6.25 Summer's Day

25 June 2020. Summer's Day.

It really is summer--not the intense sun you get when it's hot, but an evenly filtered warmth all through the air--quiet, too, just like last spring. Doesn't seem it's over, this year--the seasons are continuous, gauged against that date in March when the quarantine began. No one called it that then--"shelter in place" was the official phrase, a pretended kindness--you try to imagine who came up with it, wanting to avoid something more technical or technically threatening. But after a while, even the die-hards tired of its smarm, and we all reverted to something more medieval and appropriate. Not quite Luís Buñuel (Exterminating Angel) but neither so prosaic as General Hospital. So quarantine it was...

And then it stopped, and we reopened. Words, really--and a few clumsy and confusing civic directives. But businesses truly were suffering--still are, of course--the new Lebanese place on Solano, Chez Monsour, with the facade of the old Britt-Marie repainted so carefully. I walked by late yesterday and a couple of the tables had been moved out into the street--a small quadrangle of two parking spaces roped off with barrels at the corners. So well-intentioned and hopeful. But no one present, just the forlorn refuse container with poly liner there in the corner by the sidewalk.

What do the deer make of all this? Noor yesterday told of how she's noted their renewed patience. And described a flock of wild turkeys who'd commandeered an entire lane on San P{ablo Avenue, cars diverting to give them clearance. The turkeys knew what was up--moved in when the time was right. No automatic weapons, though...

6.21 Ynot as Tu Fu

21 June 2020. Ynot as Tu Fu.

Only in the sense of the journey, which is at night, a sparse moon set hours ago, and still we can't rest. I meet him there, after a road tipped askew down cliffs, he's become a friend, and I wonder after his well being. What that might mean, really, in this time since we both left the Palace Ministries. The precincts of the capital overrun, he made his way north, the family by some miracle surviving there. A friend took him in, the children were given food. But now we're in  the west--frontiers and borderlands, where strange armies roam wide, and the banners of war fly over every valley. Crossing mountains to the south, in flight--roads carved into the sides of cliffs. And now the moon has set, our thousand fears at that ferry...

Yes, it's always a boat--elegant and fragile--the long boards pegged together, following the curve of the wood. The boatman sang-out, laughing at seething waves. An outrigger sailing canoe, just half completed, and then the letter arrived announcing another journey, also far to the south...

A theater stage by the ocean. Set up with chairs looking back towards the bluffs. Friends and family in attendance, listening. Gene Price, afterwards, his encouragement for a vision of hope. 

A waterfall of light, yes, light poured out of his eyes...

____

After reading Tu Fu's River-Swarm Crossing, translated by David Hinton.

Notes: The outrigger--a boat--building project I'd undertaken when I was fifteen. The letter--announcing an American Field Service scholarship to spend a year in Argentina. A theater stage--the band shell at the beach side stadium in Oceanside, California, where I gave the valedictorian address to the Class of1963. Gene Price--a close friend of my parents, he'd studied to be a concert pianist. I valued his articulate presence...
  

6.19 Fisk Jubilee Singers

19 June 2020. Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Fisk School, one of a handful of Southern colleges founded soon after the Civil War, took on the challenge of providing an educational setting for  Black Americans who'd never had never had that possibility in times of slavery. ("The first stuydents ranged in age from seven to seventy, but shared common experiences of slavery and poverty...") A private missionary effort, finances for the endeavor were constantly a problem--but perhaps a choral group could be organized to perform and raise funds? The idea took off, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers have been with us ever since.

Their repertory included spirituals and other songs from the South--but for the first time the performers were Black Americans themselves, rather than their blackface caricatures (generally white performers) in minstrel shows. In other words, they sang the songs as they knew them--as they'd lived them. This made their versions distinct--and proved invaluable to the story of American popular music.

They Fisk Jubilee Singers also made some of the first recordings of this material. Take Swing Low Sweet Chariot, for example--a song we all grew up with and might think of as timeless. But in fact we have it in the form we do because the Fisk Jubilee Singers put it on a record in 1909.

