denial, many claiming they saw or knew nothing — although many sensed that this was happening. As a high school student Diego went to visit some friends one day and no one answered the door. The house was vacant and remained so — later his father said maybe they were taken. There was a general feeling of paranoia — and for a high school kid the fear manifested in stuff that a typical school kid of that time might worry about — that if your hair was too long or if you got caught with a joint you might be picked up. Only the repercussions of being picked up were ominous. Everyone was careful, political talk was hushed. Gunshots could be heard on the streets at night — the military or police (often the same thing) doing business.
I myself remember paranoia in elementary school. It was the Cuban missile crisis and the level of fear must have been intense. I remember walking home from school in suburban Baltimore (I would have been in 5th grade maybe — 10 years old?) It might have been about a mile to my home through mostly old suburban neighborhoods of lawns and trees. I remember I could imagine the dark winged bombers coming overheard (Cuban bombers? Russians?) …and as I walked I planned my route to shelter, block by block. On this block I could make it to Dean’s house — it was just over there — then, a little further, my friend Ricky’s house would be a better bet. The way home had to be calculated, planned, measured.
Changing neighborhoods
Palermo, where we are having a sandwich now, used to be a quiet neighborhood with lots of pocket parks — which are still here. It got gentrified in the last few years and now it’s filled with clothing boutiques, chic eateries and bars. Diego recently moved out of his apartment across the plaza from this sandwich shop. The house is for sale. He asks what changes NY is going through — commenting that it now seems so clean. Same process — the artists and new arrivals seek apartments further out as the rising rents drive them out, away from the center. I comment that the resulting lack of concentration and mixing of people is ultimately detrimental to creation. Creation of all kinds. With young creative types now spread out over NJ, Bronx, Williamsburg, Red Hook and elsewhere it’s harder for a scene to gain traction…the city will end up like Hong Kong or Singapore — a vast gleaming business and shopping center.
We walk to my hotel — a few blocks. The streets are empty (football is still going on.) The rain has stopped. Diego asks about hip-hop. I reply that the beats and music are often incredibly innovative and sophisticated, but for the most part the lyrics are gangster crowing and put-downs of bitches. He brings up Baile Funk — the fairly recent Brazilian evolution of 808 beats, techno, hip-hop, and funk (though it’s more like being pummeled in a violently disorienting fairground ride than getting funky, in my opinion) — we agree it’s incredibly innovative and ridiculously extreme. Diego says the lyrics in the Brazilian case are violent and rough, but unlike hip-hop the words are usually from a victim’s POV.
Argentina just scored a goal — it's 2-1 Argentina — shouts go up from the hotel bar.
Now Argentina plays control-the-ball, beautifully, I hear.
15 minutes later — Argentina has won — the crowds in the club tonight are sure to be in good spirits.
They are. It’s a typically late show in Buenos Aires (12:30 start…maybe later.) I joined the band at the end of the set and the crowd was caught unawares. I flubbed some lyrics in the excitement, but the vibe was good. Got back to my hotel around 3AM and fell out, as we fly to Bariloche in the lake district of Patagonia tomorrow for the closing show of the festival de nieve.
I’ve been reading an Argentine guidebook alternating with Lolita. Nabakov’s hilarious descriptions of his darling Dolores Haze (what a perfect name), her mother and anyone who enters his view are perfect. The way he catches how one obsessed fixates on skin, the back of a neck, a goofy posture — “polyp-like lips” was part of a description of a neighbor of “Big Haze and Little Haze”.
Even his descriptions of the object of his obsession and desire are less than flattering — gum chewing, silly, and slightly awkward — but they still convey the perverse rose-colored view of one in love — love of a very special sort.
One of the funniest books I’ve ever read.