There was no doubt some idealizing along the way (the group even performed a number of Stephen Foster tunes) and since audiences for their touring shows were drawn from the population as a whole, the songs were no doubt rounded off a bit--generalized, made appealing (think of Harry Belafonte's calypso for listeners who knew nothing of life in Jamaica.) But that always happens with popular music--that's why  it's popular! And in any case, what the Fisk Jubilee Singers brought us--that they made these songs a part of American life--remains a gift, ongoing.

______

The name Jubilee was chosen to reflect the Jubilee Year in the Hebrew Bible--a time of release--including the forgiveness of debt and the liberation of servants and slaves--along with a general increase of righteousness in the world...

___

Note: Fisk's "The first students ranged in age from seven to seventy, but shared the common expewriences of slavery and poverty--and an extraordinaery thirst for learniung."


Note on the rounding off process. Listen to a song like Oh Mary Don't You Weep, first recorded by the Fisk Singers in 1915 in an engaging uptempo version--one which no doubt inspired later recordings such as the Swan Silvertones in 1958,  and soon enough, in a more-generalized-for-everyone treatment, became a standard in the folk revival (Pete Seeger taught whole auditoriums to sing along, often in harmony.) But at the same time there was a parallel church gospel version--incantatoryy, almost a different song--Aretha Franklin's in 1962 is a compelling example--or a more recent recording by the gospel group Trinitry 5:7. To my ear, at least, it's in  these "church" versions that we get hints of what the song originally sounded like--and what it meant in the world it came from. But more on this in another post...)

6.15 At Jack's

15 June 2020. At Jack's.

That's what we always said, regardless of who might be there. Always an old-school (old country) kind of welcome--something about the paintings, the worn furrniture, the casual seriousness--anticipation--of ideas and conversation, camaraderie. And music, of course, Jack and Klara sitting together on the couch late one evening--probably midnight--maybe even holding hands. The song was something Russian--or maybe Goodnight Irene. He'd balked at the way I did it, years ago--Jack could be a stickler for getting things right--but by now we'd grown used to these varieties and variations together--and what was important (always) was a place for a certain quality of feeling.

I connected this with the Russians, of course--having grown up with a measure of it as a boy. The evenings with my father's friends (Uncle Howard, Uncle Jimmy) gathered around the low rattan couch table in the living room, glasses of scotch, a tray of rye bread hors d'oeuvres prepared with his special avocado and anchovy... All of them people I loved so very much without even knowing why...

I'm saying that a lot lately. "Without even knowing why..." As in the drawing here--Zoya and Klara, with me alongside. There's someone to the right--just the hands--and we're listening, attentively. That's the point--we're listening...

My love for all of them as well...
_____

Note: It's a pretty accurate drawing, which makes me happy. Missing Zoya's ancient hands--maybe that's okay. She'd have preferred it this way. But it has Klara's smile. And somehow I look like they've pulled me out off one of those early Renoir's, there on the balcony over the river...

6.15 Concertina on Miramar ++

13 June 2020. Concertina on Miramar.

It’s soon after we've done our three songs--the pattern, since mid-March. Always a surprise to my more impulsive self—hey, three songs is just getting going--but music is shared, and my cohort is strangely rigorous on this point. It's a neuekoronafest, after all. We gather at the other end of the block--near Capistrano, sunny at 6pm, the appointed time. Csilla and John sometimes come out with little Andros--barely a year old, but his tiny man-like stance still comes as a surprise. The way he looks on, too--a part of the circle…

Right after, everyone's headed back to their respective lairs, so I turn towards my own end of the block. No longer bound by melodies borrowed from Beatles (Let It Be has turned into Dr. Fauci), which I've actually enjoyed, being what, say half a century behind the times? And Tanya and Dave (our principles) are quite good melodists, so they keep my on my toes. "A new challenge" would be the operative phrase--they say it's good for you.

The fact is, Burt Bacharach (What the World Needs Now) is something I'm delighted to have learned. Always associated it (much too easily) with its mood music versions. And Bill Withers' Lean on Me (thank you, Tanya)—it just doesn't get better...

So, I walk along, continuing to play, but as I get closer to home, it's the Russian songs that re-emerge. Left them too long ago, maybe eternally. Always forget the way they're a part of me. Like the snow-flurry arpeggios at the beginning of Stary Klën (in the Soviet film, Devchata)--played on a garmon, the Russian accordion--and then the voices of tiny Nadezhda Rumiantzeva and her beau, Nikolai Rybnikov, walking together in the snow. We're somewhere in the Russian hinterland--a Soviet logging camp--and the set is a total concoction, but that's part of the charm--also essentially Russian... I don't know what this means, really—that is, I could never explain it. But it all goes straight to my heart…
_____

I think of Klara, and her mother, dear Zoya--both from Moscow. Those evenings together, at Jack's--they made these songs possible. (I’d walk in, see dear Klara's beaming face, then make my way across the hall to Zoya's room--tiny, ancient--but her smile, when we see each other--so beautiful.)

I've been an imperfect friend. How is this possible? How is this now not possible? Reach out while we can...

6.12 Peter and Chuck Berry (2)

11 June 2020. Peter and Chuck Berry.

It's not really a question of top billing, but I did like being able to put Peter's name first. And in any case, the lead act at the time was Joan Jet and the Blackhearts. The concert took place at San Diego's Jack Murphy Stadium, in May 1982. By the look of the photographs, it was a full house. Chuck Berry at that point was touring with pick-up bands, and for some reason the keyboard player had bowed out--so they tapped Peter to replace him. I always wondered how he did it--not through any lack of musicianship, certainly--and everyone knew Chuck Berry's songs, the audience included--but still, looking out over that sea of faces, you've got to feel the weight of moment...

Now why wasn't I there? In retrospect, it seems impossible--but life's concatenations had taken me on other paths, and Maybelline was very far from the center of my being. Probably pretty far from Peter's, too, by then--he was writing and playing his own songs--but Chuck Berry was the fount--ground zero--he'd set them all in motion.

The whole thing came together at the last minute--no sound check, no rehersal--and as Peter waited to come onto stage, he asked the bass player what key they'd start in. "Don't worry man, they're all in C..." That was Chuck Berry's way--make it do-able. Keep it easy. And no matter what, he knew that from the first notes, the crowd would be right there with him.

I always liked the scene here--we used the photo for the liner of Raining in the Heartland, the commemorative CD Peter's musician pals recorded after he was gone. Chuck Berry, leaning over the piano with every bit of that taut ambiguity that made him so electric. And Peter? Well, beautifully himself--solid, composed, the hat just right (Thelonious Monk in the wings, too...) Makes me realize that there's an element of zen here--if that's what we want to call it. Inwardness, even with all the crowd. And a strange devotion to tradition, too. A raucous tradition...

I saw this again on the night of the memorial at the Belly Up. The way his musician friends reached for the maximum intensity in each song. Like a wake--no holding back. Make 'em loud--that's what we do. It's Rock 'n' roll...

____

Story from my mother about the two of us (Peter and me) still in the play pen. Apparently when I was ready to get out, I just climbed over the bars. Peter, however, continued sitting--in concentration, it seemed--until finally, when his turn came,  he reached forward with both hands, pried the bars apart, and crawled to freedom...

test

6.8 Monk Plays Oceanside

8 June 2020. Monk Plays Oceanside.

The first time around with this--maybe 1997—much more playful. The sly thrill of just being able to conjoin the two—Monk and the Beachside Stadium, or thereabouts. Which never happened, of course—that corrosion of salt air. Concrete bleachers and rusting metal. But I remembered it again today, needing something much less distinct, something full of wandering, if only in the line.

I should never have let it go—the painting, that is—like letting go a part of myself. Maybe because it was connected with Peter—the loss, regret. But also a kind of honesty, which increases over time. Vision of him standing by the barbecue, when C’s family visited, looking up and smiling—that Peter smile. She has it in a special frame, needs a little repair. He was tending steaks—a venerable task—you could see he enjoyed it. Not just the cooking, but the being part of things…

Monk’s face as he plays, eyes rolled upwards into his head—drunken but not from alcohol. That inner state he taught us, but with flat thumbs and a defiant smash. Hard to understand, from such a distance, what that meant—that absolutely full-bodied intensity, foot pumping the pedals, on and off the floor, almost leaping…

Set here against the Buena Vista lagoon, blurring towards the ocean. Late afternoon, sometime in the fall. That smokey light, with whatever’s left of the sun half-disappearing into mist. Very still. Tells you you’re home.