Denote refers to the literal thing. If one screams “fuck” when one makes a mistake is one denoting rough sexual intercourse? Not likely. To connote is to refer to qualities implied or suggested by that thing, but not the thing itself. In trying to apply the above example I am therefore lost — obviously we often use the F word solely for emphasis…as far as I know when one says, “that’s a big fucking tree” one does not imagine the tree engaged in sexual intercourse. So how did “qualities implied or suggested” by sexual intercourse become an intensifier, how did a word for sex become a word for adding emphasis?
Parallels
Here are some frames from Blind Spot — Hitler’s Secretary, that is pretty much one long contemporary interview with that woman. It is a wonderful example of how we humans can deceive ourselves, delude ourselves and blinker ourselves.
Now, of course, she realizes what she had willed herself not to see or admit, just as now many people (many less than previously) refuse to admit what the Bush admin is doing because the politicians and others push their buttons with words or national security, terrorists, democracy, small government…
Our ability to live in denial and hide from facts in front of our faces is obvious. I am thinking that it must have evolved out of a survival mechanism — some mental ability that helps one focus on the hunt, on courtship, on our children and on other ancient behaviors that are essential and absolutely necessary…necessary at the time that they are needed.
The fact that demagogues, advertisers, marketing experts and religious leaders have learned to tap into these powerful instincts is unfortunate, but maybe inevitable. In fact, since it is natural that we have these abilities, maybe it is also natural that they will be exploited and that some will become skilled at this exploitation.
However, as powerful and irresistible as these buzzwords are, it is possible to resist them and be aware when they are being employed — employed for better or worse. And then to make a decision whether one wants to be manipulated or self-deluded, or not. There are times when a certain amount of self delusion is “good”, when it allows us to accomplish a necessary task, create something unlikely or new, or even speak out — and in those cases it might be deemed worthy.
E.B. White, Death and Hope
Read E.B. White’s skinny little book This Is New York. It was written in 1948 as an assignment for Holiday magazine — I’m not sure travel and leisure mags would accept a piece like this these days — it concludes with some very prescient meditations on death and war.
When he wrote this piece, a few years after WWII, the UN building was either just completed or was being built. He points out that after that war all cities, New York being a prime example, were opportunities for massive carnage and destruction on a scale not hitherto imagined:
"A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages, cremate the millions."
Cities once were secure refuges for people — whether walled like the Medieval ones or not — they were places where people met, haggled and were to a degree protected. Now, with the atomic bomb especially, the protection part has been turned upside down.
But he notes that just as this shadow begins to loom over great mixtures of humanity like New York, an institution, the UN, rises to attempt to put an end to this threat. Death and hope, simultaneously, as always.
That the U.S. has clearly and brazenly taken an anti-UN stance in recent years — failed to pay their bills and has acted in defiance of UN resolutions and principles is a bad sign. The U.S. are not the only ones to have done so, but being the biggest kid on the block, it’s the most obvious, visible and ominous. It sends a sign to all the other kids that this kind of behavior is OK. A sign that death is sometimes more powerful than hope, temporarily. The UN is far from perfect — self interested parties and nations skew its abilities to perform its mission, its members are human — but the fact that that a little ray of hope still exists and it is unavailable to corporate lobbyists, religious demagogues and crooked election rigging is something.
Heard Chinua Achebe, the African author of Things Fall Apart, speak with Uche Okeke, the African modernist artist, at Newark Museum. Here’s a drawing by Okeke. 
Pretty contemporary looking, eh? It was done in the late 50s or early 60s. Okeke collaborated with Achebe on an illustrated edition of the famous book — and there is a small show of his work at the museum.
The photographer Phyllis Galembo told me about this talk — it became an excuse to read Things Fall Apart, which had been on my bookshelf for decades. I’m glad I finally read it. “The Empire Writes Back” is a Salman Rushdie quote, referring to the wave of writers in former colonial countries that are now part of the literary global mix. Achebe’s book was a prescient antecedent to all of those.