6.7 3rd shot +57

6.7 Taking the Knee (2nd shot)

7 June 2020. Taking the Knee.

I resist the phrase--the way the culture so easily recapitulates itself for commercial purpose (in this case the media)--but the act itself is too important--and shows in the image, no matter what we call it. And in any case, major league football is big-time business, so who could expect otherwise? However, everyone in this line-up is doubly valent--each player a part of the group--that's implicit--and at the same time an individual. That is, you see the meaning of this moment expressed on their faces--in their postures as well. For each one of them...

Can we read this? What's seen on each face? And how does someone like me (a white boy) show it? I think of Winslow Homer--his indelible painting, Gulf Stream--with the figure of the Black Man lying stretched across the deck of a de-masted sailboat--the sea roiled with sharks (there's even some red in the water) and far in the distance, a sailing ship that will almost certainly never spot him. Doomed. But still, Homer treats the man's face with dignity--even if there's a great deal of anger in his resolve. A lost sailor? A shipwreck? An escaped slave? The date of the painting is 1899, so we're 30 years after the Civil War--and who knows how literally we should take this thought--but viewed as "unrecognized guilt" (thank you, Charles)--at least on Homer's part-- we have a point of entry...

How different with the faces of the football players. Their resolve shows not so much anger as hope--in the same way The Star Spangled Banner can almost inevitably bring out something of this feeling--the way the heart lifts at its first strains, even when we know better...

And why not-- they should  have hope--they've been taught to win... Will teach us how to win, too...

6.7 Taking the Knee

7 June 2020. Taking the Knee.

I resist the phrase--the way the culture so easily recapitulates itself for commercial purpose (in this case the media)--but the act itself is too important--and shows in the image, no matter what we call it. And in any case, major league football is big-time business, so who could expect otherwise? However, everyone in this line-up is doubly valent--each player a part of the group--that's implicit--and at the same time an individual. That is, you see the meaning of this moment expressed on their faces--in their postures as well. For each one of them...

Can we read this? What's seen on each face? And how does someone like me (a white boy) show it? I think of Winslow Homer--his indelible painting, Gulf Stream--with the figure of the Black Man lying stretched across the deck of a de-masted sailboat--the sea roiled with sharks (there's even some red in the water) and far in the distance, a sailing ship that will almost certainly never spot him. Doomed. But still, Homer treats the man's face with dignity--even if there's a great deal of anger in his resolve. A lost sailor? A shipwreck? An escaped slave? The date of the painting is 1899, so we're 30 years after the Civil War--and who knows how literally we should take this thought--but viewed as "unrecognized guilt" (thank you, Charles)--at least on Homer's part-- we have a point of entry...

How different with the faces of the football players. Their resolve shows not so much anger as hope--in the same way The Star Spangled Banner can almost inevitably bring out something of this feeling--the way the heart lifts at its first strains, even when we know better...

And why not-- they should  have hope--they've been taught to win... Will teach us how to win, too...

3.30 Out of Africa (from March)

30 March 2020. Out of Africa.

Isak Dinesen—but it’s also B, of course, and Cinde as well. I see them all here. Or maybe that each of them appear as I make the drawing--each line its own kind of remembering. We know the shapes from what we’ve touched—or from what’s touched us. It works both ways. So that the first caress (too extreme a word, but it has face a root. Cara. We wonder at the sound…) To touch someone’s cheek, very lightly, hand in a palm, turned so that it’s with just the back of the fingers. Who would try to describe this, when?

Alongside is Lulu—out at the edge of the grass. On a farm in central Africa, below the Ngong Hills. Magical name. A coffee farm, high up on a plateau. She describes this beautifully, locates us, as she must have felt, looking out into the distance, the African air…

Lulu, a forest antelope (bushbuck in the book.) A small deer-like creature, so delicate and graceful that she’s accorded the rights of a princess. But somewhere all girls have this. A total grace…
____

Africa. The Rastafari love the word—gives meaning to all…

_____

We’re reading the book together. That is, C reads it to me, each evening now. Beautifully. It’s maybe her very favorite, from years ago. I know she feels close to Isak Dinesen—it’s a pleasure to see her this way, makes me wonder (marvel) at the connection…

Rebecca at the well…

6.5 Cinde's Prairie

5 June 2020. Cinde's Prairie.

And pretty close to what she requested, after my suggestion that we make her a place on the prairie..."With some sheep," she said, smiling, adding with delight, "...and some small ponies... And maybe some rabbits..." These wishes being so genuine, who could not grant them? And quite in line with the tenor of the times--her view that animals could be kinder than  people. Not always, of course--for there's Jimmy the contrarian, right alongside. Would he prove a good shepherd? Well, that remains to be seen--he may well have something else on his mind today...

Nevertheless, it all fits in with stories past, even when we barely know them. The first and second bottomland, there near the Sappa. Beaver City, with Uncle Dale half-way up the ladder of a windmill, still fixing them at 80. And Aunt Twyla, with a hand so steady that when a letter arrives it looks as if she could still be sitting at a sloping wooden desk in the one-room school...

Dorothy got out quick--not the she didn't carry the memories along inside. Put on her good dress and jumped over the creek--but she still knew from chickens, and when she'd say to me, "You're just a city boy..." I was quick to acknowledge her expertise in the matter. Usually having to do with common sense more than prejudice--although she did like a good steak...

Even Janet retains some of the diction. "We just did the warsh," with that Nebraska "r" tucked in--or  the disappearing "l" in a glass of  miwlk... But these are small matters, odds and ends, you can leave them on a hook in the mudroom when you take off your boots...

_____

I flew over once, it was one of those New York to San Francisco flights, with that endless and ever-extended evening light as you gradually make your way west. Looking out the window onto a golden-gray-brown expanse--you could almost see the curvature of the earth--through five miles of mist-filled late-summer air, and somewhere down there, judging from the map, a place I felt I almost knew...

6.4 Nymph and Shepherd

4 June 2020. Nymph and Shepherd.

Precisely in that interval between art and life, and just yesterday--I could hardly believe I was witness--a young deer, over by the back fence, up on her hind legs, reaching for new leaves on the ivy. An image I'd seen so many times over the years--but always in a painting, Titian's Nymph and Shepherd. A very late work--one of those rough, open-ended canvasses--among my very favorites--I'd found it in a catalogue picked up at one of the used bookstores in downtown Oakland, nearby the old studio--so that would have been in the early 1980's. Reproduced in black and white, from an obscure picture gallery somewhere in Hungary. At least that's how I remember it.

Which is how it was then--knowledge of such things being hard to come by. Inadvertent. Happenstance.  Even the museum obscure. Whereas today images of paintings are so readily available--there's even a Wikipedia article on this one, listed as being in the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm Collection, now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, with an accurate color reproduction showing all of Titian's subtle warm-cool tonalities.

When I first found the painting, even in black and white, I already sensed it was crucial. Came at the time I was looking at a lot of Titian--as a kind of guide-- the way he let the painting itself precede the drawing--the massing of form rather than the Florentine outline. That Venitian sensibility--color over linear edge. (Which may seem funny, today, since I've allowed myself to return so much to line in these drawings--but the malerische is in there too--hidden away in all the erasures and pauses...you can see this especially when they're enlarged, becoming a kind of autobiography.)

The meaning of Titian's painting became apparent as well--or at least the way I understood it. Two young figures, shepherd and nymph, reclining in the foreground, music, love--while close behind,  buttressed on a slope, a broken tree. Just one living branch--and reaching up to seize it, the figure of a deer. (I'd say young stag from the look of his male appurtenances.) I would have been in my mid-thirties then, but I knew Titian was speaking to me--clearly he'd painted himself here, reaching up for that last branch. (He'd have been in his eighties at the time--this was painted a year or two before he died.)  I found the arc of time in  the painting astounding--and Titian's vigor--how he saw himself as a painter, even at the end...