The book is incredible. It came out in 1958, and along with Amos Tutuola’s books (My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was his second one) heralded the arrival of uniquely African literature. Tutuola’s books are fantastic and surreal, but Achebe went for something quite different. He saw Africans abandoning their own culture and he wanted to point out that there was something valuable there before it was all gone, before it was too late. The colonial powers had convinced most Africans that African culture was inferior, and that to engage the modern world one should adopt European models. Sounds like the era of globalization, no? Achebe describes this in beautiful language and through a story that is tragic but not didactic. The African characters often speak in proverbs — “proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten” — so there is a metaphorical and even musical tone to the whole story.
The story begins with a man in a traditional Ibo village (southern Nigeria), describes a few years in his life, and that of the villagers, before the arrival of whites. Then, in what would be considered the 3rd act of the book, missionaries begin to arrive, in ones and twos, seemingly harmlessly. They challenge the local beliefs and customs, not through aggressive force or conquest, but slowly, subtly, overturning “superstitions” and even showing a kind of tolerance. (Of course it is a kind of passive aggressive tolerance — a kind of psychological warfare that gives no ground — tolerance as a destructive force). Eventually, they gain some converts and increase in numbers — numbers who are backed by the law of the distant white government — the district commissioners. From these sometimes innocuous and often well-intentioned interventions things do indeed fall apart.
At the Newark Museum the Africans, 2 men and 3 women, sat on the stage, a white woman moderated. The Africans all wore traditional robes and head wraps or coverings, which made a colorful and regal impression. Their body language was slightly reserved, dignified, calm and relaxed. When the men spoke they spoke slowly, deliberately, as if they were talking to people they knew.
Achebe at his teaching post at Bard.
In Africa and elsewhere, anthropology, and archeology especially, are European ways of separating a people’s history and culture from those who are still living. Sometimes science destroys the thing it seeks to examine and understand. Like young boys, we will understand our toys when they lie scattered in bits around us. For Africans though, archeology IS their history. In Achebe’s words, the establishing of museums in Nigeria that began to display the works of the great African civilizations “confirmed what we already knew — that we were human”.
Implicit in his statement is that colonialism had dehumanized the cultures that it had touched.
He made a statement near the end of the evening that had relevance for me. He said the “emperor” prefers that artists and writers and musicians relegate themselves to making beautiful things. The “emperor” says that the arts and politics should not mix, that political decisions should be left to the politicians. But Achebe implies that all art is political — even if, like the emperor approved work, it denies being anything but beautiful. That too is a political statement and a decision. To not act, not to not include part of life in one’s work is to leave it to the politicians.
That, to me, does not mean that I should write a bunch of rabble-rousing songs — though I might if I thought I could — but rather that every creation implies a worldview, a social context and resonates meanings beyond what it objectively is. I think we feel and sense all this, all these layers of meaning, without consciously bearing this moral and social weight. A song can be light but deep — that’s part of why we like them. As animals that is what we have evolved to be — beings that can sense the subtle meanings and repercussions of things. We have evolved to read intention, deceit, love and tenderness in faces, but we also see, read and hear music and everything else with the same mental and emotional acuity. But I’m getting off the track.
“Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter”. Achebe was instrumental in beginning to redress the balance of stories. Interesting that the Rushdie quote puns on both Star Wars and the postal service. Achebe says in his book Home and Exile that the British established the Royal Mail as an early and integral part of their colonial enterprise. The British were proud of its reach and organization, and Achebe remembers as a child the rumbling Royal Mail truck that would visit every little African village — the symbol of a far reaching global network and distant power. An Internet of paper. The British must have sensed that communication, in this case the Royal Mail, facilitated control – though they probably believed they were nobly bringing enlightenment to the “savages”. But like much else, communication is 2-way. What might have been established as a means of facilitating a European order in far-flung lands also became a way for the inhabitants of those lands to talk back. When I connect to you, you become connected to me. The writing back may have taken decades and not taken off until after independence, but the floodgates were opened.