_____

Yesterday's deer was astounding, too--I'd seen them reach of for plumb branches before, of course, deer will do this--but yesterday's pose was exactly the same as in  the painting. And just after I'd been talking with a friend about the meaning of ultimate things--and the phrase choose life. The story of the midwives again, the vigor of the young Israelite mothers. It's a matter of what one choses to focus on, always, in the balance--an image of opening...

6.2S Soldiers and Police

2 June 2020. Soldiers and Police.

And where are the images now? Two days, and the time of quiet has vanished. Was it real to begin with? That is, founded? An artificial respite, occasioned by the virus--for the first two months, everyone seemed to agree. But then a modern impatience set in. "They're all sitting together, on blankets, no one has masks," C told me, describing the park at the top of Orpheus on a recent evening. "I left..."

I agreed, of course--but then we can't leave the entire century. Even as we carry all centuries past, each one with its retelling. Goya's Third of May still holds. The animation comes through even in a sketch--the diagonals, of course--but they're the result, not the cause. Of a time lived, rather. On the side opposite, Giorgione--the watchman figure in The Tempest--replacing a woman's figure prior. That the origin of a militia could be maternal? No urgency in the pose, though. A watchman of dreams...

The middle section? Well, maybe they haven't told me their story yet. Whose doing? Who knows the story, that is? Thinking about the Mary Frank on the cover of a recent NYRB--saw it again this morning. An African figure leaping across the gap between two rocks. She's drawn him in silhouette--evocative, always--and the rocks are real, that is, they're fragments of photographs. She made this just last year--at 87...

Hope still...


_____

Note: Found the Mary Frank image on DC Moore Gallery site. It's a detail from a collage painting, As You Can See,  made in 2018-19. And the rocks are actual rock--not fragments of photographs. Oil, acrylic, graphite, paper and stone on board, 49-1/4 x  96 inches.

5.31 Young Racoon

31 May 2020. Young Racoon.

A visitor just now, and I'm so used to seeing Goose, the neighbor cat--that this came as a surprise. The same coloring, yes, but then the lift to the shoulders as he made his way through the high grass--not domestic. You know right away. A certain roughness--Chris Alexander's phrase for one of the necessary elements in a good design--a good anything, really--the roughness corresponding to something alive, something not completely controlled. Yes, we give in to the gods--whatever they may demand...

Evenings here of old--when a string of them would parade into the kitchen--the first alert little head peering over the top of the stairs coming up from the back door--two dark eyes set in a black mask, The lady of the house would welcome them, after a fashion, of course. I once had to scoot out a whole family of who were aiming to occupying the downstairs room. Babies included...

But most memorable of all were the visits by Rashi and Tosfos. Talmudic scholars, both--even if they were also in the possum family. Their favorite place being underneath the back side of the couch. That took some doing on my part--a long bamboo pole--just enough to prod them gently into action. I don't know who was most startled--after all they could hear me coming--but a wild living creature like that--in the living room--what can you say?

_____

Gary Snyder--in his excellent book, The Practice of the Wild, describes how his family would open their Yuba River cabin for one month of the year to all creatures who wished to visit. Indoor deer, for example--or a stream of fire ants making their diagonal across the wooden floor. However, even the Snyders hedged their bets--flour and staples were secured in a strong trunk--and I'm not sure what they did about bear...

_____

That's the shelf-like bracket mushroom there behind--growing out from the trunk of the mimosa tree. It's gotten quite large now--just the right size for a raccoon umbrella...

5.30 Rastaman (small image test)

30 May 2020. Rastaman.

People would say elders, but that's sentimentalizing, and when you look at these faces, there's something more essential going on. Yes, some are old enough to remember even Leonard Howell--the Rasta founder--maybe not quite to the beginning, in the '1930's, but from the late 1950's, say, when Pinnacle (the Rastafari redoubt in the hills above Spanish Town) was intact--and lived through it's destruction, with the exodus to the slums of Kingston (Back O'Wall, the Dungle, Trenchtown).  Materially, a time of great privation--and the lives of most of the Rastas then were extremely poor--but also characterized by elements of real hope--the mission to Africa in 1961, the dream of repatriation, then Jamaican Independence in 1962--and the indelible experience of Haile Selassie's visit to the island on April 21, 1966.--thereafter known as Grounation Day. And the music emerging in parallel--Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae, and the way it reached an audience far beyond Jamaica... The world of Roots Reggae--the Skatalites, Burning Spear, the Ethiopians, and of course Bob Marley--the spirit of that music reflects this great opening...

But Jamaica's political situation turned increasingly corrosive, with nonstop gang violence egged on by both of the primary political parties (the Rastafari were neutral, but everyone was drawn in, regardless.) And then the emergence of Jamaica's drug culture, extremely violent--the trade soon enough exported to the United States--so that the world of Roots Reggae was replaced by that of Dancehall--also reflective of its time. Louche, flashy, dangerous.To the degree (as described by writer Colin Grant) that when Bunny Wailer appeared on a Kingston festival stage in 1990, he was met with a hail of bottles and stones. The crowd didn't want what him. Hard to fathom, less than ten years after Bob Marley's death--but not if one follows all the changes...

So, these faces, still from the time before--as was much of Rastas culture, I'm guessing. And then their age as well--so that the natural arc of life can be seen there too. Giving them (at least to my eye) not so much an antiquarian feel as the mein of dignified survivors. The world that nurtured them has disappeared (including the death of Haile Selassie--Jah Rastafari--however one interprets it.)
_____

A parallel: remembering my father's face on the 26th of December, 1991--sitting on the living room couch in Oceanside. He would have been 87. The television  was on, and as we watched, the Soviet flag was being lowered, in Moscow, for the very last time. The symbolic end to another era--the one he himself had lived through (having fought on the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War). I wondered mightily at the time what it meant for him to see this--his feelings, after those many years of commitment and hope. But as carefully as I looked at his profile, and as much as I wanted to know, I couldn't tell...

5.30 Rastaman

30 May 2020. Rastaman.

People would say elders, but that's sentimentalizing, and when you look at these faces, there's something more essential going on. Yes, some are old enough to remember even Leonard Howell--the Rasta founder--maybe not quite to the beginning, in the '1930's, but from the late 1950's, say, when Pinnacle (the Rastafari redoubt in the hills above Spanish Town) was intact--and lived through it's destruction, with the exodus to the slums of Kingston (Back O'Wall, the Dungle, Trenchtown).  Materially, a time of great privation--and the lives of most of the Rastas then were extremely poor--but also characterized by elements of real hope--the mission to Africa in 1961, the dream of repatriation, then Jamaican Independence in 1962--and the indelible experience of Haile Selassie's visit to the island on April 21, 1966.--thereafter known as Grounation Day. And the music emerging in parallel--Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae, and the way it reached an audience far beyond Jamaica... The world of Roots Reggae--the Skatalites, Burning Spear, the Ethiopians, and of course Bob Marley--the spirit of that music reflects this great opening...

But Jamaica's political situation turned increasingly corrosive, with nonstop gang violence egged on by both of the primary political parties (the Rastafari were neutral, but everyone was drawn in, regardless.) And then the emergence of Jamaica's drug culture, extremely violent--the trade soon enough exported to the United States--so that the world of Roots Reggae was replaced by that of Dancehall--also reflective of its time. Louche, flashy, dangerous.To the degree (as described by writer Colin Grant) that when Bunny Wailer appeared on a Kingston festival stage in 1990, he was met with a hail of bottles and stones. The crowd didn't want what him. Hard to fathom, less than ten years after Bob Marley's death--but not if one follows all the changes...

So, these faces, still from the time before--as was much of Rasta culture, I'm guessing. And then their age as well--so that the natural arc of life can be seen there too. Giving them (at least to my eye) not so much an antiquarian feel as the mein of dignified survivors. The world that nurtured them has disappeared (including the death of Haile Selassie--Jah Rastafari--however one interprets it.)
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A parallel: remembering my father's face on the 26th of December, 1991--sitting on the living room couch in Oceanside. He would have been 87. The television  was on, and as we watched, the Soviet flag was being lowered, in Moscow, for the very last time. The symbolic end to another era--the one he himself had lived through (having fought on the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War). I wondered mightily at the time what it meant for him to see this--his feelings, after those many years of commitment and hope. But as carefully as I looked at his profile, and as much as I wanted to know, I couldn't tell...