The Internet, our modern parallel, is mainly managed and controlled by America and American companies. Yes, the communication is not one way, but structurally and philosophically it emanates from North America. I suspect that, like these writers, once the lion has a chance to tell his story many things will change.
Rode my bike to the beach by following a bike path along the Torrens River that runs through Adelaide. I was told it’s a 10km trip following this winding route, which took about 45 minutes each way. It’s shorter if one takes the road, but this is more peaceful. The path winds through eucalyptus groves (gum trees they are called here) and there are magpies and pelicans hanging out.
The trees eventually begin to disappear and the river empties into the sea. This was a Sunday, it was hot, but there were only 6 people on this part of the beach.
A bit further north in the town of Charles Sturt there were cafes and restaurants overlooking the beach. I had a beer, some calamari and assorted dips, then headed back to practice guitar and went to the venue for yet another tech check (the Australians are careful, so I’m told.)
The sold-out PowerPoint talk goes well. Some of the slides (Hamlet as a PowerPoint-style slide turning the famous monologue into a list of pros and cons — to be, or not to be — etc.) get big laughs, no credit to me — I just found them online. The talk has a little arc to it now — it starts off with some jokes, then gets serious for a bit, then winds up with the PowerPoint sent to me from the space station, which is also amusing. It’s becoming an example of my proposal that presentations are a form of theater.
Some of the crew has arrived in town today and in spite of their jet lag they’re up for the festival’s party in a hotel walking distance from this venue. An attractive woman with bangs that cover the top half of her face delivers some “gossip rap” about celebs and their diet problems — accompanied by slides of Oprah and Brittney. I discover a bucket of oysters on a table (a bucket!) and not having had dinner I park myself there and suck down a few.
Reading The Selfish Gene, the Richard Dawkins book about how things that often appear to have a “purpose” in fact are merely arriving at an evolutionarily stable strategy. It’s a relatively early classic in this field and he has added loads of footnotes apologizing for mistakes in the first edition and his past overprosyletizing.
Some amusing bits:
• The Virgin Mary was never a virgin in the original Hebrew version — she was simply a young woman. It was the much later (mis)translation by Matthew into Greek that changed the word and hence “improved” the story. In English it would be sort of as if young woman became maiden, which someone then assumed meant virgin. I would suspect that this change in a word made the myth, the legend, more amazing, cosmic and profound. The story got embellished in retelling, as stories do. Hollywood would say it have been given a “polish”.
• Not only does the female mantis often eat her husband after he’s mated with her, she sometimes bites his head off ahead of time. It seems he performs better without a head. Ladies, take note. Talk about thinking with your dick!
Dawkins now is hosting a TV series in the UK that “proves” most religions are bunk. You’d never see a show like that in the U.S.
Saw another French group at Joe’s — CQMD (Ceux Qui Marche Debout). A funky brass band obviously inspired by the New Orleans grooves and bands, but also by James Brown, Charles Brown (they did a Go-Go cover) and others. Vocals mostly chanted by a host of the players led by a young mulatta who resembled a more athletic Josephine Baker. Incredible grooves, tighter, I would bet, than many of their New Orleans models… but not rigid, as white people can often be when they do this — this group has a mighty swing.
It made me think they will certainly be seen through the lens of reverse discrimination here — they will not be appreciated or written about because the are not black. The same goes for black rock groups, black classical composers, etc it goes without saying.
Saw a play last night — Hurlyburly — a revival of a David Rabe play about a bunch of guys and gals on the fringes of the movie scene in LA — it’s basically a vortex of bullshit and self-delusion, fueled by drugs, anger, sex and more drugs. The writing, poetic speeches full of narcissism, backstabbing and sheer lunacy, was often oddly beautiful.
Went by a talk by Adrian LeBlanc, the writer of Random Family, a book I read recently. She’d spent 10+ years with an extended Puerto Rican family, including boyfriends, step parents, etc… and her book details rough lives in the South Bronx and the various poverty-inspired tragedies — with the characters often ending up in jail — women and men both.
She basically lived with these people during that time, and the writing describes every sordid, loving, hopeful, happy and fucked-up detail of their lives… except the presence of the writer. One gets a deep sense of each person, their connections to each other and what motivates them to behave in ways that white middle class folks might objectively view as self-destructive or mean. We see them as human beings, in other words, not as examples, news stories or statistics.
But her deep involvement brought up lots of serious journalistic issues, which she and her editor and a collaborator tried to address. She mentioned that as she got sucked into the Bronx world, more and more her downtown life began to shrink, until eventually she had no “personal” life at all. At the rare dinner party with downtown friends she would be assaulted with questions as if she had just returned from some strange planet. Her friends and others wanted amazing stories, which there were in abundance, but Le Blanc felt these were cheapening and betraying the humanity of her uptown friends, and eventually she just kept quiet about her uptown life.
When she did eventually realize it was time to put the stories down into words it was extremely difficult for her at first. She’d lost the gift of seeing the uptown world as an outsider — she was seeing it as its inhabitants did, more or less. So when she began to write she left lots of stuff out. Her editor, however, began to prod, through conversations and meetings, and the details began to emerge.
These deeply immersive journalists realized they often ignored or denied seeing lots of things. At one point one of them attended an uptown family party with a photographer in tow… a party at which some kids were maliciously teased by their grandfather. Teasing that led eventually to violence and humiliation. The writer took it all in stride, denying the violence and remembering only sort of rough horseplay. But then later the photographer said, “no, look at my pictures… this was violent and cruel, you're just too close to it.”
Only when confronted by the photographs did the journalist realize what she’d witnessed.
Oddly, the reaction from the book's subjects was, “you didn’t tell enough, you left out some of the craziest shit” …which apparently was partly true. It was decided that the intended readers would lose all sympathy for some of the characters if all of their behavior were described. Without long and detailed descriptions of context it was just too hard for downtowners, for example, to understand why an incarcerated man had to have new Nikes etc. when his wife or girlfriend could barely feed her kids. It just made him seem cruel and unfeeling, which he was apparently not. It seems shoes are so crucial in jail to his place in the world, in society, that it almost became a matter of life and death.
Been reading Stasiland, a book by an Australian journalist stationed in former East Germany who investigates personal stories involving the notorious agency.
Her perceptions are wonderful — she spots the bizarre and oppressive not only in the detaining, spying on individuals and unexplained deaths, but in things like a weird sexless popular dance (the Lipsi) that the government attempted to insert into popular culture as a kind of immunization against Elvis' rock and roll gyrations.
There were massive "files" that consisted of jars of smells of suspected subversives. Jars filled with scraps of clothing, preferably underwear, that had been secretly procured. In some cases if clothing could not be found an agent would wipe the seat where a suspect had been seated and preserve the rag, labeling it by name of suspect and how long he or she had been seated on said chair.
It goes on... there's a beautiful Kafkaesque scene where a woman, denied employment for suspect activities is called in:
"Why don't you have a job?"
"YOU tell me."
"You’re a smart woman, surely you can find employment."
"No, I am unemployed."
"That can't be; there is no unemployment in the people’s republic…"
Went to see I (heart) Huckabees last night. A Brazilian woman seated a couple of seats over saw our show in São Paulo. She pulled out her camera and took my picture before the movie started.
Nonesuch does want to do another record with me. We are also in discussions with them about re-releasing the My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts record through them in North America.
David W. and I talk about music biz models fairly often, like a lot of us do, I imagine. The traditional model seems to not work anymore. We noticed that in the last year I made a lot more money on my little soundtrack through Thrill Jockey than I will ever see from Nonesuch. Granted, Nonesuch gave me an advance that allowed me to pay a producer and the cost of string players etc., and on the soundtrack that was paid for by the film... but this kind of alt model might be the future. Or one possible future.
I also think that acts will need to be self-sufficient live, and good performers. Lip-synchers will need to put on a good visual show or give up.
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