5.29 Met Robert

29 May 2020. Met Robert.

A painting from Robert arrived this morning. Landscape above, with trees reflected in water--a slow river, late fall, or maybe the very end of winter, with snow in patches—the colors ochre and sienna, merging into darkness on either side--blasted almost, as of the image were appearing in a flash of light, the feelings contradictory. Below, a long row of windows and doorways, in Warsaw--or maybe one of the very old neighborhoods in Amsterdam--many of them boarded up. War traces visible on the walls, stone work and exposed brick. He's run  them all together, side by side, so that their continuity also expresses time. And from one dark opening, painted en grisaille, a woman's face. Robert's note above tells me the street is Ul. Grzybowska 29--still standing then, in the Ghetto, from a photo he made in 1968--but that the figure is the sister of his father, Webster-von Parera. Between the two a band of black with a phrase painted in Yiddish script: gedenk in zey un frey zich mitn lebn. To think of you and free you with life...

Did I ever know her name before? The van Parera is Portuguese. Jewish, in all probability--like one of the family names inscribed on the wall of the wintershul in the 'Snoga, Amsterdam’s old Portuguese synagogue.  Robert would sometimes tell me that his father had Portuguese roots, but the name itself now illuminates this connection.

My dear friend. We first knew each other in Warsaw, and all these traces fit together, for both of us-- lived and understood. Which of course he knows, too, even if it's now another 30 years we haven't seen each other.

I first drew his more dramatic self, with deep set eyes, looking out from the side. But the melodrama wasn't right, so I reworked it to show him in a more pensive mode, spectacles on his nose, thinning hair, thoughtful, a little askew. Or is it just the drawing? I like to think of him this way, regardless--like one of the beautiful characters in a Wim Wenders film, always close, almost reachable...

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Note: Quite fortuitous (more than that, really) that I'd done the Ulica Glogera drawing just yesterday--and then Robert's painting arrives this morning. Together with what he writes. Our circles have always been joined this way...

5.28 Ulica Glogera

28 May 2020. Ulica Glogera.

Urgent need to begin again. Desperate even, after two days solid dealing with outside matters (contractors, the city, the beautiful oak tree in back--all vis a vis my very decent neighbors, but still, but still..). All resolved this morning--quite amazing, really--and I sat down to begin a drawing. But the pull of the everyday kept interceding...

So, there I am (above) reaching out again--is it for a place to start (as in today) or for all time? Always the sense that somehow I intend both. You can't hold your arms like this without invoking duration. Maybe it's because a friend queried me recently about final things, and of course I turned once more to the story of Jewish midwives in Egypt, the word hayot, which I always think of as meaning alive. (It's a one-time occurrence--hapax legomenon--so meaning depends on context.) Vigorous, perhaps. Full of vitality. A matter of focus--where one wants to look...

Then the figure with suitcase appeared. From Poland, inevitably, which means it's also me. Ulica Glogera, one of the streets I lived on in Warsaw--in Ochota, an old neighborhood--and a quick look shows that there are views even today that appear much the same...

I wasn't really thinking about this--the point being to get a drawing going, the flow of association matching the movement of the lines, the erasures, which are what tell me, finally, what the drawing means, (towhee, always)--but it's a beautiful early summer day here-- the warm air,  light breeze--same feeling as when I'd walk out of the apartment in Warsaw fifty years ago--an old structure, pre-War--onto the leafy street, set in an arc, with paving stones, beautifully detailed facades--playing Supraphone Corelli on my Czech phonograph (I still have the album) which felt so appropriate and true...

And now all these times have merged, layered together--but each detail remains distinct, distinct...
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Reading late last night--one of David Hinton's new versions of Tu Fu. He's eliminated all the rhetoric, it seems--just the images from the poems, juxtaposed, set in a world of ancient China. His world, I should say, in the way he repeatedly reaches for that connection. But I'll go with him in this. The vision is too valuable---the  cosmos enjoined...even if in part his own...